Sophia Perl of Wisdom

It’s important to connect with the Silicon Valley tech community

The Silicon Valley area is based on the principles of cooperation and collective innovation. Really, this means that techies from other companies interact with one another frequently and even job hop every 2-3 years in order to gain more skills and experience. In my personal opinion, I think that techies are doing themselves a disservice by not getting involved with the local tech community. Imagine if you were in Nebraska or Ohio, you wouldn’t find such an innovative, entrepreneurial environment there like you would here. If you don’t take advantage of what SV has to offer in terms of a vibrant tech community, go live somewhere else because you’re paying too much for cost of living.

Local companies have a great opportunity to tap into this rich community in many ways. Here are my suggestions for managers of tech employees:
• Recognize external involvement during annual employee review time
• Be open to new ideas and technologies
• Hire more experienced candidates from the local area, not just new college graduates and internal transfers
• “Walk the walk” - interact with managers from other companies
• Cultivate an environment that encourages your employees to build marketable skills that other companies desire
• Sponsor and promote local tech community events

The goal of your business

So a few buddies of mine always talk about their business ideas, some are good, some are so so.  Just recently, I’ve been asking what is your business goal - is it to make a $h*t load of money or to just make enough money to support the current salary?  This is important to know because the strategy (marketing, sales, start-up, etc) of the business will be different.  For instance, if the entrepreneur wants to make a lot of money, then she should really think about the sustaining competitive edge.  People are attracted to good ideas, so expect competitors to come out of the woodwork or even expect competitors to already be there, but just unknown to you.  If the entrepreneur wants to make some income to replace existing salary, then I would argue that sustaining competitive edge is not as important (but still important) and she should do some analysis on whether the market will make room for a small fish.  Another related topic, some people talk about having the next best thing because the service/product will be offered cheaper (I hear this a lot and have been guilty of doing the same thing).  Here’s the problem, you can offer services/products cheaper fine, I get that, but how come you can offer it cheaper?  Are you cutting into your profits?  Do you have a systematic distribution model (e.g., Wal-Mart)?  Be sure to think this out because the reason that you can offer your service/product cheaper is the competitive advantage, not just the price.

Creating custom one-off t-shirts is a good option for bare bones promotion

A few days ago, I was looking for a custom t-shirt website to make a few one-off t-shirts for fun. There are a lot of companies out there such as UberPrints.com and Zazzle.com. This is great for anyone who wants to promote his/her business without having to print up 100s of t-shirts at a time.  I’m stilling waiting for my t-shirt to come in the mail, so I’ll let you know if they are of good quality.  Then I happen to run into CNN’s website about t-shirts. You can purchase a t-shirt with a current CNN headline including the date and time of that headline. That’s pretty neat. Maybe I’ll buy one.

Green Dell laptop at WITI 2007 conference

This is a bonus post since I tend not to post during the weekends, but I thought it might be worth mentioning.  If you are a female reading my post and you were at the WITI 2007 conference in which a female won the raffle for a green Dell laptop, well that was me.  Funny how things just happen when you least expect it.

Glam.com’s Spring Mix Party night was fun, but random

First, thank you to Terry from Kineda.com for getting my friend and I on the RSVP list. OK, about the party last night. It was a celebration of Glam.com’s acquisition of StyleMob.com. While we were waiting outside in line, I met a line producer from ThreadBanger.com, an indie fashion website. She was holding a camcorder and I was curious. Apparently, she flew in from New York to capture the event, cool. When we finally got inside, the place was packed which is a good sign of a good party. However about 45 minutes into the party, the food and drinks were not so flowing like the invite said. The open bar turned into a cash bar and the only food that I got to eat were tater tots. I do like tater tots though. The party had a really short street fashion show with the runway on a set of stairs and gave out a goodie bag with the picapp.com logo. I also ran into Pete Cashmore, CEO of Mashable.com, again (before I ran into him at SF Beta). He’s always a nice person to speak with. For the rest of the night, my friend and I ended up sitting at a booth with some random (in the sense that we didn’t know them) girls. They were fun and we danced until it was time for some late night Thai food, yummy!

On a side note, I’m starting to notice a trend of startups throwing parties. I love it! If you’re a startup and need people to attend, send me an email and I’ll post it under my events section and if time allows I’ll attend also. It’s fun to live in Silicon Valley.

Why do fruit picking robots have to look so scary?

Did you know that Japan produces 2/3s of the world’s robots?  I’m reading up on robots and agricultural and some of these robots look very scary. It reminds me of that evil character in one of the recent Spiderman movies with the long arms. If I was a farmer and saw this on my farm, I would have a heart attack.

Some open questions about robots to consider. Does it make sense for a robot to be the next best alternative over humans or a set of other technologies? For instance, can a robot do it better, the same, or worse? How much does a robot cost in comparison to human labor? Does the task require a few robots or many robots? How long should the robot operate when it’s on? So my question out to the folks, in what way ways can robots help today’s fruit farmers?