Posts Tagged ‘Geek’

Cabestan’s Nostromo watch is geared for success

Cabestan’s Nostromo watch is geared for success

You might think, given our recent bout of attentiveness toward wristwear, that we’re starting to develop an Enwatchet subsection, but that’s not entirely accurate. It’s just that when we come across such wild and quirky designs, there’s nothing to be done but share them with the world. Case in point: the Cabestan Nostromo watch, inspired by the ship from the Alien movie. In the words of its own designers, the Nostromo combines traditional watchmaking with “retro-futuristic audacity,” and when we gaze upon its exposed vertical mechanics, we can’t exactly argue otherwise. With a titanium case, Superluminova phosphorescent coating for dusky situations, and side windows (see them after the break), this is as appealing a watch as any geek can dare to imagine. Sure, you could probably buy a sports car for less than the 150,000 Swiss Francs ($141,400 in American currency) asking price, but it’s not like you can strap a Porsche to your wrist, now is it?

Continue reading Cabestan’s Nostromo watch is geared for success

Cabestan’s Nostromo watch is geared for success originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Brizzly Releases iPhone App

Brizzly Releases iPhone App

For power users, the Twitter website is often just a thing of the past. We’ve moved on to third party interfaces with multiple columns, special user list navigation, search, and so on. But what about the novice user that wants something more than Twitter.com?

For that, there’s Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client that today is announcing the release of its awaited iPhone app, along with a neat feature or two.

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The web-based version of Brizzly takes the Twitter stream and opens it up for the average user. It expands shortened links into full URLs, making it easier to know what you’re clicking on, and turns links to YouTube videos or images into just that – embedded images and videos. In a way, it takes the guess work out of Twitter.

Today, the company is releasing a full-featured iPhone app that was built off of the skeleton of Birdfeed, the company acquired by Brizzly last fall. The app is a simple and doesn’t offer some of the opening up of Twitter that you find on the website, but that would be difficult for an iPhone app to do, with it’s limited real estate. Links are shortened and images hidden behind links, but that’s as expected. Still, it handles multiple accounts, each of which you can view in its own stream. It also supports lists, mentions and DMs – all the standard stuff you would expect.

As we mentioned the last time we wrote about Brizzly, when the company added Facebook to its stream, the tool tries to make the experience of twitter simple for the non-geek. In that way, it interprets and explains Twitter Trends, the hashtags that are most popular at a given time. The Brizzly staff looks at hashtags and writes up a quick little blurb that explains what the Trends are that day and why. The iPhone app prominently contains these guides as a separate tab called “News”.

Brizzly is expanding on this trend explanation feature with its launch of the Brizzly Guide on its website. The Guide gives each of these trends its own page, which is a “permanent source for up-to-date information on topics people are talking about,” it says in its press release. In addition giving these explanations a permanent home, Brizzly has acquired WikiRank, a visualization web application based on Wikipedia data. It will be “integrating WikiRank technology into the Brizzly Guide” the company says in its press release. We can only wonder what will come of that, but it sounds interesting.

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Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks

Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks

Curious folks around the world enjoy a bit of hackintosh every now and then (although once is enough for many), but no geek has successfully ventured as far as Toni Nikkanen of Finland, who became the first person to run OS X on a phone — the Nokia N900. As you can see in the video after the break, Toni’s hack relies on PearPC — a PowerPC emulator — to install good ol’ OS X 10.3 (Panther), but the mammoth sluggishness means it’s far from usable. Still, if you can spare 90 minutes for each boot-up plus plenty more for the snail-paced cursor, then head to the source to learn from Herra Nikkanen.

[Thanks, Matija]

Continue reading Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks

Mac OS X 10.3 installed on Nokia N900 via PearPC, barely usable for impatient geeks originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Palm’s Jon Rubinstein named a ‘Geek of the Year’

Palm’s Jon Rubinstein named a ‘Geek of the Year’
Just to clarify right out of the gate, the “year” Fast Company is referring to is 2009, but nonetheless, it’s an award we’re sure Jon is happy to have. 11 geeks were found worthy of the “Geek of the Year” award in ‘09, with the likes of Evan Williams and Biz Stone (Twitter), David S. Goyer (the creator of Flash Forward on ABC), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Neill Blomkamp (the writer of District 9) joining him. The justification for Jon making the cut?

“He came on board as the new chairman of Palm and brought about the Web OS and the Palm Pre, the start of a line of products that is the best hope for reintroducing the geek masses to Palm.”

After speaking with him on our first-ever Engadget Show and falling head over heels in love with webOS, we can’t help but agree. And yes, after last year’s introduction at CES, it’s all we can do to contain our excitement for this Thursday.

Palm’s Jon Rubinstein named a ‘Geek of the Year’ originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 13:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009

From A Geek’s Geek: Daniel Raffel’s Favorite New Projects, Products and Features of 2009

When Daniel Raffel emailed and asked if we’d be interested in publishing his list of favorite stuff from 2009 we quickly agreed. He has worked on some of the more interesting projects in Silicon Valley over the last couple of years, and has his finger on the pulse of new technology. His post is below.

As the year winds down, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at my favorite tech launches this year. As I started assembling my list and bouncing them off friends I started to group them into the following categories: New Projects, New Products and Services, Feature Updates, and iPhone Apps. This list is an admittedly subjective batch. For instance, you’ll notice I am clearly interested in these trends: games, geo services, HTML5, identity, mobile, music, social updates, and web development. I’d love to hear what you think were exciting developments this year!

New Projects

Dive into HTML5
There are so many reasons to be excited about HTML5. Mark Pilgrim’s book illuminates many of them. When it’s finally published on paper in early 2010 it is likely going to be one of the most beautiful computer text books ever.

Music Hack Day
Get a bunch of passionate, competent technologists in a room and inspire them to hack on music projects all day, cool! While I didn’t get to personally attend the Boston event I was inspired by my friend Brian’s wrapup and Anthony’s too. Both posts contain great tips for anyone running a good, hackfest. Hope to see these events continue and look forward to attending one myself.

OAuth WRAP (Web Resource Authorization Protocol)
For a variety of situations where a developer simply wants to integrate with an API via POST the OAuth dance can a bit of a headache. OAuth WRAP is not much different than OAuth except that a client only has to pass the Access Token in the HTTP Authorization header, so it completely eliminates the need for signatures. All server-to-server WRAP calls happen via SSL. An additional benefit of eliminating signatures is that one can curl OAuth-WRAP requests without requiring any special libraries. There is an active working group fleshing out a spec and I expect to see widespread adoption of this in 2010 coming via products from the major service providers (specifically Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!).

Playdar
Started by Richard Jones, Playdar is “designed to solve one problem: given the name of a track, find me a way to listen to it right now.” While it’s definitely not ready for the general public I am very excited by the progress it has been making. And, I am looking very forward to the types of projects it is likely to enable in 2010. In the meantime, if you’re super curious checkout a few demos to see where things are starting to head.

PubSubHubbub and Simple Update Protocol
Polling feeds is no fun, it’s costly and too slow. These protocols are exciting to me because they offer novel solutions so that products depending on realtime updates can more efficiently, and quickly, aggregate update notifications.

Webfinger
Webfinger is an emerging standard that is being designed to return metadata for a given email address over HTTP. It could be used to publish metadata about an email address such as a URL to the user’s Profile, a link to a user’s Calendar, etc. This is strategically important for OpenID because it can be used to determine if an email address is OpenID-enabled and if so kick off the OpenID authentication flow.

New Products and Services

Cloudkick
With more businesses moving their infrastructure to the cloud there will be a need for new tools that help businesses manage their ops. Cloudkick provides a hosted service for managing infrastructure on multiple cloud platforms. They are already managing over a hundred thousand servers. As they build in support for more and more platforms it’s a natural assumption that they will attempt to support functionality that will allow users to migrate from service to service. As an early user I have been impressed with the teams response time to issues I have encountered. While Cloudkick isn’t ready to compete head to head with Ganglia, Nagios and other popular ops projects I’m looking forward to continuing to use the service.

Flavors.me
Technically, not launched yet, but I’ve been playing with it for a little bit. Think of it as a simple vanity site for people with either no web development chops or little interest in investing time building/hosting their own website. The default templates are very aesthetic and can be easily customized. Since there is little functionality on the site other than creating a simple, web based, business card, it’s a bit unclear how much juice they have. That said, I like how easy it is to create a public profile and share your identity with the public.

Foursquare
There’s a competitive aspect to Foursquare that makes it both satisfying and addictive. After using it for a few months earlier in the year I decided to abandon it because I didn’t see the point of using the service. A compulsive urge sucked me back in and I have to admit that it has led to some wonderful, serendipitous moments. I’ve taken a look at a few other competitors and frankly there isn’t a huge difference (for instance, Gowalla is prettier but I have far fewer friends on it, and it has terribly obnoxious Facebook integration). The LBS space is getting crowded with FSQ wannabe’s so I’m eager to see how they continue to evolve and add user value. It will also be interesting to see if any of these apps can build a sustainable business around them, at the moment FSQ seems best positioned with their Mayor deals/etc.

Google Chrome Browser
Ever since the beta launched for OS X I’ve been spending more and more time in this browser. It’s elegant and very fast. There are definitely missing features but honestly 85% of the time its current feature set suffices. If Firefox and Safari mated this would definitely be its more evolved offspring. I’ve had mixed luck with Chromium and installing extensions but then I have no business running nightly builds. In fact, I’m impressed with how hard they make it to find the link to nightlies, smart. I’m looking forward to bookmark syncing and non-buggy extension support in 2010. In the meantime, I’m happy with the beta – it’s great to see so much attention to detail, you don’t get there packing on every single feature you can think up.

GDGT
C|Net has to be a bit worried because GDGT feels like the new place where folks are talking about tech products and figuring out what they wanna buy. There are significantly more reviews, I can quickly qualify the reputation of the contributor(s), there’s a community to ping for advice and suggestions, and there are significantly more useful stats to help me make a purchasing decision. For someone interested in making informed decisions about the gadgets they buy this is a great new resource. For those who are passionate about the gadgets they already own this is a great place to evangelize and discuss hacks/etc.

Hunch
I have a tendency to enjoy making well-researched, informed decisions. So it seems natural to share what I’ve learned once I’ve invested the time and found the perfect water bottle or picked out a portable digital audio recorder. Hunch provides simple tools that make it easy to roleplay through scenarios that have already been explored by others. One might choose to think of it as a wikipedia for decisions.

Kickstarter
It’s exciting to see a platform that enables makers to raise the funding they need to do their thing. It’s also inspiring to see so many successful projects that have already launched. There are all sorts of ways to pursue the things you’re most passionate about and Kickstarter is one more toolkit in your arsenal. BTW it also feels great to fund someone with a creative idea.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii
I probably hadn’t turned on my Wii in over a year until this game came out. The gameplay is essentially a 2D scroller that’s very similar to the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. The characters have a few new moves and the levels are significantly more creative than earlier franchises in the series. I never got tired of the original game and this version feels like it has a lot to keep me coming back for more. The multiplayer version is also very entertaining.

Square
It’s hard to remember the last time I paid for something and had a delightful point of sale purchasing experience, but that’s exactly how I feel everytime I pay by credit card at Sightglass Coffee. The software that a customer interacts with at a Square vendor is just lovely. But, it’s the business plan (and hardware approach) that’s brilliant – Square is reducing the barrier for small businesses to setup a merchant account and providing inexpensive hardware that enables them to offer credit card services for next to nothing. I’m sold as a consumer and a small business owner. I’m very excited to see this running on more devices and in more types of sales environments in the near future. I also hope to see them explore premium readers with more advanced industrial designs, such as the Incase reader that Apple stores are already using.

Feature Updates

Android 2.0
While Android is still a bit too rough for me to consider ditching my iPhone (and 3rd party apps) for the 2.0 software update demonstrates that it’s quickly catching up to the iPhone OS. If you use multiple Google services the integration is all the more compelling. At this continued pace, 2010 is going to be a massive year for the Android ecosystem.

Apple iPhone OS 3.0
It’s rare to get excited again about a phone that you’ve had for years but the Apple iPhone OS 3.0 update included many great new features that brought my 1st gen iPhone back to life . It also rubbed in how much faster my new iPhone 3GS really was. The features I most appreciated were: cut/copy/paste, ability to create meetings via Exchange using ActiveSync, and wider use of landscape mode in a variety of apps. I’ll spare you the internet tethering gripe.

Apple Snow Leopard
I’m a big fan of doing less stuff better so I was very supportive of seeing Apple focus the majority of this release on under the hood performance enhancements. Their investments show too, I have a few older Macs around the house and upgrading to Snow Leopard freed up on average around 10gb of disk space, required less operating RAM during most common tasks, and caused all of my macs to feel a lot more responsive (fewer spinning wheels of death.) While there were basically no new features that got me excited the speed enhancements were well worth the minor upgrade costs.

Boxee Beta
While I haven’t logged significant time playing with the latest beta of Boxee the user interface changes are very promising. This is on my list of things to further investigate. It’s exciting to see innovation in both the 10-foot experience and internet TV space.

Facebook
Facebook launched a number of impressive new things this year, the things that stand out the most to me are: an awesome new iPhone app, the Facebook Connect for iPhone SDK, a live streaming box for 3rd party sites, the Facebook Desktop Notifications app, and what felt like a few re-designs. It’s inspiring to see a company stay true to its original objectives and still manage to innovate.

Flickr Photo People Tagging
One of the most compelling Facebook features is the ability to tag a friend in a photo, doing so creates a viral thread that triggers a lot of clickthru’s and engagement. It was safe to assume that Flickr would eventually add similar functionality and this year they did. I was pleased to discover that people tagging on Flickr was designed with additional sensitivity around a users privacy. You can explicitly define which contacts of yours can people tag you in a photo. And, Flickr explicitly spells out what happens if you remove a photo tagged with your identity (nobody else can add it back). There’s nothing wrong with borrowing a feature a competitor has but this is an excellent example of how to add your own flavor to it.

Google Voice
GrandCentral was shutdown this year and logically rebranded as Google Voice. After being ported to the Google platform and re-launched users were given a slew of awesome new features. While I’ll admit I’m still holding out for a number portability feature I’m a fan of how disruptive they are attempting to be. And, I’m a fan of numerous enhancements they’ve shipped this year alone, some of my favorite include: voicemail to text transcription (needs more tuning), free web based text messaging, the ability to change your number, and easy steps to allow you to forward your mobile voicemail to Google.

Kindle Software Update 2.3
There’s nothing like a little competition in the ebook market to cause Amazon to add basic features to the Kindle 2 that it could (and should) have supported all along. Regardless, thanks to this software update it’s nice that my Kindle 2 now natively supports PDFs.

Firefox and Webkit Support for Geolocation APIs in HTML5
It’s very satisfying to see my browser starting to have a clue regarding where I am. While very few services are actively using this functionality today the fact that browsers now support it is wonderful!

Firefox Support for the HTML5 File API
It’s unfortunate that most webservices have to use Flash to support decent file uploading experiences. Now that Javascript can read the contents of local files web developers will have the opportunity to create more refined file sharing experiences for both online and offline applications. I’m not sure if this is currently available in Webkit but beta’s of Firefox 3.6 support it.

Spotify
For the past 2 years I’ve been using Spotify as my default streaming music player and it just keeps getting better. This year I was impressed by two specific features: their massive increase in library size and their approach to the mobile experience. If you depend on the cloud for your tunes the size of the library matters. Spotify has spent the past year aggressively growing their library by tens of thousands of tracks per week. That’s much easier said than done, particularly when you’re trying to add compelling media that people actually want to listen to. I am consistently impressed when I search for something random and find they have it. While Spotify will never have absolutely everything under the sun their library consistently satisfies my very demanding appetite for both the latest releases and older classics. This year Spotify also released mobile applications that allow you to locally cache media on your phone so that you can listen to your favorite music whether or not you have a internet connection. In the year ahead I look forward to seeing how they innovate around discovery, sharing and library resolution (ie building up a list of stuff they know I already have in my local iTunes Library.)

Twitter Lists
Twitter has long had a discovery problem. Finding and surfacing what you want to follow isn’t easy. The lists feature still requires you to invest time if you want to make one but it also gives you the opportunity to track things that others have put the time into assembling (such as food carts in San Francisco or Great Chefs.) For me, the nicest part is your main feed isn’t polluted so you can casually and passively track things without adding a lot of noise.

YQL
YQL is a developer tool that treats the internet as a giant source of data. The team was on a tear this year, amongst other things they launched the element to enable arbitrary server-side code to run inside tables, open data tables to enable anyone to create their own API bindings for YQL, hosted storage tables to build on top of Yahoos cloud store (sherpa), and “query aliases” that let developers name their YQL queries using meaningful short names.

iPhone Apps

Dropbox
My data, backed up, and now available on my iPhone too. Brilliant.

Drop7
A very creative puzzle game that will quickly get you addicted.

Eliss
An addictive game that sets the bar very high: creative use of multitouch capabilities, beautiful graphics, innovative gameplay, and great music. Overall, an inspiring piece of work on multiple levels.

Evernote
The Evernote iPhone app got a series of major updates this year that makes it an even more useful productivity tool for note taking and backup/sync.

Orbital
I particularly enjoy games that you can drop into for a few minutes. This game has great graphics and a simple concept that turns out to be rather complex to master.

Tweetie 2
Super attractive Twitter client for the iPhone, lots of nice little touches.

Zillow
Ever checked out a new neighborhood and wondered what property there might cost? This application is extremely interesting to launch and drive/walk around with.

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TiVo planning a new "Premiere" DVR?

TiVo planning a new "Premiere" DVR?

A packaging mixup may have revealed the next DVR coming from TiVo. Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to be the Series4 we were looking for, but the “TiVo Premiere” (or Premiere XL) instructions sent along with a new TiVo HD to self-described Chicagoland geek Patrick McCarron show a slimmed down box with one (multistream only) CableCARD slot instead two and no S-video or phone jack. The prevailing speculation is this is a lower cost revision of the existing Series3 hardware that could be on shelves very soon, but we’re still hoping for updated internals and UI to make TiVo fresh for the next decade. The full instructions are scanned and posted over at Infinite Shamrock, for confirmation and any real details on what’s next we’ll probably be waiting until next week in Las Vegas.

TiVo planning a new “Premiere” DVR? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 19:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Zatz Not Funny  |  sourceInfinite Shamrock  | Email this | Comments
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PSP Digital Comics set to launch in US today

PSP Digital Comics set to launch in US today

If you feel like geeking it up (or, as they say back east, “getting your geek on”) there really is no better combination than gaming and comic books — that’s why we’re stoked to hear that the PSP comic store is set to go live at 3:00 PM today. In addition, the European PlayStation blog states that the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa stores should become available at 5PM GMT, while the store in Ireland is being held up due to technical issues. The store boasts “hundreds of new and classic collections,” including your favorites from Marvel, IDW, Titan, iVerse and 2000AD. Check out playstationcomics.com to give it a shot yourself — but not before peeping the video after the break.

Continue reading PSP Digital Comics set to launch in US today

PSP Digital Comics set to launch in US today originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s All About Selling for Survival

It’s All About Selling for Survival

Devito--Tin MenThe one skill which entrepreneurs need is something they don’t teach in business school—selling.  Yes, I know that “selling” conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because sales is not just about selling things for money. Selling is about life. Convincing the perfect soulmate to go out on a date is a sales job. Enticing your children to eat their vegetables is a sales job. Negotiating a raise with your boss is a sales job. And, yes, selling your company to Google is definitely a sales job. A sales job in that you are listening to others, finding out what they want or need, and giving it to them in a form that they appreciate. And guess who the best salespeople in tech companies are? Your developers.

Let me explain why I believe this.

I started my career as a geek. I ended up as Chief Technology Officer of Seer Technologies, a software startup which we grew from zero to $120 million in revenue and took public in a short five years. And then I became CEO of my own very successful startup called Relativity Technologies (until I burnt myself out and needed to shift gears).  A number of skills helped me through this ascent. I learned a lot about motivating and managing people who were sometimes smarter than me, about understanding markets and communicating effectively, and also a few really boring things like accounting, finance and law. But if I had not learned how to sell then my company would never have made it past three guys in a room with a phone and some laptops.

I didn’t believe this in my youth. I thought coding was the exact opposite of selling. I always associated “sales” with hustling and sleazy ways to convince customers to spend money on things they didn’t need. And you had to work fast to get that check before the dupes backed away.

PCWeenies on SellingOne day I was promoted to project manager. After thrashing through a few uncomfortable meetings, I quickly understood that running a good project required a form of selling to my peers and managers. I also realized that perhaps sales was not so simple. In fact, convincing my staff that the ideas I had made sense was far more difficult than writing clean code. And persuading management to supply sufficient staff and funding to implement my ideas was harder still.

Being a successful project manager meant learning to listen closely to what others thought, to make them feel included, and to give them what they wanted and needed to succeed. It meant constant communication that was honest yet finely nuanced. It was hard work but ultimately very rewarding. I could listen and focus on helping others to achieve their goals and at the same time advance myself quite easily. When I was able to focus on a global view of helping my company succeed, I found it much easier to avoid destructive departmental politics. I rose up the ranks to become a vice-president of technology at one of the world’s five largest investment banks.

Then I got the chance to become CTO of a startup which would market technology which my team had built. Selling became an even more important skill. We all were living on borrowed time and the only thing that would give us more time was sales to put money into company coffers. We had a truly amazing product, much better than that of our competitors. But the stark reality was that unless we could really sell well, our competitors had a big advantage. They were a known quantity. They were not going out of business tomorrow. They played golf, went out for beers, and had lunch with our competitors.

My guru and mentor was my boss, Gene Bedell. One of the first things Gene did when we launched our company was to put everyone through a sales training boot camp. Gene had run billion-dollar businesses and reached the executive levels in investment banking. He had even convinced IBM to seed our company, a software spinoff from Credit Suisse First Boston. At first my technology team protested at being taught to learn about qualifying prospects and closing sales rather than the latest version-tracking software tools.

Within months, we were closing multimillion dollar sales with blue-chip customers across the globe. We did this with only two experienced sales reps and part-time sales support from our development staff. That’s because developers with sales training are incredibly valuable as a part of the sales process. They have two essential ingredients that make people persuasive—credibility and trustworthiness (for the most part).  So while a prospect may not really believe a salesperson, for example, when he says a system is reliable, they’re far more likely to believe a developer they respect.  This is a very powerful ingredient in the sales process, and one we used regularly.  We would compete with some of the largest software companies in the world—and win the sale almost every time. As CTO, I also took it upon myself to sell strategic partners. My biggest catch was a deal with IBM-Japan worth $8.6 million.

With a culture that put customer support and sales above everything else, we grew  into a profitable $120-million-a-year revenue machine. Our developers formed long-term bonds and friendships with our customers. They would go to great pains to understand customer requirements and build products that would sell. More often than not, new development projects would be funded directly by customers. Whenever there was a customer-service problem, our top engineers would voluntarily work around the clock and fly all over the globe to personally provide support.

So, how do you learn sales? It’s easy. There are literally hundreds of books on selling. The methods vary, but in essence all of them teach you about the basics of understanding customer needs and honing your message. There are also hundreds of “selling seminars” conducted all over the world. Be wary of any which teach you to sell things a customer doesn’t want. It is one thing to persuade someone to buy something which they need, it is another thing to con people. My personal favorite book (and I am a little biased here) is one by Gene Bedell himself, titled Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way.

By the way, I’m not the only guy saying this kind of stuff. The high priests of the Lean Startup Methodology, like Dave McClure, Brad Feld, and Eric Ries, all advocate a “get to sales ASAP” approach. “Recovering venture capitalist” Healy Jones blogged about how he was shortchanged with his Wharton MBA. Yet a quick conversation at any networking event in the Valley yields a simple observation that most technology workers don’t think that selling is part of their job description. The smartest technology entrepreneurs realize that everyone in the company is in sales and the sooner they embrace that reality, the easier it will be for that startup to grow and prosper. Coder, biz dev, PR, QA—nope. You’re all in sales. It’s all about selling for survival.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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