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Hit By Van

It was one of those days in New York City - hot, muggy, and the sky shaded dark freakishly ready to storm. Around 2pm Thursday went for a quick lunch 2 blocks away from our office space inside Ebay New York. Still dry after getting a sandwich and walking into Duane Reade between 17th and 18th st an unexpected flash storm occured out of nowhere. So I started to run the one block to avoid the down pour - and then while crossing 18th st at 6th ave, looking to my left watching cabs sit at the light - BAM!!! ... next thing I'm on my ass watching a huge white cargo van running over my left leg. Perspective (from what I think I remember) - I'm running across the street north on the west side of 6th ave, van hits my right leg forward spinning me to my right and onto the ground, too close in front of the van it's about to run over my left leg. Life and legs flash before my eyes... the right front tire either hits my left leg or I'm still sliding a few feet from momentum - I'm watching the tire about to run over and crush my left leg - and before it can, I get up, feel myself up and down for damage and start running back into the building in shock. I'm saying to myself "so lucky, so lucky, so lucky"...

For at least the rest of the month, all challenges with the company and personal life pale in comparison to the fact that I get to keep my legs for another day. After a small break and icing, it's back to it doing everything I know possible to push the company and life forward to succeed. Had it been a fraction of a second sooner or later, the outcome may have been dramatically different.

A way I wanted to restart this blog is with a story - and what better than one that reflects the path I've been on. Put obstacles, challenges, pretty much anything in the way - it's relentless execution, persistence, and dash of luck that has defined the journey so far.

First Time Hackathoner

Hackathons are something that should be quick to evolve in this rapid changing collective learning internet enabled culture. Last weekend I attended AngelHack NY - my first hackathon experience is described as sharing ideas and finding synergy then attempting to make the most efficient use of 24hrs while coworking with a floor of maker awesome people. With unlimited Red Bull, Snacks, food, and internet at our disposal, teams hustled their way from idea to prototype and pitch in one day. Coming without an idea makes you a free agent focused on finding an interest and placing skills with a team to launch something with.

Many called it unorganized, and there were disappointments with how projects were discovered, people learned of each others' skills, and even the judging seemed a little arbitrary. And if someone built a usable hackathon recruiting platform, it could help solve a cutting edge problem of how to assemble teams that ship products quickly. In the end, several strangers came together, committed to and executed an idea, and shipped a prototype product - that is undeniably awesome.

Bootstrap OK


Been building it alone for over 2 years, now it’s almost a business that fits in my hand. It was only supposed to take 3 days, yet iterations are routine as the road map infinitely grows. What you’re building isn’t exactly in the world yet, and you’re never a me too unless it makes sense. Either way this one aims to be the best easy easy.


The prototype is a flinstoning mvp because building a business based on another stack won’t cut it. You’re building a product aimed to be easy to use, high performance, and made available on every media type and screen size on the planet. At least pretend to make the idea look scarce.


You’re boot strapped, armed with knowledge and computers internet, building a dream you believe you can make real. No pedigree or family for money, less facebook friends than twitter followers, just keep building it and survive to and through launch.


When the only thing that matters is the founder vision, stick to believing the community, team, and funding will come once you’re done, bootstrap ok.
Take a head start on the startup advice, angels are waiting, and the world needs new commerce models.


There’s no impressing investors without a beta product and some market traction, and thanks to Disqus and Twitter you can get to know some of them before…


It’s you vs. the execution of the next best idea.


GO AND DO NOT STOP UNTIL YOU WIN OR DIE.

30 Things 30 Years

What I’ve learned and what I live by – 30 years on the planet.


I build internet, so it may not apply.


Whenever truly alone in life, embrace the time don’t waste it.


Do what you say, say what you mean, especially to yourself.


Keep a diary of ideas, never hesitate to act on the best ones.


Domain experience plus evolving awareness enables innovation and the perception of magic.


Never take waking up for granted, too many will never again have the chance to.


Search visible fast loading popular internet machine = success.


Value your time, get more by the second, it’s limited and adds up.


When lucky enough, cherish true love, it doesn’t happen very often.


Don’t put the business on personal credit, people will lend money to help build great ideas.


You’re either an entrepreneur or not, in between ensures failure or worse mediocrity.


Encourage the vision and innocence of children, not their ignorance.


Knowledge is wealth, health is happiness, cash pays it all.


If you have a gift, use it to get ahead, not a head that gets used.


There is physical, then there is love, and it’s a blessing to have both.


Life happens cosmically, when life tells you, you should listen.


Live by a checklist, execution better when planned.


Keep the integrity always, karma is real.


Failure is an option, fear is not.


Love what you do by doing what you love, especially if you do it best.


Seek discomforting evidence, the world is full of bullshit.


Always in your head, keep going, there is no fail.


Trust yourself before you trust others, embrace the connection to those you really trust.


Learn from mistakes, your own and others you know.


Be responsible, nobody cares, too many judge, so be aware of who is watching.


Healthly diet, daily excercise, aim it in the mix.


Stretch the back, build it sitting down, build it standing up.


Make time for yourself, if it ends tomorrow, there should be no regrets.


Easier to ask for money after you are proven, so try not to need anything and keep building it.


Need to provide more than value, must provide incentive.


Discipline and sacrifice always worth it when building dreams.


Still building the milestones, working on a better way to build internet…


Public beta by year end.

#freeseo Summary with Real-Time Search Case Study

I have an issue with the current state of realtime search. The one hang-up I have with this new type of search engine is that you can not mine the Twitter database for past results. Maybe one day I want to give a gift to the first person who mentioned my brand or product. Or what if I was interested in learning who started the #followfriday trend using Twitter search. Currently, even Advanced Twitter Search is a failure. I attempted to mine Twitter's database for the hash tag #freeseo from February of this year through today. The result set only showed two of the twelve tweets that mentioned #freeseo. With the $55 million in funding they have, I hope we will see a better Twitter search engine in the near future.

Here is the table with all of the #freeseo tweets to date. Note that the first tweet in the list is the most recent. The following tweets were exported using Tweetake.

#Status Date#freeseo Tweet Content
1Jun 01#freeseo obtain quality links. submit your business website to internet directories such as http://bit.ly/idirs
2May 22#freeseo /relevant-or-related-keyword-directory-names/ #seo
3May 07#freeseo <h1><a href="page-pointing-to-itself">relevant keyword page title</a></h1> #seo
4Apr 22#freeseo the content inside the html <title> element should not be exactly the same as the content inside the html <meta> element. #seo
5Apr 14#freeseo use relevant keywords with < IMG ALT= attribute. example: < IMG SRC=image-file-name.jpg ALT="relevant image keywords" /> #seo
6Apr 09#freeseo the html < title > tag is one of the strongest #seo factors. example: < title >unique page title with relevant keywords< /title >
7Apr 06#freeseo domain name CAN be one of the strongest variables. example: yourbrandpluskeyword.com #seo
8Mar 30#freeseo use-dashes-NOT_underscores_to-separate-keywords-in-file-names. example: good-keyword-topic.htm #seo
9Mar 27#freeseo the search engine bot reads the document from top to bottom. #seo http://twitpic.com/2hq8i
10Mar 26#freeseo relevant content is KING! #seo 101
11Mar 25#freeseo make sure the search engine bots can READ your code. http://validator.w3.org #seo
12Mar 23eventually i will teach everyone #freeseo. when i have time. precious time it is. only 14hrs for me to engineer internet. ONLY 14hrs.

I decided to do a little case study of the Twitter search engines. I entered the queries #freeseo and freeseo into the relevant realtime search engines just to see if there was any variation in the results. I believe the obscurity of the terms "#freeseo" and "freeseo" is important. Since the number of tweets that mention these terms is limited, we may deduce logic for how these different realtime search engines function based on the results.


Twitter Realtime Search Engine #freeseo Results
QueryABCDEFGHIJ
#freeseo20 | 1U022*210 | 1L20
freeseo2 | 110 | 1U02 | 113* | 72 | 111 | 80 | 1L2 | 110

The first number indicates results with the #freeseo hashtag. The second number indicates the total number of tweets in the result set. Where only one number is shown, the total number of tweets resulted in all #freeseo hashtag tweets. U represents a tweet by the user @freeseo. L represents a tweet by a user that mentioned FREESEO in a passed url. Something interesting happened with the *.

A - Twitter Search
B - Flaptor Twitter Search
C - OneRiot Realtime Search
D - Scoopler Realtime Search
E - Topsy Twitter Search
F - Twazzup Twitter Search
G - Tweefind Twitter Search
H - Tweetmeme Twitter Search
I - Tweetzi Twitter Search
J - Twitalyzer Twitter Search

About the results. Twitter search returned the two most recent tweets for the #freeseo hashtag (tweets one and two in the first table on this page). For the query freeseo, 11 total tweets were returned. Two of the results included the same #freeseo hashtag tweets, the remaining 9 tweets were the latest from the user @freeseo, with one being from a Twitter user that included FREESEO in a url. From the results in the chart above, and from the search results themselves, one can deduce that for simple obscure searches Scoopler, Twazzup, and Tweetzi are replications of the authentic Twitter search. Tweefind is a weak version of the authentic Twitter search that produced only the most recent tweets for the queries entered. OneRiot and Twitalyzer returned 0 results. It seems that OneRiot delivers results for trending topics, and this is completely an assumption. Twitalyzer uniquely only returns results based on the influence of the tweet, so the result of 0 makes sense. Tweetmeme returned the one tweet from the user that included FREESEO in a url for both queries, which is its purpose. Flaptor only returned the most recent tweet from the Twitter user @freeseo for both queries.

Topsy Twitter Search was the most impressive, even beyond authentic Twitter search. For the query "#freeseo" Topsy retrieved one of the first tweets (tweet #11 from the #freeseo table above) along with the most recent tweet. For the query "freeseo", Topsy retrieved the most recent #freeseo tweet, #freeseo tweet #11, and a link I had tweeted that included freeseo in the url (http://bit.ly/freeseo). The remaining four tweets were a blend of tweets that were unique to all the other realtime search engines. Topsy definitely has a unique realtime search algorithm from the several realtime search engines.

If there is absolute certainty that realtime search will play a role in the internet's future, there is a benefit to understanding these algorithms while they are at the ground level. If Twitter is diligently working on the future of realtime search behind the scenes, then I assume that these results will be dramatically different in the future. But for now, realtime search feels like 1999 web search.

First Time For Life Internet Entrepreneur Confessions

The mindset is simple. Do whatever is necessary to ensure an opportunity to venture, begin building the industrial grade internet machines in my brain, and transform them into businesses that all have clear paths to exit. This journey starts with building a skeletal prototype, using it to power and scale internet businesses, and then using the exit for seed money to power the rest. Results guaranteed and directed to solve a problem that our internet poses for the small business. It is always a race against the clock, which in itself fuels the energy for 14 hour workdays. Market research, business planning, and VC/angel investor brain reading consume all the time spaces in between. The venture capitalist blog circuit and Twitter profiles of both angel investors and venture capitalists provide the knowledge of who I aim to inevitably become. It is all about introducing an internet scenario that invites a fair yet high valuation. It is all about introducing category killing clear path to exit internet machines that provide value to the world while causing disruption.

It wasn't always such a direct path. When I first started the path toward internet mastery in 1999, the internet dream was to create a residual income that was generated solely through the creation of what my own two hands could generate. The years past, I lived the college experience, tried to stay awake, then in 2005 I had my first internet vision. After dropping out of CSULB four classes shy of my bachelor's degree, I began a venture that cost me my credit and three and a half years of my life. My first run at venture ended in failure, but I didn't walk away empty handed. Now there is a comprehension of internet that enables internet visions. I now have a complete internet education that no university currently provides. And most importantly, I walked away trained with discipline for having patience, and learned a great appreciation for when things go as planned. This is not a fly by night operation, they are calculated steps where the odds of success increase over time.

There are a few things that I realize. When I sound crazy commenting on Fred Wilson's blog, what I am really doing is setting a tone for the future. As the come from nowhere internet entrepreneur, I understand that finding a team and building a network is a core attraction to venture capitalists and angel investors. In the meantime, I can show them my brain by participating in their arenas, and sometimes even earn feedback that should be as valuable as gold to any aspiring entrepreneur. So when the time is right, when the businesses running on the prototype have traction, when the deal is completely clean and all the docs are solid, and when there is even a little seed money to boot, I won't be a complete stranger walking through their door. I'll at least be that crazy guy who spoke of visions for the internet version of Walmart.

Is it so wrong that all I want to do is build internet machines? I look to build a team that will take my directions for profitability and turn them into solid financial models. Put those MBA's to good use. Though I believe I will be racing against the clock for at least the next few years, I am no longer anxious that someone will come along and build one of the machines in my brain before I have a chance to. The fact is, whether you believe it or not, we are on the verge of the next internet BOOM. Smartphones, netbooks, and even the television are all becoming internet mediums. Three days from now, the airwaves begin opening up for next generation internet here in the US. Soon enough we will be engulfed with internet devices that currently do not exist. And as long as this future is imminent, I will have internet innovations to provide the world with. One step at a time. This train has been set into motion.

Internet Television Version 0.01

internet tv theory

Soon we will have access to internet television. This posting is part of a series focusing on the transition of traditional television broadcasting to internet tv programming. Separate posts will be dedicated to both the interface and the control of this new to be standardized internet medium.

(Personal ADVERTISEMENT - the internet tv designs I work on are all ten steps ahead of the technology I describe here - contact me at categorykiller.info for investment opportunities.)

Give us a Moblin, personally me an Android, unless Microsoft can figure out their policy in time and provide us with what we really need. Sorry RIMM, the future for this market is looking bleak for you as of now in my eyes. Linux, this is where I'd like to see you gain some traction. Nokia Symbian, let's see what you can do. It would make sense for the initial offerings to come from cable, satellite, and telecom television/internet service providers. In areas where smart grid powerline internet is offered, utility companies could venture with innovative web startups to develop an open source aggregation interface.

Start with a net top box, and the key here is simplicity. Sure, every techie, gadget lover, and everybody who is into and can afford new technology will go out of their way to enjoy the internet programming of the future, such as Boxee. The unfortunate reality is that in order to reach the masses, internet television must become simple. The most complicated part of the system is that it would require cat 5e or wireless-N broadband internet connection. For the sake of familiarity, it makes sense for the isp content aggregators to utilize a channel block at first. Each software controlled channel could choose a version of the internet content specific to either the css viewport, browscap, device signifier, or something other relevant. Each "internet channel" provider should make efforts to develop their own unique signature style, and there should be a remote button dedicated to a standalone web browser. An example of the framework could be a tailored os that autoloaded a "channel viewer" application. Like before, the remotes would control the box wirelessly, and include programmed hotkeys for functions of the "channel viewer" program. (Later posts will specifically cover future remote designs.) Let's briefly discuss the remote. Elongated typical tv remote with joystick to start. Eventually we will figure out that the game style joystick paddles work better, unless the price drops on another hardware sooner.

The video overlay ad model will have to change. Viewing internet advertisements that interrupt our viewing and request us to cancel them out is not a sustainable model if we are to accept them for our everyday full screen entertainment viewing. These channels could include Hulu, YouTube, and other video aggregators. I could easily see Digg, Reddit, and even VideoSift having channels that we surf through. If Facebook has in on any of this, we could see a toolbar that keeps us socially connected with our peers for anything we are watching. The best channels would have interactive function, such as Aviary and Photoshop Express.

That is what I see for post 0.01.