Category: Entrepreneuria
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Social Entrepreneurship at NWEN: Doing Well by Doing Right (via Flexcar)
Lance Ayrault, CEO of Flexcar, gave a great talk at the Northwest Entrepreneur Network (NWEN) Venture Breakfast at the Bellevue Harbor Club yesterday on the topic of social entrepreneurship (a topic near and dear to my heart … and blog). Flexcar is an interesting exemplar of a non-traditional social venture, in that they are a…
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Social Entrepreneurship at Zino Society
The Zino Society Roundtable meeting had a social entrepreneurial flavor — or perhaps it would be more accurate to say several such flavors — this month. Two of the four companies presenting their plans to the Zino investors (SoilSoup and MadreMonte) had goals of creating greater social and/or environmental welfare, and another (Jookster) was incorporating…
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Co-promotional Considerations: Customerization and The Brand “Us”
Peter van Stolk, founder, president and CEO of Jones Soda, gave an energetic, inspiring and irreverent presentation at this month’s NWEN Venture Breakfast on being relevant and real to, for and with your customers. The official title was "Creating Meaningful Relationships with Customers", but the unofficial title might be better expressed as "Marketing in a…
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Chaordic Leadership Principles
In anticipation of the possibility that week’s Seattle Times article about Interrelativity might generate increased interest in the company, I updated our web site … including my curriculum vitae (CV, aka resumé), both the short and long versions. I decided to include a section in the latter document about my approach to leadership, which I…
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Almost Famous
Kristi Heim wrote a nice article about Interrelativity (and me) in The Seattle Times, entitled Using High-Tech to Help Break Ice, that appeared in today’s paper. As with Kristi’s’ great article about Amal Graafstra and his RFID agenda, she really captured the essence of what Interrelativity — and I — are all about. I felt…
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Awarea: Taking RFID to the Streets
Around 1997, I shifted my research focus from artificial intelligence to ubiquitous computing, and started exploring — and working with others to create examples of — what I called active environments: physical spaces that can sense and respond in contextually appropriate ways to their inhabitants. One of the things I learned from my AI research…
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Entrepreneurial Proverbs
Marc Hedlund, serial entrepreneur and, until very recently, entrepreneur-in-residence at O’Reilly Media, has shared an inspiring — and inspired — collection of Entrepreneurial Proverbs from his eTech presentation on Monday on Coding to Co-Founder: How to Move from Engineering to Entrepreneuring … or, as Marc likes to put it, "Entrepreneuring for Geeks". The post has…
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Wine and Wisdom … and Interrelativity
There were lots of insights and experiences involving entrepreneurship, investing and wine flowing at The Rainier Club during last night’s Zino Society Roundtable meeting. As with the last Roundtable meeting, the event offered a unique combination of business and pleasure, with a short keynote address and four investment pitches by entrepreneurs, followed by a wine…
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Entrepreneurship and Religion: Moses’ Startup Experience
I attended an inspiring church service at the Northgate Church recently. The primary motivation for my attendance was to explore the possibilities of church groups as a target market for Interrelativity, but I got far more out of the service than market research results. Larry LaMotte, a friend from NWEN and a member of the…
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Hope is Not a Strategy, One is Not a Team, Ideas are Cheap
I’ve been meeting with lots of people lately — prospective partners, investors, advisors and customers (in a way, they are all prospective customers) — exploring different avenues for how best to move the Interrelativity venture forward. In the process, I’m gaining lots of valuable feedback on a variety of dimensions of this endeavor. Three recent…