Many of them are far out.  #5 is a joke; the protective wall is much too thick to do anything serious.

However, some real insight does show up in #14:

The most important of all is the defining flaw of large organizations: you can’t tell who the most productive people are. A small company is measured directly by the market. But once an organization gets big enough that people on in the interior are protected from market forces, politics starts to rule, instead of performance.  

So your client comes to you and says, I need a blog.  Always willing to please, you setup another random blog on Google’s Blogspot and tell them to write a 10,000 word intro post.  You don’t bother to think about integrated a blog into your website as a content management tool to make sure the website remains relevant and you’re not directing traffic away from your cause.  Brilliant.

Since you’re on a roll and your client can’t stop typing, you put a rambling note about your blog in your email newsletter.  That extra bit of wasted text really doesn’t do much to sell the blog, but it sure fills that prime, above the fold, email marketing real estate with something.  It’s definitely something.

Further on down the email newsletter, the client wants to plug every service they have available, because everyone is still reading on their 6th scroll of the page. 

So we plug a job board.  Most of the jobs are a little stale, but who cares, it’s content, and content is king on the internets.  Of course, as you work diligently for your client, you check, double check, and re-check the links in the email newsletter so you get the maximum impact.

Oops, you didn’t check that last link.  Unless that band is called Talent Engine, you’ve got the wrong website. 

Of course, it really just points out that not only did you not check the links on this client’s email, but you didn’t setup your server for www to work on that subdomain.  Is that three stikes yet?

The problem is that with that 20%, a lot of Google products could really be useful, such as:

- Google Reader:  The links in the start page work, so after you read the teaser, the link clicks through to the same page.  This was probably a 20% time project enhancement that ran out of time.

- Gmail: Great, you made it easy to manage multiple accounts, except when I send an email with on of them, it says send “on behalf of” my google account which I prefer to keep private.  Maybe Google could use some of that 20% time and realize that’s likely a fixable issue.

-  Google Search: Believe it or not, the answer to every question is not a blog.  Since you can’t tell an engineer what to do with their 20% time, let’s hope it comes to them in a vision.

You’re right, Google’s 20% time isn’t causing 80% of the problems.

I think it’s just Carson’s way of saying, yes I know you’d be great as a writer on my show but I can’t cross the writers strike picket line, so go ahead and call me with all your amazing joketastic talents.

Dear Carson,

With the impending writers strike, I’m posting an open letter to offer my services as an almost-professional comedic writer in your time of need.

Luckily, I’ve seen your show and I know that you’re not losing much if the writers strike on Monday.  Double lucky, I know I can maintain the average comedic level of your show.  Triple lucky, I know the viewers don’t expect much and nothing else will be new on TV.

The best part for you is that I’m willing to work for free because I need to prove myself before Kimmel will hire me.

Sincerely,
Bill

ps.  Look for the internet to gain a lot of popularity if this writers strike lasts for more than a few days.  Why? 

- Because TV ratings will go down even further (and this time the people may not come back – the fall lineup is terrible)

- Because all the new content generation will be done on the web for a while

- Because some enterprising young comedian will take the place of the reruns of all the late night shows with their own daily comedy show (is funnyordie.com impacted by the writers strike?)

- Because it provides an opportunity for video, podcasts, and other produced compilations from online companies to make a bigger splash and fill the pipeline for TV shows that still decide to report business and entertainment news.

Update: Techcrunch paraphrases Tony’s post 3 days later, and lights up 100% algorithm Techmeme.  I can’t figure out if the writers strike or blogs are a bigger joke.

Take pricing?  Yep, just raise the minimum CPC on those PPC ads, and you can add millions to the bottom line.  How?  Something Google is calling Ad Quality, and because they are taking pricing, they need a new tool to show people their ads now have poor Ad Quality.

But Google does no evil, they save puppies, and don’t flaunt their private jets or exclusive Federal runways. 

Great, here’s a real life example that can only be explained by Google taking pricing:

* Created a new ad in Adwords for a very specific keyword and landing page
(both requirements for good Ad Quality)

* The keyword ran for a total of zero impressions
(Google must already know the keyword with existing data or it’s an Ad Quality issue)

* Traffic Estimate tool says that Google doesn’t have enough data on the keyword
(Ok, so it has to be an Ad Quality issue since it didn’t have any impressions)

* The brand new Ad Quality (price fixing) tool shows that the Ad Quality is ok
(Now I don’t get it, it’s neither data or Ad Quality, seems like you want me to spend more money without giving an actual reason other than you run the ad network)

The best part about this whole pricing scam is that Google, because they’re not evil, gives you the chance to buy your way out of the problem.  It says, just increase your bid, then your ad quality won’t matter as much.  I finally found a need for Yahoo.

The talk of the week has been the absurd imbalance in property taxes and how everyone forgot they were coming.  I can’t wait for the legislation that requires impounds instead of leaving it for someone to save on their own.  Good thing you can put in on a credit card!

Now we have the Southern California fires and because it’s been a few years, we didn’t bother to figure out a new way to fight them.  New delivery mechanism?  New chemical?  Nope, still got hundreds of guys in trucks with limited water supply and shovels.  That’s right, shovels.  Maybe they’d be more comfortable in a covered wagon and burlap sack.  And once those guys kill themselves, then we try to drop some water or pepto bismol and get it over with.

I don’t understand why we put a single person on the ground.  We’ve got trained military pilots that can drop a bomb from 10,000 ft with precision, so if we let them get within 1,000 ft they’d probably not hit too many houses.  Since the best attack is always from the air, but is the most difficult to do because we have to fly too close to the ground, seems to me we should develop a delivery system for the pepto and be done with it.

Believe it or not, Boeing is at least trying.  Of course, the better solution is a bigger container, possibly with a compressed air timed explosion that could disperse the pepto once the retardant bomb was at the optimal height for coverage.   It can’t be that difficult, and it’s far cheaper than all the overtime the ground crews are racking up. 

We can chat about this in two years when the fires are back and we’re still sending firefighters to risk their lives.

Conflicts aside, it’s always helpful to know how what these genome startups are doing, so I asked an expert in the field of genotyping and genetics (who is open to new consulting projects).

How hard is it to do genotyping via SNP?
It isn’t hard at all until you try to do a lot of it.  In research, you look at SNPs pretty regularly and it is very easy when looking at one at a time.

Trying to look at all the SNPs in a genome at once is a lot harder. You couldn’t possibly look at them all so you use informatics tools to define informative sets of SNPs then ignore the rest. This still leaves many many SNPs to look at so this is cutting edge technology.

What’s the benefit to knowing this genetic information?
Countless things you can do with this info.

First of all this is the beginning of personalized medicine. Once we have this information for large numbers of people we will be able to figure out why one medicine works for one patient and not for another and doctors will be able to better treat people with this information.

That is the good stuff but you will also be far better at predicting possible health problems, which is great for preventative medicine, but is scary if your health care provider gets this info and decides to charge you more or not cover those things you are at risk for.

Another interesting but dangerous application is precisely defining peoples ethnic makeup. Once we know this information for many populations of people we will be able to say for example that someone is 18% Scottish 42% Irish 27% German and 13% English. Cool, but what if someone decides to descriminate against you because you aren’t 100% caucasian? And there are many more things to do with the data as well, no wonder Google and Genetech are involved.

Has the human genome been mapped?
Yeah that has been done for about 5 years with tweaks every now and then. It was originally defined for about 6 individuals. The original effort took A LOT of work and money. Technology has been improving and price is coming down quickly. The cost of DNA sequencing/genotyping roughly follows Moore’s Law.

What’s a genome?
Yeah every organism has a genome. Every cell has the same DNA as all the other cells in your body. So since we know the entire genome for the 6 people I mentioned above we can just look at the SNPs for everyone else and merge the two to know each individuals genome.

How much does this cost?
In a lab it could be done for $2 per SNP. I would guess 23andme is looking at 10s of thousands of SNPs, so the lab price is $50,000. There is a huge economy of scale here with new equipment and custom software for processing and analytics, but their price will likely be very low.

No, Apple really didn’t announce a $200 credit for early iPhone adopters, but 99% of Apple loyalists still believe it will happen this week.

I don’t know why you can’t search google reader, I’ve only wanted to do it 100+ times. 

Since Google isn’t going to add search, maybe they can fix the Google Reader Image Bug.  You’ll notice in Google Reader that images are often not displayed at their intended size.  They’re shrunken, garbled, and otherwise un-readable.

Unfortunately, the image usually tells the story or makes the money (ad images have the same problem – wonder why you’re not converting Dell?). 

Here’s the typical problem:

See that square of gibber gabber?  That’s an ad unit that Dell is paying good money to Techcrunch for, and getting nothing in return.

Now this is how Dell would like the ad to display:

*Google Reader Image Bug workaround: 
When you click on an item in Reader, it automatically marks the item as read.  All you have to do is uncheck the “Mark as read” checkbox, and the image will display as originally intended like magic. 

Since I tested this game, purely in a viral marketing context, and could never score well evaluate it completely, I was encouraged by the after market enhancement available.  When someone goes to the effort of hacking your flash game, you’ve made it big time.

So the startup is a logical extension… I hope one of them has a marketing strategy.  When the online advertising dollars start to drop, hopefully they have another game that’s just as addictive.  That’s not likely, but there’s always the option to do custom games for organizations, develop a point and click builder for similar games, or even do something silly like charge for access to older games.

The same goes for the growth of a small business.  When you go from $1000 to $2000 per month, or $100k to $200k per year, there’s a celebration that ensues.  Unfortunately, even if you add $1M to revenue, from $5M to $6M, the percentage makes a celebration overstated compared to the good ol’ days.

With less selection of inventory, alternative online adversiting forms such as PayPerPost will likely spring up and be successful in the short run.  You’ll also see a large increase for ad management and SEM firms because they work off a percentage of the advertising dollar spent.  Overall, it means you’re going to be paying too much for online advertising if you’re not evaluating click-thru-rates and using alternative ad vehicles.

The best part about the flourishing online advertising industry is that there’s a reason for it, and the worst part is that it’s a short term boom.  Starting at the end of this year, most advertisers will no longer be able to generate the same reach from their ad dollars because of the Presidential campaigns on TV.  These never-had-a-chance politicos will spend millions in TV advertising, moving the demand curve and increasing the price.

The next best choice for the 18-35 demographic is likely online advertising, which essentially means there’s more money chasing the same inventory – demand curve take 2 steps to the right.  So if you think you’re paying a lot for online advertising today, just wait.

However apparently there are still some companies with money to spend, with this recent email (don’t ask me why I got it, don’t ask me why they don’t have a legal disclaimer) about a couple of advertising deals for Kelley Blue Book:

——————————————————————————–
From: Melissa S. Chapman [mailto:x@kbb.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2007 1:13 PM
To: Jean Brockmeier; Bill
Subject: FW: HP SOLD! for tomorrow’s flight
Importance: High

HP Spons on it’s way for tomorrow!

Melissa S. Chapman
VP, OEM Segment Product Strategy & Management, kbb.com
x@kbb.com
(949) 268-3048
(949) 268-3028 – fax
Kelley Blue Book
The Trusted Resource
www.kbb.com

______________________________________________
From:   Susan Brown 
Sent:   Tuesday, May 29, 2007 4:13 PM
To:     .Ad Inventory; Melissa S. Chapman; Anne Diep
Cc:     Ercy Coronel; Robin Cooper; Tim Hand; Kim Notario; Chris Buckley; Carrie Noworolnik
Subject:        HP SOLD! for tomorrow’s flight
Importance:     High

Saturn will take the open slot.

IO should be here soon.

Thanks
smb

Susan Makuch Brown
Director, Advertising and Business Development
Kelley Blue Book – kbb.com
x@kbb.com
P: 248.637.7500 ext. 5100
C: 248.840.5545
www.kbb.com

1. Rather obvious, but don’t copy an existing idea or reuse an old one.
Viral Marketing is about doing something wacky or odd, even if you think it’s really stupid.  That’s why your ad agency won’t ever show you the best ideas.

2. Expect your viral marketing project to be a total failure.
Not unlike the rest of your marketing efforts, your first stab at viral marketing will be a complete flop.  Let it be, don’t resort to traditional push marketing efforts by running ads, sending spam emails, or doing press releases, you’ll only destroy the viral marketing mojo.  Better yet, use a small team and don’t tell anyone in the company.

3. Get in the mindset.
Viral Marketing is not a groupthink, check the box, powerpoint pitch, approval matrix type decision.  It’s likely going to be a single person idea, with a lot of add on ideas supporting the main theme, and may indeed come from the mailroom or CEO’s daughter.  The most important part is to get in the right mindset - understand the brand, understand the trends, understand the outcome, but no one should be pitching ideas on the first day.  Take a week to think about it, then post a short summary on the bathroom wall with no name.

Here are some starters for corporate viral marketing:

• Make the Logo Bigger
  http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/003259.html  
• Hummer & Coop
  http://www.hummerandcoop.com

By the way, Joost is average at best because it lacks quality content.  Most of stuff isn’t even worth putting on TV late at night.  Buy.com did just as good of job with their internet TV play.  Of course, Joost is new, different, and from the millionaires who created Skype, so you’d probably give them the benefit of the doubt to fix the content issue.

I’m 3 months away from a big trip to Pittsburgh and I’ve got 100,000 mileage plus frequent flyer miles to spend.  Guess how many options I have to fly in August from Southern California? 

Zero.

How about on the Star Alliance award ticket?

Zero.

Non-stop First class?

Zero.

Apparently I didn’t get the memo.

From an internet product marketing point of view, why can’t I search for award travel and paid flights from the same travel search?  Oh, right, it’s United.

How about a new way to look at flight search?:

(Full Size)

Apparently a plain old barbershop isn’t a sustainable business model anymore, you’ve got to hire 4 incompetent “stylists” and pipe in the local 90′s station.  Noticed that prices went up recently, and the menu board is now 2 layers, that allow them to change the underneath layer with pricing and still poke through the label layer.  Brilliant!

Great Clips, have you ever thought about the following tips for marketing your below average service?

• Loyalty Card: Instead of announcing my fake phone number to the world 3 times since your “stylist” is more skilled in haircutting than english or numbers, why don’t you give me a loyalty card.  You’ll get fewer fake phone numbers and better data on usage across your stores (people do move)

• Self Service: Now that I’ve got a loyalty card, turn that fancy touchscreen register around and let me check myself in, and even pay for what you like to call a haircut.  You’ll keep your “stylists” from stopping their work and allow them to focus on what they do best (that’s hard to write).

• Customer Website: It’s time to put that loyalty card to work, you can call it HRM (Haircut Relationship Management).  So when I sign up for the card, you give my a flyer that says I get $2 off my next haircut (yes, I understand you’re franchised, it’s worth $2, just do it) if I give you my spam email account.  The really cool part is now you can send me a reminder every 6 weeks to get another crappy haircut, let me give you feedback on my last haircut, and let me make a future appointment with the stylist who didn’t Van Gogh me.  You’d quickly realize who should be made available to the industry.

Of course, doing all this really just tells you that you need to hire better people, but at least you’ll placate the existing customer base.  At least you’ll have a top notch web strategy for your local business.

By the way, for no extra charge, your stylist told me I had “sexy hair.”

Hitwise collects web usage data on multiple retailers in a variety of store categories.  It’s real competitor data, not the fake traffic stuff Alexa and others.  Hitwise data is truly invaluable if you’re looking for benchmarks, analyzing competitors, or any other custom web research you want to undertake.  Any retailer selling anything but truck parts has had their internet marketing consultant tell them they need Hitwise data. 

Couple of reasons Google should have acquired Hitwise:

• At $240 million, it’s just a manageable price with real revenue.
• Hitwise clients are online retailers who are big enough to spend, so you’ve got both new advertising customers and another line of service to sell to your existing captive advertisers.
• Google already has data comparable to Hitwise, but Google promised not to sell it and be evil, but it doesn’t say anything about using it as a reference.

Experian did buy Hitwise, smart move, just like many of their other web companies.  It’s a natural fit for a company with a great database of intimate financial information, and looks like they’re on a path to clash with IAC, especially if Experian acquires First American next.

Of course, if you’re blogging for no reason, monetary or otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.  Since unemployment is below 5% in most of the country, the only people with extra time subprime wholesale mortgage account executives from New Century, Argent, Encore, and many others.

So how does a blogger make money without a conflict of interest?  With small websites (microsites) with on a specific topic (long tail). 

That’s what Slice is all about.  Blogs sell advertising based on page views. Slice sells advertising on specific content in the long tail, on one page microsites.

You can ignore the screw up, like Google Reader not having a search feature.  Yes, the same Google that is known for search.  If you want to search Google Reader, you’ve got to hack it yourself.  That should have been a product feature on launch. 

You can fix the screw up, like the new Highrise CRM tool not having a robust free account.  Free-mium is a viable product strategy, but you’ve got to offer something useful.  Within 3 days of launch, after listening to customers, 37 Signals fixed the product.

Or, just don’t screw up.

That’s a brilliant idea, I couldn’t imagine how to better spend another billion dollars in advertising by dropping the Cingular brand in favor of branding all services as AT&T.  I’m convinced the marketing consultant that came up with this brilliant idea was paid for by the advertising service companies.  Of course, they make the announcement now but still have millions in produced content for millions in ad buys, so AT&T can’t really ditch the Cingular brand anyway but they need a boost in stock price. 

Now check out the Cingular website for their available rate plans.  You’ll notice both Cingular branded plans and AT&T branded plans, with different features such as Rollover (Cingular) and Unity (AT&T).  So in addition to confusing the brand by ditching the established company with the stronger service line, you’re marketing different features for each brand that will eventually become one. 

So with that logic, Microsoft buys Yahoo, announces they’ll drop the Yahoo brand in favor of Microsoft, but continues to market both search engines.  AT&T gets away with bad marketing decisions because they’ve become a monopoly, once again.  Of course, if the Google phone is released, you better hope those marketing strategy consultants are really worth the millions they’ve been collecting.

Of course, if you read carefully, you’ll notice a nice tease for what will be the killer feature that makes it the coolest small business CRM application:

The mystery way
There’s one more way to get new people into Highrise. We’ll be covering it in a future preview post.

I’m glad at least one internet product marketing guru predicted that there might be a mystery way to add contacts to Highrise:

Keep an eye on how it’s integrated with email, as that seems to be the difference between cowbell and more cowbell with other small business CRM products. 

And the point of all this self-promotion is to highlight the ability of a company to blantantly hype a product because (they will soon announce that) they have a hype appropriate feature.  To get away with this kind of hype, you need a product that does all the basics well, and it doesn’t hurt to have a track record of making great internet products.  The latter is why Microsoft can’t get Live off the ground, and the former is why David Sacks with a Paypal pedigree can get a $100 million valuation for a simple family tree that can’t handle predictable beta launch web traffic scaling.

You can lose that license to hypefest just as quickly.

They can kill a website that isn’t setup to scale with web traffic. 

Seth checks out how much his domain is worth with a new SEO tool, the targeted use being for expiring domains. 

As an aside, there’s a virtual land grab going on right now, with ireit, demand media, and a number of “smaller” players (1,000+ domains under registration) buying all kinds of domains.  They buy expired domains because google likes older domains, someone probably put some effort into marketing the site, and they likely have a lot of backlinks.  It’s easy search engine optimization. 

In the process, he overwhelms the website with traffic because the application and database haven’t been setup to scale.  This is the same problem Oprah creates with her “favorite things” (Oprah is unbiased of course) episode, where the web traffic crushes the small businesses she highlights.

Now imagine you’re an up and coming company with a website that is going to be prominently featured on a Superbowl commercial, in 3 weeks.  Most don’t know enough about the problem to fix it anyway, so we’re back to the Seth and Oprah problem.  Fortunately for that Superbowl advertiser, a scalability expert stepped in juggled a web traffic spike into the tens of millions of unique visitors.  Awesome.

Now some bloggers argue there’s a difference between shout outs, ads, sponsors, and paid posts, but if you’re going to put someone else’s name and content on your site, you’re already biased.  From the short comment and link to a friend’s site to a 4 paragraph gushing about a random company, everyone has a bias, so you might as well get paid for it. 

If you don’t like it, stop reading the newspaper and watching TV.  The only difference is it that they’re better at making the bias subtle and therefore do a poorer job of monetization.

37Signals, a small web company creating simple applications, follows a similar internet product marketing strategy.  They create products that are simple, work well, and solve problems beyond email, word processing, and spreadsheets. 

The problem is that they’re just so slow in their development of new products, it seems like a waste of talent.  They’ve shunned money guys (except for Jeff Bezos), hired 1 employee at a time, and grew a popular blog.  It’s the Jack Johnson story all over again.

Well, looks like Signals has gone back to work, starting to tease a new product called Highrise.  (see the previews of Highrise, Highrise, and Highrise)  If they really did web-based CRM with collaboration, instead of an online address book, then they will once again be successful, at their own pace. 

Keep an eye on how it’s integrated with email, as that seems to be the difference between cowbell and more cowbell with other small business CRM products.  From my experience in internet product development, I’d guess 37Signals will have a webmail function embedded that works with your domain, or at a minimum an email address you blind copy that feeds into your Highrise account. 

It’s your turn Jack.

2. Nobody will click-thru to my website.
Ideally, you shouldn’t really care about how someone reads your content, the point is that they’re reading it.  Now if I never plug Ralston Ventures in this post, and never tell you that I’m a jack-of-all-trades online marketing and internet product management consultant, then yes it would be a shame to have to click-thru and read that tidbit.  If you think your content is that good (it’s not), run a teaser feed that requires the customer to click-thru to read the whole diatribe. 

3. RSS is too technical, email works for my customers.
Then I should assume you have a 0% bounce rate and a 100% open and click-thru rate on your email campaigns?  There’s nothing more technical about RSS than anything else, and there are a hundred companies out there trying to make it easier.  The point about email statistics is that RSS feeds are unfiltered, direct to the customer, unlike email which can be blocked as spam, filtered as junk, or lost among 4 email accounts.  With RSS, the customer gets it all and has the power to unsubscribe at any time (and know it worked). 

4. I can’t make money on a RSS feed.
You actually can, Feedburner will slip them right into the end of your feed.  Of course, when was the last time you clicked on a banner ad?  Focus on the content, the customer relationship, and the message; ignore the pennies.

5. RSS feeds require content which requires creativity which requires work which requires time.
Content is king, so make the time to produce more content, or hire an online marketing expert.

On a hot tip from Jason Kolb, who apparently reads the fine print, anyone who signs up for the beta of Google Apps will continue their service for free.  So I present to you, a FREE COUPON for Google Apps, which is probably closed to new accounts…

Multiple sources are proclaiming there are companies that would pay for business-style gmail or just a bigger gmail account, but most think the value is in 24/7 tech support and not in the Google Apps features offered to business users.  Of course, one of those companies is Pixar who is run by Steve Jobs, so it’s probably no surprise the IT guy can’t go out and buy Microsoft Exchange.

Now there is a little detail that in the past wasn’t associated with internet product strategy, and that is a ton of downtime across Google’s network.  Wait until your entire office is left stranded by an gmail outage that doesn’t have a five-nines SLA, not to mention can’t get a SAS-70 certification and the free pens don’t even work.

But it wasn’t because the music industry is already headed that way, it was because Wal-Mart made a big move into movie downloads by offering movies from all 6 studios today.  Evil Steve, because he’s Disney’s largest shareholder, already knew Wal-Mart would announce the movie download service today, and therefore waited until the Wal-Mart news broke and then got the last word in. 

He must have the best public relations firm in the Bay Area. 

1. Bush got tired of people complaining about Global Warming.
2. Lohan said she’d go to rehab when something froze over.
3. Scott Boras does a fair deal.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to make a family tree, see Geni.com.  Started by David Sacks of Paypal and indie movie fame, it’s a good start using proven internet product development rules.

Rules?  Yes, there are rules to product development (aka features) at internet companies.  If you’re from the brick and mortar world, these won’t make sense, but then again you’re probably not internet product development.

1. Launch a product with less than 5 useful features (optional: label it “beta”).
2. See how people use it and ask for feedback.
3. Add the most requested or needed feature each week.

There’s no reason to do 10 months of development on every feature you can dream up, only to have to develop more features the user wants, be upstaged by a competitor, miss the bubble 2.0 funding craze, and/or not collect any ad revenue for the 8 months you’ve had a working version with 5 features.

You can’t buy it, but Apple’s market cap increased $6.1 billion.  That’s some fancy marketing, and some excellent pimping of the biggest players in the mobile internet space.

Here are the highlights:

• Cisco - Apple decided that they’d call it an iPhone even though Cisco owns the trademark for the name iPhone, and Cisco just launched a phone called iPhone.  Cisco’s only response was “we expect to receive a signed agreement today” which basically means Apple wasn’t returning their phone calls.

• Yahoo! – Nothing like offering Free IMAP Yahoo! Mail to a relatively small group of customers, when you’d overtake Gmail as the best webmail service if you made it available to everyone.  That’s Yahoo product strategy at it’s finest.

• Cingular – Apple trades early (they’ll need more market share than 1 mobile company can provide) carrier exclusivity for “Visual Voicemail” with Cingular.   They probably can’t even use it for their more profitable BlackJack device, not to mention they’ve now shown every cell phone maker there will be a new area of negotiations next time around - carrier features specific to the phone.

No, you still can’t search Google Reader, but over on the Google Reader Blog they rolled out a MyBlogLog-Digg style web 2.0 trend page.  This sounds like one of those Google 20% projects that makes the company what it is today.

It’s also nice to see an interesting title on a Google blog post, with the subtle reference to the great British royal, Sir-Mix-a-Lot.

It’s interesting to see the trends/metrics/analytics of how you consume feeds in a reader, versus what you percieve about your own habits.  For instance, I would have bet my page rank that I’ve read more posts from Techcrunch than anyone else, but the “Reading trends” proves me wrong:

Of course it’s also a great reminder that marketing, especially online marketing, is less about colors and more about data.  However, data often needs a better medium, and so graphs and charts can tell far better stories.  For instance, see the relationship to blog posts and actors who played James Bond, and start to think of how you could market the entire franchise now that you understand the content, timeline, and volume on 1 fancy graph.

Of course, Google Checkout needs to add 1 feature to actually make that happen - an offline merchant terminal running the Checkout API.  What?  A small credit card scanner with a small screen and a couple of buttons, which interacts with Google’s Checkout service through the API.  Google Checkout will then be able to process offline transactions.

But why?  Because Paypal already owns the online transaction market, but that’s not where the majority of all transactions are located.  Instead, Google needs to realize that there is an underserved offline retail sector that needs a way to process transactions.  If you told the local retailer that for the next year, they wouldn’t have to pay credit card transaction fees and an easy way to do it, Google would have a line out the door.

The real benefit would be the further acquisition of the SMB, which Google already started on this year with the partnership with Intuit.  Google gets more data on offline transactions, finds more businesses for local search, and most importantly, the ability to sell more Google Adwords. 

If Google paid a referral fee, I’m sure there’d be a mashup of the API and some cheap hardware already. 

UPDATE: Google Checkout is getting punchy, blatantly trying to buy new users with a $10 offer on the usually minimalist home page.  Several other sources are predicting more Google Checkout related developments in the near future.

First, they gained some street cred by making a funny video and releasing it to YouTube.  Immediately, you think, how are they going to make any money giving away the content for free? 

Second, more people watched this video online than did actually on TV.  For a show that has been marginal in ratings for some time, that’s a lot of free publicity.  With the upcoming holiday weekend, more people will tune into SNL this weekend than have in 10 years, hoping to see the video or something equally interesting. 

Third, the real key to this video is that it was a prepared, produced video piece, not a live improv skit.  That’s not what SNL has been famous for over the past 30 years on late night TV.  Do you think those smart marketing folks at NBC didn’t notice? 

The smell of this success will create a ripple through late night Network TV, whether it’s SNL or a show from ABC, something like YouSNL.  The premise is simple, use your advantage in production to make short videos with talented actors on relevant topics or funny skits.  Test those videos among small focus groups to pick the best for the show.  Feel free to throw in a few live skits, fake news pieces, and musical guests just to keep it interesting.  Even use YouTube as a talent factory for new directors, actors, and writers for one off videos produced by YouSNL.  After you’ve had a great show on Saturday, put the most popular videos on YouTube and repeat week after week.

I saw the video on SNL last week and thought it was great.  I wanted to send it to a couple of friends, so I went to YouTube hoping it would be there.  I’m still emailing with people about it 4 days later.  There was no marketing involved, just good content on the right platform.  That’s the only topic those NBC marketing folks aren’t talking about this week.

If A-Rod was already paying for my Ferrari, I think I’d wait 2 years to collect an extra 5 million bucks. 

So the Red Sox party will make their exit from John Wayne tomorrow morning sans Matsuzaka.  Noel Wax is thanking the Red Sox for the radio show material.

Also, if you’ve got a hot baseball prospect in Southern California that you can’t get the scouts to come out and see, send me some info/stats/video at scout@ralstonventures.com and I’ll see what you can do.

It makes the news because Yahoo! is struggling with the lack of product strategy, lack of product strategy, and lack of product strategy.  It makes the news because Myspace is probably making more by artificially increasing page views and offering ad “deals” to dumb marketing managers.  It makes the news because in all the Web 2.o haste, no one tackled Web 2.o analytics, and so we’re still using a web novelty called the page view. 

But instead of beating up on Arrington and his own version of Digg for Web 2.0 companies, it’s time to blame the readers.  Why do you sign up for every beta?  Would you sign up if you had to pay even as little as a dollar?  Are you reading the company’s own product information, or just listening to the Jim Cramer-style hype about random companies and following the pack?  You’re adding to the false success of companies that deserve at most a cursory look, stop it.

Speaking of false success, I love to hear about people who are self-made without any Harvard buddies or nepotism.  Pretty sure those connections won’t even get you on Techcrunch.

See the story below:

Aside from the humiliation of John Ireland, co-host of The Big Show on 710 ESPN, the benefit of USC’s big loss to UCLA is that all the USC alumni will tone down their overzealous self-promotion.  Now maybe they’ll realize that neither has the best business school in Southern California.

For the most part it was the typical real estate networking event, except for 1 great insight into the Blackstone-EOP $36 billion private equity buyout that you won’t find anywhere else.

Bill Halford, formerly of The Irvine Company and now Bixby Land Company, got a lot of disbelief from the following:

“The Blackstone Group buyout of Equity Office for $36B closed in 3 weeks.”

Obviously there’s justification for doing so, but it just doesn’t happen in real estate companies of any size.  Of course, they’re a private equity group, and so they have a different focus.

This was also a great conversation, right after a discussion on real estate market inefficiency:

Guy #1 – With the help of Guy #2, we just bought a 10 acre development site.

Guy #2 – Funny, I thought we bought a 200,000 sf industrial building.

Triple Net Properties made popular the TIC (tenant in common) investment method combined with 1031 exchanges and owns a big share of that market.  By going public, it seems as if the transparency will give credibility to the investing style and separate them from the competition.

So not only is it big real estate news, it will be a sizable IPO for an OC company.

In other real estate news, Edgeio decided to buy into the real estate listings market instead fight the uphill battle like Zillow.  Not too bad of an idea, except I doubt real estate listings will ever generate enough ad revenue. 

What he shows is that if you alienate a group of people who don’t buy your product, you’re really not doing much harm.  Here’s the guide to online marketing by Cosmo Kramer:

1. Do something stupid that doesn’t affect your career or your market
Richards hasn’t done any real acting work since Seinfeld, so he didn’t lose any major movie deal.  One of the late night guys asked African Americans on the street about their intent to purchase the Seinfeld DVD (that was being released that week, un-coincidentally…).  It was no, and no.

2. Put the video on the Internet (preferably YouTube)
Another miracle is that TMZ was there taking video of the performance.  You’re filming a 1-trick-pony-comedian on purpose with the hope he goes on a tirade.  A little more conspiracy theory, but he’s now made the ever important step of distributing his stupidity through a free video site.

3. Get a bunch of news outlets to say your name
Since TMZ was there, it’s a little easier to get the other journalists to follow.  Eventually the 5 o’clock news picks it up because (1) he’s a racist, and (2) he’s Kramer.  Every time they said Kramer, they mentioned the DVD (#13 DVD on Amazon.com) that Kramer was not publicizing.

4. Apologize for anything really stupid
If you took it a little far with the stupidity like Kramer, make sure you apologize for your hard work after millions in free press.

Now go out there and alienate a group of customers that isn’t your core business.  Might help to make it less racist, and more humorous or odd, but you get the idea. 

So to wake up this morning and see that Sam Zell has sold out to Blackstone Group, in the largest single real estate transaction in history.  As in, 36 BILLION dollars worth.  The underlying point is that it’s not just any REIT, it’s Sam Zell, the master of acquisition and disposition timing. 

Fortunately, I think someone just offered him an absurd amount of money.  Another fortunate coincidence is that my current gig is looking for property accountants, acquisition analysts, and property managers, so send me a note if you’re an Equity Office employee looking for a new job.

But at the end of the day, you’ve got people drinking the Silicon Valley kool-aid with the following statements: 

Within a year or two, companies with fewer than 100 employees will have no need to buy anything from Redmond other than perhaps Windows XP Home; within five years, the same will go for firms with under 1,000 employees.

 There are 50 reasons why SMB companies will be the last to adopt online applications instead of good ol’ Microsoft Office.  Granted, Google will create a bit of marketing pressure that will result in a cheaper price for Office, but that will only do more for Microsoft market pentration.

And then these doozies:

…and no $50+ million opportunities remain for startups other than in “Social Networking,” …

…and have a maximum upside of $50 million.

Although some may be happy with $50 million paydays after a seed and A round, if you want a shot at making some real money, best to stay out of Google’s way.

When you can start a company for $600 (and $10 million worth the VC connections) and a lot of people are tired of being the fighter pilot doing the crop dusting, I’m pretty sure $50 million would get you off the couch.  If you start working now, you might even be able to get 2 of these only 50 million companies off the ground. 

So take the opposite approach, get in Google’s way, you’ll have to settle for $50 million.  If you’re thinking “only 50 million,” shut up and buy someone a turkey.

CEO Tip #1:  When a new employee starts working at the company you run, personally welcome them to the team the first day.  You can do it via phone, email, or even in person, just let them know they’re appreciated.  If you don’t have time, it’s probably because you don’t know who works for you and therefore can’t delegate to them.  The cycle is brutal.

The goal for the new Jelly product is to pick up where the Peanut Butter Manifesto left off, and make Yahoo! a really sticky place to work.  Yahoo! Jelly may possibly be renamed Yahoo! Jam after it slows down the company for a few years, or they may buy fruit spread start-up Preservs.com and run both products in competition.  Yahoo believes that once they’ve made a mediocre sandwich with the Peanut Butter and Jelly offerings, they’ll cut off the crust.  Google will release their own marginal product in beta in the Google Labs.

By the way, Yahoo! Peanut Butter is very similar to the Jerry Maguire manifesto, except the Jerry Maguire one was well written.  It’s so good, Scott Boras has it as the hold music on his phone at the office.

Toni Schneider picked up the larger size of the perfect illustration (I don’t think Sun has made 40+ of these magical data centers as the fake picture shows, unless those are just painted cargo containers). 

By the way, Toni is the CEO of WordPress.com, which runs blogs for lots of people.  Before that, he was CEO of Oddpost, which got bought by Yahoo because it was doing AJAX before it was called AJAX, and is now the foundation of Yahoo Mail Beta which Yahoo is really pushing.

I’m guessing Toni is more interesting than 40 of these fake container data centers with a logos on them.

The name is a little dramatic for the concept, but the theory makes a strong case for accepting your dueling attention interests and keeping your day job.  The hypothesis is that if you stop being conflicted by your work for work (“cash”) and work for passion (“sex”), you’ll be more focused on both.  Of course, you could just call it the Work and Passion Theory, but that makes it sound like one of them isn’t any fun. 

If you think your work sucks because it’s not your passion, then keep your day job. 

If you think your passion should be your work, then empty your piggybank, and start building something or buy a company. 

If you can accept that both your work and your passion have a place in your life, you’ll be better at both.

I’ve never heard a bad thing about Jason Santa Maria, now I know why:

When was the last time you met a X?:

I’m pretty sure crazy ideas come a little easier when this is the front door:

The Internet has created a collective of consultants that are always working to bring their clients up to speed on the web.  With the constant change, it means constant work for those consultants, which hypothetically is a great situation.  The problem is that you only collect a paycheck when you’re working on the project; there’s no passive income in the consulting world.

Fortunately, most of us know what we have to do – “Product-ize your Services.”

If you’re a web application shop like 37Signals, you create a great project management application like Basecamp, because you know everyone needs it.  Coudal reiterates the mantra with “be your own client” and Threadless used design and web skills to create shirts combined with great web communities. 

Of course, since you’re working like crazy for your clients, you don’t have time to make a left turn into incomeless product development.  In your case, take the first step and “Order-ize your Services.”  Huh?

When a potential client contacts you, do they already know what to order, or do you have to sell them?  Think of your consulting services like a In-N-Out menu board, where your basic service, say a quick report on a company’s online marketing is a hamburger.  A cheeseburger is an online marketing plan, and the Double-Double is the implementation of the marketing plan with three months of SEM and SEO work.  Of course, some clients are going to want to order off the secret menu, but only after they’ve tasted what you’re cookin’.

This is a huge advancement in data center thinking because it mitigates the underlying real estate problem.  Traditionally, data centers need to be located near fiber loops (the secret buried fiber network that no telco will discuss) and have capacity for at least 50,000 square feet of conditioned rack space, UPS systems, and fuel storage to be cost competitive.  Usually they like a non-descript location too.

That’s a real estate challenge in any major market.  So a data center in a cargo container changes something?  Yes!

The data center problem is that you have to have 50,000 sf of data center space for economies of scale and the ability to take on the big customers.  Ever tried to cool 50,000 sf of office space (data center) that has a bunch of portable heaters (servers) fighting against you?  You’ve got to move a lot of air, all the time, and that is expensive, which is why lots of people are focused on data center efficiency. 

But look at what just happened to with the cargo container idea to help design a new kind of data center:

• Standard size container
• Movable, plug-and-play if you will
• Self-contained cooling

So now I can drop (actually, you can stack them for even better real estate returns) a bunch of these in a warehouse that has connectivity, and I only have to cool the container!  I still need power, but if you have a couple of these around the country, you can reduce most of the redundancy. 

Again, the biggest change is cooling.  You’ve broken down the space into manageable units that can be cooled to the needs of each one. 

So do I think you’ll sell a ton of these cargo container data centers?  Nope.  What will happen is that data center operators will demise (make smaller spaces) the large data centers into manageable sections.  If you’ve only leased 10,000 sf, that’s all you cool.  If you’ve got a customer with a bunch of blades, you put them in a section with colder temperatures and more airflow – and charge more!

Just like metered powered and bandwidth, soon your data center provider will charge for cooling.  You heard it here first.

Google today announced guidelines for using the verb “google.”  Yes, they even gave examples of improper usage, one of which I’ve posted below:

Usage: ‘Google’ as verb referring to searching for information via any conduit other than Google.
Example: “I googled him on Yahoo and he seems pretty interesting.”
Our lawyers say: Bad. Very, very bad. You can only “Google” on the Google search engine. If you absolutely must use one of our competitors, please feel free to “search” on Yahoo or any other search engine 

So I thought I’d see how serious they are about policing this policy, because if they don’t then they run the risk of losing their rights. 

Ask.com released a mobile version of their search website a couple weeks ago that has some impressive mobile search features. 

I guess you could say Ask.com now googles on mobile phones.

I doubt Google is focused on video and search is no longer important, but it seems rather idiotic to not offer a search box for the RSS feeds.  They’ve got the data, they’ve got the search engine, it just doesn’t make sense for Google.  

I think it’d be great to get search results in typical article/feed format, 1 line at a time.  Google could insert 2-3 ads at the top of the search results based on the search terms, in 1 line format, and everyone would be happy.  Google could monetize the product and add ad inventory, and I could find relevant articles without reading all the garbage, especially on Craiglist.

By the way, Google Reader is a RSS reader that allows you to keep up to date on your favorite sites.  MyYahoo is a good starting RSS reader, but it has had recent problems with common RSS feeds that they haven’t bothered fixing.  Your SEO consultant probably wants you to provide a RSS feed for your website.

The Idea Factory, or Beta Factory if you like that better, released our first idea into the wild.  It’s called Trim and Wash.

You do now, even if you only caught 2 minutes of sports news. Did Adidas do a press release? Autograph signing at Foot Locker? Nope, just used odd NFL rules and bureaucracy to their advantage by asking Reggie to wear the illegal (brand) shoes in a preseason game.

Reggie got fined $10k for the uniform infraction, which Adidas will likely pay, in addition to the millions he already gets in the endorsement deal. The NFL doesn’t allow unofficial brands to show their logos. As a sidenote, Adidas owns Reebok, which is approved by the NFL, so one could assume some lawyers will make the whole thing go away.

The marketing lesson is that everytime someone said Reggie Bush, they said Adidas, all for $10k. So it makes sense to exploit sports leagues, award shows, and other events that have funny rules and are covered by the popular media.

Take for example, Under Armour, a rapidly growing sports apparel company that started by making a shirt that wicked away sweat and kept you dry. A novel, billion dollar concept. But now, they want to sell shorts, warm ups, hats, and shoes. It’s a niche brand that most people don’t know about even though they’re a public company, so they need to make it mainstream to make Nike money.

Just a week prior to the Reggie and Adidas stunt, Under Amrour signed an agreement with the NFL to become official so any NFL player can wear their shoes. Again, a sidenote, in that UA only gave the NFL some warrants to buy stock at a now underwater price, but that still costs them capital. The worst part is that it wasn’t a newsworthy deal.

Instead, UA could have paid a nominal amount to every rookie or guy fighting for a contract or even the whole defensive team to wear their shoes for the Monday Night game of that week. These are the types of guys that are in their commercials, no-name players who need smart equipment, just like the recreational basketball player who is really the customer. So yes, they’d also have to pay the fines, so maybe it costs them a million bucks, but the media would be ranting and raving for the rest of the week. It might be bigger than TO this year.

If you’re wondering where the ”e” went in the name, what Web 2.0 is all about, and why Yahoo! spends millions on simple websites that they could probably create themselves for 10% of the cost, I don’t know either. Maybe they like paying the extra for viral marketing or the accountants like the goodwill on the books. Either way, I’m fairly certain that Flickr is Yahoo!’s second biggest mistake, only to Cuban’s Broadcast.com.

Can you imagine paying over a billion dollars for a company that is obsolete 5 years later? How about paying for a photo sharing site that still hasn’t solved the ultimate photo sharing service problem – getting the pictures on the net without software. Do it via AJAX and you’d be a Web 2.0 star, and then Yahoo! would give you millions.

Click Fraud occurs when someone clicks on the ads without intent of buying anything. Harmless enough, but not when it’s done hundreds or thousands of times an hour, which can generate large advertising bills. There are 2 basic flavors of Click Fraud – competitors clicking on your ads to spend your money, and networks of clickers hosting ads on affiliated sites and clicking on them.

In that 2nd scenario, here’s how you make money:
1. buy a domain name ($5)
2. populate with content from others via rss/xml ($0)
3. link the lots of sites together, throw in a little blog comment spam, and attract search engine results. ($0)
4. host Google Adwords on your site, where you make a couple of cents for every click, Google makes the rest.
5. get your brother-in-law and his 27 kids to get all their MySpace friends to click the ads.

Google is making a lot of money this way right now, and has no interest in stopping it, because it helps the stock price. However, the advertisers are starting to get irritated, and I’m guessing that the government will get involved once someone explains it to them. I’ve seen 1 keyword generate a $12,000 bill in a month because it wasn’t protecting against Click Fraud.

Think I’m crazy? Cuban is on top of Click Fraud. Cringely knows it too.

It’s a stretch, but law changes similar to those that brought down the old Savings & Loans could have a brutal affect on internet advertising, including the biggest of them all Google. Could they make PPC ad publishers guarantee click quality, be subject to Sarbanes-Oxley style audits, or just let advertisers have more input on who the ad gets served to (because you know Google knows who you are already).

This time it’s all about social networking and web 2.0, which are 2.0 things that you’ll find on every startup profile. Lots of money chasing new web ideas, with minimal justification. It’s not my money, so might as well have fun with it.

So stay tuned for a couple of favorites in the coming weeks. This week, it’s prosper.com in the spotlight. Prosper.com claims to match up lenders and borrowers with an overlay of social networking as the glue that makes you not default on a loan that you can’t afford. Brilliant!

Unfortunately, I think Prosper.com (the market) will make a fair amount of money and get purchased by eBay/Paypal, a majority of borrowers will default with no recourse (there’s no collateral in a prosper.com loan, just that below average credit rating to damage), and the lenders will be left holding the bag of uncollectable paper.

Even better, Prosper.com better unload this deal soon before regulators catch up with them for usury, fair lending practices, and a number of other strict regulations.

I do think this is the start of a new idea of lending, where a Countrywide, Ameriquest, or LendingTree.com (they are close already) will setup a market that allows private investors to buy in on bigger pieces, say $10-100k, of home loans. The mortgage business could service the loan and would source more loans without need for brokers. No mortgage brokers? Now that’s an idea!

Scott D Boras, Inc
18 Corporate Plaza
Newport Beach, CA
949-760-0188

I’m sure he’ll enjoy your business proposals, scouting tapes, and phone calls.

Anyway, much to my amusement, I’m the foremost authority on Scott Boras. I continue to get search results, emails, and all kinds of SEO hype for just loading up the blog with spicy content.

Since I don’t have a lot of insight today, let’s just promote a good buddy’s website. He sells truck parts at fleetoilandtrucksupply.com in Long Beach and now online. I think it’s a good experiment, but my marketing sense says his biggest sellers are going to be trucker hats and trucker shirts. So if your truck has a need for a Wix Oil Filter for your Cummins, a Gates Belt, or a mud flaps for your truck.

So why not “create” one? It’s legal, because I’m not claiming to be the Scott Boras Corporation, just providing information.

The Scott Boras Corporation is run by Scott Boras himself, a popular sports agent, who along with Leigh Steinberg, basically invented the role of the sports agent in modern professional sports. Scott Boras and Leigh Steinberg split a couple of years ago, and Scott Boras left he and Jeff Moorad. Scott Boras now focuses mostly on baseball and is usually considered the one of the most ruthless agents. Scott Boras and his Scott Boras Corporation are located in Orange County in the Newport Center or Fashion Island area of Newport Beach. I won’t give out the Scott Boras Corporation address or the Scott Boras Corporation phone number, but I do have it. Scott Boras himself probably lives in Newport Coast somewhere near Kobe Bryant and Karl Malone. The Scott Boras Corporation represents Carlos Beltran, Alex Rodriguez, and plenty of other overpaid athletes. The Scott Boras Corporation employs about 60 people and makes millions. These are all things that should be on the Scott Boras Corporation website and the Scott Boras Corporation email would tell you.

The failures are easy, it’s either a bad idea or bad management. I don’t believe you can “fail” with just bad execution if you have a good idea or good management.

The successful start-ups are a little harder to diagnose, but most of the time a couple of the following make it click: management, money, experience, connections, luck. Some people just make it work, and it’s often a mystery to me.

I once asked Ron Simon of the namesake RSI Holding Co (they make cabinets for Home Depot/Lowes type stores), a $500 million dollar company, how they got to $50M. A little confused, he started with a standard answer and then ended up saying “It was hard.” Not even a very accomplished business man could tell me how it happened, it just did.

The most troubling to me is the start-up that just treads water. It doesn’t fail, doesn’t grow, just sits there no matter what pushes on it. This one I can’t quite pinpoint the reason.

Coincidently, these are the companies I often sign as clients. Their ventures are not shy about spending money, hiring people, or marketing their businesses – at least no different than a normal mid-sized business.

My guess is that they are treading water on purpose for various reasons, either financial or personal. That’s difficult to prove, but at least I know where to look. Now I only have to figure out how to fix it!

The market is unique in that it is both underserved and in high demand. Two factors that contribute to this situation are the rise in corporate real estate ownership and the minimal organizational structure of facilities and corporate real estate departments.

Some of the services we’ll be offering are lease analysis, lease audit, temporary facilities management, emergency facility response, computer aided facility management software selection and implementation, facility knowledgebase, and basically everything from lease signing to move in. The services are a good match for facilities and corporate real estate departments in companies that are expanding, merging, or just need temporary or project help from facility management professionals.

Some of my projects come about through a proposal and bid process. It generally works pretty well, but often you don’t get the work for reasons unknown to you. Projects sometimes never get off the ground or your bid is for reference with another vendor, you learn to accept the good with the bad.

Well today, I had a potential client tell me my bid was TOO LOW! Actually, the client was another vendor who was subcontracting out the work, which is why I think there was something funny going on. I’ve heard of a lot of shady business practices in these situations, such as the client taking a kick back from the sub to get the work.

With that in mind, make sure you require your vendors to show you any proposals and responses, and let you make the decision, so you’re in control!

Paul Graham agrees (one of those guys with a phd and millions), going as far as predicting the end of hiring. He thinks companies should hire people by buying the companies they’ve started at an early stage, which gains both talent and product development.

It’s not unthinkable, but there’s one hurdle – office space. Even in a big real estate market, the 500-1500 sf office (2-6 employees) doesn’t exist on a scale to support the growing start-up movement. Landlords won’t divide big spaces in hopes of big tenants, real estate brokers won’t represent small companies because of lower commission potential, credit, and hassle, and small companies run when asked to sign a 3 or 5 year lease and steep lease rates.

Many professionals I know have very successful businesses, but office space just isn’t available. The best CPA in Orange County doesn’t have a traditional office, and neither does Ralston Ventures.

Maybe that’s an advantage of big metropolitan areas like SF and NY, which have creative real estate options like lofts that can house a small business. And maybe it doesn’t matter with ubiquitous wireless internet, email, cell phones, blackberrys, and all the other stuff we use.

For all of you refusing to talk about outsourcing, here are the problems you get with cheap labor half-way around the world:

So now you’ve got a ship sitting in the same time zone of your office, that you can get to in a couple hours, and they’re committed to be there for 4 months! To top it off, I can only imagine how happy some computer programmers are going to be working where many people vacation.

You know Google loves this idea because of the effort they set forth to keep people at the Googleplex. They spend millions trying to keep smart people at work. Now they can put them on a boat in the middle of the ocean with a computer and a buffet dinner.

With all that hype, I don’t think it will work. The 3 guys trying to pull it off aren’t smart enough. At best they’ve got a business plan – no money, no boat, no contracts, no protection. How can you have a great business idea and give it away like this? You’ve setup zero barriers to entry, and it’s only a matter of time before someone like Google or Microsoft eats your lunch.

Both are Microsoft solutions houses (hold your boos) offering Great Plains software and Microsoft CRM in Orange County. Business is apparently strong, with plenty of medium sized companies either upgrading IT for security or Sarbanes Oxley compliance, or for better automation of their sales process.

My guess is that both of those are ok reasons for the investment, but the real reason is that businesses are flush with cash. They’re still scared to hire because of uncertainty, but business is brisk enough to produce returns. I read something the other day that said companies in the OC netted almost $1 billion increase in revenue with no employment increase.

Study a few balance sheets and look at the cash positions. Now you know why companies are buying buildings, software, and other large capital purchases, but not hiring employees.

The good news is that the Fed won’t be able to stifle business with increases in rates, but that means inflation also won’t be halted because the business will pay the asking price to other businesses. Following that logic, the Fed will continue to pump the rate over the next few years to stop that problem, but kill the consumers. What a nasty cycle.

He’s getting a lot of interest in it even though he admits it’s very simplistic.

Cheers Bazily!

First, Kinkos (a FedEx company) lost my originals. They can’t verify if they were stolen or thrown away, and they’re begging for mercy. An interesting point is that they ran me a 2nd copy of the said originals that they had already lost, which means they’re scanning and storing the documents, not just copying! Can I really trust the guy with bloodshot eyes behind the counter to be the best trustee of my important documents?

My other gripe is about UPS’s drop boxes – these things are impossible to find, and often they’re in the basement of buildings. I just don’t understand how that’s the optimal location.

Buyer Beware!

Now some people will frown on using a blog for anything corporate related, but they write about all kinds of things I don’t care about, so I think we’re even. I’ve also wrote my own blog code, eliminating comments and controlling my own content.

Look forward to tips, insight, and just about any business idea I have an opinion on to be posted here in the future.

Quote of the Day: “I don’t trust a ball that has no air” (in reference to baseballs, but plenty of business models have the same effect)