By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Over the past 20 years, I (Wyn) have heard countless pitches from entrepreneurs at venture events. On Friday, April 6, 2014, I had the wonderful opportunity to judge some of the best pitches ever during the semi-final round of TigerLaunch at Princeton University. Sponsored by the Entrepreneurship Club and [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The recent collapse of Mt. Gox brought digital currency to the front pages of news outlets all over the world. Bitcoin was the first digital currency to gain enough traction to emerge from the all-nerd community into the public realm. It seemed like science fiction at first: a futuristic society with invisible credits [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Yesterday, I filtered over forty spam comments from this blog. Many of them are transparent: in Scandinavian or Cyrillic alphabets, listing links to designer handbags, or patently nonsensical. Some are unsolicited invitations to take advantage of SEO services or getting me hundreds of Twitter followers for the nominal price [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker You’ve heard of hump day, that day in the middle of the workweek that you just have to get past? Well, we’ve finally reached the hump day for our book. We’re editing Chapter 8 in a 15-chapter book. While author friends have told us that writing a book is [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The model of consumer feedback has changed drastically with the appearance of social media. In fact, the very mechanisms corporations use to gather feedback – and their failure to address customers’ real needs – have driven consumers to their 140-character soapboxes on Twitter and also on Facebook. Look at [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker In the famous (probably apocryphal) story, George Washington cuts down his father's prize cherry tree and comes clean about it in a grand gesture of integrity and honesty. I've always wondered why he cut it down at all - did he need firewood? But that's not really the point. [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker Public libraries have been great places to go in the US since the first one appeared on the scene in Peterborough, New Hampshire in 1833. They have collections of books on thousands of topics and knowledgeable professionals to guide you to the right ones for you. As new media have [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker One exciting new product unveiled at SXSW was Memoto, the life-logging camera. It's a tiny personal camera that captures a photo every 30 seconds, unless it's too dark (or you put it away). Instagram and Facebook are major outlets for just those photos we remember to take, recognizing the importance of some [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The Interactive portion of SXSW has now ended. We can look back at our own pace on the topics that were introduced, and see how they might fit into our world. Much food for thought coming out of SXSW has been the ongoing and expanding world of what I'm [...]
By Ed McLaughlin and Wyn Lydecker The Mona Lisa is frequently described as "priceless." It is a unique and marvelous work, and its value cannot be measured by something as vulgar as currency. (May your work be equally extraordinary.) It was also a labor of love - Da Vinci carried it around for four years [...]