LaunchBox Digital 2009 Applications are Live!

I already wrote about the value of the LaunchBox Digital incubator for myself and Luc here. It's a great program, and I highly recommend it.

The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well at LaunchBox Digital, the Washington DC based business incubator and early stage investment firm. I participated in last summer's LaunchBox08 program and my other LaunchBox08 colleagues and I continue to push our businesses forward. To date, six of the LaunchBox08 portfolio companies have raised additional funding totaling approximately $6 million. In addition, we are all seeing some great adoption statistics, as we learn from our users and refine our offerings.

Building upon its initial success, LaunchBox Digital is now accepting applications for LaunchBox09, its second annual business accelerator program, which will begin on May 18, 2009 and culminate in Demo Days the first week of August 2009. Applications are available at www.launchboxdigital.com.

Up to ten successful applicants will each receive up to $20,000 in seed investment and help in incorporation. Then, during 12 intensive weeks in Washington, D.C., they will gain from the day-to-day advice and guidance offered by the firm's founders and advisors, as each team works to develop or advance an initial product/beta, craft its business plan and launch its business. At the end of the program, each company will be given an opportunity to present their business to angel investors and venture capital firms, strategic partners, bloggers, and the media on the East and West Coasts.

LaunchBox Digital provides entrepreneurs an accelerated path to getting early-stage businesses critical early financial support, as well as advice and practical guidance on how to best bring their ideas to market or gain traction for products already in the market. Founded by technology industry veterans Sean Greene, John McKinley and Julius Genachowski, and supported by a roster of world-class advisors who have built successful technology businesses, LaunchBox Digital is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs navigate that first crucial year of operations, and succeed. LaunchBox Digital is also supported by sponsors who add tremendous value to LaunchBox09, and provide participants with world-class services that would not otherwise be available to such new companies. The LaunchBox09 sponsors include Cooley Godward Kronish LLP, Viget Labs, iStrategyLabs and Square 1 Bank.

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Why I love BarCamps

I think barcamps are great. I've been to a few in about a year and heard about tons more. What's a barcamp? Well, it's the ulitmate unconference. Find Wikipedia's definition below:

BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats.

In the DC-Baltimore area over the past year, there have been several barcamps, such as SocialDevCamp, PodCampDC, WidgetDevCamp, BarCampDC, HealthCamp, eDemocracyCamp, RubyDCamp, beCamp, etc.

There's great energy at barcamps to meet and greet people that are interested in learning and contributing to the tech community. As there are three basic rules to barcamp:

1. Participating means being ready to present something/anything.
2. Have fun.
3. And no other rules, because it's a barcamp.

That's pretty much it. I say this all to motivate anyone in the DC/Baltimore area to attend SocialDevCampEast on November 1, if you're interested in learning more. Especially, if you missed this weekend's BarCamp, as it was featured in The Washington Post.

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RIP Web 2.0, Long Live Web 2.0

Well, there has been a lot of chatter in all the major tech and startup news sources, that we have reached the end of an era. Web startups that are high on nonsensical names, non-existent profit models, and goofy web design are now a thing of the past. Most will die within a year, and many of the ones standing will be charging a fee for their services. Others will simply outlive their competition with their bank account.

But that isn't all bad. Of course, most startups will have to cut back on their expenses Guess what? Marketing and advertising are the first to go. From there, any non-essential perks and technology usage will soon follow. If the echo chamber of financial wisdom is right, then we'll have many years to claw back to our current levels of startup activity and funding. Of course, they aren't right sometimes, leading to these financial crises. The important point is that a small recession of startups is probably good, because the noise from so many sites basically doing the same thing will begin to die down. From there, you can expect some new companies to emerge as web portals during that time, besides AOL, Yahoo, Google, and MSN.

As for us, we'll be fine. We'll work harder than ever, and be even more focused under the pressure. It'll help us to focus on the most important aspects of our products, as we continue to turn the fly wheel.

For everyone else, hold on to your butts, it's going to be a rough ride. Do well at your current job. Save as much money as possible for anything that could go wrong.

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Learning About Happiness from Kanye West

At the beginning of the summer, I saw the Glow in the Dark tour stop in Raleigh, North Carolina. Kanye West performed all of his hits in a very interesting story style without interacting with the audience at all. It tended to elevate his emerging superstar status. At the end of the concert, people at the gates of the auditorium handed out "Thank You and You're Welcome", a book by Kanye West.

There was one classic page about happiness. Basically, he put forth two ways to happiness. Your first option is to be happy with what you have. Your second option to have the will to change your circumstances to be in line with the first option, if you're no okay with the first option. In other words, be happy, or make yourself happy. Most importantly, don't complain about not being happy.

Unfortunately, most people that aren't happy are always happy to complain about why. They spend more time rationalizing their unhappiness rather than actually doing anything about changing their circumstances. I'll call that Class I Unhappiness. These are people that complain about being unhappy.

Class II Unhappiness is spending our energy on have-to's instead of want-to's. "I have to do this and that" versus "I want to do this and that". Our generation does go a little overboard with instant gratification, but I think it's warranted. We're quickly finding that biding time and doing things that we have to do makes us boring and more susceptible to catastrophic life decisions, such as drug addictions, etc. We should all shape our lives to do what we want, not what we have to do. Of course, there are repercussions for this behavior, but happiness requires some courage.

Class III Unhappiness is really about thinking unhappy thoughts. I would characterize it as having lowered expectations of your own happiness. In that train of thought, everything is happy, but you truly believe otherwise. If you're reading this blog post, and think that being happy is unrealistic or unattainable, then you're a Class III Unhappy.

The answer to any of the three classes of unhappiness is to have the will to change them. You have to change your words (Class I), your actions (Class II), and your thoughts (Class III) to be truly happy. Most unhappy people just suffer from cowardice about seeking happiness, because unhappiness becomes a comfort zone to reside in. It's scary to think about a world without unhappiness, when you're always unhappy. Think about what a world of air travel would seem to people a few centuries ago. They'd be scared of what they didn't envision or see for themselves too.

Take a page, literally, out of Kanye West's book, and change the circumstances of you life to be happy rather than happy to complain, act, and think about it.

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Blaming Things Other than People

Recently there's been a rash of coverage in local and national news about blaming culture, religion, and everything else but the person responsible for doing something criminal or otherwise. Whenever there's something in the news about some religious or cultural affiliation of a criminal, people are quick to blame a culture or religion. But the nature of human being is to always excuse another human being. I don't know how I feel about that.

Seldom, is anything other than an individual to blame for their own actions? It's a strain in American and Western culture that all too often blames things other than people for their own actions. It's the culture that leads to gun deaths in the US. There's no other excuse than to blame the criminals that choose to use guns. We're almost too obsessed with finding the big picture trends, that we just don't say, "Hey, this guy is ridiculous and quite stupid enough on his own. His culture or religion is just an excuse to do this."

History shows that many of the most of worst mega murderers of the last several centuries used religion and culture to prosecute their crimes against humanity, not vice versa. If you have enough instances of using culture and religion to be violent, then it's hard to pinpoint a culture/religion for that violent character. On the contrary, it's the construct of religion and culture that leads to its manipulation for violence.

I wish others knew that and didn't get so judgmental about culture and religion, but instead about instances of personal character and actions. That's something to be scrutinized, not a culture or a religion which cannot be objectively defined.

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