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Hearts and prayers out to Serenity Burns, the daughter of Utah blogger @Phil801 and his wife Adria. Serenity has been diagnosed with and is being treated for Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia. I first heard of this about 15 days ago through the Utah Twittersphere that led me to Jason Alba’s blogpost and then to Phil’s blog where with great detail he has detailed their family’s challenge: help Serenity beat this disease.

(Incidentally, I was excited to see that this past weekend a good friend’s daughter graduated high school. She fought and won a battle with Leukemia when she was seven.) 

I noticed the ChipIn widget Phil had on the side and saw that it had a goal of $10,000.00. It was at ~$1,200 then and I used it to make a donation and thought that it was very easy – especially if you already have a PayPal account.

Today their ChipIn reached over $10,000 which is really awesome and I’m hoping that their goal is revised upwards 10x. While they’ve got an uphill battle to fight with medical costs, the support of the blogging community combined with yet-another great social media application – ChipIn – Serenity Burns will surely walk a high school graduation stage. Just as in the case of Leilani’s GabrielsLife.org, social media is saving lives and helping people out. How cool is that?

If you have the ability to make a donation the the Serentity ChipIn, I’d appreciate it.

Click. Course, it never really clicks anymore, no one has used mechanical switches since like the ’50s, but some Spew terminals emit a synthesized click – they wired up a 1955 Sylvania in a digital sound lab somewhere and had some old gomer in a tank-top stagger up to it and change back and forth between Channel 4 and Channel 5 a few times, paid him off and fired him, then compressed the sound and inseminated it into the terminals’ fundamental ROMs so that we’d get that reassuring click when we jumped from one Feed to another.

Click. It clicked with me. My career chasing the multi-property player tracking systems for casino marketing was over. My sweet executive office on the top floor of the Harolds Club was about to be demolished. I was about to be sentenced to the bowels of the third floor of Fitzgeralds with no windows and a never-ending supply of HVAC direct deposited second-hand smoke to my 8×8 office where I would manage 22-less employees.

Yeah, I know it’s boring of me to send you plain old Text like this, and I hope you don’t just blow this message off without reading it.

I’d just re-acquainted myself with Martin – an old UNR ski team buddy. He and I ran in to each other at the Beer Barrel and compared our mutual admiration for Mosaic. We both loved Mosaic just like Jim Clark.

Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.

By the time I finished reading Hack the Spew by Neal Stephenson, my thoughts of what it would mean to be a database or direct marketer in the future (2004? 20014?) were fundamentally shaken to the core. I was excited. I knew that I working in the casinos would only leave my lungs hacking for oxygen. So right then I made up my mind to quit and join the Internet.

I went to Sundance Bookstore on Keystone and bought Snow Crash and stayed up the next two nights and finished the book. And then I emailed Martin from my fresh PPP Connectus account on a rebuilt ZEOS to talk about his idea for this company he and Jay were calling Aztech Cyberspace… 

#1: ‘Get Yo’ Global Look On’ your business card

A 44-year-old unemployed ’seasoned senior executive vice president of sales’ person says to me, “Why’s there a plus sign in your phone number? Is that a typo?” Nooooo!

Business cards that are “global friendly” immediately communicate that you have a passport and are capable of surviving outside the US on your own. Or that you’re aware that the US is not the only place in the world that has phones. That maybe you actually know/interact with someone outside the US.

More than likely, you are experienced/capable of interacting with other professionals outside of the US and you do that frequently enough that it’s important to have a global-friendly phone numbers that include the country-code. I can run through a pile of 1,000 business cards from folks I’ve met recently and immediately tell you who has gold/platinum status on United and is capable of speaking in front of large audiences by this simple little trait alone. (For now, I guess. I just blew the secret!)

The international seasoned professional simply includes the mobile-phone friendly country code, i.e: +1.775.555.5555. The key here is to simply include the County Code (CC). Here in the US it’s “1″. +1 on mobile devices. We do this because phone numbers in pretty much every country outside of the US and Canada are totally f’n confusing. Want to send a txt to someone in another country? You have to use the +CC.86.311.456.12345

(BTW, seasoned globe-trotters carry ATT or T-Mobile phones. Sprint & Verizon largely don’t work outside the US.)

#2: UPPER CASE EMAIL ADDRESS IS BAD. lowercase everything communicates way emo-hip-startup-with-not-a-lot-of-revenue

You’re email address should always be all lower case. BAD: DAVID@IMADORK.COM. Weak: David@ImADork.com. good: david@imadork.com. Punctuation still matters on everything. Typically well designed business cards that are in all lower case shouts: Hey! I work at a small start-up where we jobbed our corporate collateral to an emo identity designer/we’re trying waaaayyyyy to hard to be hip and cool!!! Companies over 10million in revenue largely care about proper punctuation on their business cards. Startups that are too cool for school are less than 1 million in revenue.

#3: No mobile phone number on the business card.

This guy interviewing with us sporting a sweet Motorola Star-Tac said to me: “I’m sorry, I keep my mobile phone number private and only give it out to my close friends and family.” That was in 1994.

Sorry to bust out the big news on some of you: <cough> It’s 2007. If you still have a land-line, you’re getting kinda weird. I absolutely think it’s quaint of those folks that still think of their mobile phone a private luxury only to be used to call AAA for a flat tire or to let their honey know they’ll be late for dinner. Yeah, back in 1992 when I paid CellularOne $1.25 a minute with “no free anytime minutes” (yeah, shocking!) I was kinda stingy too. Now I chaw down 2000 minutes, 3000 sms and an all-u-can-eat data plan for ~$100.00/month. And guess what? You can too! 

Seriously, get over it. Give it up. There’s nothing gained by being stingy with that mobile phone of yours. And guess what, it get’s stranger: I actually don’t want to call you! I’ll be more likely sending you a text message.

No text messaging plan? Great! I can’t think of a better way to nonverbally tell someone, “Hello. I stopped evolving as a functional part of the professional business world in 1999 and please consider me to be unemployable. Dude, let’s trade voicemails and faxes!!!” C’mon. 33% of the kids 12 and under are more freakin’ connected than you. Get with the ’00’s.

#4: Print-at-home says “Unemployable”

Word.

#5. Kill your FAX number.

Get rid of the fax. Shoot it. Blow it up. And PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t put it on your card business card unless you’re a lawyer who still uses Word Perfect 5.1.

Fortunately the folks who still send/receive fax’s don’t read blogs so I don’t need to hammer down this point to much. I’m pretty sure I’ve “faxed” two people in the last year. One was a practical joke. I typed up an email, printed it, and then faxed it to a friend who works for a prominent US Senator who employes interns to print his email for him and then called him and left a long voice mail asking him if he got my email. hahaha!

In a world where we send/receive hundreds of email, + txt, IM, facebook, myspace, do we really need to send/receive faxes? Replace that with your Yahoo!, AIM, Skype, Gtalk!

#6. Holy-mother-of-all sweet receding hairlines/sick vertical bang factor 10x! Dump that photo!

This is rather narrow nit and aimed particularly at my black-turtleneck-wearing real-estate/insurance/human resources bro’s. Leave the photo off the business card. Seriously. That Sears model look you’re sporting ultimately does you more harm than good unless you moonlight at Tao in a bathtub. Replace that photo and reclaim that space with links to your facebook/MySpace/LinkedIn/Flickr/Tumblr/WordPress/Typepad/etc. so we can see some better photos of you and your family/friends and validate you’re not a total dangleberrier freak.

Oddly enough, not having an online avatar/profile photo on the social networking sites says “I’m a freak/lurker.” Again, it’s 2007. Something’s wrong if you don’t have a digital photo of yourself at all. One that’s semi pro looking or minimally visually complimentary says a lot about to the degree to which you clean up and care to function professionally.

#7. Serif Type Face or an ignorant use of MS Comic Sans, Hobo or Arial Black

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of serif types that kick-ass and I love it and it looks awesome. But on a business card that will more-than-likely be scanned, serif gets hard to read and is totally the civil engineer, tax attorney or banking/finance look. That’s OK if you’re one of them kind of folk. If you don’t know why using Hobo is like writing “I’m a dumbass” on your forehead and hanging out in front of Hot Topic at the mall with an OrangeJulius in your hand then go right ahead and use it. Or hire a trained professional identity designer. Best case: copy as close as you can that card from Deloitte.

#8. Test Drive that sucka on Card-Scan and make sure it scans 99% accurate.

Word.

#9. Quality says quality

Business cards printed on nice recycled stock with a matte/gloss finish say “I’m a clean, contemporary and professional.” Some people complain that gloss scratches. That was back in 1992. They fixed that. Now it protects that card. 

If you’re coated cards are getting bent/scratched then you don’t give out enough cards/party/meet people. Certain businesses can get away with rough, uncoated stock — like a concrete manufacturer, dog-groomer or the carrot-juice supervisor at Wild Oats.

Anything that can easily be confused with print-at-home stock is simply a business card personal branding death sentence. If you can’t be bothered with getting professionally printed business cards, you’re killing your professional brand. C’mon, there’s like 5,000 places on the Web (Flickr has a cool service) that can do this in 1 week or less and you won’t look like a total goober dangleberry!

#10. Some random nits for people looking for employment or a sales pitch appointment beyond the business card but related enough for this post:

• Got a sooper slick resume and absolutely no Google Juice? You’re either spooky, strange, of no social relevance or just plain out-of-date.
• Don’t be stupid. Get your Google on. Google me. See what Page 1 looks like. I own my Page 1. And Page 2…
• Google yourself before you go meet a potential employer or sales prospect. What you see (or don’t) is what they see (or don’t).
• Research who you’re talking to! I have pretty much laid out my whole personal life online; you should be able to find something to talk about/have in common.
• Resume’s are dead. Don’t send me a resume. Point me to your Facebook/Myspace/LinkedIn/ClaimID/OpenID/etc.
• I had a 55 year-old former CFO/business executive complain I was hard to reach. hahahahah! I had a 17 year old high school kid reach me out of the blue about an internship in 60 seconds flat.
• If you want employment at my company, it’s not my responsibility to conform to how you communicate best.
• Don’t EVER EVER EVER EVER be anything but sweet, humble, gracious and courteous with anyone at the Company — especially my assistant or the receptionist. Here’s how they relay your message to me: “Some total ass-wipe dickhead just called you from Wall Street Mergers & Acquisitions. Do you want me schedule him to call you in January of 2032?”
• Talk to the people who talk to me. Talk to the people who talk to the business leaders. It’s not so important that you talk to me more than anyone else…or even exclusively. Do you honestly believe I walk out after meeting with someone and give a unilateral order: “Hey, you in that cube. I just hired this guy. He reports to you know.” hahaha! I look to my team to be the social filters. How someone interacts with my team is 99% more important than how much they interact with me. It really doesn’t matter if I like you. If my team can’t like you, that’s an insurmountable problem.
• I ultimately look to my team that I trust to filter and opine their impressions of anyone. Getting a glowing recommendation from Steph at the front-desk is worth more than an hour my time telling me your five-year plan and your summa-cumma-humma claude thingy you did in college.
• Overt attempts to hide your personal life and go for the Sears model look work against you these days. Businesses are more than ever not interested in homogenized drones with no personality. Birds of feather flock together. Everyone at my company is sooper cool. I love hanging out with everyone at my company. They’re all cool. You’d better be too! We want real people with really cool/interesting personal lives that make our lives richer and more interesting. But don’t tell us how cool you are, show us!
• What are you hiding that can be all that negative today that Google can’t find? By the way, we do a standard 10-year background checks on pretty much everyone. The HR Scare-mongers of the 80’s got everyone all screwed up on union-driven fear. All the old hangups (you’re gay, you’re divorced, you’re a single mom, you’re pagan, you like to go to burning man, you have tats all over you, you accidentally voted for GW, you were in a Sorority, you hunt, you support PETA, it’s not your natural hair color, you drink soy milk) have soooo little bearing on what really matters. Great companies are filled with great people who could largely give a crap about whether any of that. What matters? (a) Are you congruent with the company’s brand? (b) Do you present any significant HR issues/risks? (c) Will you attract other good people to the team instead of driving good team members away? (d) Are you really good at what you do and willing to learn to do other things? (e) Are you socially conscious and willing to invest in and give back to your community?
• Get a Gmail account for personal email and get it out of the work email. ’nuff said.

When I look back at all the books of fiction that I’ve read, there’s a few that absolutely stand out as being totally congruent with me personally and my developing worldview. Of course, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is right at the top of the list.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Neal Stephensen’s Snow Crash stand out dog-eared and above the boxes and shelves countless Bruce Sterling, Phillip K. Dick’s, Isaac Asimov, Verner Vinge, Carl Sagan, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson novels.

But I still remember reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer as a junior in high school in 1987 and thinking, “This is cool. This is a world I could live in! This world will exist one day.”

This is the book that really started it all for me. Why I do what I do. Sure, a snowball effect. But a tremendous connection was made in my personality that I didn’t know existed.

This is the book that led to a ‘couple hundred other books being read…and I believe this book led to the Web as we know it. Minimally, we owe the Matrix movies to William!

“They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours.The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who’d lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall.” – Neuromancer

Neuromancer went on to win all three major science fiction awards: the Nebula, the Hugo, and Philip K. Dick Award. I didn’t know then how much recognition it would receive. I just knew that my love for technology how it impacts human social behavior OK someday in the not to distant future. That this guy Bruce Sterling was not a writer of fiction…he was a seer…a social economist…a person with a gift to follow trajectory within the human spirit and paint a vivid photo of where we’re all headed.

So it was with some dismay that I caught this quote from William Gibson (thanks Bruno Giussani, you have the best del.iciou.us feed on the planet right now IMHO):

“The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that – we have no idea at all now where we are going.

Will global warming catch up with us? Is that irreparable? Will technological civilisation collapse? There seems to be some possibility of that over the next 30 or 40 years or will we do some Verner Vinge singularity trick and suddenly become capable of everything and everything will be cool and the geek rapture will arrive? That’s a possibility too.

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it – it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.”

Should we be troubled by this? Is there a new class of science fiction writers ready to take this task up? What’s next? Should we be scared that when our best science fiction writer gives up we’re in trouble? Is this DOOMSDAY? hahahaHA!

I’m a huge proponent of professional social gatherings (a.k.a. parties) here in Nevada to bolster our tech/design economy. Lifelong experience has proven to me over and over that people do business with people and if you’re not out starting and maintaining relationships you eventually suck at your business and/or your career. And there you have it: business is largely about parties and meeting people hahahah! 

From a branding perspective it’s ABSOLUTELY IMPERATIVE that our Greater Reno Tahoe brand perception is that of a great place to party and hookup I’ll blog about why Reno’s burgeoning meat-market is vital on another post…just know that the 20-30 something tech/creative’s are in high demand everywhere on the planet and we need to hold on to every single one of them here locally. Frankly, my business cannot grow without them.

A long time a go (1999 – 2002) Michael Thomas (now at EDAWN) ran Greater Reno-Tahoe’s first technology oriented social-networking driven organization, the TechAlliance @ NewNevada. Perhaps the greatest boon to northern Nevada’s tech economy back then was what was then known as Cocktails.com. It’s where we all got together, got on the same page and built momentum with cocktails in hand.

I met Robb Smith for the first time at a Cocktails.com event and he convinced me to joined the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (then known as YEO) which has been perhaps one of my greatest professional life experiences. Back then there were startups like Ken Hawk’s iGo, CandyBarell.com, HardwareStreet.com, HomeSeekers.com and a dozen others. UNR’s Mike Reed, Nevada Bell’s Dick Bostdorf and Reno attorney Garrett Sutton were instrumental in the TechAlliance’s startup. More recently, thanks to EDAWN/Michael Thomas we’ve got the newly formed  Reno Tahoe Young Professionals Network kicking ass and an we’re on the world’s design radar with a fully legit and operatin cool AIGA chapter.  

At the beginning, Cocktails.com events would last all night with everyone spilling out of bars, nightclubs and JK’s Nugget in the wee hours of the morning. It was a great time of forming a tech-community. Then: Dot.com bust…and as Paul Harvey would say “now know you know the story….”

Michael Thomas to came to work for Twelve Horses in 2002 and the TechAlliance eventually folded in to a newly formed state-wide effort known as Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (NCET.ORG). (DISCLAIMER: I’ve was on the founding board and am now the Chairman of this wonderful organization — so this is blatant promotion.) About a year-and-a-half ago under Dave Archer & Emily Lowe’s exceptional care, we brought back Cocktails.com as Tech Thursday’s. These events have been awesome, however, they’ve leaned a little too much on the professional and a little too less on the networking/drinking/have fun/hooking up. In perhaps kinder words, Tech Thursday attracts an “older behaving crowd”. Folks that have to be home before sundown.

WiFi Wednesdays are, by design, intended to be much more geared to the twenty/thrity-somethings rather that “all-inclusive professionals”. If people aren’t doing shots of Tequilla and YouTube jousting, we’ve failed at this experiment. I expect/hope that the Thursday mornings following an event to be just a little less productive among Reno’s tech/design class. But in trade for that, collectively we hope to have a larger pool of those workers to chose from. Now this doesn’t mean that folks over the age of 40 aren’t welcome. If you still feel and act like you’re twenty-six (that’s my personal maturity wall) then get your game on and come out!

Wi-Fi Wednesdays is the brainchild of NCET marketing manager Emily Lowe and Robert Payne/Josh Kenzer of Twelve Horses. The trio was looking for a way to expand their professional networks and was weary of the same old venues. Wi-Fi Wednesdays is intended to be a bi-monthly high-energy networking opportunity designed to serve the specific needs of and cater exclusively to the influential 21-39 demographic. Come help make it succeed!

Details:

August 22, join NCET and the Reno-Tahoe Young Professional’s Network
(YPN) as they put a modern-day spin on Greater Reno Tahoe’s networking with the launch of Wi-Fi Wednesdays: “Connecting the Connected.”

- Wi-Fi Wednesdays is a bi-monthly high-energy networking opportunity designed exclusively for the influential 21-39 demographic
- Held in wireless venues throughout Reno
- Entertaining high-tech networking tools
- “Speed networking,” a twist on the “speed dating” concept that helps facilitate numerous one-on-one introductions in a short period of time
- Brief presentations by successful young entrepreneurs and technology professionals.

The Chocolate Bar
August 22 – 5:30 – 7:30 pm
475 S. Arlington Ave, Reno

August’s Wi-Fi Wednesday features a YouTube contest where you get to vote on your favorite video. To enter, send links of your best videos (3
max) to Emily at NCET by Monday, August 20.

- Space for the August 22 Wi-Fi Wednesdays debut is limited and reservations are preferred.
- Cost for the event is $5 per person for Reno-Tahoe YPN members and $10 per person for non-members. RSVP@NCET.org.

NCET, Nevada’s Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, helps foster an environment within Nevada in which high-growth entrepreneurial companies can succeed and flourish. NCET has a strategic partnership with the Nevada Commission on Economic Development. For more information on NCET, visit www.NCET.org. NCET is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.