Before I get started on why I can't get my Slingbox to change the channel on my TV even after I've read all the Help instructions, let me remind you that if you hate getting these in your email box, you can go directly to the blog they come from at http://blog.stealthmode.com, and if you use a feedreader, like Google Reader (www.google.com/reader) you can have this blog fed to your desktop.



And if you are planning to attend the already highly successful (which means the room will be full) First Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference on Nov. 8, you had better go to www.azentrepreneurship.com and sign up.



Never mind about the Slingbox; it's too negative. Let's talk about the power of networks. When I got the idea for the entrepreneurship conference it was because there is no such thing as a superfluity of networking opportunities in a high growth business community. If you doubt me, go to www.workit.com, which is a list of networking opportunities in the Bay Area. On any given day, there is more happening than you can ever attend. You get to sort by region, by date, event type, and industry segment. I bought a house up there about a year and a half ago, and by judiciously attending a FEW events (I'm only up there in the summer and about one weekend a month during the rest of the year) I have already begun a second network, which I am valiantly trying to connect to my primary network.



Every time you go to one of these networking events and talk to somebody new, you either learn something, find a customer, make a friend, make contact with someone who can help you later, or just begin to think differently.

But most small businesspeople, entrepreneurs, or managers either don't realize the full value of networking, or thing there's some mystery to it.



Well, there IS a mystery to it: it's the mystery of manifestation. The universe is always manifesting what you need, if you just take the time to look around you and find it.



Yes, that sounds "way out there." But I built a business on it. Many of you have heard me say this before, but when I was first going into business, I would volunteer to hostess a fundraisers, or do their publicity pro bono. At those events, I met the people who would later become my clients. And as soon as I had two dollars to rub together, I began to buy tickets to those fundraisers, and get on their mailing lists and committees. On those committees, I met local bigwigs who would have never taken my phone calls.



Unless you network, you never know who actually has money to lend, invest, or spend on your business. And you never find out who your ideal teammates are. They are all working for someone else right now, going to these same events, waiting to hear your story about why they should jump ship and go to work for you.



So that's why I planned the conference, and why I told the panelists they could not use Powerpoints during their presentations, sit at the front of the room at a dais, or speak without being spoken to. I wanted the panelists to learn as much from the attendees as the other way around. Think of this conference as "user-generated content," much like that on the Web. In some circles, it's called an "unconference."



And I'm taking a page from my daughter's book -- I'm not letting people sit down for lunch without standing on a buffet line. My daughter did this for her wedding dinner, because her guests came from all over the world, and no one knew anyone else except the bride and groom. Not as elegant, perhaps, but a great way for strangers wearing nametags to ask the person ahead of behind them "what does your company do." And perhaps, then, not to go sit down with the same three people they knew from before, but rather drift to a table with a stranger.



So next Wednesday, when the conference occurs, I will not care much what is said from the front of the room. I will only care what people say to one another.

http://scobleizer.com/2006/10/31/see-a-demo-of-what-jotspot-sold-to-google-today/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/10/31/google-acquires-wiki-company-jotspot/
Here's another good analysis from Marshal Kirkpatrick on Tech Crunch.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/wp-trackback.php?p=3866

Hooray! Google bought Jotspot! I'm really anxious for them to buy everything so I can have access to all my data online when I travel back and forth from California to Arizona and work on my three different machines! And I really want an editable web site, so a free Wiki would be great.

No one, even if they do it all day long, can keep up with all the available and cool new technology. This week, I feel like I'm really behind the tech power curve, so I decided to try to figure out what I've done with my time. It�s not like I�ve been sleeping.

In the past three weeks, I've purchased a Blackberry Pearl (the best cell phone I have ever had by orders of magnitude) and taken photos with it of my European cruise. It has a 1.3 megapixel camera, and it was tempting to use the phone rather than my Canon to document the ports I stopped at on the cruise.

I have posted those photos to my Flickr account (www.flickr.com), and even blogged some of them, along with photos and video of my daughter's wedding in September. (You may see more of my daughter�s wedding at www.danielandsamantha.com).

I have downloaded another version of the social browser Flock, which connects me to both Flickr and my blog automatically, making it more efficient for me to do those things.

And, because, I am always curious, I�ve also downloaded and installed the new Internet Explorer 7 browser, and the Firefox 2.0 update. Do you want to know what I think? I think they are all trying to look like Mac OSX; everything is minimalist and blue. And everyone now has tabbed browsing. I�m not sure any one of these browsers could be defended to the death against the others.

Next, I've downloaded the new Democracy Player (http://www.getdemocracy.com/downloads) so I can watch Internet video, and watched the new Scoble Show on Podcast.net and Eddie Codel's Geek TV (http://www.geekentertainment.tv/), where figures from the technology world are interviewed and MORE new technologies are demonstrated. I watched Scoble film Codel interviewing the CEO of Wetpaint (www.wetpaint.com), which is a new software that creates Wikis (editable web sites). By the end of the interview, by dint of assiduous multitasking, I had created my own Wiki.

I listened to the Gillmor gang, where Steve Gillmor (used to be with InfoWorld) chats weekly with Dan Farber, Jason Calcanis, Michael Arrington, and Dana Farber � most of them journalists who have now become bloggers.

Also this month I've downloaded the new Google reader (www.google.com/reader) so I can read all my RSS feeds (other people's blogs, newspapers, etc) quickly and in one place. I have to thank Scoble for teaching me to page through the reader in the old Evelyn Wood Speed Reading fashion by repeatedly hitting the j key.

I have signed up and created an avatar to play the simulation game Second Life, which has a million players (http://secondlife.com/) and is attracting the attention of advertisers like Reuters. Unfortunately, I�ve only been back once to Second Life, because my first life has been too busy. On Saturday night I sat in Scoble�s house watching his son play the X-Box360 game �Oblivion� on a huge home theatre screen with surround sound. It was very much like being at a movie, especially since Patrick is extremely good at this game.

I've been trying to do all this keeping up with technology while planning the First Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, attending the ESS EXPO 2006, cruising the most exotic Mediterranean islands, treating the respiratory infection I got on the plane home, planning next spring's FastTrac program, and voting by mail for a bunch of ballot propositions that are not what they have been advertised to be.

And I burned a few more hours searching the web for toilets and showers for the bathrooms I�m redoing in my house. (Tip: go somewhere familiar, like the Kohler site or homeclick.com , find a product you like, and then type it into Google. Up will come all the other sites that carry that product at sometimes as much as 50% off. The Internet is a perpetual price war.

Oh, I also have a full time job as mother to a golden retriever who requires a lot of ball throwing.

So there are many aspects of every technology that I have still not mastered, and which I like to think are saved for the future: I still have to figure out how to voice dial on the Blackberry; build a home on the lot I bought in Second Life, and find out how to make good real estate investments there like I do in First Life; and watch more Internet TV.

No wonder you haven't seen me in person lately :-)

IMG_5157.jpg

IMG_5157.jpg
Originally uploaded by hardaway.

The pictures on here are of the wedding of my daughter Samantha, which took place at the Navillus Birney winery in Glen Ellen, California on September 9, 2006. While I am not a sentimentalist, I was blown away by the wedding and I am now amazed by the technology that allows me to post these to Flickr and share the most endearing ones with you!

FrancineRuralDev_1722.avi

FrancineRuralDev_1722.avi

Is it true that Arizona is a great place to start a business? Or is it true that we lack capital and seasoned management teams? On November 8, 2006, Arizona�s entrepreneurs and aspirants will find answers to these questions at the First Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, presented by The Business Journal of Phoenix, Stealthmode Partners, and The Opportunity Through Entrepreneurship Foundation, and sponsored by Grand Canyon University, Shea Commercial, Core Purpose, Inc., the City of Tempe Economic Development Department, and Ephibian. Michael Gerber, author of the best seller The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It, will be the lunch speaker. The conference, to be held at the Ritz Carlton Hotel from 8 AM to 4 PM will feature a day of great content and connections for Arizona companies in both startup and growth mode.

Other confirmed speakers include Marianne Hudson, Director of the Angel Capital Foundation, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation; William Cockayne, innovation specialist and Director of Stanford University�s Humanities Lab; and former Phoenix Mayor Paul Johnson, a real estate and a technology entrepreneur.

Attendees will hear from successful Arizona entrepreneurs, local startups familiar with the environment, entrepreneur mentors and angel investors, and specialized resource providers.

�We are hoping that this day will leave entrepreneurs with business insights, leadership skills and networking opportunities to create new businesses or expand existing enterprises. Its agenda, developed from the Kauffman Foundation�s FastTrac Entrepreneurial Education program, includes practical, hands-on business development tracks and workshops for existing and aspiring entrepreneurs,� says conference organizer Francine Hardaway.

Panelists who will be available to answer questions and work with attendees include experts in due diligence, business valuation, intellectual property, business formation, product development, leadership, hiring and firing, product marketing, sales, franchises, and social ventures.

The cost of the conference will be $125.00, including lunch and refreshments. Proceeds will be donated to the Opportunity Through Entrepreneurship Foundation http://www.otef.org), a 501�3 that provides entrepreneurial skills to underserved populations, and to local not-for-profits that serve entrepreneurs in Arizona. Registrations are being taken at www.azentrepreneurship.com.

L.GroupPhoto.avi

L.GroupPhoto.avi Herding the members of the wedding for a group photo...this wedding coordinator earned her fee!

P.Dinner.avi

P.Dinner.avi. The beauty of the Navillus Birney winery, where Sam and Daniel got married, and he happiness at the head table. I'm the woman walking across the foreground.

O.HeadTable.avi

O.HeadTable.avi Sam and Daniel with Chelsea and Temple at the wedding reception

 
 
 
  

If there was ever any doubt that September 11 changed the world, that doubt was resolved for me yesterday at ESS Expo 2006 as I listened to Michael Rasmussen, a Forrester analyst who covers Enterprise Risk Management, discuss operational risk � a term I only began to hear about a year or two ago, but a term that defines a large and growing preoccupation of corporate executives.

Operational risk is the risk you have, when you are in business, of losing all or part of your business at any time because of inadequate or failed internal processes, people and systems, or from external events (remember Kantor Fitzgerald, the company in the World Trade Center that lost not only its physical assets, but over half its staff?)

This kind of business risk never goes away, but until recently financial risk was the only element of risk management that was deemed worthy of attention: will we have enough sales; will we get paid on time; if we invest our cash reserves, will we lose them; if we operate in a foreign country, will we be able to get our profits out of there? This is called �treasury risk� in the enterprise.

However, at the turn of this century, because of 9/11, people began to notice other kinds of operational risk, including loss of physical assets (think Katrina), rises in oil prices (think airline bankruptcies), and environmental health and safety issues. These risks bubbled up from further down in the organization, perhaps from the facilities management or the environmental areas rather than the corporate boardroom, but they quickly integrated themselves with the financial risks because of their common interest in government regulation.

Yep. Every year there is a greater risk of noncompliance with increasing and increasingly complex government regulations and reporting requirements. The federal Office of Management and Budget has a sub-agency just to count and keep track of new rules and regulations coming out of the government. The overall economic impact of these regulations on the US economy is over $1 trillion annually; there are 4000 employment and labor laws alone!

As the government began to regulate the disposal of hazardous wastes, safety in the workplace, and how we treat �protected classes� of employees, the operational risk aspects of noncompliance (your CEO goes to jail, or your company gets fined millions of dollars) became recognizable. Not only could you blow up your valuable plant and shut your lines down by handling your chemicals incorrectly, but you could also be fined for EPA and OSHA violations simultaneously.

So any operational incident invariably affects the bottom line of the company. In fact, in a survey done by ZDNet Media for MRO Software, 45% of enterprise companies have had an operational incident in the last twelve months, and each incident has an average cost to the organization of $16.9 million.

As a result, the worlds of compliance and risk management have begun to blur, and most large organizations seem to have some CxO who is responsible for managing all the risks. This can be a Chief Risk Officer, Chief Security Officer, or someone who is not at the �C� level at all, but has the responsibility anyway. As you can imagine, being in charge of all the eventualities that can possibly be imagines as business risks is a pretty big job.

How does this CRO get a handle on all this potential risk and manage it? Through software, of course. Fortunately, in the 21st century we have business intelligence, which allows an executive to see at a glance�through a desktop dashboard � whether he is in or out of compliance, in or out of danger, at any given time. All you have to do is choose a vendor, pay some money, and have the software deployed. The correct software automatically updates the regs, tells you what has changed, and modifies the tasks you have to do to comply with the new rules. Lest you think this is not a big deal, Rasmussen says 400 software vendors and 75 consulting companies are marketing operational risk management and compliance.

How do you choose a product in that crowded a space? Probably you want to choose the one with the broadest capability and the best integration between compliance and traditional risk management. (A small point made by Rasmussen that�s really telling: Operational Risk Management Magazine, a trade pub you have probably never heard of, has recently changed its name to Operational Risk and Compliance. And that�s because every notable incident in which there is significant loss of life or money is accompanied by increased government regulation.)

That product, of course, is ESS. Shameless promotion of a Stealthmode client, but fascinating anyway :-)

 
 
 
 
What a surprise! I found the Internet cafe in Majorca :-) 

 
 
 
  

 
The Blue Grotto, Malta, as seen from a small boat (by me!) 

The Great Floating Wal-Mart chugs idly through the Mediterranean, saving on fuel by proceeding one knot (1.12 nautical miles) an hour. For an entrepreneur-Type A like me, the speed of the cruise itself is intolerably slow. Today is a �day at sea,� which means a day of massages, spa treatments--cocktails of sunscreen and alcohol.

I much preferred being in the small outboard that took us out into the Blue Grotto, darting in and out among the caves and rock formations off the coast of Malta, showing us up close and personal how sandstone formations can be beautiful, especially against turquoise water.

Malta, like most places when you really get into them, is fascinating. It�s a country made up of three islands, and like most of Europe, it has been overrun by everybody from the Phoenicians to the Brits. The Brits were the last conquerors before Maltese independence happened in the 60s, and they left the islands with the dubious distinction of driving on the left.

But the previous conquerors left much more, including a tradition of native sandstone architecture, and a language half way between Arabic and French.

I have to be thankful to the GFWM, which has taken me to places I never would have chosen on my own, such as Naples, Sicily, and Malta. I just wish its marketing brochures were more truthful, because it promises a lot that it never delivers, including the lure of fine food, and the lure of being connected to the Internet and TV while on the sea. Branding, as everyone knows, creates a set of expectations. And if you don�t fulfill those expectations you damage the brand. For me, the Celebrity brand has been damaged big time by its failure to connect me with the Internet and its failure to connect my daughter to some athletic shore excursions.

Apparently, Celebrity Cruises has made a deal to outsource its network to a company called High Seas Internet, which provides connectivity to most of the cruise ships. About half way through the cruise, after I had complained about the slowness of the Internet connection, I was told that it is a 56k modem connecting to a satellite. The man who told me this was apologetic, and acted as if I should know that only a 56k speed is possible from a satellite.

Well, I have had both satellite TV and satellite Internet in the past, and have represented Hughes Direct when it first got into the business many years ago. I also know that in the 90s, dark fiber was laid under all the sea by companies enthusiastically trying to connect the world before they themselves went broke.

So I know that, for the same reasons that it chooses to travel at 1 knot per hour, Celebrity has chosen to connect at 56k, and then charge its guests $.75 a minute for service that is worthy of a third world country. But worse than that, the connection has been down almost half the time, due to hardware issues. These issues get resolved, and then mysteriously unresolved. In the mean time, I pay through the nose, trying to get on.

There is a market here: supplying people on cruise ships, who after all want to email their digital photos home no matter how old, infirm, drunk, or non-technical they are, with a good connection that can actually be used. Every time I�m in the Internet caf�, I see people coming in to complain about their Internet connection. We are an unsatisfied market.

Even no connection at all, and no promise of a connection, would be better than what we have. Then we would all get off the boat and trot dutifully off to an Internet caf� at each port, which I have done anyway so I don�t break my own bank.

So I think the worst part of the cruise is the disappointments: the endless flyers about spa treatments that cost $250 if you sign up for them in advance and are suddenly on sale for $89 on the ship after a week; the shore excursions that are carefully chosen by each guest and cancelled at the last minute if they don�t have enough signups; and the AcquaSpa, which doesn�t even have a place to swim.

I found my spot. It is Taormina, in Sicily. In fact, Sicily itself, Sopranos to the contrary, may be my spot. It is a beautiful mountain town, as yet not overrun by the tourists who have ruined the Amalfi coast. I was bummed when we took our drive to Sorrento, Positano and Amalfi, because even though I knew they were beautiful, and the coast line was beautiful, and the Bay of Naples is beautiful, when you throw a few thousand people with cameras into a town that only has a total population of 5000, you quickly unbalance the ecology and the place begins to look like the Ginza. Every town on the Amalfi coast that we visited looked like the Ginza.

The highlight of the Amalfi coast was the restaurant where we had lunch -- down three levels and hanging over the Bay. Homemade Spinach Canneloni. White wine much stronger than any I remember in the US. And an elevator that did not work and trapped three of our fellow cruisers.

No, wait a moment: the highlight was when the guide told us that the word spa comes from the Latin "salute para acqua" -- health through water. So health spa is redundant. And on our ship, we have a redundant "AquaSpa." Now you know.

But I am glad I saw it, because I read about all those towns in Hemingway, who went to them in the 1920s and 30s when I am sure they were really great. (Have you noticed I am writing without using contractions? I cannot find the apostrophe on the Italian keyboard!)

Taormina, beautiful, classy, with narrow streets. Sicily, especially Messina where we docked, has very narrow streets. I could not understand the guide, because she has a thick Sicilian accent (calls the castles Kass-tells), but I think she told us Sicily is the product of two fault lines, one in Messina and one in the middle of the ocean, that divided it from the African continent long ago and pushed it toward Italy. At present, Sicily is about a twenty-minute ferry ride from Italy, but they have never built a bridge to the continent -- perhaps because they think there will be another earthquake and it will just come unglued anyway.

Sicily, like the Netherlands, is one of those countries everyone marched through -- Greeks, Romans, Arabs, etc., so it has a real mix of cultures and its language is a dialect. It also has a real mix of landscapes, from desert to the beautiful views of the Bay of Naxos. I love it.

After over a week of constantly being around people, I decided to get on a bus tour where I would know no one, and try to spend the day without getting to know anyone. I am traveling with thirty-odd friends and neighbors, and learning more about them on this trip than I ever knew before. It is amazing how we Americans, busy with our work and our investments and our workouts and our leisure, manage to pass each other casually without ever breaking the surface of our personalities. On this trip, the amount of time we spend at sea, in relatively close quarters, gives us a chance to get to know each other more. But after I get to know the people I came with, I am afraid I do not have much desire to know anyone else :-)

Eleven nights is an unsettling number of days on a ship, and an equally unsetting number of shore excursions. Somewhere in Italy, on a bus to somewhere else, we passed a cameo factory that had been in business since 1848, and because it had new, clean toilets, we all stopped there and I bought a cameo. But I cannot remember which bus, which town, which day. So there you have it.