Diary: An entrepreneur’s trek to the State Capitol to support tax relief for startups

kevinminiter11

OLYMPIA, Wash. — I blink and catch my breath.  Wait, where am I?!  Why am I in the hot seat staring at Washington’s House Technology and Economic Development Committee?  How did I get to sit next to the esteemed Bellevue Mayor Conrad Lee and Redmond City Councilman John Stilin?  The pounding in my heart subsides… Read More…

Visual language: Stagecraft in Obama’s Google Hangout

obamapull

The President may be a master of the teleprompter, but Google+ hangouts ain’t television. You can replay yesterday’s hangout with Barack Obama here, though sometimes the visual language of a video event reads louder when you freeze the frames. So here is a collage of screenshots from the Valentine’s Day Google hangout with President Obama…. Read More…

Commentary: We need more startup marketing minds (a.k.a. Full-Stack Marketers)

stack

Three years ago I was at a dinner and an entrepreneur was telling me and the VP of Marketing of a successful startup how there weren’t enough marketing folks in Seattle. This VP of Marketing disagreed and said there are plenty of marketing folks, but not the ones startups need. If you go to Twitter… Read More…

Be Very Afraid: Notes from a ‘Data Privacy Day’ Town Hall

dpdeng

Happy Data Privacy Day. Or maybe another way to think of it is Happy Halloween in January. After attending this week’s Data Privacy Day Town Hall meeting at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), sponsored by the Online Trust Alliance (OTA), you’d be right to be afraid, very afraid. Data Privacy Day is an annual event… Read More…

Sunday marks new era in cellphone carrier market power

iphone-small5555

New cellphones purchased after this Saturday Jan. 25, 2013 can be unlocked only with the permission of the carrier; phones purchased before Sunday are exempt from this restriction and have been since 2006. Back in October, the U.S. Copyright Office filed a new decision on unlocked phones in the Federal Register. The Copyright Office is… Read More…

Untangling Justice: The case of Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz

Commentary: I spent much of Saturday trying to reconcile two very different approaches to justice meted out by the Obama Administration. The first is old (mid-December) news: British bank HSBC launders money for at least a decade and is fined four weeks earnings. I learned about it Friday from The Daily Show. Blatant laundering, moving “tainted… Read More…

Commentary: Does shopping online mean we aren’t farting around anymore?

amznfresh

I had a baby and I found in the first few weeks of her life, the things I couldn’t get done online didn’t get done (sorry hair). My early days as a parent were spent sleeping, trying to sleep or wishing I was sleeping. And somewhere in between managing a butt that was not my… Read More…

Legal lessons from Amazon’s ‘noncompete’ battle with Google

amzngoog

As Geekwire reported last week, a federal judge in Seattle has pretty much rejected Amazon’s recent attempt to restrict what a former Amazon Web Services sales exec might do in his new job at Google. Amazon had been asking the judge to enforce the full scope of the noncompete covenants that the exec, Daniel Powers,… Read More…

Q&A: OfferUp’s Nick Huzar on startup lessons from facing off with a rhino

huzar-nextcast1

OfferUp CEO Nick Huzar knows you have a bunch of stuff in your garage, and he wants to help you sell it. With a history in startups and a passion for solving big problems, Nick shares his ideas on simplicity and “the rhino principle” on the latest episode of Nextcast. “I like to build and… Read More…

Q&A: Gatherball’s Paul Watts on how his startup survived a big pivot

Nextcast's Jeff Dickey interviews Paul Watts of Gatherball

Gatherball co-founder Paul Watts has hung around startups for a long time, working as a software engineer at companies like WildTangent and WildSeed. And yet he still says there’s no feeling like having people wanting to provide a hug for the software that you create. “That’s what drives me every day,” says Watts. In the latest… Read More…