Marc Hedlund
Marc Hedlund is an entrepreneur working on a personal finance startup, Wesabe where he is Chief Product Officer. (He also blogs at Wheaties for Your Wallet.) Before starting Wesabe, Marc was an entrepreneur-in-residence at O'Reilly Media. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Sana Security, co-founder and was CEO of Popular Power, a distributed computing startup, and founder and general manager of Lucas Online, the internet subsidiary of Lucasfilm, Ltd. During his early career, Marc was Director of Engineering at Organic Online, and was CTO at Webstorm, where he wrote one of the Internet's first shopping cart applications in 1994. He is a graduate of Reed College.
Customer Service is the New Marketing
I've written earlier about liking the people and the project at Get Satisfaction, the wisdom-of-the-crowds company for customer service. They do great work and have a fantastic product going. (Note: since my original post, O'Reilly Alphatech Ventures has invested in Satisfaction, and OATV is also an investor in my company, Wesabe. But I'm on the record loving Satisfaction long before…
evhead: "Will it Fly?"
Evan Williams put up a great post today on evaluating business ideas, "Will it fly? How to Evaluate a New Product Idea." Required reading for entrepreneurs. I think his last criterion, "Personally Compelling," is the most important for whether an idea will succeed or fail at all. The other criteria speak to how big that success can be. I find…
Dopplr Launches
Earlier this year, I posted about Dopplr, saying it was "the coolest app I saw at ETech, by far." This morning at LeWeb in Paris, Dopplr launched, so anyone can sign up for it now. Check it out. I continue to think Dopplr is an amazing product and, having had ten or more Dopplr-facilitated lunches or coffees while on the…
Tab bankruptcy
I'm no Larry Lessig, but I get a fair amount of email these days. Still, I'm not yet at the point, and hope never to be at the point, where I would ever declare email bankruptcy. I already get over 200 non-spam email messages a day, but if at some point I can't deal with that, I won't delete my…
What does Google's Open Handset Alliance announcement tell us about iPhone third-party apps?
I'm listening in on Google's press call about the Open Handset Alliance, which Google announced today. It's hilarious to hear all of the big wireless companies speaking about open platforms and software. Good for Google. This announcement and the focus on open platforms make me think back to Apple's recent, seemingly rushed announcement that it will finally be supporting third-party…
Infiltrating the privacy movement
I had a fantastic teacher in high school named Rick Takagaki, who once played a class of mine two speeches in a row: Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and Malcolm X's "Message to the Grassroots." The speeches, while both incredibly compelling, couldn't be more different (and certainly couldn't be more different from what passes for rhetoric today)….
Goodreads
My friend Rosaclaire was patient zero in getting a bunch of our mutual friends, and me, to join Goodreads today. So now I'm getting book reviews from my friends via RSS. Useful. I'm totally in love with the LibraryThing blog but haven't fallen for the product yet. I'm not sure why Goodreads drew me in; LibraryThing seems more my style….
Here's to the Crazy Ones
I love this remix of Apple's "Here's to the Crazy Ones" ad over a scrolling display of third-party iPhone apps: (Found here, which also has the original ad.) Apple has previously hinted that they went after Hymn and similar iTunes-hacking projects not because they cared themselves, but because they were contractually obliged to by the studios providing them with music….
WebRunner 0.7 rocks
Mark Finkle has been pushing out builds of WebRunner, a Mozilla-based tool for running a standalone application with a single web site in it (a.k.a, a "Site-Specific Browser"), for some time now, but WebRunner 0.7, released today for Windows, Mac, and Linux, is ready for its close-up. I use WebRunner for Google Reader. I double-click a .webapp file which launches…
And don't make me tell you again
Jason Kottke seems to have decided this week to empty a full clip of silver bullets into the just-stilled heart of the New York Times' ill-conceived TimesSelect subscription service. He's been digging through the now-free archives of the Times, finding treasures and blogging the hell out of them. Earlier this week, he celebrated the first day of free archive access…
