To those of you who have suggested that I get into the lucrative slam poetry business… I say “uh…no.”  Ironically enough, while in business school, I did some work very briefly with an Slam Poetry startup, but they expected me to work for the promise of equity which I thought (correctly) was worth just about nothing whatsoever.

But thanks to all of you who dropped me private notes about my treatise on entrepreneurship.  I had one of those days the other day when I was seriously questioning my own sanity and I had to get the thoughts down on paper.

An intersting datapoint in my blog… when I started podcasting because of my broken finger, traffic dropped off bigtime.  I resume typing a few days ago, and we’re back up — at about 5x the traffic I had during the few weeks of podcasting.  One of my semi-regular readers (which I know because he’s just about the only user I ever see of Windows Live’s Blog Reader) suggested the other day that text is a better medium because it can be easily browsed and it is largely undetectable at work.  Perhaps.  All I know is that podcasts take a lot longer to produce.  So I probably won’t be doing that much for the time being until I find a better distribution mechanism like the iTunes and/or Zune podcast directories.  Blogs are definitely not the answer for distributing podcasts… not unless you are insanely popular.

The Notice Technologies update

We at Notice Technologies continue to see a lot of consulting opportunity out there in the social media arena… especially helping enterprises use Web 2.0 and social media.  I just wrapped up a project with Microsoft to build one of their first truly Web 2.0 implementations of Sharepoint — and the project has been well-received.  It inspired my post on tags, articles, RSS and the enterprise, because I truly think discoverability is the only thing that matters when making employees more productive.  The tools exist today to dramatically improve communication within the enterprise, but they admittedly need a lot of customization to work properly.

We also see a lot of what I call “bottomfeeders” looking for unreasonably inexpensive consulting help.  I’m talking about people who want you to shake the world for say $500-$1,000.  While I can appreciate people wanting to get things done for as little as possible, it can be a bit insulting to make a reasonable quote only to hear that the client’s expectation was 15-20% of your good price.  It’s sortof the unprofitable “business you don’t want.”

Ho-hum… it’s one of the growing pains of a startup.  You have to work with a few bottomfeeders for each reasonable client you get.  You never know who you are dealing with when you get started.

On the application development front, we have our first paying customer, Land Rover Austin!!  We’ve been working behind the scenes with them on the product, which 1) is currently in Beta, and 2) we’ll talk more about later once we work out a few kinks.  What I can say is that our product solves a *huge* need and we know that their problems are fairly consistent across other businesses like Land Rover.  Vague enough?  Good.

We have peeled back development on Facebook for now for a variety of reasons, some of which I’ve discussed on this blog before.  The MinutesNotice Beta is mothballed for the time being but will be resurrected at an appropriate time soon.  The good news is that we are using some of the core technology we developed for other purposes that are proving to be more lucrative in the short-term.  We do intend to pick up MinutesNotice again soon, and we have another Facebook idea that is on the backburner.  But all told, I’d say it is pretty accurate that we’re moving more in the direction of “social apps” and away from any one social network in particular.

We have a few other opportunities just sortof hanging out… we’ll see if anything emerges in these other areas.  But the net of it is that we’re seeing significant traction from businesses like Land Rover Austin, and we’re hot on the trail!

Onward!