tomatic | thomas marban

i'm currently at the maker faire in san mateo which probably has the highest geek density next to burning man. here and here are videos of the combot cup that takes place as well. scoble has the mentos thingie.

where do you keep all the stories you find throughout the day that you like to read later on? in all likelihood they're scattered on your desktop, e-mail or bookmark collection. enter readbag, a nifty little tool that allows you to store all those links in order to read them later, on another computer, your iphone or mobile, via rss or through an api. while there are a few services out there that do similar things i didn't find one that had all the features i needed and with the advent of the new google app engine it was a no-brainer to build an own version from scratch. head over to readbag.com and give it a shot. in the medium term i might combine the service with popurls for a seamless experience.

there's been some discussion lately on the new startup occupation du jour referred to as community-driven ceo, essentially a crowd-controlled puppet delighting the community with public product wishlists, logo design contests and other tasks that are just too painful to do in-house. while the intarweb is all about collective openness, i argue that active listening is only valuable for companies with a limited customer base who can't innovate by means of life-prolongers such as venture capital, but allowing your web product to be shaped by the mediocre crowd will end you up with a gluey mess of soulless nothingness. if you can't figure out what to do, why should i and your employees put my trust in it? almost any innovation was inspired not by asking around but by people who are supremely pissed off at the way things are and every time something new comes along people will, for the most part, just try to resemble old habits with it just like ford's customers asked him for a faster horse rather than a car.
did steven p. ask the music industry about their preferred distribution models? no. did he score? five years later, for sure. did zuckerberg ask the facebook mob before introducing beacon? no. did he fail? for sure, but after all he's certain to gear up for something even bigger 'cos in order to prepare the field and succeed in the long term it's better to slap & embrace your community every once a while and be the evangelic bad boy rather than showing them white teeth time and time again. if you really need to ask for ideas, reach out to privately, listen to your deeply held values, put in more hours, pay more attention and care more, but just don't bother the crowd. ceos need to serve the opinion market, not obtain from it.

and so, i'm entering the widget industry, more on the popurls blog.

for the most part i've stopped reblogging popurls coverage but marshall at rww just got it right. thanks for that.