iSawToday - The Coolest Thing I Saw Today on the Web

Several months ago my colleague Matt talked up the Lego Star Wars game that his kids had received for Christmas. Not being overly into video games I listened polietely and said… ‘very cool’. Fast forward to the previous Sunday at which time I discovered the Indiana Jones Flash Lego Game and since find myself using this amazingly fun game as another excuse to buy a Wii. For many of you out there video game systems are probably a way of life but my parents chose to buy me a Tandy 1000TL instead of a NES back in the 80’s. This meant I spent my days writing games in GW-BASIC instead of playing them. I suppose I have to credit my career in technology to my parents because of that move but I think much of my eagerness to buy the Wii comes from the fact that I’ve never owned a console game system. In the meantime hop on over to Lego.com and play this fun game.

I just found these great new demonstrations of Google’s Andriod OS. Some of the functionality looks great and although not earth-shattering more productive than the IPhone. Still no examples yet of how Android might accept user input which IMO is what will determine how this fairs in the market. Will the OS support tactile feedback? Will it function with and w/o the Blackberry-ish keyboard?

I was searching Amazon.com for a particular Beethoven album that I lost many years ago. It had a great presto piano concerto from Sonata No.7 (very fast piano playing) and I was jones-ing to listen. I found the cd I was looking for and examined the option to buy it used for $5 but paused to think; shouldn’t this music be public domain and basically free? After all Sug Knight wasn’t around to shake down Beethoven or Mozart. I did a quick search on public domain Beethoven music and found Musopen.com which has a large collection of freely downloadable classical music. True, the performances here aren’t by the London Pops but it’s not bad if you’re just looking for a few piano sonatas or a casual listener. Heck, you can even follow along and print the Beethoven sheet music. Here’s a link to a couple of my favorites:

Moonlight Sonata (also known as the theme song for the 1985 PC game Thexder)

Sonata No. 7 in D Major, Op. 10 No. 3

Enjoy!

Although this is NOT the coolest thing I saw today, I wrote up a summarization of CRM’s for a friend and thought I would post it for everyone’s benefit.

I use Highrise in both of my startups companies and have found it to be a great way to communicate sales and biz dev progress to my 10 person teams. Simple, quick, and relatively painless. I do use Salesforce when I need to create multi-step email campaigns or am selling products with a $5k-10k price tag. In an organization where you have more than 30-40 transactions a month you will probably NEED something like a SF for invoice and product reporting.

And that brings us to Sugar, a product that I implemented back in ‘04 at a 20 person software company. In fact, I know several of the Sugar team members and had several products featured in their product exchange. I probably wouldn’t recommend Sugar these days because the price point between SF and Sugar has shrunk quite a bit and the manpower to maintain the open-source version is very costly.

Pricing (last I checked):
Highrise: $50/mo <=15 users
Salesforce: $100/mo <=5 users
Sugar: Free -> $40/mo/user

I’ve been using http://kuler.adobe.com/ to create website color schemes for months now. It’s a simple, free, easy-to-use tool that finds analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, and compound colors that look great together. Give it a try

KIVA is a social networking site dedicated to connecting lenders willing to contribute a few hundred dollars to entrepreneurs in under-developed countries. For example you can help Rosa Josefa Marquez De Limachi further her shoe sales business, or Lucila Malagon in Ecuador grow her pharmacy.

Through a network of partners Kiva screens loan recipients and provides a transparent view of the loan status to all of the parties involved.

Kiva very clearly lays out the risks involved with lending in this manner even though the amounts are relatively small; under $5,000. In most cases the average lender only contributes one-two hundred dollars and can monitor the progress of the investment via a personal online portfolio.

Furthermore, the folks at Kiva have done an excellent job of keeping the site design simple and accessible to many different audiences. If you’re thinking of giving to a charitable cause I HIGHLY recommend Kiva.

Problem:
I wear button down dress shirts every day but don’t like the look of a t-shirt collar underneath.

The options:

1. Constantly fight armpit stains

2. Buy tons of these AWESOME v-neck shirts from American Apparel

These great shirts let you look cool without worrying about sweat stains.

Thank you American Apparel!

Just like MTV stole much of the thunder from the Grammy’s and the American Music Awards years ago, here comes YouTube. Here’s a great way to spend an hour if you’re caught in a spring snowstorm like I am today.

Snowstorm = Milwaukee, WI

Videos = http://www.youtube.com/ytawards07

Have a safe and happy Easter.

P.s. It had been 3months, 10 days, and 3 hours since I last saw Chocolate Rain. Phew!

Back in 1997 I sold ice cream all summer in order to afford a small MIDI sequencer to record my homemade music on. At the time a $500 Yamaha QY-8 was the rage one of several options.

Today, I found this story on Wired.com that details KORG’s plan to release an application for the Nintendo DS that will surpass the sequencing power of my little Yamaha QY-8.

Luckily, my girlfriend gave me a DS for Christmas to ‘train my brain” so I’m ready to go.

Funny, the first and only video game system I’ve ever owned and I still don’t own an actual play-game for it.

Here’s a great article detailing someone’s opinion on how to save money and cut costs while starting up a company.  Having worked for two bootstrapped early-stage companies; one in Internet search and the other in financial software I fondly recall the benefits and disasters that I’ve seen caused by these practices.

Link: Saving Money at a Startup