Thanks, Greg, for pointing me to this post from Murthy Nukala, CEO of Adchemy, about company values. Murthy is one of the savvier minds in online advertising, and I always enjoy immensely our conversations. Building a company is about so much more than just getting the products right or even getting the smartest people on board, it’s about motivation, culture and being able to really act and think like a team without falling into the “groupthink” trap. There are many examples out there of getting it horribly wrong, or getting it right and then letting it fall apart. Taking some time to think about what your personal and professional values are is well worth it. In my opinion, weaving those into the framework of the organization you are building is essential.

I have given myself 12 months to run a marathon (preferably attached to a fundraising effort) as well as to run a mile in under 5 minutes. I still have to come up with a time that will make the marathon goal a bigger challenge, though of course just finishing a marathon is a big achievement in itself. I’ve never run more than 10 miles… but I find myself enjoying running a lot more than I used to. Perhaps it’s the music and the GPS/heart-rate monitor gadgetry.

I was reading a bit about training methods, and keeping your target heart-rate in a very narrow zone. So when I ran today, for the first time I really paid close attention to varying my pace in order to keep the heart rate fairly steady. Interesting - lots more research for me to do here. Today was 5.47 miles at a relatively slow 9:13 per mile, or 50:27. I hadn’t had any chance to run for the past week while I was out of town, so it felt pretty good!

I recall with fondness doing a lot of advertising on AOL in 2004-2005. AOL placed a lot of additional creative and technical restrictions on advertisers. One of the most annoying of these not just on AOL but on a variety of platforms was with respect to the version of Flash that Flash ads were published in. It caused endless strain because while everywhere else pretty much accepted Flash 6, AOL still required ads to be in Flash 5 format. Pain. Some things just weren’t possible in earlier versions, or when you had painstakingly had your designers make sure the ad was under 30kb in size, doing it in the older version now made it > 30kb etc. etc. You get the idea.

 I was reminded of this when I saw the message below on Facebook’s ad platform. This is just for the display of the dashboard graphic, mind you, that shows you clicks and fans and so on (in general I find 90% of these types of dashboards useless, but that’s a topic for a different, much longer conversation). This is certainly not requiring me to change the Flash version of all of my ads and is really a minor annoyance, but seriously, you’re making me upgrade from Flash 9.0.45 to 9.0.47? Sheesh, what’s up with that?!

Congratulations to Alicia and the team on the latest round of funding! It’s a great space to be in and Consorte is poised for great success… visit their website to learn more!

This is really funny actually. Thanks to Todd Sawicki for this one.

I was chatting to a friend who is CEO of a online vertical content company, and he told me about a recent domain name purchase his company had made - quite an important one for an area they’re moving into. He told me that they’d been after the asset for two years, and for the last two years that he’d called the owner of the domain (an individual) once a week every week to see if he was ready to sell, chatting about price etc. He was unsure whether he wanted to sell it, or do something with it… but the persistence paid off as he called back and agreed to sell it.

The point here is never to give up; a point also made by Joe Kraus in the interview with him concerning the Excite-Netscape deal in Founders At Work. The truth is that most of us give up when we meet (sometimes even only minor) resistance. To be able to persist when you know there is a long-term value there or even just have a hunch that there is, and to focus your energy and resources even if they are only a small amount applied regularly… that’s a special discipline. It applies as much to relationships as anything else - many of the most valuable business relationships are ones that have been nurtured for years. Something that I’m thinking about now is fighting patterns, and one of the most basic human patterns is to give up (unfortunately). Don’t give up.

I ran across this Google ad put on by well-known brand and (ostensibly) Facebook partner, Blockbuster. Apparently, you can’t put the word “Facebook” in an ad on Google and have to say “Face book” according to this particular promotion. Seems a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?

The ad links to http://www.blockbuster.com/movieclique, the Movieclique Facebook app site on Blockbuster.com… and ironically I saw this ad on a Facebook app itself, Scrabulous. So much for having a tight relationship with a major brand I guess?

Wow, we did some analysis on the Facebook numbers according to Facebook vs. according to comScore and when it gets to older visitors (i.e. over age 35), where comScore Media Metrix says 13.6 million people aged 35+ visited Facebook.com in October compared to Facebook’s figure of 1.256 million (!). Check out our post here on CPM Advisors.

Not so secret, but Techcrunch has a good compilation of tricks, tips and other “magic” to boost viral viewership of online video clips. A whole new layer of people and companies has arisen over the past several years that one could describe as “media market makers” or “attention arbitrageurs” in a sense; they’re often only indirectly making money but are moving user attention around, building on top of relationship- context- and relevance-graphs that are increasingly addressable online.

According to this AP story, some people are still finding the Facebook Beacon stuff a bit freaky. It’s still pretty early in the game, though. I’m sure we’ll get a lot more user feedback in the coming months, some bad and some undoubtedly good. What would be great is seeing any actual efficacy data which I fear will take a lot longer.

Word reached me today of a rumor that News Corp is to purchase LinkedIn, as relayed in TechCrunch.

This story about a rogue mobile phone constantly calling 911 is actually a little scary - sometimes a feature created to provide additional safety or security may end up compromising it. If a lot of cellphones unburdened by the cost and trackability of a carrier contract start dialing 911 in a particular area, they could quite easily create a denial of service for legitimate emergencies… however, in this case, surely they can triangulate the location based on other 911  services that have been set up that require the location of the call to be pinpointed?

Both Pricegrabber and Retrevo have given their sites facelifts and in the case of Retrevo, released some new features. Exerpted from an email from CEO Vipin Jain, they have ‘introduced value-based shopping along with visual simplicity … to make shopping fun again’. check it out at http://retrevo.com

I am a fan of gadgets, no real surprise, especially watches - I love my Garmin Forerunner I got last year, though I am only so-so on my Suunto golf watch. But Michael Parekh found a new device that tracks how you are sleeping and can change when its alarm goes off to wake you depending on what your sleep-state is. Cool. Add it to the wishlist!

Amazon will be offering hourly deals/specials and all sorts of other Black Friday wonderfulness without the actual long lines, parking problems and traffic jams (and crazy people shouting “Planet of the Apes on DVD for $19.99 one per customer, omg kids, each grab one!”): here’s the page with their deals.

It’s Saturday, so it must mean new features for LinkedIn (they release features on a Friday late afternoon typically, every second week). LinkedIn is very much about incremental improvements, which has sometimes been frustrating for people when things change around but I think on the whole it has been very good and people I talk to feel like there is a constant progress to the site. Here’s the blog entry discussing the new features which include a more newsfeed-ish like quality to the updates section (breaking things down by day, collapsing certain things the way Facebook does to get more info in there e.g. X, Y and Z have updated their profile pictures), and the ability to send notes that aren’t emails to your contacts. LinkedIn has spent a lot of time on their messaging features: I’m a big fan of this since increasingly people will find that regular email is such a deluge of spam and bacn that meta message services with good deliverability that are frequently used will help bridge the gap for a lot of people (ironically contributing to the bacn problem themselves… but… ). So continuing congrats to the LinkedIn team on the new feature adds!

I really like startup blogs that are smart and informative: like that of Jellyfish.com, the comparison shopping/advertising company which was acquired by Microsoft in October. Congratulations to the Jellyfish team; they were doing some interesting stuff and hopefully they can continue to do so under MSFT’s roof.

Almost new, an 80 hour (I think) Tivo Series2, could be yours if you live in the Bay Area and want to email me. I have three DVRs, and we only need one so looking to give someone a nice holiday gift. Email me at rob at the name of this blog dot com if you are interested.

Referenced in a post from the excellent Comparison Engines site (Brian Smith also started a company called Singlefeed that provides just that for merchants to leverage across multiple engines), apparently Shopping.com is really hacking merchants off and not doing themselves any favors as we get into the holiday shopping season!

This is from a promo for the next SFBIG event and I have no idea what it means. Maybe someone out there can help me translate?

“Sure there are brands with VERY specific demographics they need to reach, but often, even with colossal wastage the online ad network is much more efficient. You get much better price per performance on networks. Why? Well, even if your creative performs better on the branded site, it will do so by about 20%-30% for the same creative; but you get between 3x to 30x better pricing on the network you do the math. Unfortunately most brands dont.”

- Sean Cummings, Director of Marketing, Ask.com