The World's Largest, Least Historic Hostel Opens in December

September 1, 2008

Who says flight travel is a commodity? Entrepreneur Oscar Dios just acquired the Jumbo Hostel in 2006, and plans to start booking rooms in December.

The catch is, the airplane doesn’t actually go in the air. The plane is permanently parked in Sweden, and is to be used a hostel for newly arriving European travelers.
The idea [...]

Well Shit! Obama vs Palin in 1-on-1 for the White House?

August 29, 2008

It looks like John McCain has suddenly turned himself into a compassionate conservative. No longer is he uncle gramps whining about everything, suddenly he’s progressive, and conservative, at the same time.

Putting a fresh, female face on his campaign is John McCain one-upping Obama. Why would you want a young guy to run the country? Well, [...]

Obama is Cool. McCain is Pathetic.

August 27, 2008

After watching Obama on ESPN last night, and seeing him play 1-on-1 with Stuart Scott, it really made you feel like he’s one of us. The people LOVE W because they feel like he is, “one of us,” despite being a rich-kid whose Daddy was President, and gave him everything he’s ever had in his [...]

Analyzing Startup ROI in the Music Space: Lala vs Grooveshark vs we7

July 2, 2008

Working at Grooveshark, we’ve long been the underdog in the startup music game, and I definitely don’t think things have changed for us, but after 2 years of hard work, we’re finally starting to see some of the fruits of our labor. Rhapsody is spending $50 million on their new DRM-free campaign to try to [...]

Where to Begin Your Startup Advertising Campaign

July 2, 2008

Looking to begin your start-up marketing and run your first advertising campaign? You need to know where to start, and what to watch out for when spending your early dollars. Startup advertising can be very tricky, and if you’re not careful, you can blog the limited advertising budget you do have, being a startup.

Start up [...]

KYSSS: 5 Steps to …Keep Your Startup Simple, Stupid

June 30, 2008

The new rule these days is keeping your startup as dead-simple as possible. Feature creep has so often been the problem for web 1.0 players and the web 2.5 crowd has definitely learned its lesson. I think the reason we’re seeing such a shift to simplicity in this new crowd of web 2.0 apps is [...]

Business Plan 101: How to Generate Revenue Early & Often

June 24, 2008

When writing a business plan, you want to be able to prove to potential investors that your startup can produce revenue early, and often. Business plans are notoriously tossed out months after being completed, but the core elements of the business plan and the process of planning out and writing them is what’s so valuable [...]

Is Your Pitch Getting Shot Down? 3 Steps To Make It Effective

June 16, 2008

How do your potential customers feel when you reel off your sales pitch? Are they yawning or are they ecstatic and can’t wait to start throwing money at you?

Regardless of your effectiveness, your pitch can always get better, and from Jill Konrath at Selling to Big Companies, she has a great exercise:
Using a 1-10 (tops) [...]

"We start from the perspective of what problems we do have."

June 13, 2008

That’s a quote from Google’s Chief Mastermind Eric Schmidt, and it’s a really insightful commentary on how people should be building a business and conducting themselves in society. The quote is reflected in their charitable wing of Google.org and reflected across their entire network (ignoring their issue with monetizing YouTube aside). I wanted to specifically [...]

Grooveshark's Top Performing Ad on Facebook

June 11, 2008

I’ve been experimenting with our Grooveshark ad campaigns on Facebook and have been happy with the results — we’ve been seeing a huge number of impressions for $.29 CPM, and I just ran a poll to gauge the effectiveness of our ads, strictly from a brand awareness aspect.

Save Time By Storing Your "About Me" Information

June 11, 2008

I sign up for about 5 sites daily on the average, and in the effort to make sure all my tracks are covered, I’m always completing all of the profile fields, so this means I’m typing in my birthday, sex, and phone number all the time, which is pretty much unavoidable. Luckily, I have a [...]

Track Your Brand in the Blogosphere at a Glance: Addictomatic

May 2, 2008

While I just recently profiled Tweetscan, and how it can be used to track your customers and fans, I get introduced to another cool product, Addictomatic, which lets you check a particular search term, like “Grooveshark” across a bunch of different properties:
Topix
Ask.com
Live.com
Google Blog Search
Digg
Technorati
Bloglines
Flickr
Blinx
Truveo
Youtube
Newsvine
Wordpress
Yahoo!
:whew: quite the list, and I’m sure they’re going to be adding [...]

Creating a Legal Alternative to the Illegal Networks

April 19, 2008

Exclusives are the common trade practice for most industries to help companies get a competitive advantage over others. AT&T and the iPhone, the Super Bowl on FOX, Madonna on Verizon, etc.
Now for the first two, the exclusives make sense. You can’t use an iPhone on Verizon and you can’t watch the Super Bowl on CBS, [...]

Startup: Shawn Fanning of Napster Promotes Legal-Clean Diesel

April 14, 2008

I guess after starting Napster, and then selling SNOCAP to Imeem, this guy needs to find a new day-job:

FayerWayer Features Grooveshark, and the Servers Go Down..

March 30, 2008

FayerWayer, one of the top Spanish technology blogs, did a feature on Grooveshark yesterday and it sent our servers down (for about 15 minutes) and also their servers for a similar period of time.

It turns out the reason our site went down wasn’t actually a server issue, our load was less than 50%, but rather [...]

Marketing: The Importance of Good Hygiene From Flavor Flav

March 29, 2008

These Vh1 shows are so ridiculously stupid, but I can’t help but crack up at this video:
video.vh1.com