NFL Draft

One of the biggest crap shoots in sports-the NFL Draft-is taking place this weekend.  From a purely business standpoint, it's amazing to see the amount of guaranteed money professional athletes are getting today.  
     
I can't imagine any Fortune 500 company paying a key executive a $15 million signing bonus, yet it is common place among professional sports organizations.  Furthermore, what are the chances someone in any other industry gets paid whether nor not they actually perform any of the stipulated services put forth in their contract?  Professional athletes do and they do it frequently.  

So back to the draft.  The first pick on today's draft, Mario Williams, has already signed a 6 year $54 million contract, of which approximately $20 million will be paid to him whether nor not he ever actually even shows up for a single day of "work".  Insane!

What's in a Name, Part II

So, we finally decided on a name for the company. SOMNIO, which is Latin for to dream. Very fitting for a creative agency, I think. We have overhauled our branding and refined our story to be more indicative of who we are. So far, our customers have responded favorably, which is really the only thing that matters.

Survive and Advance

My Texas Longhorns are still dancing in the NCAA Tournament, thanks to an unbelievable buzzer-beating three pointer to win their game against West Virginia. The shot was made by senior Kenton Paulino, who has been basically a role player during his career. Therein lies the beauty of "March Madness"; anyone can hit the shot and be the hero on any given night. Texas plays tomorrow against LSU. Should be a good one.

Skype Challenger

I've seen a million (or so it seems) supposed "Skype killers" and, so far, none of them have even been Skype competitors. Om Malik has posted about a new version of Yahoo Instant Messenger. If the things he's saying it's going to be, and there's no reason to believe it won't, are true then Skype will finally have some competition. Om touches on something that only a handful of companies, unfortunatley not including Skype at the moment, are poised to do: blur the lines of communications formats or platforms. The next generation of comm apps have to be able to aggregate communications between you and your friends/family regardless of whether it was text-based (email, chat) or voice (VoIP), real-time or incremental.

Imagine this scenario:
1. You send an IM to a buddy. He/she responds and you start a conversation.
2. You decide to do a voice chat to save your hands from typing.
3. An hour after the conversation ends, you remember to tell your friend "one last thing" and send him/her and email reminder.

Now imagine an application that can save those three communication streams as one. Maybe you give it a subject, for instance "Trip Planning with Victoria". Now you can go back at any time and re-read or re-listen to the various part of the conversation in their different formats. Now imagine you can "tag" these conversations with multiple key words to serve as search or organization criteria later. Assuming OM's correct in his assesment, Yahoo is at least moving in this direction by allowing the user to send an IM, email or voice from a single app. The next logical step is to index and search (assuming people will allow it considering the privacy ramifications). Google seems like the other company that could move there very quickly. They already index your GMail emails and GTalk text chats. The only thing for them to do is index the audio chats.

Of course, there are serious technology requirements to archive all audio chats. I believe this is only a temporary concern as storage prices continue to plummet. Ad revenues could also be used to offset the increasing costs of such a service. Of course, this is all conjecture on my part, but I suspect we'll see it happen soon and for the better of all of us.

RIAA Don't Get To Randomly Hunt Through Computers

In a move that might signal the beginning of the end of the RIAA cartel's scare tactics operation, an Oregon woman was given the right by a judge to hire her own "expert" to determine whether or not she has committed the crimes accused her by the RIAA. The judge even ordered that the cartel has to foot her bill. If you haven't followed the story of the RIAA and it's fear-based initiatives, you can read up on them at the site linked below. Story via digg.com

RIAA Don't Get To Randomly Hunt Through Computers: "racking up wins against the RIAA... keep em coming..."

(Via digg.)

March Madness

I've said it before, probably on this very blog, that this is my second favorite time of the year (behind the start of football season, of course).  The NCAA Men's basketball tournament reminds me each year of why I love sports, and, more specifically, college athletics.  Each year some tiny team from some tiny college in some tiny town shocks the sports world and pulls off an upset of a highly ranked team.  This year has not dissapointed, with several upsets taking place in the first two rounds of the tournament.  My Texas Longhorns, a two seed, have earned their way into the "Sweet 16" by virtue of their two wins against Penn and North Carolina State.  Unfortunately, if they win their next game they will probably have to face Duke, which pasted them earlier in the year.  Regardless of how they do the rest of the way, this is one of the best times  of the year to be a sports fan.  I just hope the rest of the tournament will be as good as this first weekend has been.

Monster Ballads are Back

I have to share this. First, let me mention two things: one, Saturday Night Live has hired the funniest group of writers I've seen in a long time. They're actually a group of friends calling themselves Lonely Island. They've done a couple of hilarious skits and short films. Second, I've discovered a great website for those that need a good repository for finding videos, commercials, etc. It's called youtube (www.youtube.com; apparently, links aren't working right now on blogger). It's just awesome. So the point of all this is that I saw this video that I believe everyone should see. Through the power of youtube, I've included it in this post. Enjoy!

What's in a name?

I now know why companies spend so much time and money to come up with the perfect name. A bad or, mismatched, name can give a company serious problems in the mind share department. We've been trying to come up with a name that is more descriptive of and appropriate for our business. It's very difficult to find just the right name. Someone can always find something wrong with the name, which is really the point. At some level you have to create brand value by driving value to your customer. The name means everything but, at the same time, means very little. By the way, we had to go outside of the english language to find something we liked. I can't say what it is now but, I will when the time is right.

Stevenote '06

I don't know whether or not I've mentioned it here before but, I'm a huge Apple computer fan. Today they unleashed a couple new software and hardware gems. I won't delve into detail about the hardware (think dual core Intel processors) as I would rather rant about software. The reason I switched to Apple in the first place was their dedication to putting the user first. Everything they do is driven by the user experience. Their latest update to the iLife suite of applications seems no different. They just make complicated things (setting up picture gallery websites, etc.) easy to do. I call if the wife test. If my wife can do it then anyone can. iLife has definitely passed the wife test and this version should only allow her to do more. That seems to me to be the difference between Apple and most other tech companies; they understand what the people really want/need. Check out iLife and, for that matter, a Mac today. You won't be sorry.

Read more at www.apple.com/

Finally

I've been an avid University of Texas fan as long as I have been cognizant of sports. Last night, in the greatest game my eyes have witnessed, Vince Young, in the greatest individual performance I have witnessed, beat USC to claim the National Championship. I have been waiting for this moment for around 20 years. Needless to say, I was as excited about a sporting event as I ever have been. When I was a teenager the Dallas Cowboys were just beginning their run in the early 90's. I hadn't been as pumped up about a game since the '92 SuperBowl. Honestly, my enthusiasm and excitement for sports in general has been fading as I've gotten older. Last night, however, made me feel like a young man again. Amazing what a silly game can do to some peoples' psyches.

Been a while....

Hard to find time to do anything, much less write in a blog, when you're working 16 hours a day. Here's that latest:

Bryce is getting big.
Work is good and bad.
My wife is lovely.
The Texas Longhorn football team is 60 minutes away from the Big Prize.

Company Dog and Pony was tonight. It's always interesting to see how people explain things they didn't create to other people. Food was good.

More to come soon, including an exciting look at the hottest holiday gift you won't have under the tree.

Google whistles a new tune | Tech News on ZDNet

Looks like the long rumored Google - iTunes pertnership had a shred of validity (they usually do).  This can only help the legal online music business.  Instead of finding links to myriad spyware-riddled P2P apps when searching for music, maybe a user will be directed to a resource where they can legally purchase the content.  This is great for the music industry and the online music stores.

Read more at news.zdnet.com/2100-958...

Help Wanted

Been a while since I've posted because we've been so busy at work. We've been trying to find people to add to the team, but, unfortunately, good help is hard to come by. It looks like there may be no relief in sight. 20 hour work days are the norm now and I don't see that changing any time soon. I guess things could be worse, though. Our current situation exists only because we have a flood of work pouring in. It could be much, much worse.

Mobile and Agile

P8100106.JPG
Originally uploaded by spudnik187.

Forgot to mention earlier that Bryce is now walking and doing so with much joy. He is enjoying, I think, the trouble he is causing for his mother and I.

No Rest for the Weary

Things have been insanely busy at work. This is both a good and a bad thing. Good because we are winning business and growing at a rate which we've not yet experienced. Bad because I see my family once a week. It's good to see what people are made of, however. You never learn more about a person than you do when you see them in the pressure cooker. It seems as though we've made some good personnel decisions because everyone is pitching in to make it happen. I feel very lucky.

Still learning

It became clear to me recently that our company would have to rethink our web delivery strategy. Although we have positioned ourselves somewhat against Flash, I came to the conclusion that it would be the only platform that we knew of that could satisfy our requirements. Being the adventerous type that I am, I quitely started working on a Flash framework that could allow us to deliver our presentations over the web at a reasonable bandwidth while maintaining the functionality of our DVD based presentations. After about a month of trial and error I came up with what seems to be a working model. I have to say that I am very impressed with the Flash platform and its ActionScript coding language. Because of my C++ programming background I was able to pick up AS very easily. It is indeed a powerful platform and I can see why so many people are drawn to it. Hopefully I will soon be able to convert the family website I was working on in HTML to Flash and take advantage of all that ActionScript has to offer. I'm just sorry it took me so long to discover it.

Quick Getaway

It's good to get away from the office sometimes and not think about work. Since I helped start "the company" I've had very few chances to really relax and focus on things other than work. Even on the weekends my mind often turns to work. Yesterday I had a chance to totally remove myself from the day-to-day. Much needed indeed.

Deal with the Devil

Those that know me are aware that I am a huge proponent of open source software for a number of reasons. In particular, I have become enamored with the Mozilla Foundation and their flagship offerings-Firefox and Thunderbird. They are both great products. I have also detested Microsoft Outlook and it's susceptibility to viruses. It isn't Microsoft's fault necessarily, but the fact remains that people write viruses that affect the majority of users. Unfortunately for me, as our company has grown it has become difficult for all of us to stay in sync with regards to our schedules and keeping track of who has to do what. Outlook has somewhat of an answer for this problem. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say that Thunderbird doesn't offer the same solution. In the best interests of the company I have decided to jump to Outlook as my primary business email/task/calendar/meeting management tool. It hasn't been as bad as I thought, but there are a number of things I'm already missing about Thunderbird-namely the junk mail handling. We'll see how long it lasts.

Holiday Spirit

P7040168
Originally uploaded by spudnik187.

Guess it's never too early to celebrate our great country. This is my son in his 4th of July garb. By the way, he enjoyed his first fireworks show.

Humble Pie

It's always nice to see a piece of work that makes you remember how feeble your skills are. Keeps you hungry and always wanting to get better.