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The Growing Ex-Amazon Club and Why It’s a Good ThingYesterday

Call it a coincidence, but over the past few days I have spent a lot of time with folks who used to work for Amazon but are now out doing new things. It all started with Jason Kilar, the CEO of Hulu, who was a keynote speaker at our NewTeeVee Live conference. Then last night I met with Dave Schapell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, an e-marketplace for teachers. And this morning I had coffee with Jeff Lawson, co-founder of Twilo.

My buddy Dave McClure was the one who pointed out that they are all part of the Ex-Amazon club. Just like the rising number of ex-Google entrepreneurs I wrote about last year, these guys are leaving top jobs at one of the best technology companies in the U.S. Here is a list of just some of those names, their current companies and their previous positions at the e-tailer:

Fast-growing mobile social network mig33 adds themes, languagesYesterday

Mig33, which offers services like instant messaging and cheap calls on mobile phones, is launching a new version today that makes its services more customizable, international and social network-like. It’s also releasing numbers showing impressive growth.

The Burlingame, Calif. company is less well known, at least in the United States, than social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, or even mobile-specific social services like Loopt. But by targeting lower-end phones, the company has become quite popular internationally. Since January, mig33’s user numbers have doubled from 9 million to 18 million. (Back then, chief executive Steve Goh told us he wanted to make head

Some Practical Advice For Getting ProfitableYesterday

Ted Rheingold at Dogster has a great post up titled 10 Tips for Building a Profitable Business.  My favorite is #4: Spend at least 50% of your time selling.

Many technology companies assume if they built great product it will sell itself yet that almost never happens. Usually we’ve found that incorrect assumption is a rationalization of people who love building product, but secretly loathe the business side of running a business. Such a strategy is a great way to lose a lot of money. So constantly ask yourself, are we spending 50% of our time selling? I bet you’ll always realize you’re focusing too much on the product and not enough on finding customers that want it. (Of course the inverse is true. If you love selling you need to make sure you spend at least 50% of your time building product or your sales effort will be for naught.)

In most companies, too few people sell too little of the time.  If you are a member of the senior executive team of a company that is trying to become profitable, are you spending 50% of your time selling and generating revenue?  If not, why not?  And, if you have a board of directors, are your board members selling also?

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College Stops Giving Students New Email Accounts: Start Of New Trend?November 20

p0.jpgOfficials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.

Sponsor

Starting next year, freshman enrolled at Boston College won't be given an actual email account complete with login and inbox, just an email address. This address, in the format of johnsmith@bc.edu will simply forward mail to the student's already established inbox, be it Gmail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, or whatever else they may be using.

The college reached this decision after first looking into outsourcing their email to the cloud. They considered offering from both Google and Microsoft, but eventually decided against both in lieu of the new forwarding option.

A Smart Decision

While the Boston College decision may h


Lively no moreNovember 19

Shared by charleshudson
wow, that was both fast and unexpected.

In July we launched Lively in Google Labs because we wanted users to be able to interact with their friends and express themselves online in new ways. Google has always been supportive of this kind of experimentation because we believe it's the best way to create groundbreaking products that make a difference to people's lives. But we've also always accepted that when you take these kinds of risks not every bet is going to pay off.

That's why, despite all the virtual high fives and creative rooms everyone has enjoyed in the last four and a half months, we've decided to shut Lively down at the end of the year. It has been a tough decision, but we want to ensure that we prioritize our resources and focus more on our core search, ads and apps business. Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams.

We'd encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms.

Posted by The Lively Team
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