Over the past weekend I had attended a seminar with real estate guru Than Merrill. In telling us a little about his story and background he told us that he had played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers while Tony Dungy was still coaching there.
Than had said, and I’m paraphrasing a little here that “Tony was the only coach that got everyone’s attention without swearing or cursing”. And he was calm and composed. If you’ve watched much football and been around it much on TV or in person many of the coaches swear, get mad and have quite the temper.
If you don’t know who Tony Dungy is he was the Head Coach for the Indianapolis Colts. And coached them to a Super Bowl win in 2006. You can read more about Coach Dungy at Wikipedia here.
Tony Dungy is one of the coaches that everyone respected and listened to. In the artricle that I read here today, it said:
Yet to Dungy, life was never solely about championship rings or division titles.
His top priorities were faith and family, and he never wavered.
In a profession where spare hours are scarce, Dungy made time for the prison ministry, All-Pro Dads and Family First although he always wanted to do more. He urged players and coaches to get involved in community work, too.
He had his priorities in order and spent time giving back. And he still had the time and energy to be a kick butt coach. His record speaks for itself
Dungy went 148-79, won six division titles and appeared in three conference championship games—one in the NFC and two in the AFC.
It is sad to see Tony Dungy leave coaching football, but I think he has done a splendid job in his career as a coach. Also, he coached with integrity, and without compromising his values. This is something that I believe we should all aspire to; being able to pursue or goals with integrity and without compromise. He kept his priorities in order and earned a lot of respect from the people that he coached and the people on his coaching staff.
It is also a testament to his leadership the kind of coaches that came out of his organization such as …
Kansas City coach Herm Edwards
Pittsburgh’s Mike Tomlin
Chicago’s Lovie Smith
former Detroit coach Rod Marinelli
Indianapolis’ Jim Caldwell
Over the past several weeks I have had some time to do some reflecting and one of the biggest things that I’ve found being an entrepreneur and business owner is how vital it is the people you surround yourself with.
As an employee you really don’t have too much say or control of who you work with and interact with, but as a business owner and entrepreneur you can choose who you work with, who you interact with on a daily and regular basis.
I feel it is important to surround yourself with the best people that you can, who can support you, be a good sounding board, as well as bring you down to earth when you need to pop the big head of yours.
Having a great leader or coach such as Tony Dungy in your life might not be a person that you currently have in your life right now; but it’s someone that you should look to find. I’ll be looking for a coach and mentor such as Tony.
Also, on the flip side of that is who can I mentor and coach who is in a place that I was not too long ago. How can I invest back into someone else’s life and help them grow?
I was on twitter yesterday and had heard some rumblings about this new google wikisearch. I didn’t really think too much about it; but had noticed some strange things showing up when I was logged into my gmail account and doing searches in google.
I didn’t pay too much attention to it until I was searching for a video and came across this video from Google about Google WikiSearch today:
Confirm enabling Google WikiSearch for the first time
It definitely looks pretty cool that you can add notes and get rid of sites that you don’t like too much. My thoughts are, if I’m going to be repeating a search, why do I need to rearrange things and put notes. That means that I already know what I’m looking for. And isn’t that why we have bookmarks and sites such as delicious, digg, furl etc. to hold and organize our bookmarks and share them with others…?
The other ramifications might be that Google will start using human edited rankings to influence their SERP’s (search engine results page). I’m not sure how much weight Google would give to the wikisearch if any at this time. But I’m sure people out there who are doing SEO will be testing some things out with this.
I’m not sure if I like the added “new feature” or not yet as I haven’t tested it extensively; however it seems that there isn’t a way to turn off the feature as noted by this article from the Washington Post and PC World Google SearchWiki Addition Fails to Wow.
You can get more info about it directly from google at SearchWiki.
If you have used Google WikiSearch or have some thoughts please leave your comments.
I was reading that Jerry Yang had just stepped down from Yahoo from google news
I just finished watching the following video interview with Jerry Yang and John Battelle :
It was interesting to listen to Jerry Yang discuss some of his trials and how he perceived things versus what us outsiders thought. Many thought that he didn’t want to do a merger with Microsoft, but he seemed fairly open to it and was quite candid.
One of the things that caught my attention near the end was someone asking about being follower’s / copying google and microsoft and Jerry says that they continue to innovate and try to be the best at what they do. Also we have seen some changes and innovation come from yahoo since he has taken over. But it seems that it wasn’t enough.
I really thought he’d be able to shake things up and make some changes, but it seems that he has run out of time and shareholder’s and other investors want to see the results quickly. We will see who will be selected to take over as CEO and how the deal with Microsoft buying them out or merging plays out; if it does at all.
Here are a couple of my thoughts from the notes that I took while watching the videos. But you should definitely take a watch if you’re interested in social media, business start up or just a fan of Gary.
you’ve got to hustle - and just start building from wherever you are at now.
Social Media - is one of the biggest opportunities in our space.
Newcomer Kicks Old Timer’s Butt - Yelp is kicking Zagat’s butt online.
Costs of time - Cost to building business in social media is time; not dollars.
Watch those Teenagers -
look at early adopters and see what they’re doing and how they’re using things.
-> watch 14-18 year olds and see what they do
Case in point, I found out about facebook from a friend’s younger brother back in early 2005 when it had just opened up from requiring invitations to join.
Fanatical users - build happy and passionate users, they’ll do all the Word of Mouth for you if you make sure they are very happy with you, your products, and services; take care of them
Incremental Changes Cause Monumental Shifts - things change when platforms change
I really got fired up from listening to Gary. He had a ton of energy and the big take away for me was to hustle. Just get things going with whatever I’ve got.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
- Theodore Roosevelt
A close second was the idea of paying attention how things change when platforms change (new technologies and media distributions become available).
Myspace is still king of the hill, but has seen slow growth at only 1% year over year to 59.3 million users; while Facebook has grown 116% year over year to 39 million users.
You can read more about it at cnet. So if you’re doing internet marketing or just interested you should probably have at least a myspace, and facebook account if you’re interested in leveraging social networks. And if you’re more adventerous you might want to try out twitter, linkedin as well as some of the other services that are listed in the press release.
I had never been to a game in Yankee Stadium, but when I found out that it was being closed. I was a bit sad. Many famous baseball players have come through Yankee Stadium, and it’s like the passing of an era.
Babe Ruth hit the first ball on opening day and Derek Jeter hit the last on closing day.
It also reminded me of the closing of Comiskey Park. That was closed in 1990 and moved to a new stadium. I think it’s called US Cellular field, but everyone that I know still refers to the “new” Comiskey Park as Comiskey Park. It definitely feels different attending a game at an older field where you feel a part of the history and can imagine the hundreds of players and thousands of fans who have come before you and the ones that will come after you. Comiskey Park had been around from 1910 to 1990 about 80 years. That’s probably more than 2 or 3 lifetimes for some people.
You can check out a video about the Comiskey Demoltion Below:
Thanks Yankee Stadium for many great games and memories that I watched on TV, heard about or listened in on. I definitely feel for the fans. On the upside they’ll be getting a brand new stadium next year!
Quick update about last post. Just found this on gizmodo. So it’ll be Oct 13 for the official launch date and pre-sales begin on Sept 17th through Oct 3 for current customers according to Tmo News Android Info Galore Article.
Details still coming in about pricing but it seems it’ll be around $199 to $140 price range with a two year contract. They’re calling it the HTC Kila. I liked how Tmo News had it …
Patient TmoNews readers, may we present to you, the HTC Kila, errr we mean HTC Dream, or the G1, aka the first android handset ever!
I’m glad T-Mobile is getting some great new phones. I was with them for a long time and even remember my first “smart phone” the Nokia 3650 (darn rounded dialpad was so annoying, had to look down to dial when driving…). According to wikipedia it was apparently the
the first Symbian Series 60 smartphone to appear in American markets. It was also the first phone with an integrated camera delivered to North America.
Hmm… I didn’t even know that back then. The camera was alright, but remember the phone locking up at times. Doh, sorry for the trip down memory lane. The HTC Kila looks very interesting. I’ll have to wait as I still have a few months on contract with verizon. For all of you contractless or T-Mobile users I’d go and check it out. Let me know what you think about it, as I’ll be in the market in a few months.
It may be old news to some, but I hadn’t heard about it until I read the story.
Here’s a quick video from the Google Developer’s Day in London with a quick demo.
The device is rumored to be an HTC Dream. I thought the interesting things about the phone were integrated GPS, built in acceleramator for “browsing the web” but has some neat implications for games and apps, java based programming. I’m not sure about the appeal of the phone itself, and how much of a selling point it’d be to be able to write your own apps; or have a slew of developers creating apps out there.
But it’s definitely piqued my interest.
Will be looking out for more details when they are revealed. You can check out some more videos of HTC Dream below:
For More videos check out Phone Mag’s article about the HTC Dream. Things are definitely getting interesting with the new mobile phones that are coming out.
Well, like many people I heard all the buzz about google chrome and wanted to check it out for myself. So I hopped on over and read the comic about google chrome that started it all.
It’s a pretty interesting format and way of showing the functions of google’s browser, google chrome. I think it did a decent job of going through the processes and reasoning why they had setup the browser the way they did.
A couple of things I had researched after reading the comic was about the webkit. A lot of people were under the impression that the webkit was from apple, but actually apple had been using an open source code that can be found here that grew out of the KHTML and KDE open source projects.
Google Chrome is an open source web browser. After using it for a couple of days, I can say that it opens gmail and other javascript dependent web email apps like yahoo mail and even hotmail a lot quicker than firefox (and IE the occasional times that I’ve used it). I didn’t have a very scientific method of testing it, but it was just from my observation and interacting with gmail, grand central, yahoo mail and a few other sites that I frequently visit.
I do like the “most visited” view when I open a new tab. It saves me time in going to the websites that I usually use the most… namely gmail and yahoo mail.
I started missing some of the plugins that I use often with FireFox while using Chrome; but the speed and flexibility for Chrome has given me some high hopes to look forward to in new revisions.
The plugins that I use seem to see the most of in FireFox (and I just recently reloaded my computer and firefox plugins…so I’m a little more conscious about it than I normally would be) are All-in-One Gestures, Better Gmail 2 and Foxmarks.
I have played around with other web browsers in the past see my thoughts on flock here. But I usually end up going back to my trusty stand by of FireFox. Although it was rough going for a little while right after FireFox 3.0 came out and a lot of the plugins that I had used hadn’t been updated yet. But, we’re back to the good old trusty FireFox.
For now, I’ll be using google chrome mostly for checking email since it seems pretty snappy and fast at that. And I do like the fact that I can move the tabs around or even pop them out to a new window.
One of the other things that I noticed, and it might just be on my system is if I have google chrome open for awhile at the same time that I’m browsing with FireFox; occassionally I’ll have FireFox lock-up and not be able to close my tabs. I’m not sure if this is just because I had too many tabs open in FireFox or whatever the reason (it also usually starts to happen when FireFox starts to go over 100k in mem usage.
I’ll keep you posted on my thoughts as I continue to use google chrome and test it out on various web sites.
Hi was reading a blog post from Patric Chan at How to Make Money Faster. He showed how he used resale rights products to get him started quickly to creating a new sales funnel and he drove the traffic via ppc (specifically google adwords).
He had purchased the resale rights to Mike Kemski’s Banabu product. The interesting thing about this offer was that Banabu had a built in continuity to deliver a monthly newsletter that was provided with the purchase of the Banabu product.
What Patric did was instead of trying to sell the product itself, he offered to give away Banabu for FREE to people who purchased the monthly newsletter. This was ingenius because the people would be receiving the monthly newsletter for free as part of their purchase anyways. But the change in wording made a huge psychological difference.
It’s a bit like the pscyhology for buy one get one free vs get 50% off when you buy two items. The math works out to be the same but the positioning and wording make all the difference. The pscyhology of one makes it more effective than the other even though mathematically and fucntionally they are both the same.
He worked out the numbers so that the amount he recieved would be the same as if he just sold the product itself, but he put in people’s mind that they would be subscribing to a monthly newsletter.
Also he differentiated himself in his market by telling people NOT to buy Banabu, offered a unique selling proposition, built a list for himself and made enough to recoup his investments and make some profits.
I really liked the idea because he used some creativity to sell the product in a different way. I’ll definitely be taking a look at some of the resale rights that I have and seeing what I can do to sell them more creatively.
