Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams…

Flash Sushi is bringing the shadowy Japanese tradition of Nyotaimori, the art of eating sushi off a naked female body, back to London until March this year.
For centuries this rare practice was the preserve of Japan’s elite, but has been brought to the event scene in London, with reportedly high demand.

Flash Sushi will offer a limited number of places until March 2010, when the concept ends.

Diners are invited to varying locations at different times of the month. Once you have a confirmed place at the Flash Sushi table, the dinner’s location is divulged 24 hours prior to the event.

All locations are within Central London, and diners are alerted by SMS message.

Between 12 and 24 other gastro thrill-seekers will gather at each session for a champagne reception before taking seats for a ten-course, seasonal Omakase style sushi dinner.

For more click on the original link:

http://www.eventmagazine.co.uk/news/bulletin/newsbulletin/article/977923/?DCMP=EMC-NewsBulletin

50 albums you need to hear in 2010

January means only one thing in Music World: new albums time. This week’s NME issue takes a look at the most anticipated releases of the year, and speaks to the stars making them in the studio. Click on for the 50 most exciting projects coming your way soon…

http://www.nme.com/photos/50-albums-you-need-to-hear-in-2010/162718/1/1

Looking back at 2009, we can say that it was the most interesting time in the web technology ( despite the harsh economy). The year 2009 boosted the potential of mobile gadgets and its value in today’s networked society. We can call it the rise of social awareness of networking and communicating.

So when we look ahead in 2010, we will see that the innovation has just begun. So here are the lists of technologies, which I think, will rock the year 2010. Most of the technologies that will be mentioned are related to online media and the Internet.

1. Apple’s Tablet

The noises and speculations are too high to ignore the presence of Apple’s Tablet. If all the rumors are authentic and, if by all means, Apple launches the iSlate on 25th January, then it’s going to be the thing to talk about in 2010.

We must admit that a tablet is a concept that has been around us for a very long time. But it is still not the consumer device that people would die for. But after the increase in sales and demands of Amazon Kindle and Nook, the market is pretty sure that a tablet is soon to be the device to have. So at this time, if Apple can bring the device with the interface that people are looking for then that’s it - We have our new iPOD. It is not a biased statement, but a truth in some way.

The reason that I say is because Online Reading is something that every Internet users do and Tablet provides the best way to consume the Internet content. Though we might still be working on a Laptop, Tablet will be the way to consume digital content.

2. NetPhone

We are already seeing the importance of Google Voice, which many Americans have enjoyed. We already have a software like Skype which allows you to communicate through the internet data line.

This demonstrates that people are still comfortable with voice communication and it is not going to die. We would still want to call our friends and families and communicate. Hence, we might see more advancement in VOIP technology.

Though mobile network providers would have to play a hard battle with the VOIP services, the conflict between these two models will end once we have more and more VOIP services running in our mobile devices.

3. Net Neutrality

The rise of Smartphone have suddenly put a lot of pressure on the mobile network providers. The online content consumption and communication have stressed out the network providers. One of the prominent example is the failure of At&T to meet the iPhone’s demand. This have forced the content providers and distributors into two opposite poles.

Content providers like Google (YouTube for video content) consumes a lot of bandwidth. This is not good for the network providers because they have to face the burden of handling the requests. On the other hand, content providers don’t have to pay anything to the distributors. As a result, Network providers would have to increased their fees. Now, this brings a great conflict between the consumers, the providers and the distributors.

Net neutrality is all about giving full access to the Internet without any restrictions. But we still need to see some agreement between the providers and the distributors. Hence, we might be able to see some breakthroughs on Net Neutrality in 2010 which would solve the current problems.

4. Social Profile Management(Advanced Analytics)

Online Social Networking sites have blasted the news channel on each opportunities in 2009 and it will continue to do so in 2010. More and more real time contents would be distributed online and consumed by people. Online networking will see more than just sharing information.

2009 had an overwhelming reaction towards social media which created a lot of junk in the Internet. Currently, informations and contents go to waste and don’t make their way toward the targeted audiences.

2010 will see a revolution towards social profile management with advance analytics. This will be applying spam control over your networks and strengthening the efficiency of your network connections. As sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are used in professional hiring, Profile search will also be a big thing. Social network provides a best way to reach out to potential businesses. Hence search (not for content) but for people should be big. Social profile management with advance analytics will be the next big thing for social networks

5. Virtualization

Client desktop computing is surely the new way towards connecting people to offices. Virtual desktops or Virtual machines will soon be employed in many offices providing better flexibility to hardware and software selection.

This will reduce the hardware cost of servers and desktops and CPU maintenance in office. This will also reduce the cost of softwares as most will be deployed in the virtual machines. This is a key to cutting costs, lowering complexity, as well as increasing agility as needs shift.

6. Online TV

YouTube and other online video sharing sites have almost killed Television. The new generations prefer Internet over TV channels. As with the music industry, TV channels have understood that going online is the only way towards future and they have to jump into this bandwagon before it’s too late.

There are already many commercial channels shifting their attention from TV to Youtube or other sites like Hulu. Further, Google have already announced its paid content over Youtube and the new video advertising technology.

Along with TV, advertising also has to make its way to the eco-system and we already know of many rumors over Apple and Google coming with ways to prevent viewers from skipping the ads. This provides great opportunity for TV Channels to enter into the Internet. Hence 2010 will certainly see hand and hand cooperation of the Internet providers and the Online TV channels.

7. Cloud Computing

Cloud computing will be the new way of doing business over the internet. It will be more of virtual resources management, where company can optimize his/her resources according to needs and dynamic adaption to changes. This will allow companies to greatly enhance their products and services. Cloud computing will also leverage the potential of web applications in the Internet and we might be seeing some great online applications for users and also enterprise solutions.
8. Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is going to blow people’s mind in 2010. With the help of mobile computing, GPS technology, mobile camera and Google maps, mobile applications are going to have much more power to bring the experience to the user than in the past.

Further, the core of the technology will be the mobile camera and the placement of processed information on top of live streaming contents from the camera.

We are already seeing some of it with mobile GPS applications, but 2010 will clearly put these applications on the top shelf of mobile apps. This will allow users to get information by integrating physical reality and virtual world.

9. Online Microsoft Office

Microsoft did face a lot of failures in 2009, starting with its slow rise of Bing and failure of Windows Mobile 6.5. So 2009 was not the year for Microsoft, but we could expect more from Microsoft in 2010. It’s Windows 7 have received good reviews, hence in 2010 we may get to read more about it. Windows Mobile 7 is also on its way, it might help Microsoft gain over their Smartphone market share.

But above all, we might get to read about Microsoft’s online OS. With the strength of today’s computing power over the Internet, the time is right for Online Office Suite. We have already seen the success of the Google Docs, so the speculation is high for Online Office. Hopefully this will reduce their cost and avoid nagging updates. The new competition is obviously on the Internet.

10. Mobile Transaction (Mobile Banking)

We surely need to get rid of credit cards and debit cards. They have already become less attractive in terms of monetary transaction. Once mobile phones starthandling our financial details, we will see a huge potential for mobile transactions and mobile banking.

Mobile application builders have already started making applications for enterprise solution by adopting enterprise protocol. For mobile banking and transactions to be successful we need an enterprise solution over the mobile network, similar to RIM’s Blackberry, which will confirm security over the mobile transaction.

The year 2010 will certainly see the glimpse of future’s monetary transaction.

- source: globalthoughtz.com

SOCIAL order crumbled and mass executions of sacrificial virgins were ordered as over a centimetre of snow fell in some parts of London today.

Putney virgins must dieAs temperatures plummeted mayor Boris Johnson abandoned snowbound boroughs and told them to fend for themselves and eat each other if necessary.

Johnson said: “We can’t save the people of Putney now, we can only pray that the gods spare them. All we can do is hope the blood of 100 virgins appeases the snow sprites and makes the roads usable once more.”

Many famous London landmarks, including the National Gallery and Madam Tussaud’s are currently ablaze as locals try to ward off the white terror.

London cabbie Charlie Reeves said: “It’s a bleedin’ shame all them Rembrandts had to go up but that weird white stuff has gorn away now, so maybe Jack Sleet hates Dutch Golden Age art? I blame the Polish comin’ over here and bringing it wiv them, meself.

He added: “Mind you, Tussaud’s has gone up a treat. It’s like a giant candle made out of corpses. Luverly.”

This evening will see the sacrificial virgins pushed off the top of Nelson’s Column into a blazing pit of Monets followed by a carol service by the Westminster choir. The ceremony has not been conducted since 1751, when half of London died as several ponds froze over for three days.

Boris Johnson added: “We can only assume we have angered Old Flaky in some way, possibly with our plans to extend the Congestion Zone. I’ve commissioned a think tank to look into alternative methods of snow god appeasement, such as Jew expulsion or making the Queen dance erotically on the roof of Buckingham Palace.”

Martin Bishop, a Carlisle-born builder working in London, said: “They’re like this all the time, you know. You should have seen my neighbours when some of their roof tiles blew off last winter. You couldn’t move for slaughtered chickens in our cul de sac.”

:: Courteousy of The Daily Mash, Dec 2009

Should a Church do Experiential Marketing or any Marketing?

Written by Daniel Herndon on July 28th, 2009

I was posed an interesting question first as a comment to a blog a few months ago and then again this week… Does Current Church Do Experiential Marketing? Should Current Church do Experiential Marketing?

Should a church spend money on advertisement? Should they seek to market themselves (like a business)?

Some would say that churches should NOT do “marketing”. They should only serve the community, and I will admit up front that I am (mostly) of this persuasion. Why spend money on promoting your assembly when you can use those resources to help those in need?

For background: I attend Current Church in Franklin, IN. Current Church is also the ‘parent’ and host of “The Gear”, a music venue that every weekend has performances from bands of all types, all persuasions, from all over the country and patrons of many walks of life. It is a welcoming environment for everyone regardless of their beliefs.

So to the question, does Current do experiential marketing? I would say yes…without trying. The Churches goals are to reach people and make a positive difference in their life and give them a place to turn for answers. The core audience is people from the age of 18 to 32 at Current. The Gear music venue provides an environment for this segment of society. Indianapolis (and Franklin) needs places where people can find community, as well as a positive environment. A place to connect, a place to engage. A place where young adults have a person to talk to, and place where “those on the fringe of society” can fit in and feel welcome. The Gear provides that.

By this, serving a simple need in the community, people are exposed to what Current offers. The next level of community… a family, and a purpose. The Gear is creating a platform for people to come without being sold on any ideologies, yet they have the opportunity to experience the fervent message and care that Current has freely received and freely gives. This is not a marketing plan, yet it is indeed experiential marketing.

What do you think?

Daniel Herndon | redwall LIVE Marketing

Nikon took its cue from our celebrity-obsessed paparazzi culture to launch the brand’s D700 model in Korea.
At a busy Seoul subway station, Nikon mounted a huge interactive, light-box billboard displaying life-like images of paparazzi. Huddled together as if at a premiere, the “paps” appear to be jostling and competing for the best celebrity snap. The celebrities in this case were the passersby, who automatically triggered a deluge of flashing camera lights as they walked past the billboard. The accidental superstars then followed the red carpet all the way out of the station and into a mall - directly into the store where they could purchase the new D700. Mission accomplished.

Love it or hate it?

We Let You Loan to the Working Poor

Kiva’s mission is to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website, empowering individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs around the globe.

The people you see on Kiva’s site are real individuals in need of funding - not marketing material. When you browse entrepreneurs’ profiles on the site, choose someone to lend to, and then make a loan, you are helping a real person make great strides towards economic independence and improve life for themselves, their family, and their community. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates and track repayments. Then, when you get your loan money back, you can relend to someone else in need.

Kiva partners with existing expert microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified entrepreneurs. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva, our partners upload their entrepreneur profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them. When you do, not only do you get a unique experience connecting to a specific entrepreneur on the other side of the planet, but our microfinance partners can do more of what they do, more efficiently.

Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle, and what effect it has on the people and institutions lending it, borrowing it, and managing it along the way. To do this, we are using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.

For more information; http://www.kiva.org/

Evan Williams’s first little idea shifted the culture.(You can thank him for the ubiquity of blogging.) His new business, called Twitter, will be entering your consciousness right…about…now. Why does this stuff happen? Because he lets it.

By: Max Chafkin

What is Evan Williams doing?

I ask myself this as I consume a second cup of strong coffee in a quiet San Francisco café. It is early in the morning on the first workday of the new year, and Williams is apparently blowing me off. For the past two weeks he has ignored my e-mails, phone calls, and text messages. We were supposed to meet this morning to discuss his next move; instead we have radio silence.

This is odd. Williams is the sort of person who can’t seem to do anything, no matter how trivial, without blogging, photo-sharing, or text-messaging the news. He founded Blogger, the website that introduced the world to blogging and now attracts some 163 million visitors each month. He has maintained a detailed personal blog for more than a decade–posting pictures, explaining his latest theories on business, and huffing about the cable company.His new business, called Twitter, takes it a step further: It lets exhibitionists, techies, and–a hint of things to come–marketers blast their latest doings to cell phones. So he’s not just a practitioner of hyperconnectedness; he practically invented the concept.

Eventually, Williams sends me an apologetic text message–we resolve to push back the meeting slightly–and then he does something else: He uses Twitter to send a text message to, oh, a few thousand people: “Late for my first meeting of the year and in need of a shave.”

Like so many technology entrepreneurs, Williams, whose friends call him Ev, is a software engineer. But unlike many of the most successful, he’s no genius when it comes to programming. His specialty is taking a tiny, almost nonsensical idea and turning it into a cultural phenomenon. “He’s like a master craftsman,” says Naval Ravikant, a serial entrepreneur who is an angel investor in Twitter. “There are entrepreneurs who are financial geniuses, and there are raw coders. Evan is the master of creating a product where there wasn’t one before.” If Williams’s art is the conception of inconceivable products, then Twitter is his chef-d’oeuvre.
What is Twitter? It’s hard to explain–Williams and his co-founders have wrestled with this–but it helps to begin in familiar territory: blogging. A blog is an online diary, in which someone holds forth on a topic, like vacation itineraries or the case against Roger Clemens. Now strip this to the core. A typical entry–say, a couple of paragraphs, some links, pictures, or maybe a funny YouTube video–becomes a 140-character plain text comment. (That’s the maximum length of a Twitter message–also known as a tweet–and the exact length of the previous sentence.) Instead of sitting down in front of a screen and typing a couple of paragraphs into a form, you compose your message quickly on your phone’s keypad.

Instead of having readers come to your website to check out your latest, you blast it directly to their cell phone inboxes. A recent selection of Williams’s tweets includes: “Considering making February external-meeting free,” “Relaxing my shoulders. Writing a little code. Drinking Guayaki,” and “Packing my warmest clothes for Chicago.” Each snippet is sent to his 5,644 (and counting) “followers,” as they’re called in Twitter-speak: the friends, acquaintances, and stalkers who have elected to keep tabs on his every move.

This is Twitter, in all its wildly popular, ridiculous glory. The service, which had a few thousand users at the beginning of last year, had close to 800,000 at the beginning of this one. Because Twitter allows anyone to send messages to thousands of cell phones at once and for free, new uses are popping up. JetBlue (NASDAQ:JBLU) and Dell (NASDAQ:DELL) use it as a kind of mailing list; presidential candidates use it to contact supporters; the Los Angeles fire department uses it as a de facto emergency broadcast system. As with all movements, there’s a backlash. The United Arab Emirates recently banned the service, and there are lots of cautionary tales about Twittering gone bad. (I had such an experience when, en route to an unfortunately named barbecue restaurant, I Twittered, and then hastily deleted, this gem: “Walking to Smoke Joint.”)

As a cultural phenomenon, Twitter is a comer–having been featured in an episode ofCSI, on MTV, and in nearly every major newspaper–but its status as a business is nebulous. The 14-person company is unprofitable (its single largest source of revenue last year was the subleasing of half a dozen desks to three small start-ups at $200 a desk a month), and there are no immediate plans for it to be anything otherwise. Although some technologists think Twitter could one day be a billion-dollar company, many others say it represents the worst of Web 2.0: a company that is built to flip, that does little of value and has no long-term prospects as a standalone enterprise. Williams and his collaborators don’t entirely dispute this notion. Co-founder Jack Dorsey, the service’s inventor, freely admits that Twitter is “useless, in a sense” and that many people are “violently turned off” by the idea of constant communications. But, he adds, “there’s a lot of value in seemingly useless things.”

This strange statement encapsulates Williams’s business philosophy. He believes that small ideas are almost always better than grand visions. That Twitter’s main function–telling you what your friends are doing–is included as a feature in Facebook, MySpace, and most instant messaging programs doesn’t bother him in the slightest. “I think features can make great companies,” he says. “You just have to choose them right.” Moreover, he argues, a product can succeed by doing less than a competitive product. Case in point: Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), which rocketed to popularity because of a single feature–the search box–while its chief competitor, Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), offered dozens of services, from search to stock quotes to horoscopes. Google operated for years without a business model before it figured out that it could throw off billions in cash by serving little text ads next to its search results. “Applying constraints can help your company and your customers in unexpected ways,” says Williams. “The default thing we do is ask how we can add something to make it better. Instead we should say, What can we take away to create something new?”
That an entrepreneur can look at something as silly as Twitter and say, Yes, this is the future, is remarkable. Technology inventors have a horrible track record of turning new behaviors into long-term financial successes–social networking pioneer Friendster was long ago lapped by MySpace and Facebook; the first search engines, Web browsers, and video game systems met similar fates. And it’s not as if Williams doesn’t have the money (he made a reported $50 million selling Blogger to Google) or the connections (Twitter’s angel investors read like a who’s who of Silicon Valley) to attempt something more ambitious.

But he doesn’t care to. And he probably doesn’t need to. Mass adoption of broadband and social networking have made finding customers cheaper, and a booming online advertising market has made it easier to turn a profit once you attract them. Moreover, a handful of acquisition-happy tech companies have shown a willingness to add services by buying tiny, money-losing start-ups for tens of millions of dollars. These may be signs of yet another technology bubble, but there are smart people, like start-up financier Paul Graham, who argue that technology start-ups are undergoing a fundamental change, becoming smaller, cheaper to start, and more numerous–in short, commoditized. We may be entering an era of the little idea, a time tailor-made for Evan Williams.
Williams grew up on a corn farm in Clarks, Nebraska (population 379). He’s a self-taught coder, having dropped out of college after only a year to start a company. But this wasn’t Bill Gates dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT). The college was the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and the companies–there were three failures in five years–were unambitious, money losing, and admittedly dopey. Williams’s most successful product was a CD-ROM for fans of the Cornhuskers football team. Finally, convinced he still knew little about how to run a business, he cut his losses, took a Web development job in California, and started writing about it.

Today, Williams is 35 years in age and unassuming in appearance. He talks quietly in the soft, flat tones of a Midwesterner. He’s handsome, but ordinarily so. In person, wearing a nice pair of jeans, a gray T-shirt, and a cashmere cardigan, he is subdued and guarded. When his bagel with peanut butter and banana is brought to our table sans banana, he seems to struggle mightily as he weighs what to do about it. Williams often speaks tentatively, revising, disclaiming, and qualifying his thoughts in a manner that most businesspeople would take as a sign of weakness. When I ask him a question on start-up finance, he starts with a disclaimer. “I was thinking a little differently before,” he says, pausing. “I wonder why that is?” A conversation with Williams can quickly devolve into an inscrutable merry-go-round of ideas.

But to meet him online is a different story. Many of the qualities that make Williams awkward in real life play beautifully on Evhead.com, the online journal he has maintained since 1996. Williams’s honesty, his tendency toward frankness, and his willingness to admit not knowing everything make him different from most business bloggers. They make him interesting.
As the name suggests, Evhead is a record of Williams’s thoughts, profound and otherwise. In the past months he has posted a picture of himself and his wife, Sara, with a stuffed black bear–as well as a thoughtful essay on how to evaluate a new software product and an untitled post that reads, “I’m awake at 5:37 (for two hours now). Thinking about so many things.” Even 15 years ago, an entrepreneur who did this would have seemed creepy or ridiculous. But to members of the Facebook generation, who meticulously groom their online profiles–posting photos while sharing everything from their political preferences to what’s currently in their Netflix queue–Williams comes off as likable, even humble.

Some 25,000 people, mostly techies and entrepreneurs, look at Evhead each month. (Many of these readers also follow his Twitterings.) Dorsey had followed Williams’s blog for years. He knew it so well that when he spotted Williams on the street in San Francisco, he recognized him immediately and decided to apply for a job. “It was the first time I’d seen him in person,” Dorsey says, as if he were talking about a celebrity he had never considered a real person. “I took it as a sign.” In the online world, Williams is seen as a truth teller, an engineer who’s not afraid to stick it to the suits and the venture capitalists. He’s someone who actually understands the process of invention and who values it more than he does the bottom line. To read his blog is to watch the growth of a human being: You see Ev nearly lose his company, bring it back from the dead, strike it big, struggle with the tech support for his new cell phone, and get married. In Williams, a new generation of entrepreneurs has a mascot.

It’s January 31, 2001, and Evan Williams is alone in his apartment, writing a blog post for Evhead. It’s a big one. His company, Pyra Labs, is on life support, and Williams has just laid off the entire staff. (His co-founder and ex-girlfriend, Meg Hourihan, quit rather than be laid off.) The trouble is partly the result of the Internet bust–the Nasdaq has been tanking for months, and Williams’s investors have told him he must make do with what he’s got–but it’s also, in a strange way, a result of his company’s unlikely popularity.
Williams and Hourihan started Pyra, in 1998, with a plan to develop and sell project management software. They did contract Web programming for Hewlett-Packard to pay the bills while they developed their product. So they could keep track of each other’s progress, Williams created a piece of software he called Stuff, which, it turned out, was a far simpler and more useful collaboration tool than the one he was building for Pyra. Stuff allowed him to quickly upload text to a webpage by filling out a simple form, and it organized the text by date. He and Hourihan joked that it worked better than their actual product. Only Williams wasn’t joking. While Hourihan was on vacation, in August 2000, he put it online as Blogger.com.
Blogger took off. Online diaries had existed since the birth of the Internet, but they had been difficult to maintain and organize and were therefore limited to serious techies. Blogger made communicating your thoughts to the world much easier and more satisfying: Fill out a simple form, click a button, and–bang–you’re a published writer. By 2001, Blogger had attracted 100,000 users and the beginnings of what seemed like a healthy buzz, even though it made no money and had no model for changing that.
So as he sits in his apartment and blogs, Williams finds himself in an odd place. He’s running a company that’s more popular and growing faster than he could have possibly imagined. It’s also flat broke. Several weeks earlier, Williams had written a post that begged users to donate money to keep the servers running. It worked: He raised more than $10,000 in $10 and $20 money transfers made through PayPal. Now he’s got to figure out how to save the company. Writing the blog post, which he titles “And Then There Was One,” he describes the layoff, wishes his former employees well–”Hopefully our friendships will survive”–and then finally addresses his customers: “I’m still fighting the good fight,” he writes. “The product, user base, brand, and vision are still somewhat intact.

Amazingly. Thankfully. In fact, I’m actually in surprisingly good shape. I’m optimistic. (I’m always optimistic.) And I have many, many ideas. (I always have many ideas.)”

With no personnel costs, Blogger hung on. In March, there was a $40,000 licensing deal with Trellix, a business software start-up whose founder, a Blogger admirer, read about Williams’s plight on his blog and decided he wanted to help save the company. By the late summer, Williams had a business model. He had been making next to nothing placing banner ads on people’s blogs. Now he would charge those people $12 a year to remove the ads. Meanwhile, Pyra–and the phenomenon of blogging–grew like gangbusters through 2001. By the middle of 2002, there were 600,000 registered users. In late 2002, Google came calling. Sergey Brin and Larry Page offered to buy Williams’s little company and let him run it inside their highflying (and still private) search start-up. Williams blogged the news of his acceptance while delivering a speech at a technology conference. “Holy Crap,” he wrote, linking the words to a minutes-old article on the sale. “Note to self: When you get off this panel, you should probably comment on this.”

The experience of shepherding Blogger through growth, then hardship, until he finally turned it into a real company cemented Williams’s philosophy of business. He would be an entrepreneur who looked for value in things that seemed worthless. Faith–in one’s ability, in one’s chosen path, and, above all else, in the fact that there are always opportunities ahead–was a company’s greatest need. Stick to your product, forget about scrambling for deals, and good things will happen.

The belief that faith is an important business attribute goes a long way in describing how Williams is able to see opportunities. “He has a stubbornness of vision,” says Tim O’Reilly, the tech luminary who runs publisher O’Reilly Media and who coined the term “Web 2.0.” O’Reilly was Williams’s first employer in Silicon Valley and an investor in Pyra. “There are so many me-too start-ups on the Web, so many people saying this will be the next big thing, but the successful entrepreneurs are people who see the world differently.” Williams’s closest collaborator, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, says much the same. “He has a tendency to wait just a bit longer than everyone else would, to give an idea more time,” Stone says. “It is patience and perseverance and hope–all those things rolled up into one.”
After leaving Google at the end of 2004, with his fast-appreciating stock and a world-class education in business, Williams resolved to tread water until the right opportunity came along. “While I think I’m likely to start another company sometime,” he wrote on his blog, “I’m forcing myself to be noncommittal at the moment. My goal is to develop some perspective, learn new things, rest, and explore.” He promised to travel and to think about how he would change his life.

He didn’t do much of either. His next-door neighbor, an entrepreneur named Noah Glass, was starting a podcasting company, and Williams began advising him in the weeks following his departure from Google. Advising turned into full-time work, and full-time work turned into being co-founder, seed investor, and, eventually, CEO. By February 2005, he had invested $170,000 and personally launched the company, now called Odeo, with a demonstration at TED, the invitation-only tech conference held in Monterey, California. That same day, a front-page article in the business section of The New York Times profiled Odeo and its famous founder. Williams, it seemed, was on his way to turning another weird technology phenomenon into the next big thing.

But Odeo had no real product–only a sense that podcasting was somehow going to be popular. The website that Williams unveiled at TED, an audio directory and a few simple tools for recording one’s own podcasts, wasn’t ready for the public until a few months later, and by then it had been overshadowed by Apple’s release of podcasting features for iTunes. Odeo’s strategy, if there was one, was to be a one-stop shop for Internet audio, offering a number of tools for podcasters and casual listeners. Being all things to all people required money, and there were plenty of eager investors who wanted in on Ev’s next big thing. He raised $5 million from the venture capitalists Charles River Ventures and a number of high-profile angels, including O’Reilly, Google backer Ron Conway, and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor. The company quickly started hiring, and by the end of the year, it employed 14 people.

While he was trying to come up with a strategy for Odeo, Williams was processing the lessons of the past few years. In the fall of 2005, he wrote what he calls “my best blog post ever.” It was called “Ten Rules for Web Startups,” and it has since become something of an Internet classic. (Google the title and you’ll get more than a thousand results, nearly all of which point to Williams’s post.) The lessons were lifted from his experience at Blogger, particularly the first one, “Be Narrow,” which urged entrepreneurs to “Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would be potentially useful.” Other lessons were “Be Tiny,” “Be Picky,” and “Be Self-Centered,” which discussed the importance of company founders using their own products.

Even as he wrote his rules, he was ignoring them. He wasn’t even podcasting. As Odeo sputtered, struggling to gain new users, Williams began to see his problem as one of corporate structure. He had accepted millions of dollars in investment capital, built a team, and worked the media before he knew what his company was. Odeo needed to experiment–to play, even. “If we were just two guys in a garage, we could say, ‘I don’t know about that idea, but let’s see where it goes,’ ” he says. His solution was to organize what he called a “hack day.” He broke the company into small groups and told them to spend a day experimenting–not just with podcasting, but with anything that struck their fancy. It was Dorsey’s project that struck Williams’s. Dorsey had long been fascinated by the status function on instant message programs: the short, pithy postings that allow you to tell your online friends what you are doing. He built a prototype of Twitter in two weeks.

“Thinking twttr is the awesomest,” Williams Twittered in March 2006. With little fanfare it went live in July. Like Blogger before it, Twitter was introduced as an experiment, a fun little side project. Nonetheless, Williams was excited–more excited than he’d been about anything that had happened at Odeo. This got him thinking about the hack day that had led him to Twitter–and then about the two years in which he had struggled to build anything, despite having plenty of money and all the hype in the world.
How had a single experiment succeeded where an entire company couldn’t? And more important, how could he do more of them?
On October 25, 2006, Williams blogged his answer. He was buying Odeo, taking the odd–to some, almost unbelievable–step of returning his venture capitalists’ money. It cost him $3 million out of pocket, plus all the cash Odeo still had. It was a lot to pay for a failing Web company and an unproven prototype.

He called the new endeavor Obvious, a nod to a lesson learned from the success at Blogger–that seemingly silly and trivial ideas often look like great ones in retrospect. Obvious would be a workshop where Williams and his cohorts could experiment with ideas in an environment free from financial distractions. If an idea worked really well, he could spin it off into an independent company using outside investment. Otherwise, he could either keep it for Obvious or throw it away. “I don’t want to have to worry about getting buy-in from executives or a board, raising money, worrying about investor’s perceptions, or cashing out,” he blogged. The move was widely seen as heroic. “Odeo Buys Back Soul,” read the headline of gossip blog Valleywag.

Shortly after buying Odeo, Williams wrote a blog post that announced his intentions to sell the podcasting part of the company–a New York start-up paid a reported $1 million for the service–and focus on Twitter. The text messaging service had its coming-out party at the South by Southwest technology festival in March, where conference attendees eagerly began Twittering one another. From there it grew rapidly, reaching a hundred thousand users in a matter of weeks and garnering nationwide media coverage. In July, Williams formally spun off the company, raising several million dollars from Union Square Ventures, a New York City VC with a hands-off reputation. (Managing partner Fred Wilson, who, judging from his Twitters, really, really loves to eat at Murray’s Bagels, had been using the service for months.) Williams appointed Dorsey CEO and told him to focus exclusively on fixing Twitter’s reliability problems. Though Williams remains the single largest shareholder, he has taken pains to stay out of Twitter. The business model, he says, can wait until millions of people are using it.

Beginning on the first day of this year, Williams started working in earnest on Obvious. His work area is a small nook under a lofted conference room in Twitter’s San Francisco office. The building has served as a private home, a snowboard factory, and an underwear store. The soiled carpet is a sort of puke-green color, and the only natural light comes from a few skylights far overhead. To date, Williams has hired two contract engineers to build small software products; they are building an application that will allow users to write “notes to self.” Obvious isn’t particularly counting on this product–”It’s almost not worth talking about,” Williams says–but that’s the point. Williams wants to make product development less risky and more prone to the kind of spontaneity that created Twitter.

At the same time, he’s trying to find early-stage start-ups to roll up into Obvious. He says he would like to invest roughly $100,000 in each company. Everyone will work in the same office, which means he will eventually have to look for additional space. He’s also trying to hire an assistant: The job description warns that the candidate will be paid hourly “until you set up the payroll system for the company, and then we can discuss salary and insurance (once you set that up, too).”

The goal is to separate the creative environment of the start-up process from the regular work-a-day of running a business. “It’s all theory for now,” Williams says. “But we’re hoping that by setting up an environment with multiple projects at once, these happy accidents can occur.” If this sounds unbusinesslike, then that’s the point, too. Obvious is, in the broadest sense, a company founded on the idea that it’s hard to predict which ideas will work and which won’t. “It’s almost like a theater troupe,” says Stone. “The idea is to tinker around and to be willing to come up with flops.”

Like most good theater, Williams’s new company is at once disruptive and self-indulgent–an ambitious challenge to the Silicon Valley rule book and a test for all of those blog-worn theories. The company of little experiments is itself an experiment, and a chance for Ev to do something grand on his own terms.

Max Chafkin, Inc.

Are you mad crazy passionate about hooking up with your mates online, blogging, and sharing interesting stuff? Do you want to spend your free time doing more of the things you love and also getting rewarded for your efforts?

Yes? Then you could become part of the exclusive community called, ‘The Sparks’.

As part of The Sparks, you’ll be the first to hear about the latest and greatest developments in youth volunteering, as well as being given a number of tasks to complete which will help shape the future of vinspired - the country’s leading youth volunteering community for 18-25’s.

vinspired want to share his opportunity with you so could become an active part of this new and exciting experience.

In return for your energy, wit and wisdom, you’ll receive points which you can collect and trade for everything from cinema tickets and spa days, to tandem skydives, helicopter rides and entry into a prize holiday draw.

If you’d like to do your bit to help shape the face of volunteering and bag some great prizes along the way, we’d really like to hear from you.

To see if you’ve got what it takes to be a part of The Sparks, click here to take our eligibility quiz.

http://www.thesparks.info/survey/Welcome.aspx?t=NCTS

Good luck,

The Sparks Team