Written on March 2, 2011 at 7:25 pm, by wills

A recent conversation with an entrepreneur who is scaling an “Asian-Heritage” shoe brand cleared up a lot of what I think is essential for “21st Century Relevant” businesses. These thoughts were synthesized one step further this past weekend for a presentation I gave to a class of Colgate students (Alma Mater) who enrolled in an entrepreneurship course that I co-teach with two alums.

Written on January 13, 2011 at 8:27 pm, by wills

I have three bookmarklets currently in my Chrome browser (seen below) and I wish I had a few more.

I renamed them for my own satisfaction, but the three add-ons above are for Instapaper, Boxee and The Fancy and they are really simple to add and understand.

I’ve been using the bookmarklets for a little while, but am still in the adoption stages of trying to break my stubborn internet-behavior and increase the frequency with which I access them.

Written on January 6, 2011 at 8:44 pm, by wills

Patient capital (Acumen Fund), crowd-sourcing (Kickstarter), socially-focused businesses (TOMS), new avenues for volunteerism (Catchafire), ‘B’ Corporations, forums and message boards with volumes of free and constantly updating content making you your own expert (Hacker News, StackOverflow, Everything Longboarding), university-quality blogs and educational tools (SteveBlank, AVC, Khan Academy)… There is an undeniable evolution taking place affecting what talented people feel motivated to do.

Written on November 22, 2010 at 12:40 am, by wills

In the beginning, music was live. People needed to be in the physical presence of an artist to hear his/her sound, or they were charged with creating music on their own or with a group of friends. Later, radio and TV emerged and distributed music (and other forms of art) directly to the home and individuals. This one-to-many distribution allowed for tremendous scale and equally tremendous profits. On the heels grew another billion dollar industry in printing songs onto the latest-technology materials (vinyl, 8-track, cassettes, CD’s…), and picking a price at which to sell to a hungry public looking to rock-out whenever they wanted; end users could now own their own content.