I’d rather be surfing

When I was a young pup, I thought ideas where extremely valuable.  I’d think up some “new” business model and talk about how I could make a ton of money off of it.  I had an idea for an ad network for video games, a video game using a guitar for input and tons of other stuff that eventually someone created.  (Really…)

So when I see another article about someone claiming that facebook was their idea, I have to chuckle…

I’ve learned that 99% of the time its not the idea but the execution of the idea that matters.  If you have an idea, chances are someone else has the same or similar idea.  If you think its an out of the ordinary, killer, next-big-thing idea then go after it with all your worth.  Execute on it and blow it out.  Otherwise you’ll be kicking yourself when someone who “stole” your idea is about to have a $2B IPO.

I went to the Mickey Avalon show at Slims last night. HardRockChick has the review and video!

I’ll be doing a short demo tonight at Mobile Monday Silicon Valley. AdMob has been building tools for both advertisers and publishers to take advantage of iPhone capabilities. So I’ll be showing those off. See you there…

Update: For a sneak peek check out this post.

Halo 3 launches on September 25th! This game is one reason I bought the Xbox 360… Guitar Hero is the other reason!

Apparantly, the Legendary Edition of this game is almost sold out already.

PowerSet sure has gotten a lot of press for still being in “stealth” mode.  If these guys are as good at building the semantic search engine as they are at building buzz, they’ll be very successful.

I met a few of the guys at a Stanford Job Fair a while back and talked a little about their use of Amazon EC2 for building their indices.  We talked a briefly about running Hadoop on EC2 (which all the rage these days).

Anyway, PowerSet likes to build models and are going to be releasing them publicly for feedback and generally to take advantage of the community at large.  Their first is the PowerSet Datacenter Model lets anyone model building a datacenter.  It takes into account lots of variables that you don’t typically see on a Excel model like Moore’s Law and tries to predict future speed/cost ratio of servers.  They also let you model the cost of Virtual (EC2) vs. Leased servers.   Very cool!

The folks over at Read/Write Web point to a video where Google’s Eric Schmidt defines the term Web 3.0.  I think Web 3.0 is already a loaded term but I don’t disagree with Dr. Schmidt’s assertions.  He basically describes applications the are “pieced together” where data “lives in the cloud”.  I know a lot of companies have been trying to make this a reality but I think Amazon is really leading the way with their suite of web services.

Amazon announces their  Flexible Payment Service!  Jeff Barr’s AWS Blog has the scoop.

This is a game changer!  Until now, micro-payments have been all talk.  Not anymore.   It should be interesting to watch things developer around this incredibly rich API.  I’ll be exploring it and will have more to write soon.

Well, it turns out that EthanHaasWasRight has nothing to do with 1-18-08.  It’s actually a teaser for a RPG board game called Alpha Omega.  I am not much of a RPG-er much less a board-based RPG-er, so this is a bit disappointing.  I guess J.J. Abrams was telling the truth when he said the two were not related.