Rice’s Riffs

0. Twitter is a coral reef
1. Twitter has tons (maybe more than a million) of users
2. It’s a social ecosystem
3. Everyone can create their own experience
4. You can listen to your customers
5. It creates competitive advantage
6. Journalist use it
7. It’s just fun–try it!

From one of the smartest guys in the software business, Joel Spolsky:
I’ve never learned as much about business strategy as I did from the simple infantry concept called fire and motion (it’s also sometimes referred to as fire and movement).
Here is how it works. You fire at the enemy. That’s the fire part. And you [...]

In case you missed it, Mint won the TechCrunch40 Top Tech Company Award. Mint is a new simple way for you to manage your money online.
At first glance, it seems to be a more intuitive and user-friendly personal accounting replacement for Intuit’s Quicken. However, as you begin using Mint you begin to note how [...]

The announcement that IBM has received approval for mortgage originations could be bigger news than many might first imagine. This could be the entrance of mortgage as a service (MaaS) taken from the lessons of SaaS.

IBM Lender Business Process Services, or LBPS, received clearance to provide mortgage origination services for federally insured Federal Housing Administration [...]

First, if you have not begun reading Marc Andreessen’s blog, put it in your feed reader and start.
Now, turn your attention to Marc’s analysis of Facebook and ignore any reference to “Facebook.”
I often find that Web 2.0 labeled technologies’ infrastructure and philosophical value is lost in the immaturity of current users implementation. That is [...]

I must confess I don’t get (conceptually) the fascination, but I suppose I need to try it…
Marshall Kirkpatrick » Twittering more than blogging
This is particularly fascinating, considering the number and frequency of production software pushes we do at Kaleidico:
Dave Winer on Twitter for Coding Communities
Technorati Tags: twitter, blogging, software, cocial

If you write software for users. This is what it is all about in one sentence:

When we were developing Radio 8 in 2001, we set a goal that 80 percent of the people who tried it had to get to first post in five minutes. We iterated until we got there.
Zune, Day 2 (Scripting [...]

Ian Landsman shows us what we can learn about our own businesses with a little Web 2.0 mashup. Mapping your customer base.

Bingo! Troy has hit it right on the nose.
This is something Jeff Bell and I learned and practiced at DeepGreen Bank and emphasized and perfected very early on at Kaleidico.
Getting the customer to close a transaction is all about matching their usage patterns to the usuage patterns of the sales person or automated process. [...]

Interesting commentary from Don Dadge (Microsoft Emerging Markets) on Kleiner Perkins 7 rules for software start-ups.