Orrin Edenfield

Instead of leading with new technology, the studios lead with litigation, legislation and lobbying. (Imagine if the $110 million/year spent on lobbying went to disruptive innovation.)

Great read on the history of the movie/music industry's fight with technology and how Congress has gotten pulled into the middle of it.

But there isn’t a clear path in increasing analytical capacity, and that’s what goes wanting.

This goes right along with something seen for years. IT for the sake of IT rather than IT investment for the sake of returning value to the business. There is little point in setting up a Hadoop cluster and storing 200 TB of data if there is no plan on using that 200 TB of data for a business use and you have the appropriate man-power (however little or much is required) to extract the value.

If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue. At Amazon we like things to work in five to seven years. We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

Eric Baldeschwieler, Keynote speaker at Apache Lucene Eurocon 2011 in Barcelona last week, predicts that 50% of the world’s data will be stored on Hadoop within 5 years

Interesting article on the key role search (Lucene/Solr) plays in a Big Data architecture.

Why does social intelligence emerge as the make-or-break leadership skill set? For one, leadership is the art of accomplishing goals through other people.

Something I find hard at times but I think I am getting better with as I gain more experience and insight into how others approach problems.

This is what the rest of the world has been waiting for. I am looking forward to using this device.

A survey by Citigroup showed the primary inhibiter to tablet purchases among consumers was the price, and most struggling would-be iPad manufacturers, like Motorola and Research in Motion, cannot afford shrink margins to undercut the iPad.

While the cost to manufacture the Amazon tablet is not yet known, Amazon itself is one of the few companies that can even afford to sell a device at a loss to firmly plant its platform. It is expecting $10 billion in revenue in the current quarter.

Yes, I will spend $250 that gets me 90-95% of what an iPad does at $500. I think there are many of us out there looking forward to this Amazon.

1) Make the commitment. You need to decide to be an entrepreneur and leave the traditional path behind. A good friend of mine, who has built a $400M company, once told me that choosing to be an entrepreneur, deciding to give up the seemingly safe employer-employee world, is like disengaging from the matrix. Once you have experienced reality, you never want to go back.

2) Find a problem, then solve it. There are two types of businesses --“pain” and “pleasure.” “Pain” businesses have a higher success rate because they address more urgent problems. Venture out to address a problem that is personal, that you care about, that you would love to solve.

3) Think big. You can never build what you cannot imagine, so to build a business that has big impact, you have to believe you can do it from the start. You come at the problem with a calm confidence. There is no reason to scream “We can do it!” because you just know it; it’s inevitable. Whatever is stopping you for really believing you can do what your business plan says you can do, dissect it, extract it, and throw it away.

4) You can’t do it alone. There are two types of people: big-idea people and get-it-done people. Very few of us can do both. Be honest with yourself, decide which type you are, then find (hire or partner with) someone who complements you.

5) You must do it alone. Entrepreneurial journeys are lonely. When I launched my consulting business I spent every day for three weeks alone at my computer, working an Excel database I had built of 300 prospective clients, sending 100 emails a day, trying to get my first project. Even after you’ve gotten your business going and have built a team, you will find yourself alone. Leadership, after all, is having no one else to ask.

6) Manage risk. Most ventures fail because they run out of money. So never forget “DROOM”--Don’t Run Out of Money. Live by that motto. Calculate what you will need in the worst-case scenario and make sure you have enough. I do this every week now for my business, and I have not hit a cash crunch since.

7) Learn to lead. You will reach a point at which you must shift from managing to leading. This means setting a vision and communicating it. It means making promises (“We will get there”) and keeping them.

8) Learn to sell. This is my favorite. All innovators are sales people. They are selling every day--to investors, to employees, to suppliers, to customers. By convincing everyone that the iPod will change the world, Steve Jobs makes it so. Yet no business school I know of teaches sales! Study the sales process by reading books like SPIN Selling. Get practice by, for example, volunteering to raise funds for your favorite cause. But most importantly, find your passion. If you really believe your product and company and you share it passionately, you will become a magnet.

9) Persist. If you are willing to persist through the tough times, you have a much better chance of succeeding. Develop stubbornness.

10) Play the game for life. Don’t just do this for the money; do it to realize who you are, to create the life you are here to live. One of my favorite quotes from the book reads “Entrepreneurship...isn’t just about solving a problem, building a venture, managing risk, or making money. It’s about having a positive impact on the world, making the most of the gifts you’ve been given, and realizing your full potential as a human being.”

Good stuff if you are an entrepreneur yourself or desire the entrepreneurship spirit in any other job.