To me, this is part of what being an entrepreneur is all about. Turning around in the taxi line, embarrassing yourself in front of hundreds of people, and seeing what happens. Often times, it’s something good, because nobody else is willing to try...

It’s no secret that Google calendars and iCal don’t play super nicely together.   And it’s even worse on the iPhone.  It got so bad that I was using the Google calendar web app instead of the native calendar app because subscribed Google calendars (called “delegate” calendars) weren’t even showing up. But here’s a trick — a way to sync your subscribed calendars from Google’s...

I recently wrote about how I’ve swapped PowerPoint out for something I call PowerPinch (a term I made up). When it came time to make a demo video for Socialize, I wondered if I could use PowerPinch to make the video, and then somehow capture what was happening on my iPad.  It turns out, you can.  Here’s the finished video, and below is how I did it. http://www.vimeo.com/33939244 First, I made the demo video using my...

Sick of endless PowerPoint slides?  If you want to take your presentation to the next level, and you know basic HTML, you can hack together a presentation on an iPad that lets you interact with your content like never before.   I call it “PowerPinch” because you can pinch, swipe and zoom seamlessly with your presentation, and focus in on the content you’re talking about, then zoom out quickly and move on to the next...

Mark Jacobstein, CEO of iSkoot, sat down with me to talk about Qualcomm and its upcoming initiatives. iSkoot was acquired by Qualcomm last year, and now Mark is VP of Product Management for Qualcomm. The reason I’m so fascinated by Qualcomm is due to its integrated approach to hardware and software.  I always thought of Qualcomm as a hardware company, but many of its current initiatives are software-focused.  And not just that...

I was one of the mobile and social engagement experts at the 2011 LavaCon conference in Austin, TX this week.  LavaCon is a very well attended niche conference for digital media and content strategists — not the “social media gurus” you so often hear about, but actual content strategists who create, curate and publish content for some of the world’s leading brands. They have an interesting predicament on their...

In my series about using agile processes not just for software development but in everyday life,  Socialize VP of Engineering Jason Polites has offered up a guest post about what often gets overlooked in software development: Nice post.  I think there are some very basic tenets relating to SCRUM, or agile in general, that tend to get overlooked though.  Actually.. throw out the word SCRUM for a second and just consider what the...

Google engineer Steve Yegge let an internal Google memo slip publicly (he later called it “the great-granddaddy of all Reply-All screwups in tech history”) where he argued that Google was royally screwing up by not building its social technology and other internal technologies as a platform.  He compared Google to Amazon, which does. If you’re interested in understanding the importance of a company ‘eating its own...

We’ve been using the Scrum agile development framework (or just “scrum”) at Socialize since early this year.  Hats off to Jason, our VP of Engineering, for really championing it and to Sean and Isaac for implementing it with the developers.  Our workflow is to use Basecamp to discuss ideas (Basecamp is like Democracy: it’s not great, but it’s the best thing out there — you can read my rants &...

Sue and I took a tour of the Tesla Model S factory in Fremont, CA today.  This is the old NUMMI plant.  If you haven’t heard the NUMMI story between GM & Toyota, and you’re a car buff, there’s a This American Life episode about it that’s just mind blowing.  The net of it is that GM tried to learn Just In Time assembly practices from Toyota, they built a factory together for Toyota to transfer...