> Entrepreneurial Proverbs

Sometimes in life you stumble across something that makes you stop. A few of these things will make you stop and hit "print". Out of these, even fewer will make it into the pile that you will take home and actually read. And out of those few that you read one or two have the ability to change your life.

Marc Hedlund is an entrepreneur-in-residence at O'Reilly Media and he has written (collected during his life is more accurate) what he call Entrepreneurial Proverbs.

If you have ever noodled in front of your computer and pondered something greater than what you are currently doing, read on...sage advice.

I am old creative guy, I have been part of big ad agencies, rockin' tech startups and small businesses that grew quickly and imploded just as quickly. Trust me here, Marc's EP's are worth taking to heart.

> Mayima ZD:

Being a Creative Director means continually looking for new and better ways to create. The wooly world of digital photography has been Mr. Toad's Wild Ride over the past five years but I am happy to see high-quality digital image capture advancing so quickly.

The Mamiya ZD digital camera is the first integrated medium format digital SLR camera with a built-in 22 mega pixel CCD imaging sensor so it produces sharp, high quality rich tones in a surprisingly light weight, compact body that resembles 35mm D-SLR cameras.

The 12-bit images are recorded at 1.5 fps, making it an incredibly fast digital medium format camera and an excellent choice for studio and/or on-location shoots.

At around $13,000 (USD), it's not for recreational use and you probably wouldn't want to let the kids play with it but as a professional creative tool it is well worth exploring.

> The Great Web 2.0 Logo Swipe

An old art direction technique is to look around and see what other people are doing.

If you happen to be designing an Web 2.0 site, the "creative swipe" just became exponentially easier.

>Goowy: The Widgitization & Cenralification Continues.

Ladies and Gentleman, please give a warm Web 2.0 welcome to Goowy, an offering that encourages us to, "Manage your personal communications including advanced email, contacts, calendar, and integrated instant messaging (coming soon) all from one place anytime, anywhere."

On one hand I am a bit weary of the give-us-your-stuff-so-we-can-sell-our-company-for-more business model but, then again, the ability to manage all this stuff from anywhere is greatly needed. And the interface is terribly fun.

Goowy's tagline, "Organize. Communicate. Share." is so ubiquitious that it could be slathered under a hundred various and sundry logos and be perfectly at home. I wouldn't be surprised if a new company sprung up that was actually named, Organize. Communicate. Share.

All that said, the minis (a.k.a.: widgets) are very cool and help me think of many other ideas where an interface like this could be employed.

> Origami: Folding Our Digital Lives Into Something Small & Beautiful.

Does anyone else see a Trojan Horse in this little Origami device? Sure it is cute as a button and as they said on Gizmodo, "A web surfing device. As WiFi and other wireless platforms get increasingly ubiquitous, you’ll be able to carry around one of these suckers and look up anything online, wherever you’re at. The screens on PDAs are a little too small to be good at this, phones are worse, and conventional lightweight notebooks are utterly useless for something like this."

Now with all these Web 2.0 social networked tools coming out, having a great portable device seems like a great idea.

But what if this Microsoft product is really designed to be a portable movie player? A Digital Rights Management player?

And why would that be so bad? Well, here's why. Viiv.

Viiv in a nutshell, from its Wikipedia entry:
“It is intended for primary use as a media platform or to play DRM-protected content created by one. Media recorded by an Intel VIIV processor is locked to the processor and may only be played by an authorized VIIV processor.”

> Skobee: The Assistant I've Always Wanted.

"Fuzzy scheduling allows you to start general and get specific as time goes by."
Any technology that starts with with fuzzy thinking as the first step gets my immediate attention because that is the way I tend to think. I start with a fuzzy, big animal picture and then fill in the details as time goes on. Concept first, details later.

"Discuss the details with your friends and easily propose new ideas or suggestions."
But I also need to bounce ideas off people and Skobee lets me do that.

"Not sure where to go yet? We'll show you what's popular in your location based on where everyone is making plans."
The capability to base a decision (one way or the other) on what the rest of humanity is thinking and doing is also helpful.

I am going to try this for a few weeks, it really seems like a great idea. Let's see if it is actually helpful.