8 Ways to Sunday

I bring these up to highlight a key point — you don’t get investment for just an idea. It’s extremely rare. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop believing that ideas matter. That isn’t what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurs aren’t idea people, everybody and their brother has ideas. Entrepreneurs are people that exploit ideas by matching them to market needs, executing them despite scarce resources and designing a business model that makes the idea profitable.

If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop waiting. Start doing something. That is how you learn. Make entrepreneurship your hobby, until you can make it your career. And stop reading garbage about these companies that go from idea to a billion dollar valuation in two years. That requires as much luck and timing as it does vision and execution. You will have much more success if you get these crazy ideas out of your head, and if you put the kool-aid down.

Read the rest at BusinessPundit

(Props: Photo Matt)

The Grokker visual search tool, formerly available only as a $50 desktop application, now has a free, web-accessible version.

Grokker presents search engine results as a clickable “map” of information, separated by topic area. The web version uses results from Yahoo, whereas the desktop version (still available for a price) can be configured to use a number of different search engines. The results you get from either version look something like this:

If you’re having trouble thinking of a working example, check out this Grokker search for “8 Ways to Sunday.”

I did a trial of the desktop product a couple of months back, so Groxis (the company behind Grokker) sent me an e-mail when the web site went live. I gave it a spin this morning, and it’s very similar to the desktop app. I don’t see myself using it very often, but it’s nice to know it’s there. I use search frequently in my job, so new tools are always a plus.

To use the web version of Grokker, you’ll need Sun’s Java plug-in and a browser that supports inline frames.

Things have been quiet here lately, and friends and regular readers may wonder where I’ve gone. Fact is, I’ve been so mired in the database conversion at work that I scarcely want to touch a computer when I get home. The one exception has been video games; turns out that shooting people and blowing stuff up (virtually, of course) is a great outlet for job-related stress .

The conversion and the inevitable cleanup is likely to be an ongoing thing until August at least, at which point I’m taking two weeks of much-deserved vacation. Things will continue to be slow around here until then. I’ll try to post a bit more often, but will likely stay away from heavy, or even very meaningful, topics. Fluff and minor life updates are the order of the day for a while.

One of the few good things about sick days is the chance they give you to make excuses for things you know you shouldn’t be doing.

Current excuse: “I’m only on my fourth serving of ice cream because my throat is still sore.”

Well, my first day back at work after the holidays is off to a rip-roaring start.

I work in the oldest building on campus, and the wiring sometimes has a hard time keeping up with the demands of modern technology. Not usually a problem, since we have UPSs on all the computers, right?

Well, my UPS was apparently dead during this morning’s brief power failure. When my PC came back to life, we had the following delightful exchange:

Computer: Keyboard Error. Press <F4> to resume.

Adam: (presses F4)

Computer: …

Adam: (presses F4)

Computer: …

Adam: (presses F4 repeatedly, glowering at monitor)

Computer: …

Adam: (Mutters numerous curses against Microsoft, Intel, and the computer’s BIOS makers; hits reset button)

This kind of inscrutably moronic error message, in white text on a black screen, is the kind of thing that Bill Gates has been promising us we’d never see again since Windows 95 was released almost ten years ago. I realize that — unlike Apple’s Macintosh — the PC hardware market is heterogeneous and chaotic, and that making every piece of hardware work seamlessly with every other piece of hardware and with the operating system is a monumental undertaking. But really, ten years? Isn’t that enough?

And yes, I realize that the error was actually being thrown by the BIOS and not by Windows. But Microsoft and Intel have enough control over the PC platform that they can and should set reasonable requirements for BIOS-generated error messages and BIOS error recovery.

Okay, end of rant. Time to get back to work.