Come for the Ride…

Awhile ago, I posted about an Intuit Social Network/Business Competition that wants entrepreneurs to fork over their idea in exchange for a chance to win some cash. Well today, I got an email from their team stating that the judges will soon be checking out the entries and that we should start promoting our entry so it will make an impression with them.

I was originally going to write a simple post saying: “Hey! Check out our entry…” but after checking out the site myself, I’m really not sure how effective this site is for promoting and awarding good ideas.

First of all, the site is flash based and the overall usability stinks. You land on the site and it’s not exactly clear what your next step is and what is/isn’t clickable. Secondly, whatever server(s) this site is on, is not keeping up with demand. Images are broken, things take awhile to load… and so on and so on. Basically, they’ve broken 2 of the very basic rules of web business 101 and whether it’s Intuit that’s backing this up or someone’s basement server, the experience is not friendly for their intended audience.

With regards to the link they sent me for referrals, not only do you not go directly to our entry when you click on the link above… you actually have to either do something or wait a tad bit before our entry shows up. I can only imagine who the big shot corporate guy behind this is that thought that’d be a good idea to force people to sign up to vote. As a side note, even if you sign up, I’m not sure if it’s all that obvious how you’d vote.

So yeah… we have an entry, potentially our idea may be seen but at this point, I think we’re better off alone. However, if you’d LIKE to submit your own idea, you should check it out and do so within the next few days.

Wei brings up a great point that I’ve been doing a lot of research on the last few days, having been sick and able to spend some extra YouTube time.

I’ve been watching a lot of Newt Gingrich speeches lately and he gives some of the greatest methods by which our country can achieve goals like high mileage cars: prizes. Giving money away to people for the sake of it only makes people want more money and stifles progress. People are greedy and will exploit such subsidies. However, look at the Ansari X-Prize, a prize to be the first private venture to get a craft in low earth orbit and back to Earth in a reusable shell. It took almost 10 years and $100 million of private money. The prize was only $10 million, however, the technologies developed along the way by Scaled Composites and the other teams will surely outstrip the cost of construction. (Side Note: How much does it take NASA to get a shuttle into space? There are now a number of X Prizes (including the Automotive X PRIZE) which shows that people want progress and they understand the government will not be the ones to help them. Govrenment representatives are being bought off by special intrest groups and the American machine suffers. As in the early 1900s, the political bosses controlled Washington and local governments with bribes and kickbacks, donations and slush funds create political machines that dictate the direction of Washington these days. Let me be clear though, Big Business is good for America. They contribute hugely to society and our country as a whole. The current political laws and people’s willingness to let their representatives be corrupted by these groups are the problem. But I digress….

I hope they eventually wake up and offer incentives like the X Prize to advance our technologies and inspire budding entrepreneurs in years to come. How many different advances could we offer in the way of energy alone with ideas like nuclear fusion reactors (Polywells, for example) or microwave solar collectors in Earth orbit for unlimited supplies of energy.

It’s been a busy few days trying to port over all the existing data from my HP laptop to my network drive and getting important programs for the new Macbook so I can carry on business as usual. An odd but great thing I’m now getting used to is the lack of crappy programs I have to install to make everyday things work. iChat replaced two chat programs that I would have had to download on the PC. Various iLife programs have replaced all the random and off beat programs I would have needed to install to watch and burn CDs and DVDs on my PC. The Mac version of the Office have pretty much eliminated my need to use Office 2007, even though the two are somewhat different. (I do remember hearing that the Mac version will be upgrading in a couple of months or so.) The last and somewhat annoying piece of the migration is the Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver that I’d like to have, but currently lack.

Now, MS has a student version of Office that they sell for $150 on the Mac platform; which is great. Adobe however, has ridiculous pricing on all their products which results in tons of people pirating and cracking their software for distribution. Since so many freelancers depend on these software, why doesn’t Adobe come out with a student or startup friendly version of their software? Wouldn’t they in theory be able to get more legit customers and possibly make a lot more money if they price themselves a little bit lower and became startup friendly? I mean, no one spends time hacking a $15 program… the pro’s just doesn’t outweigh the con’s. On the other hand, I don’t think Adobe should charge $15… but somewhere closer to $100 instead of $600+ would be greatly appreciated by everyone in the industry I’m sure.

So the Atlanta Startup Weekend is this weekend here and unfortunately I found out about it too late and could not get in the program. It does seem like they’re doing something cool even though I have no idea what it is. I will have to get some reports from the other people I know who are going… mabbe next time I guess. On a side note - they do hold these things all over the country so if you’re interested in meeting like-minded people, I would check to see if they have any events in your area.

Oh yeah, I stumbled across a Facebook ad the other day, (I swear being in marketing makes me hyper sensitive to ads no one else will ever click on). The ad was trying to appeal to entrepreneurs to do something. I’m not sure if this would be of interest to anyone but apparently Intuit, the makers of Quickbooks and Quicken is launching another startup contest where they will award $50k for the best idea submitted. The website is IWillJustStart.com and if you’re interested, check it out and submit your idea.

You will find on the backside, it’s a slick way to get you to participate in yet another social network dedicated to entrepreneurs. I’m not sure if that site’s navigation is easy enough to make the site sticky for me. I personally find the whole thing a bit hard to use and a bit hard to see the other entries. Then again, who ever said accountants were great UI designers?

Other things to note… Ad:Tech in NY this week. I originally was going to go through my (day job) company but unfortunately they ended up picking someone else to go instead. Talk about a major bummer; considering I did all the leg work to get the trip approved in the first place. If there’s one major pet peeve I have, it’s the lack of educational investment a company make or doesn’t make in their employees. Yes, for some, the drive is money. For others, the drive is job security and/OR education. Here’s me, someone who is obviously motivated to learn, especially knowing that both MySpace and Facebook are making some pretty big announcements this week on the future of interactive marketing. There’s the company saying: “Thanks for doing the work” but we’re going to send someone else who won this spot (in a stupid raffle) and had absolutely no interest in going prior to hearing about a random raffle. Am I bitter? Yeah, just a tad bit. What can I say? I get bored easily and if I’m not learning, I’m out there looking for other opportunities to learn… *sigh* Sometimes I wish employers would pay a bit more attention to their overworked staff and make the necessary investments instead of worrying about an extra $10-$20k on their bottom line. Heck, if we are more educated, we can probably make the company significantly more! Instead now you just have a bitter employee… (Good job!)

Note: Make sure when the dot com makes it big, we put employee satisfaction above the bottom line.

There is only about a week left or so in the Amazon Startup Challenge. For our 3 readers who haven’t heard of it, I figured I’d give you a heads up if you may be remotely interested in it.

Basically, if you are planning on building a service that can utilize a number of Amazon services including storage, cloud computing, payments, queuing, etc. You should submit your idea to see if you can get some free money out of the deal.

We will be entering our idea into the contest but since we are only planning on using S3 and none of the other stuff, I doubt we’ll get selected. For some reason, I have a hunch that the overall goal is to allow Amazon to present a case study where they can showcase how the combination of Amazon Web Services helped some startup with a crazy setup launch online with low startup costs. Unfortunately for them, my goal isn’t to design a business around Amazon, as sexy as that sounds.

Anyway, good luck if you’re hopping on the train. Entries are due on October 28.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=377634011