ToddKenefsky

I just noticed this ad for IBM’s ThinkPad x300 with a not-so-subtle dig at Apple’s MacBook Air, “Everything else is just hot air”. The x300 actually looks pretty cool with lots of ports, DVD burner, solid state drive and removable battery, and weighing in the same (but slightly thicker) than the Air.

I don’t suppose the Apple fanboys will care for this ribbing from Lenovo (whose name is conspicuously missing from the ThinkPad’s ads), but then if you’re going to dish it out in heaps, you’ve got to expect a little back in return.

Here’s a sneak peak at the new BarCAmp Portland 2008 T-shirts. The shirt was designed by Tatyana Dudnik, a student at the Portland Art Institute with help from classmate Nick Mauer. Tatyana’s design was selected from many outstanding submissions by members of Portland Art Institute’s student advertising agency BrashCreative. Big thanks to Brash co-founder Bram Pitoyo for all his organizational help and design expertise.

A Sasquatch riding a rocket! It’s doesn’t get much better than that. So where can you buy one of these babies? You can’t! But…if you donate $20 or more to help fund BarCamp Portland, we’ll give you a shirt for free. You can do so at the Legion of Tech site on the T-shirts page.

Silicon Florist led me to Fred Wilson’s post; Ten Questions About Entrepreneurs.

I was interviewed yesterday by a journalist who is doing a television-style series on entrepreneurs which will be broadcast on the web starting this summer. He asked me somewhere around thirty questions about entrepreneurs. I didn’t take notes but here are ten questions I remember and a short quick summary of my answer.

Just for kicks I took at quick stab at answering the same questions:

What is entrepreneurship? Bringing to bear the forces and resources necessary to create a business. These include initiative, energy, motivation, determination, capital, ideas, organization, risk, guile, cunning, providence, vision and many others.

Can entrepreneurship be taught/learned? There are skills that can be acquired, but ultimately entrepreneurship is more about execution than knowledge.

Is entrepreneurship limited to small companies? Of course not.

Are entrepreneurs “control freaks”? I don’t buy into the stereotypes, but many are. The name of the game is getting stuff done, without fail, no excuses, with your rear on the line. It’s no surprise that the entrepreneurs who get stuff done are the ones who make damn sure it does.

What do you look for in entrepreneurs? The ability to solve problems. Entrepreneurship is a series of problems to be solved- how to get customers, find good employees, secure funding etc.

Is there an ideal age for an entrepreneur? No. Youthful energy is good but so is experience.

Are there many women entrepreneurs? I haven’t seen the statistics, but in the local tech scene at least, the field is almost exclusively male.

Do entrepreneurs have balance in their lives? People who want balance usually do other things for a living. Like a job, for instance. Barista and yoga instructor are great jobs for balance.

What skills would you advise an entrepreneur to acquire? I think an entrepreneur should strive for a minimum level of skill in all the core business disciples. But the most important ones are product knowledge and customer acquisition. If you have a great product and people willing to pay for it, most other problems can be managed.

Are entrepreneurs happier than others? I think people who feel they have control of their own destiny are happier than those who don’t.

This morning I read two quotes from seemingly diametrically opposed business philosophies:

“If you take care of the downside, the upside will take care of itself” - Donald Trump

“Manage the top line (the quality of your people, your strategy, taking care of your customers), and the bottom line will take care of itself” - Steve Jobs

Both men are business icons who have achieved incredible success interspersed with periods of “failure” and known for outspoken attention-loving egocentricity that have inspired both swooning admirers and mocking detractors. To me their biggest commonality is that both make stuff that they personally love; Trump seems to be as passionate about ritzy real estate as Jobs is about clean & functional computer design; and both sell at a premium relative to their competitors.

A 30-foot-tall cigarette butt sculpture was installed in Trafalgar Square to draw attention to London’s growing litter problem as part of the Keep Britain Tidy campaign. This is a much more creative and memorable approach than merely posting (unnoticed) “no littering” signs or running (soon forgotten) PSA spots on the tele.

The topic of Fair Trade coffee came up this morning. Personally, I like the Fair Trade movement. It’s a fine way to tell the free market that one is willing to pay a price higher than the current market rate to support impoverished farmers and laborers around the world. A noble cause for sure. However, I am not a proponent of Fair Trade legislation much as, while I believe exercise if beneficial, I wouldn’t advocate having a police officer sent to every home to ensure we all do our morning sit ups.

Contrary to popular belief, Starbucks coffee isn’t antithetical to the Fair Trade cause. In order to qualify for Fair Trade status, buyers have to pay “a minimum price per pound of $1.26”. The fact is that Starbucks, as with almost all other gourmet coffee brands, already pay a much higher price for their beans at prevailing market rates. And Starbucks buys less than 2% of the world’s coffee- not nearly enough to have significant influence on prices.

Think of Fair Trade as analogous to the minimum wage. It doesn’t affect premium beans, which already trade at a much higher rate, just as the minimum wage doesn’t affect high salaried professional jobs. Fair Trade does pertain to lower-priced grocery story quality beans which are grown is great quantities for low cost and low pay.

If you want to support marginalized growers, the most effective thing you can do is simply not drink bad coffee. Any premium brand, even Starbucks (though I much prefer Stumptown), supports higher prices paid to growers- much higher than Fair Trade prices.

I caught this commercial for AT&T’s GoPhone today and I loved it. It’s a spoof of Meat Loaf’s classic Paradise by the Dashboard Light video.

For those of you who don’t know the referent, here it is:

In case you missed the obituary, HD DVD is dead. Toshiba recently announced it would cease production of HD DVD’s, making Sony’s Blu-Ray the apparent winner of the high def physical format war.

I watched this battle with great interest as a case study in business strategy and brinkmanship. Here was a golden opportunity to observe VHS vs. Beta Part Two. My guess was that, having lived through a format war already, the major players would take a more sophisticated approach and settle on a format before bringing a product to market, thereby avoiding risking potential billions in losses. Boy, was I wrong.

So Blu-Ray won, but why? Many cite the advantage Sony had with it’s popular Blu-equipped Playstation game console, others claim that Sony had more to lose and was more aggressive in it’s pricing and partnerships, while a few believe the Blu-Ray name itself was a factor.

I’m sure the reasons are many and future MBA students will no doubt analyze the heck out of it. But comparing the two format wars, one simple similarity immediate jumps out like a top-loaded videocassette; size. Like VHS, Blu-Ray discs have a considerably larger capacity than its rival. (In fact the ‘adult entertainment’ industry is often alleged to have deciding the winning videocassette by picking VHS. In fact, Porn’s adoption was more effect than cause- Betamax only held 2 hours of video and much of Porn’s catalog wouldn’t fit on the tapes. By the time Porn decided on VHS, consumers and Hollywood were already reaching the same conclusion about the Beta capacity problem.) This time around Sony wasn’t going to be out-gunned.

It appears Sony did learn a big lesson about consumer preferences from its Betamax loss- size still matters.

If you’re looking for something cool to do tonight, you should head over to Wieden + Kennedy for the very first Ignite Portland. Each presenter has 5 minutes- 20 slides auto advancing every 15 seconds- to say something interesting. Check out this lineup of topics!

5:30 Doors Open
6:00 Registration & Networking
6:20 Welcome and Introductions
6:30 Presentations Wave 1
- Renny Gleeson: What is Ignite?
- Steve Morris: How to put together an investor presentation
- Urban Scout: Rewilding. The process of undoing domestication
- Adam Duvander: Simplicity, create killer products and live a saner life
- Audrey Eschright: Why knitting is a good hobby for geeks
- Kevin Tate: Emergence In Business
- Scott Huber: I know more about Russell Davies than I do about my boss sitting across from me.
- Crystal Beasley: How to make a proper southern meal
- Scott Kveton: Free beef and clean bathrooms: the irrelevance of Web 2.0
7:20 Break and Networking
7:35 Door Prize
7:40 Presentations Wave 2
- MJ: Unicycling for a wicked-good time
- Selena Deckelmann: Are surveys useful?
- Bill DeRouchey: The History of the Button.
- Keith Gerr: Identity and brand development strategies for a wired world
- Sarah Gilbert: How keeping chickens will save your life
- MarcoPolo: You Give Good TXT: How to Talk to Someone Romantically Online
- Justin Kistner: Decentralized social network standards
- Hideshi Hamaguchi: How to live like Japanese in Portland
- Douglas Wolk: The Complete and Utter History of the Numa Numa Dance
8:30 Networking

Some things never get old. Like finding a sweet expanding bubble logo. This growing globular graphic comes courtesy of Beaverton, Oregon based YourList.com. From what I can tell YourList is like Craigslist but without the Craig. Contrataulations to YourList on their awesome logo.

The tally so far: