Quote: Jason Calacanis

A co-worker forwarded a quote from Jason Calacanis to me this morning that I think is worth sharing. I like Jason's view of the situation and I agree w/ his recommendation to unplug from the news sites and constant updates on the DOW and focus on yourself and your work. Get to work! Make your future.

Fortunes are built during the down market and collected in the up market. Now's the time to build, so turn off CNBC and forget the Dow. It's meaningless to you now. All that matters is your work and your personal progress. - Jason Calacanis

John Doerr's 10 Tips for Start-ups

AllThingsD captured video of John Doerr, a top VC, presenting his 10 Tips for Start-ups at VentureBeat's "How to manage your start-up in the downturn" roundtable event. Doerr presents his ten tips in just about four minutes so this is definitely worth your time - start-up or not.

Palin Rap

I got a kick out of this on Saturday night. Way to go SNL.

Pandora Ads Rock

I love Pandora. Pandora is a free Internet Radio service that uses the Music Genome Project to send you a constant stream of fresh tracks based on your music preferences. I love rocking out to the music streams Pandora sends my way every day.

The core music service Pandora offers is impressive but Pandora impresses in a lot of other ways.

Pandora's user interface contributes a lot to the success of the service. The user interface is beautiful and a pleasure to use.

Pandora is an ad supported service and I've always been impressed by the way they've integrated ads into the user interface. Ads are usually integrated into a website as an afterthought - slammed into the right margin or simply dumped into a header or footer. Pandora on the other hand integrates, or blends, the ad into the user interface. I think this makes the ad far more effective.

Recently, Pandora has been making more of the ads integrated into their service interactive. Today the HP TouchSmart ad really impressed me - it was beautiful and a pleasure to interact with. I think this type of ad is a very effective branding tool. Ads like this might not convert well on the spot but I do think they're great for brand building.

Electoral-vote.com

A post on Tim Berry's blog pointed my browser back towards Electoral-vote.com - I blogged about it in 2004. Thanks for bringing it back up to the surface Tim.

Electoral-vote.com is a great way to keep up-to-speed on how your candidate is doing when it comes to the Electoral College. Fortunately, it's painting a pretty good picture for the Obama ticket right now.

Where's the Exit?

Venture-backed startups are scratching their heads looking for the liquidity EXIT. M&As and IPOs are unheard of these days. Last year the M&A EXIT was the rage. Is the liquidity drought going to slow the innovation cycle down? TechCrunch posted on the liquidity drought today. IMO - the liquidity drought, at least in the short-term, is a good thing. I think it will force startups back to the "business basics" earlier in the startup process. Forcing startups to think about the basics like - when will we turn a profit?