Repurpose
Take a service or approach applied to one market, and apply it to another.
Examples: Chill (Turntable.fm), Yammer (social networks for businesses)

Digitize
Take content or functionality that exists only in a legacy form and put it online or in an app.
Examples: Dr. Chrono (medical records), Google Books

Automate
Take a task that seems tedious and currently requires humans and automate it away.
Examples: Google (search rankings), EffectCheck (emotional impact analysis)

Unify
Create a common platform that ties together proprietary solutions or providers.
Examples: Twilio (abstracts away carrier-specific APIs), Greplin (single search engine for lots of services)

Componentize
Take a piece of functionality that people currently implement themselves and make it a reusable component.
Examples: Apigee (APIs), Get Satisfaction (support forums)

Connect
Transform a situation where people are isolated or lonely by connecting them in a novel way.
Examples: Facebook, Meetup, LetsLunch

Catalyze
Encourage people in a community to generate data that would otherwise be less structured or available.
Examples: StackOverflow (programming Q/A), reddit (social news), Curvio (IMDB for products and apparel)

The title of this symposium shorthands these points for me: the slogan "For the Win," accompanied by a turgid budgetary arrow and a tumescent rocket, suggesting the inevitable priapism this powerful pill will bring about—a Viagra for engagement dysfunction, engorgement guaranteed for up to one fiscal quarter.

800 subscribers @ $10/mo.

On reasons why companies prohibit telecommuting:

"- They’ve been burned in the past. They hired someone on who misrepresented himself, his abilities, his capacity, or all of the above. They feel that they gave it a try and it isn’t for them…

- They don’t have their heads screwed on right. They live in a “constantly evolving and fast-paced” environment (as seen on other job postings) which translates roughly into we can’t control our product team, our CEO, or worst, what our sales team promises, so you’re going to have to sit by and wait for the hour-by-hour priorities…

- A slight variation of the previous option is that they lack the confidence in their abilities. They have the vision, the product specs are nailed down, but they don’t know if they can convey them without “reading” the other person.

- Finally, the last possible option is that they’re so out of touch with reality that they believe the only way for work to be done is with “asses in seats.”

"What terrible business jargon do you need unsucked?"

"Here’s another way to come up with startup ideas: walk around your house or apartment, and look for “hot spots.” A hotspot can be an area of high information density, clutter, stress, disorganization, or any place that has a suboptimal solution. Then think about a web or cloud solution to that hot spot. Let’s take a look at a few examples:

Music CDs -> iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, doubleTwist, MP3tunes, etc.
Bookshelf -> Amazon, Kindle, iBooks
Stereo system -> Sonos, Squeezebox, Rhapsody, Pandora, last.fm, Spotify, Grooveshark, MOG, Rdio, etc.
External hard drives -> Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Pogoplug"

"Search is a way to _harvest_ demand, not _create_ it."
"New strategy: encourage WOM, viral… Referral program w/2-sided incentive permanently increased signups by 60%… Surveys, split tests, landing page/signup flow optimizations, encourage sharing -> big wins"

"BillFloat pays your bill. You settle up with BillFloat up to 30 days later."

Portland agency that does the Isaiah Mustafa Old Spice youtubes.

"The most significant statistics is that approximately 4,500 applications on the Facebook Platform currently have more than 200 DAUs. We would also argue that there are only 1,597 applications on Facebook that are generating any measurable amount of revenue, with that being the number of applications with more than 2,000 DAUs.
In our database we’ve found over 41,000 applications with between 1 and 100 DAUs, and almost a quarter of a million applications with no DAUs. While we’re sure there are plenty of applications not included in our index currently, it’s pretty clear that becoming one of the top Facebook applications is extremely challenging."

"Anyway, as I poured hour after hour into my business, I started to wish that others had done what I was doing and just let me piggyback on their work. Other people I met had the same problems: they needed a simple template to help them optimize the time they were spending on general, not-specific-to-one's-business tasks."

"The workshifter doesn't count hours.  He can't because, oftentimes, he's working in between other commitments, at strange times, or in odd places.  Despite this, the workshifter still gets his work done.  This is because he focuses on results and not on how many hours were put in.  Workshifters work with tasks and projects, not with punch cards, and for that reason, they're more likely to get the job done, because instead of saying, "I'll work from X to Y," they say, "This needs to get done."

Similarly, the corporate world that is often predicated on a work schedule, and has the backwards habit of rewarding those who put in extra hours, could stand to learn a thing or two from the workshifter. "

"Diller, Brill, and Murdoch seem be stating a simple fact—we will have to pay them—but this fact is not in fact a fact. Instead, it is a choice, one its proponents often decline to spell out in full, because, spelled out in full, it would read something like this:

“Web users will have to pay for what they watch and use, or else we will have to stop making content in the costly and complex way we have grown accustomed to making it. And we don’t know how to do that.”"

"Professional logo designs customized for $99
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"It’s hard to describe that portfolio as anything but chaotic, let alone accept that it’s actually how things should be. Let me repeat that last bit. A disparate application portfolio is a good thing. Proprietary software has a high strategic value to the organization, and building it in a manner that doesn’t meet the requirements largely defeats the purpose."

"CSS Killswitch lets you non- destructively black out a difficult client's website with the click of a button."

"You know that old saw about a plane flying from California to Hawaii being off course 99% of the time—but constantly correcting? The same is true of successful startups—except they may start out heading toward Alaska. Many dot-com bubble companies that died could have eventually been successful had they been able to adjust and change their plans instead of running as fast as they could until they burned out, based on their initial assumptions. Pyra was started to build a project-management app, not Blogger. Flickr's company was building a game. Ebay was going to sell auction software. Initial assumptions are almost always wrong."

dustry was viewed by investors prevented that. Wall Street’s implacable demand