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Unstructured Thoughts by Taylor Davidson

Unordered ThoughtsJanuary 7

Links and bits of thoughts captured from more than a week offline; even though they are unordered, there is still an underlying theme tying them together. Can you guess the theme?

• Jan Chipchase: Tokyo Driving School:

  Imagine never having to take a test in your life ever again - not at school, university, in the work place.

  Instead assessment is ongoing, everywhere - continuous learning pushed to its il/logical extreme. The authority required to start task X or access service Y assessed in real time drawing on a life’s worth of data pushed through a filter of you in the here and now.

  … If you’ve spent time in a large organisation these past few years you’ve probably brushed up against that early 21th century notion of ‘life long learning’ - that it’s never too late to re skill, retool, learn something new. We are undergoing a fundamental change in the way we relate to objects and the way (connected) objects relate to us. ‘Life long learning’ is no longer about you in relation to what you can offer to achieve you potential - but rather the systems’ ability to learn about you over the course of it, and your lifetime.

Michael Lewkowitz: Opportunity ‘09: Micro-messaging Based Collaboration:My focus heading into 2009 is micro-messaging based collaboration. From where I sit I think it will hav

Bring on 2009January 1

Beyond | New Mexico, USA | Dec 2008

As I mentioned on my other blog, 2008 didn’t exactly turn out how I thought it would.

It was not the path I planned, but it’s the path that’s shaped me into who I am today and will be tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to 2009; I’m looking forward to our conversations, to sharing ideas and learning from you. I’m also excited to start executing on some very interesting projects.

What are you looking forward to in 2009? And how I can I help?

Organizing Past Thoughts: The Photography BusinessDecember 30 2008

I’ll return to the road trip and the thought pieces shortly, but before we turned into the new year I wanted to take a minute to point out some past thoughts on the photography business.

I write a lot about photography and the photography business over at my other blog, Taylor Davidson: Photography, and since it’s difficult for new readers to dig into past content I’ve picked out the primary articles I’ve written on the topic in 2008. More articles are highlighted on TaylorDavidson.com: Start Here.

Five Lessons
Five Lessons on how photographers can take advantage of the opportunities in the changing photography industry:

• Introduction: Five Lessons: How Photographers can Create New Business Models

  Technology has democratized access to the tools of production and distribution, leading to a surge of creators, squeezing the middle class of the industry; the long tail of photographers are getting squeezed.

  We are seeing a massive mismatch of supply and demand; photographers have flooded the market with an oversupply of images created and distributed using mediums and based on economic

Drive-By Non-Consulting: Scottsdale, AZ and Los Angeles, CADecember 29 2008

Continuing the cross-country trip to meet entrepreneurs, investors, photographers and “change agents”…

Scottsdale, AZ

Is there a Scottsdale / Phoenix rivalry? Is there a dividing line that hard-core residents of the towns refuse to cross?

On my way from Dallas to Los Angeles I stopped over in Scottsdale, AZ to meet Brandon Zeuner (bzkicks on Twitter) and Ryan Swagar (ryanswagar on Twitter). Both are experienced technology entrepreneurs in the Phoenix area.

Throughout my trip I had depended on friends to virtually introduce me to interesting people in the cities along my path, however for Phoenix I had to reach out without an introduction. Brandon has always stuck out to me on Twitter as an interesting entrepreneur in Phoenix, and I was lucky that he was open to meeting a complete stranger for lunch.

Among their many past and current projects, we spent most of our time discussing Venture 51, a project that strikes close to my thinking about venture capital and entrepreneurship. Venture 51 is a v

Confirmed: Venture Capital for Long Tail Entrepreneurs will be a SXSW Core ConversationDecember 22 2008

Last Friday SXSW added “Venture Capital for Long Tail Entrepreneurs” to the Core Conversation schedule. Obviously I’m looking forward to leading the discussion; I have been thrashing around the topic in blog posts and conversations with friends for the better part of a year. Thanks goes to Ethan Bauley for originally suggesting I submit the idea to SXSW.

“Venture Capital for Long Tail Entrepreneurs” is an idea that describes the need for a fundamentally different model for for creating and funding micro-businesses in the Long Tail of the economy as our society shifts towards a more personal, collaborative and distributed system of value creation.

I’ve continued to see the themes crop in a wide variety of conversations with friends, entrepreneurs and investors through the year and during my travels; there are a number of people that have seen the same gap and are pursuing a wide variety of approaches throughout the US. As we’ve discussed before, Y-Combinator, TechStars and Launchbox Digital are three obvious examples, but they are merely one approach, applying the same invest