[image via HowStuffWorks]

I’ll be the first to admit I absolutely love my Kindle. But there is a feature that is seriously missing from it — particularly since it has WIFI built in. I want to be able to instantly publish an excerpt, possibly with a few thoughts of my own, to my blog and have that post link to the book with my Amazon affiliate code for those who may want to purchase it. It seems a quick and easy way for Amazon to allow their Kindle Users to spread the word about both Kindle’s and all the great books available on them at the same time.

Or maybe they don’t need ideas like this since the Kindle is currently sold out.

Uploaded with plasq‘s Skitch!

By the way, thank you to my good friend Andrew Mattie at Diverse Solutions for pushing me to purchase one prior to starting my travels back in May.

From the NYT “Technology Leads more Park Visitors Into Trouble” –

“Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,” said Jackie Skaggs, spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

Come on people – grow a brain. Just because you’re a geek with toys doesn’t mean you are invincible.

I love reading Umair Haque, who always make me think about the issues he discusses in his writing. I started following Umair when my former boss David Gibbons clued me into him a few years ago and I’ve been following ever since. I’m as big an Apple fan as the next guy, but here is a fascinating quote from his recent “Apple’s Real Achilles Heel” article that should make you think — “what if someone as brilliant as Steve Jobs put his mind to REALLY changing the world (and not just changing the world for a select few)? THAT would be something…

Consider a small slice of history. When Steve Jobs was searching for his own replacement after his first tenure as Apple’s CEO, he audaciously said to the front-running candidate, then-Pepsi CEO John Sculley: “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Perhaps, today, I might gently ask the same question of Steve: “do you really want to spend the rest of your life selling slicker gadgets, or do you want take this chance to change the world radically for the better?”

The future of capitalism isn’t about making prettier, cooler gizmos every year; it’s not about helping sell more movies, music, or apps. It’s about building revolutionary companies, countries, and economies: those that are hardwired to do meaningful stuff that matters the most, and begin making up for the industrial age business-as-usual’s glaring shortcomings; those that can fuel a more authentic prosperity instead.

If the first bullet point on the agenda of 21st century capitalism is discovering a higher purpose for the economy, the second might be said to be building high-impact organizations — those that can change the world radically for the better. Because when you think about it, that’s what’s really scarce.

Right now, I’m sitting at the Coffee Bar in the Mission District of San Francisco (which I originally found in 2009) working. I successfully participated in this week’s YouReach Media webinar a few minutes ago and now I’m hunkering down to write content all afternoon. The power of technology to empower me to do this from anywhere is incredible. All I need is my Macbook Air and wifi.

Take a look at this screen shot from Facebook.com a few minutes ago – http://img.skitch.com/20100414-s4b1u26n4tppxtb8u6khtkh23.jpg

Not sure what the issue was, but seems like the site is back up now.

If the answer is “NO” – you’re not alone. I didn’t either until I got a quick demo of Venmo last night at Iron Cactus in Austin (as a result of seeing my friend Daryn Nakhuda). It seems like a cool concept, though obviously there is quite a marketing challenge that awaits them if they want to reach consumers (which they do).

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t been following me on Twitter, I’m in Austin for #SXSW until sometime late next week.

Wow, this is incredible — Google has customized a snowmobile to capture “street view” imagery from this year’s Olympics. Take a look at the video below — and if anyone knows how to get me the job driving the snowmobile around, let me know

And yes, I know this is the 2nd post in a row referring to that company they call Google. Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Wow, this is way too cool not to share on my blog — it’s an animation showing edits to the OpenStreetMap.org project during 2008 and is a super cool visualization.

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

[via Matt Lerner]

I just came across this comparison of online project management apps (via Tac Anderson on Twitter) and wanted to bookmark it for myself for later reference.

Done

Twitter creator Jack Dorsey’s newest start up — Square– is now in private BETA. It allows vendors to accept credit card payments with a tiny device that connects to iPhone/iTouch (other mobile devices are in the works).

I think this will change the credit card game for small business owners. For instance, in some shops down where my dad lives (Ocean Park, WA) they still don’t accept credit cards due to the transaction fees that go with them. I don’t know the specifics of what it will cost to get set up with Square, but I can only imagine it will be a better deal for small business owners than VISA/Mastercard. Imagine if this device seamlessly hooked up to an accounting and invoicing system with a Salesforce-like business model. Now that would be cool (and I’m guessing it will happen eventually).

…you’ll know why Obama wants to keep his blackberry so bad. And, when you are the President, you usually get what you want, so Obama will keep his Blackberry.

Salesforce is a company I’ve been a huge fan of for a few years (I use the web site on a daily basis at work). If you like what they are doing or want to learn more about their model, here’s a interview with CEO Marc Benioff in the San Francisco Chronicle. In my mind, they have done a superb job of building a product that their customers evangelize for them — and Marc realizes that is a critical part of their success.

Q: One criticism that’s come up is that some smaller customers may be leaving Salesforce.com, that people feel like they are lost in the shuffle in some way. How do you address that kind of criticism?

A: We monitor our attrition very, very closely and our attrition has remained at an extremely low percentage over the years. It’s less than 1 percent per month. That’s something that we’ve talked about now for a number of years, and we have to constantly manage that and monitor that. And we also constantly are surveying our customers and listening to them. Salesforce has the highest customer satisfaction of any company that I have ever been associated with. And our customers are evangelists – in many cases the reason that we’ve ended up with our customers is because of other customers referring them.

I’ll be the first to recommend Salesforce as a customer relationship management platform to anyone that asks me about it.

It’s about freaking time (from the consumers perspective) someone in the mobile industry woke up.

SWEET!

Full disclosure — I own (a small amount of) Apple stock.

Several things, but one of them is certainly the fact that Google makes a LOT of money — 1.25 billion in Q2 to be exact. But Microsoft still makes more

• MySpace Embraces DataPortability, Partners With Yahoo, Ebay And Twitter
• Announcing Facebook Connect
• Three’s Company Or Three’s A Crowd? Google To Launch “Friend Connect” On Monday

I won’t pretend to know too much about these programs, but I will say this — the business development divisions of Google, Myspace, and Facebook are going to be working overtime recruiting partners for the next few months. I don’t anticipate all three of these initiatives will gain traction (unless all the major web portals choose to implement all three APIs), so the race is on to close deals with highly trafficked websites on the web — Myspace has a clear lead early on as a result of their announced data sharing deals with Yahoo, Ebay, and Twitter.

Scott Karp penned up a great article everyone interested in internet technology should read — Data And The Future Of The Web.

He finished with this -

The future of the web will be determined by companies that can overcome people challenges — to bring EVERYONE’S data online, and make it useful. And it won’t be about locking up people’s data, but instead helping them be smart about the free flow of their data.

It will be about networking that data, connecting it, to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. That’s why web applications are so much more powerful than siloed desktop applications. That’s why the web itself is so powerful — it’s not just about collecting and distributing data. It’s about connecting data. And about connecting people.

Man, I must say it’s kinda cool when Yahoo! says almost exactly what I wrote last week on my blog — search is becoming LESS relevant (Yahoo says it’s history). I agree that the web is going to be almost completely personalized for the end user. Even Google agrees. Users are already determining their own trusted sources of information & they’ll want those sources displayed for them wherever they are. Some say that by saying “search is history,” Yahoo! is saying they are giving up on competing with Google — GOOD; smart move — I think it’s pretty clear that Yahoo! will never beat Google at search.

I have to disagree with Technically Speaking — to me, search is becoming less and less relevant by the day as I add trusted sources of information to my feedreader. Everyday, I seem to do fewer and fewer searches.

Facebook is going to be the next company that approaches the impact of Google. They are in a position to make a killing through personalizing and displaying “peer search results” to a user BEFORE the user even has to search. After all, people trust content that comes from friends more than they trust content from any current search engine or banner ad that exists today. Yahoo! must be kicking themselves for not creating the platform that facebook has created, which pushes trusted content from a person’s entire network of friends to their newsfeed.

I browsed around a bit today to get a better idea of what’s happening with technology companies in the Seattle area — and found some interesting stuff:

• Seattle Startup Blogs – this is where my browsing started. It’s a great selection of links to local Seattle tech blogs (make sure to thank Sampa for putting it together)
• ProgrammableWeb – I’ve read this blog before, but had no idea that John’s blog was based in Seattle
• Seattle 2.0 – a cool new blog started by Marcelo Calbucci, the founder of Sampa
• Marcelo has his own blog as well
• Seattle Tech Startups – this is not a blog, but a group of Seattle entrepreneurs. The next meeting is May 9th from 6:00 – 7:45 at the Capitol Hill Branch of the Seattle Library. I plan to be there.
• I hear Amazon Web Services team had a killer event last week. My buddy Tim from Venture All Stars and New Media Synergy told me about it, but I wasn’t able to make it. Bummer.

With so much cool stuff going on, it’s an exciting time to be a Seattle entrepreneur in the tech industry.

This morning, I met with Cliff and Mark, two UW Bothell entrepreneurs working on Zeebits.com. The site is aiming to be an online classifieds destinations for anyone selling technology related items — used servers, an iPod, graphics cards, an external hard drive, etc. They certainly have lots of challenges ahead of them in the very competitive web 2.0 space, but anything is possible if you are passionate. We spoke quite extensively about social media and how a small business can use it to their advantage, since an obvious barrier that any web startup faces is attracting an audience (cheaply). I think one or both of them will be starting a blog this week to become more entrenched in the web 2.0 space (where seemingly everyone is blogging). Some initial feedback of mine to improve the site:

• Put a big search box on the main page. The user should immediately be given a call to action.
• Focus on building tools for sellers
• Don’t have the login & register links in the middle of the main page
• Have a story for the Zeebits name (I forgot to ask them, so maybe one of them will leave a comment with the story at how the name Zeebits was born)
• Get mentioned in TechCrunch or Startup Meme or GigaOm

What do you think? Is there enough of a market for a technology-focused classifieds site? What do they need to do to attract Craigslist users? I’m sure they would love some feedback (or you can just leave a comment & I’m sure they’ll read it here).