Reid Hoffman who invested in sites like facebook and digg, was on Charlie Rose. Techcrunch has the full embbeded video. I do believe in what he mentioned that every individual is now an entrepreneur.
To add to that, every individual is now a brand. We now have a large amount of information in the public. With our facebook profiles, linkedin and even goggling our own name brings up information about us. Employers even Google potential employees (expect for Jason Calicasas). So we all have to manage our own brands. Though saying that, it doesn’t mean that we should fabricate our brand or image. Unless you want to work in politics I don’t see the need to having split personalities and deleting your drunken college photographs off facebook because people fear that they’re employers will find out.
On the way back home from Brighton (MobileCampBrighton). I was thinking about image cut outs and how they make interesting leading visuals. So I thought I’d share my random thoughts.
I know a few sites that displays cutout before going into an article. Flickr also displays cutout images of photos in a album format. The sketches probably won’t make any sense. But I thought I post it. Thanks to BetaVine/Vodafone for the free notepads.
The issue with cut outs is that if we pick at random a place to cut out an image, we risk the chance of picking a really strange area and or just a boring one.
Like for example we take a picture of a crowd of people dancing on the beach. Then we cut out the top right hand corner and all we get is the sky. It doesn’t do the full image any justice.
So I wondered if there is a speicifc area of a photo that would have the best chance of being an interesting cut out.
Agile is a well-known development methodology that is used in software and web development. It gets things going and allows for not everything to be planned.
The question is can it work for businesses? Its more commonly used in start-ups and web companies where bootstrapping is found.
The guys at 37Signals (BaseCamp) use an agile way of thinking in their business. Reading the notes that Robbie Allen wrote online from the 37Signals Getting Real Workshop (http://tinyurl.com/agx4jb)
Agile thinking to business is about: Not worrying about the future but concentrating on now There is no need to worry about problems that doesn’t exist. Worry about scale when you have a million customers and hire for scale only when you need to.
Accepting mistakes will happen and learning from them Agile will mean that mistakes will be made but agile also means that you will be able to correct them quickly. The idea is not to try and worry about making mistakes as people are paralyzed by mistakeaphobia as 37Signals put it.
Grow organically and not building a business that is monolithic Try and simplify and not build monolithic businesses with no focus. If you try 15 ideas and 2 of them gain traction, concentrate on the ones that work. Which leads on to build things quickly, low cost and if it is successful you put more effort.
If you fail, accept it Failure is something good. It is better to fail more trying more ideas than failing on the only idea you have. It is also important to know when you have failed or when to move on and try something else.
Let me know what you think - Ben [ at ] benmatthew.net
