1. The design team we had partnered with delivered the stylesheet and HTML this morning. The HTML will be merged with server side code later this week.
2. We are 80% feature complete for the first release. Few features like moderation capability, email alerts, admin features etc. and being added.
Brandjacking is the process of creating or aggregating content around a brand and then charging the brand for ceding control.
I did not coin the phrase. I first heard it on Lisa Barone’s article titled “Seth Godin Tries Out Brandjacking”. It all went down when Seth Godin launched his project, Brands in Public. Under this project he aimed to aggregate content about a brand on it own page. Think of it as an automated wikipedia like page which contains articles, tweets, blog posts etc. about the brand. Sounds like a good idea, isn’t it? The only problem here is that the brands don’t opt-in and they have to pay $400 a month to get complete control over the page.
Is this a wrong thing to do? According to Seth Godin, these conversations are happening all over the internet anyway. All he is trying to do is aggregate it and put it on one page. Further he believes that he is doing a service to the brand by giving them insight into what the internet is discussing about their brand. But according to Lisa Barone and other high profile bloggers, the intent behind this is not as noble as Seth Godin would like you to believe. First, the brands did not ask for this. And second they are being held to ransom.
Techcrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic put it best: “We were going to reach out to Godin yesterday, but instead figured we could write this story by aggregating what everybody in the world thinks of Squidoo, and then asking him to pay us $400 to remove the parts he may not agree with.”
Seth Godin has since reversed his position on Brands in Public and made the system opt-it. I give him points for listening to his critics and taking action quickly.
However, this does not mean that owning your business is easy. When you own it, there is no “off” switch. You are constantly working. You don’t have vacation days, sick days, holidays etc. Also you will be taking care of your health insurance which is not cheap. But from the poll it is evident that despite all the hardship, the satisfaction of working for yourself adds to your wellbeing.
Read what redditers have to say.
About the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index™
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is the first and largest survey of its kind, with 1,000 calls a day, seven days a week. It is the official statistic for Well-Being in
Update: Here is a post by Sarah Lacy where she says that we didn't see any world changing idea at TC50.
Few days back, after reviewing and researching over a dozen ideas we finally narrowed in on the one that we want to pursue. It follows all the principles from our post earlier titled “Foundation for a startup idea”. We are not yet at a point where we can go into much detail. But we hope to have an alpha version up and running in about three weeks. We are already hard at work trying to put the site together.
Here is the idea: We will connect you with others in your city
We also got hold of a cool domain name. Well, we think its cool, but we might be a bit biased. We would like to know what you think.
