Today we’re going to talk about the Attraction Method! Carlon Haas is involved in direct response marketing combined with web 2.0 technology. Jen is a law of attraction coach; she works with small businesses and teaches them how to build relationships on the internet. Within the last year she’s built and sold an internet business, she says, which is something I’m very interested in. Steve is involved in something he calls the ripple effect—maybe they’ll tell us more about that.

Jen wants to cover universal attraction based marketing. I think my brain is fuzzy because of my sinuses, but I’m following as best I can—and recording too. What do you want to accomplish? How many clients do you want to attract? What’s the purpose of your marketing plan?

Carlon says you need to know what you want before you can have it. Paris Hilton, he says, is a marketing genius. This woman never promotes herself. She’s always dropping other names. She can’t help herself—the liquor she’s drinking, the clothes she’s wearing. The less she promotes herself, the more others are drawn to her. This is what’s happening today in marketing, by promoting others, similar services, similar points of view, you can reap the rewards of that. It’s like karma! By Digging other people’s stuff, you get more traffic. Jen says, the most popular blogs out there are often promoting other people’s products and services—they’re not necessarily just self promoting. In this way you build a community and other people want to start promoting you, because they like you.

Tarket: I don’t know what this thing is. Pinpointing one person. Volvo has one person, one profile they try to attract, a 32 year old mother of two—she takes her children to ballet and gymnastics and they built their car around this specific model. They built a tarket, they focused on one person. This person wants to pay you more than your fee, this person wants to do generous things and offer testimonials, your biggest fan is your tarket. Work just with this kind of person. The best client possible.

I can’t have spelled tarket right. I’ll have to check up on that later.

The shotgun approach doesn’t work, Steve is saying. It comes up ineffective, especially if you don’t understand who your target market is. Carlon gets blank stares when he asks about the target market—too many of us don’t know who we’re marketing to. But maybe… maybe we do know who we want to work with. I know who I want to work with! At least, I think I do. ;}

You need to know your target market so you can pinpoint their psychological hot-buttons. Listen to all these funny words!

You want a client who is a good fit for you; if this client isn’t, they’ll complain, they’ll want refunds, you won’t make them happy and they won’t make you happy. Carlon has his clients fill out a massive questionnaire because that 80% of your energy that goes to dealing with these people should be going to good customers who will be customers for life, who really appreciate the attention.

If you aim low you get low. If you aim high you get high. If you work with people who are always dragging you down, you’ll never have energy—work with the people who bring you up. When you put these boundaries in place, people want to come to you, want to be liked by you.

Once you identify who you want, Carlon says, you need to craft a message that hits your tarket’s psychological hot-buttons—they should be nodding their heads saying Yes, that’s me, that’s what I want. Carlon is a direct response copywriter; he writes advertisements. Direct response marketing includes a call to action. Ninety percent of the websites out there suck. Welcome to X Company. We are a solutions based company that offers solutions where our solutions are great solutions to those problems. Nobody gives a crap about how great your company is. They want to know WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME? How does what you do benefit me? Make me money? Make my life easier? How does it solve the problem I have. This is the message you want to craft. Direct response’s call to action calls them to action. It’s necessary to tell them what to do, so they can do it!

I just looked it up. It’s definitely tarket, it’s target market condensed and focused! That makes an insane amount of sense.

You don’t need to be all things to all people. You need to be everything to the people you WANT.

Always put emphasis on value, not price. Price-conscious people will line up (none of us wants that). We want value-conscious people lining up. This is important.

Take a look at…
~ unstuckmarketing.com (Jen Blackert)
~ bravenewmarketing.com (Carlon Haas)
~ ripplecentral.com (Steve Harper)

Amanda says she doesn’t worry about what her advertisers want, but she can imagine self-censorship. They knew what her brand was coming into it, so they were more open to what she wanted. Violet says that speaks to something that’s important to her – Why are we doing Indie media instead of mainstream media? We can say things that mainstream media can’t or won’t say, because they’re beholden to their advertisers. This is a big question.

Mike says this is significant in terms of where you’re going to PUT your video—if you want money you’re making different videos than if you’re pushing out a message. Some people have successfully done both, some people have successfully done one or the other… Alive in Baghdad is a wonderful show, Brian Connelly puts them online once a week; “This week’s car bombing brought to you by Toyota” is the running joke in the Blip office. Mike hasn’t had a lot of advertisers ask for a change in content, though they have felt less comfy with the content of some shows than other shows. We’re at a stage in the market where they’re making a brand association decision. The Air Force is very protective of its brand—worried about being too near incendiary content.

Irina asks, Whose job is it to warn the advertiser? About sexual content, etc., is it our job to warn our advertiser that this content will be included, to say, maybe you don’t want to do this? Especially in cases where the advertiser is so conservative, like Irina’s. Nate does this; there’s a facility for being able to turn off ads for certain kinds of content, this comforts the advertisers, but ultimately it’s also up to the content host. Plus, it’s up to the people making the shows. Focus on making a good show first, worry about that stuff later (or let someone else worry about it). We all have to worry about it a little bit, our content is personal and these models aren’t worked out yet.

We’re running out of time now; we’re building long term relationships with these advertisers. The buys are scattered, some money is being spent, but if we’re going to maintain this burgeoning field we need to maintain long-lasting relationships with these folks. Don’t scare off a million dollar account for many creators because of one video—the money could dry up and go back to NBC, hell! Violet: Blip is making commitments to the advertisers but also to their content creators, which although not standard practice is wonderful.

Fifteen minutes left in the panel; whole areas haven’t been touched on yet! CPM: Cost per thousand. CPC: Cost per click. One may make you more money in one case, opposite in the other case, Mike thinks most people look for CPMs, but Nate says that will always be changing. Different networks are good for different things.

People pay for television shows on iTunes; there are a couple of successful video shows out there (Red vs. Blue, ha ha ha, where you can subscribe and pay for eps in advance, they have a huge fan following and are living off of this production + merchandise… there’s another one that sounds French, I didn’t quite get it?). In both cases they really worked on their content and built the community first.

Here’s a dude that made a DVD on home-brewing beer, but got really sick of making calls to stores asking them to carry it. He started an audio podcast, then videocasting, with a product he wanted to get to consumers. Powerful medium, niche content, connect with the people you want to connect with. Home-brew stores are now calling HIM, he’s selling thousands of DVDs, and he’s building relationships with his audience, and trust, on a one-to-one basis with email, etc. that’s driving sales of the DVD. His content is SO targeted and he’s a big fish in a small bowl. Basicbrewing.com, radio, video. With specific content you can find your audience and build loyalty with them on a one-to-one basis, this fellow is saying.

Mike is talking about selling sponsorships for broad audiences OR for very focused audiences—there are perfect audiences everywhere. Violet says, you’re not creating the market, you’re validating that the market is there, which is excellent.

Mike is saying, Some advertisers JUST want their logo there, and that’s all they care about. At Coke.com, there’s nothing there—but that’s all they want, is that presence.

Amanda things, along with Bre, if you’re looking to make money with your videos that’s not where you should START - start with what you’re passionate and excited about. Build your site and viewership and fanbase before thinking about monetization, because monetization is BASED on your viewership, on your show. Bre says, it’s all evolving and there’s so much we haven’t talked about that could come up, so it’s big territory.

Violet says, Make your media, don’t change your voice for your advertisers. Work with great companies like Blip and the companies on this panel that care about creative content. Nate concurs. Focus on the content, the audience; talk to them; be really consistent! Folks with success have been really consistent, do what you SAY you’re going to do. People will come back expecting something, and you’ll lose them if they don’t find it. Drive more traffic, advertising will come, other ways of making money will come.

Violet says also, Don’t forget because this is such an emerging thing, we’re all doing this without a map. We’re a community, and we need to learn from each other! We’re all figuring this out and bringing the rest of the world along with us.

Mike’s parting thought: Everyone at this table and the successful content creators have been at it a really long time, and it takes time. You hear stories about people making money, but it takes years. You have to build a brand and an audience and everything else comes after.

Mike Hudack is awesome. Blip.tv is awesome. The consensus is astounding.

When Mike had a blog, all his money was made through Amazon.com and click ads (I think he said) and he did perfectly well. It’s perfectly reasonable to do it this way.

Take a look at…
~ Violet Blue
~ PortableFilmFestival.com – A dude who asked a question. Does all kinds of stuff.
~ Cooking with Rockstars (cute chick!)

A nice woman involved with Cooking with Rockstars is getting brand specific mentioning but she doesn’t feel quite empowered enough going up to Kraft or Doritos—is she crazy to think there’s value there? It depends on how many viewers she has. You can get in touch with either brand’s agency, which might be interested in talking to you if there’s something in it for them.

Violet is saying… What’s interesting about that is how you’re feeling disempowered—that’s an interesting concept because maybe they would naturally want to associate themselves with that, but at the same time she’s hearing that these big brands are scared to associate with independently produced content. How much time do you spend educating advertisers about video content in general…? Nate says that they spend an inordinate amount of time doing exactly that! But this may change in a year or two, he says, because we’ll be able to reach these people in more ways that make sense. As a network, it’s Nate’s job to make it something that’s more easily digestible. Interesting.

Mike: The first sponsorship we closed probably took a couple months, but recently we closed one in three days—because we’d been working on that agency for months, talking about opportunities, etc., but it takes time and effort.

So the dealbreaker is not so much independently produced content but independently distributed content… Attendee asks, What are some of the strategies you lay out for an advertiser to get them over that fear? Past episodes, Mike says, members of the press have written nice things about this show, quotes from the press, you can give a deck with these things and other things this person is doing in the media, give an overview, let them see that this person is building a career they don’t want to fuck up—and that if the guy murders a prostitute (sex worker, Violet says) in the next episode, the advertiser will get their money back and the guy making the show won’t get paid! And that made them feel better.

Nate says, there ARE tv shows where prostitutes get murdered and they have advertisers…

Interesting.

It’s that they feel more in control of the television format than the independent video format. The advertisers have to meet us halfway, but they’re only about a quarter of the way there, Nate says—some will, some won’t (like the Air Force).

The future of ad platforms… They’re very simple right now, Mike says. We’re incredibly early in this industry – we’re building them as we go. Google doesn’t even have a video ad serving system yet. Right now we’re focusing on dynamic insertion and statistics, but it will get more sophisticated from here. We have to walk before we run. Banners are targeted, Adsense is targeted, Nate says, it’s important to think about how you set this stuff up, tags are important, statistics are important, the money people will want to know these things.

For Nate: What’s the difference in the money you can make between contextual ad networks and sponsorships or brand associations? Nate says…

Irina Slutsky just grinned at me. She has a gorgeous smile. And I totally lost my train of liveblog thought. Mrrr!

Nate’s response is that it’s all over the map, but metadata is important for contextual ads. Tag your videos well! Revenue sharing = tag your videos well!

If I were to do video, I would just want to do it for me, as an extension of my blog. The idea of developing a video in order to make money only appeals to me so far, then it falls apart in my head.

Spencer Nutting has heard that if he posts a video on MySpace he might lose some rights; Mike says there are a good two hundred and ten video sharing sites, all with different terms of service; one site might take complete ownership of your video, they can do ANYTHING with it and never give you a time—they may or may not do that exclusively, believe it or not; they might say you’re not allowed to put it anywhere else. There are other sites who don’t take any rights whatsoever, so if you apply a CC license to your work, you can give it to the Internet Archive, who won’t do any of those things (but also won’t help you make money). YouTube used to have awful terms of service, but they’re going to start doing revenue sharing. You HAVE to read the Terms of Service. You have to ACTUALLY read them. You have to know what they have the right to do. Blip only takes the right to put your video online—that’s all, and they help you find support to make money (in a certain way, I need to look this up). There are five or six different revenue sharing models out there—check out LightReading.com. Phil Harvey wrote a great article last week summarizing all the video sharing services that share money, ten on the top line, and then a really big table of everyone else, very cool. Some sites are appropriate for one-offs, some for series… great resources.

Every time Bre says something I think his voice is coming from further back in the room. I don’t know why.

We’re concerned about the advertisers, the audience… how do different people feel that affects the material and the content they’re producing? You’re trying to produce advertiser-pleasing content, but the advertisers aren’t the only ones who are important!

Mike Hudack is our moderator. He seems extra nifty, but we’re all so sleepy… and I have a damn sinus infection. So, fun morning! Bre Pettis is also incredibly cool looking. Who are these video people? I want to watch their stuff!

Violet has built a reputation through online media, podcasting, vlogging, but she’s a writer and sexpert. She’s built a brand strong enough that advertisers are coming to her… what does this mean? This is the sort of thing that fascinates me, the sort of thing I want to do.

How long it takes to build a brand… when it’s appropriate to concentrate on content, when it’s appropriate to start thinking about monetizing. Huh. Originally I just wanted to hear Violet on a panel but now I’m wondering if this panel is actually particularly useful for me.

Nate Pagel is interesting. All these people give me a neat vibe. Is that why they’re successful in online video, and why they’re on this panel? “How do you hook up with people who want to pay you what you’re doing”, etc. Now Mike is talking about how Ze Frank has made an insane amount of money selling virtual rubber duckies… I’m the only one in her awake and excited enough to have laughed out loud because I saw that the other day… and I’m sick! Oy!

Dude! Mike Hudack works at Blip.tv, and I didn’t even notice that. I’m such a dork. I really like Blip.tv and would really like to use it…

One of the things that Violet wanted to mention was that what Indie media does is have a direct relationship with the people who are watching, because we’re publishing this media ourselves—and the rubber ducky in particular maintains that relationship in a really particular way. We’re not necessarily creating a new market, we’re recognizing the market that’s there.

It’s really difficult to tell where you change from the personal relationship to the consumer relationship – there’s no map for individuals like Violet, for what they’re doing, the only ethics she can follow is full disclosure to maintain her relationship with her viewers (or readers, or listeners).

Amanda says it’s possible to do both as long as you are holding up that connection with you and your viewers. I wonder about this, but it’s very reasonable to imagine that she’s right. It’s a fine line to walk, I bet!

Also, I think Irina Slutsky may be sitting right in front of me.

Nate is talking about being unwilling to do 30 second preroll ads; he comes from the ad / user experience world and he’s trying to come up with stuff that’s not only context appropriate, but content appropriate. An 8 second postroll ad is much more appropriate, he says, and doesn’t lead to the same negative consequences that otherwise you’ll see out there. He’s also responsible for tracking how many people are seeing the postroll ad, incidently. Do we know what the difference is in viewership between preroll and postroll? The information is out there somewhere, on the efficacy of each—Mike says that there may be about a fifty percent drop off between the two, if I heard that properly.

Bre is talking about old school TV, “This has been sponsored by…” something really relevent to the video material—in which case, a preroll might not be half bad.

What sort of systems are you guys using to work with advertisers and brands—sales team, directly with ad agencies, directly with the brands? How are they all responding to the different options? Mike says that we’re very early in Independently produced content. Brands are scared to death of using generated content. (Did I get that right?) Blip.tv takes hit shows and reps them directly to agencies, I always really wondered about this also! Blip.tv matched Dove with Amanda Congdon, etc. It’s a one-off by one-off process, finding out what brands are willing to take that risk, try things out… They closed a deal with Doers for Ze Frank because Doers wants to be perceived as on the cutting edge of this stuff—but many don’t feel that way.

Nate: The best money that can be made is a direct relationship with an advertiser. If you have a decent amount of content and it’s relevant to a certain content or audience, there’s most likely an advertiser that can match you. Contact them! That’s the way to make the most money out there. If you don’t want to do that, there are great sites that facilitate for you, sell ads for you, to allow you to concentrate on your content, etc.

Advertisers in some cases are scared to death, but if they’re looking to be perceived as hip—you can use a rate card (they know exactly what they’re getting for their money) or a fluid process, but Nate prefers the former.

Amanda Williams – University of California at Irvine
Violet Blue – Blogger, Open Source Sex
Johanna Brewer – University of California at Irvine
Kyle Machulis – Engineer, Nonpolynomial Labs
Cory Silverberg – Author & Educator, Come As You Are & About.com

Much of this is not material that would generally be presented in a mainstream setting, which is what makes the birth of this panel so fabulous! Amanda Williams is moderating, explaining about user interfaces centered around the user as a brain, eyes, and hands. We’ve got plenty on virtual communities and Web 2.0, but all that hints that the real and the virtual are not so easily separated. There’s plenty of overlap and interaction between the two, and that really comes out when we start to talk about sex and computational technology.

Amanda: “...And Kyle has some magical toys.” (Kyle holds up something that looks like a short, fat bowling pin made of shiny silver… heh!

Continuity of intimacy: Johanna has been working on a mobile music interface. This actually does have a lot to do with sex; she’s spent a lot of time talking to people and finding out about people imagining realities about other people—if you have a dog, what your day is like, what you do in the evenings, there are all kinds of cues that people use to understand what this other person is like especially if you’ve just met. One of the things that this bordered on was sexual fantasies and how, perhaps, we develop crushes! There is one fellow who maybe rode the train for an extra leg with someone he thought was attractive, you make a link with a person you don’t know, you hope to find out more about them. There are so many intimate, unspoken connections that people are making with each other, and some will say no, this is unnatural, this is stalking, these people are freaks! But this is what people do.

Johanna came up against a really strong block in mainstream companies in regards to developing technology to relate to these concepts, because of the worry that this is stalking, but she’s working on applications herself. We might want to take a closer look at the continuity of intimacy that’s going on—it doesn’t have to be for sex, but it may be useful, whether or not it’s branded a “sex technology”.

What we’re actually doing: Violet says, what happens to be missing from the pornography market is what people are actually doing, instead of what people think they’re doing. People are doing all kinds of wonderful, interesting and kinky things on their own, things they’re not allowed to talk about, and mainstream pornography seems to suggest that we’re all doing the same Barbie-shaped fantasies. This is very interesting and probably very true—because wow, we don’t like to talk about what we’re actually doing, do we! Furthermore, she says that people are creating sexual technology when they don’t understand the sex and they don’t understand the technology—what is missing from the market is what people actually would use, would want to use. This is why the state of sexual technology at the moment is mostly not very useful.

Every human wants to sexualize every piece of technology they come across—and this is true, and it isn’t useful to us to try to slip it under the radar. I think this is what Violet said, and I don’t know if I entirely agree or disagree; also, the media loves to talk about sexual technology without any sort of critical thinking, which (Cory adds) is why we go read tinynibbles.com. (LOL!)

The oldest use of porn, Cory continues, was to turn customers on so that they would pay for play in brothels, etc. That use did not include any kind of happy ending, because of course that would mean less opportunity to ultimately sell the happy ending. I’m not sure where this fits in, but it’s clear that we need to improve our quality and (especially!) our understanding of sex, and to do this we need to talk about it.

Incredibly interesting uses for sexual tech: The computational technology that is out there is capable of responding much more quickly than previous technologies; sex is a constant negotiation of action and response, and it’s particularly useful to have tech that responds in more and more intuitive ways. An example of new technology—Cory is talking about autonomic dysreflexia. This happens in people with spinal cord injuries, where your blood vessels constrict for some reason and there is a block to the brain, so that the brain doesn’t get the right messages. And autonomic dysreflexia is triggered by vibration somehow. What he’s saying is that it’s not inconceivable to develop a vibrator that someone with a disability could use that would feed back what’s going on in the body, because of this trigger. This sort of tech could be really interesting because instead of just mediating between one person and their partner, it’s really functional to that one person in terms of connecting with their body. (I hope I got all that right! Cory talks fast!) And I don’t completely understand this, but I thought it was really interesting that he included it and seemed so excited about it!

It’s also not inconceivable, he says, especially with the bad teledildonic tech that exists now, that with a laptop and a bunch of toys, a person could have any kind of sex they want. He says later on that a lot of researchers who tackle sexual tech forget that we are all screwed up about sex. By and large, starting from scratch is what we need to be doing! So the people that he’s really excited about, they’re the ones starting from scratch and really thinking about the state of sexuality in human beings at the moment. I really agree with him on the one point—we are all screwed up and we are all keeping everything too much behind closed doors. These are things we can be talking about and understanding and they are things that can bring us together and help us relate better to ourselves, really start getting ourselves as people. Some of us are doing this, but many, many, many of us are just afraid. Which is ultimately why this post used a ‘more’ tag. (There may be future debates about this NSFW thing, and the use of the ‘more’ tag except in instances of exceedingly long posts… er… like this one.)

Kyle: “I will now present the horrible, bleak reality that is teledildonics…” (Much laughter from audience.) Kyle runs slashdong.org—obviously nsfw—and is talking about the fact that basically if you put two people together in a game, they’re going to find a way to have sex… yup! (I think he just rattled off a list of possible new porn games and said “BMXXX”—ha!) Teledildonics is really a great word. In fact, he has the audience say it all together: “Teledildonics!” If you don’t already know, this is remote technological sexuality. I’m sure you are getting some kind of understanding from the dramatic picture you’re making in your head! But if you need a little bit more, there’s a perfectly safe Wikipedia entry on the subject.

At this point Kyle shows us many toys currently available, including the talking head vibrator, which I’ve already come across online… as I shake my head and chortle… There are many things that he shows us on slides on the big screen and the audience is having a great time.

Random Kyle quote: “I cleaned it REALLY WELL.” Kyle is incredibly charismatic and funny. I really enjoy listening to him!

And so we’re looking at interfaces—really bad interfaces! and Kyle is telling us some of his personal ideas for this whole concept and getting really excited and just talking up a storm! It’s great! One of the things that he says is that instead of using sliders, instead of matching something that’s going on in a movie, you come up with patterns! You can actually program a series of actions, and any end-user can program their own grooves. Plus, you can have buddy lists of people whose grooves you like! And these grooves are probably series’ of vibrations or movements or whatever the technology is doing to make you feel good.

And Kyle says, “Sometimes people ask me, ‘well Kyle, what about personalization?’ Fuck personalization, this is science, people!”

Apparently there’s a total-teledildonics patent that keeps us from using waveforms, specifically, so we have to use audio streams to operate these other toys. Audio toys, a stream that’s already available everywhere, it’s excellent!

So now Kyle shows us some more items—the Virtual Hole, yes, it’s actually called that, and he talks about its counterpart, the Virtual Stick. (I know). The VH is the silver bowling pin he held up earlier. And there’s so much more that I didn’t quite get all of, I was enjoying myself and listening and I just don’t type nearly as fast as they all can talk! Someone mentioned biometrics, how does biometrics fit into all of this? I think it was Violet who mentioned “The Toy,” which pairs with your phone over bluetooth.

Other perspectives: And Johanna was talking about a whole different perspective on the sex tech industry, that “Maybe your point isn’t climaxing—maybe it’s building some kind of intimate bond!” And she’s talking about just using this technology to be closer to your partner, or to better understand yourself, and not necessarily using it for masturbation or orgasm, because there are so many more useful applications that people forget to talk about.

Amanda is bringing up something that she feels comes up a lot, implicitly, in what the panelists are discussing; what is the difference between sex and masturbation? What roles do intimacy and orgasm play? What counts as sex? At this point the panelists look very loathe to answer this question, because it’s the end of the panel and this is a whole new can of worms, seriously.

Part of Cory’s response: One of the first things people want to talk about when we bring up the internet and sex is whether someone is online cheating. This is technology forcing people to rethink relationships, which in itself is positive—but generally the mainstream media always asks the least interesting questions (is it cheating, is internet porn bad, and so on). We’re guilty of thinking very narrowly about sex.

Part of Johanna’s response: And ultimately, regarding the “is it sex” question, there isn’t even a final answer—it’s between you and your partner. There’s a continuum between sex and not sex. We can’t cut a hard line. Sex isn’t separate from life—something that isn’t sex can suddenly turn into sex, and vice versa!

Part of Violet’s response: A lot of the people who are designing and marketing sex tech are making things that are destined to fail because they’re based on some sort of “hetero-normal” idea of what people are doing, when that isn’t necessarily what people are actually out there doing—she used a great example that I can’t remember well enough to put down here. This is a big thing she keeps coming back to and it’s really important to me because it links in to how we talk (or not) about sex.

The floor was opened up for questions, and here are some summaries of information…

Regarding the Sybian, which you can look up yourself if you aren’t familiar with… This thing costs thousands of dollars, because it actually works, there’s a lot of history and effort that was put into doing it right. The Sybian, Violet says, gets used in porn a lot, at Kink.com, etc.; these are commercial practices. In practicality, she says, when she got a hold of one, “it sounded like an outboard motor in my apartment!” She said something entertaining along the lines of, I’m thinking, I’m not going near that thing! And one of the other panelists mentioned that the Thrillhammer is pretty much a Sybian with a souped up motor.

Someone mentioned a man named Crumb, who apparently draws his own pornography. I like this concept a lot and bet a lot of talented people do this very thing.

There was quite a lot more, and I did record the panel, so I may post more about this later. If you’ve read this far, thank you. :}

Take a look at…
~ Violet Blue
~ Cory Silverberg
~ Kyle Machulis
~ Johanna Brewer
~ Amanda Williams

• Limit your services.
• Don’t be a flake.
• Document what makes you successful.
  
• Don’t (EVER) trust your brain.
  
• Don’t let clients follow up on YOU.
  By the time they contact you… it’s too late. It’s like the oil light. EVEN if the update is that you made no progress… it’s still preferable.
  
• Don’t let your colleagues follow up on you, either.
  
• Get addicted to strangers.
  
• Always be teaching.
  
• Cheap is sexy. (Yeaaaaah…!)
  
• You didn’t get ripped off.
  You let yourself get ripped off. The project should be managed well enough that a bad egg doesn’t escape with more than a small fraction of the project’s worth.
  
• Be firm with your clients.
  Fight for what you feel is right—mutual respect is the result.
  
• If we settle for nothing now…
  ...we’ll settle for nothing later.
  
• Make it their idea. ;}
  
• Don’t bill hourly.
  James Archer doesn’t believe in billing by the hour—get paid not for your time, but for getting it done RIGHT.
  
• But – Track your time!
  You will learn a lot of surprising information about yourself.
  
• Never deliver crap.
  
• Never work anonymously.
  If you do work, you deserve to be recognized for that work.
  
• Use the right tools!
  
• Be different.
  
• Write your company constitution.
  
• Prioritize passion.
  
• Tell it like it is.
  
• Do what’s right.
  
• Plan for the future.
  
• Plan your work and work your plan.
  
• Put employees first.
  Customers should be a solid second.
  
• Invest every dollar!
  
• Use solid contracts.
  

Take a look at…
~ James Archer

Ha! We’re talking about the Roomba! A new product called the Create is actually like the Roomba without the vacuum part—it’s just a robotics platform to play with. So people have been fooling with the Roomba. Someone mounted a hamster ball on the top, no way he means the hamster controls the direction of the Roomba… does he?!

Apparently Ambient Devices released the schematics for their Ambient Orb, asked that people build their own and let them know how it went! That’s uncommon, and nifty.

It’s funny, if you get your hardware laser-etched, it sounds like it voids the warranty. “When you have a laser, everything starts looking laserable…” They’re laser-etching food, crazy bastards! (I love it.) Yes, I did say FOOD! Sushi-related food, whee!

Laser-etching, wikis, podcasting… Where are we now? AH! The walk-in music was actually tracks from the podcast, Limor just said! Score! I am pleased.

These folks sell things on Etsy too—interesting! And Limor showed a page—this page—where it’s possible to make a little portable usb power source… I wonder if this would work similarly with firewire… I could USE one of these…

Limor is talking about the Samsung guy who wanted to know if they could put something like her cell jammer in their phone to block only other phones… she was explaining that it was illegal… and Phil goes, “They didn’t care, they’re like, we can get lobbyists…”

Don’t throw away your old iPod! Apparently you can replace the battery and the hard drive and poof, you have new hardware. Or something! I don’t even CARE! I’m sleepy and I love it here. Now if only I had a hotel room down here, so I could take a nap…

Also, Limor pronounces her name with the emphasis on the second syllable—L’mor, even. Also, she’s way cute. Man, cute geek girls just push all my buttons!

Take a look at…
~ Make: Magazine
~ Adafruit Industries
~ Limor Fried’s Podcast
~ Limor Fried
~ Make @ Blip.tv!
~ Austin Maker Faire in October – I wanna go!

I have a short attention span. Do you have a short attention span? What? “It’s much easier to steer a moving ship… than to steer a ship that’s still in port.”

“The reality of the situation is, we’re screwing around every day…” “We tend to be restarters and not revisers.” Paint all the walls in your bathroom with the paint that turns them into chalkboards. Hee! The Book: A place for holding ideas that we’ll probably never do. It’s full of one-line ideas, like the million dollar porn page (which thankfully we didn’t do, he says). A number of other oddball ideas. ;}

The point is institutionalize and authenticate this kind of thinking…

“I’m not writing this down to remember it later. I’m writing it down to remember it now.”

We have Jim Coudal and Brendan Dawes. Brendan Dawes has a couple of books out that look really good. I went and added them to Amazon; Drag, Slide, Fade—and Analog In, Digital Out. Now Brendan is talking about dividends, which he says aren’t just about the money. They’re about reputation, PR, experimentation. Brendan is a nifty Flash dude!

I find my attention drifting… what does THAT mean?

“The less Play-Doh on screen, the slower the movie goes…” Okay so Brendan is very funny. He’s talking about building a useless, silly little project in no time at all that all of a sudden millions of people are looking at…

“They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” ~ Edgar Allan Poe.

Take a look at…
~ Coudal Partners
~ Jewelboxing
~ “The Show” – ?
~ Verse by Voice