Ideas

Steve Pilgrim pointed me to James Lileks’s entry today about his trouble with a DirectTV installation: One service call turned into seven. One three-hour wait window turned into 21 hours. I can still see the original installer who screwed everything up — scrawny, nervy, tar-stained teeth, a lummox associate whom you expected to say “I […]

Slate: “When you look at the business of professional sports — in both Europe and the United States — American sports are virtually all socialistic while the European soccer leagues more closely resemble the entrepreneurial capitalism we Americans fetishize.” via Kottke.

Jeff Cornwall: “Rob at BusinessPundit suggested a post at The Occupational Adventure about failure. It is worth a look. Failure, or the fear of failure, is what has kept many a potential entrepreneur on the sidelines. Failure is something we all have learned from along the way if we let ourselves take some risks. It

This week’s Carnival of the Capitalists is up at pc4Media. Note to host, Peter Caputa: Check the definition of carnival.

NY Times: A 33-year-old engineer from Salt Lake City, promoting a company that would mass-produce flying cars with retractable wings, was among the lucky finalists in the “Pitch Tim Draper on Your Billion Dollar Idea” contest, held Wednesday in the offices of the venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Another finalist was a San Jose,

David St Lawrence: This is sort of an advanced concept for some people. They may have such difficulty staying ahead of the game themselves, that they find it hard to conceive of sharing the best bits of their business with others. Others I have known were able to share their game without losing control of

Atmaspheric | Endeavors: “Instead of just offering an option to have the number dialed, why not send the information as an SMS or even an email with vcard so you could save it for future calling from your phone/device. Landline calling would require a simple registration to identify where you want the information sent. I’d

Chad Everett: It costs 4.2 cents to produce a dollar bill. That dollar bill lasts for 18 to 22 months. Meanwhile, it costs 12 cents to produce a Sacagawea Dollar – but the coins last for thirty years. The cost of keeping a dollar bill around for thirty years is somewhere between 69 and 84

I don’t know how I would be able to keep up without Bloglines. Happy birthday to my favorite web service.