It seems like the choice was made to raise the IPO price to $38 per share which would give the private equity a chance to cash in from the public. To my math, $10 per share times 388M shares offered at the IPO is a pretty big number. ($3,880,000,000) The $5M penalty for undue influence is not much in comparison. The underwriting commission on an extra $3.8 Billion can probably cover the penalty.

The bigger problem to me is that there are really two markets now, the “pre-public” market for insiders, and the “public” market. The choice is really between two losing propositions. Do you invest at the private equity stage with none of the regulatory protection for investors, or do you wait and pay “full retail”, but at least have some laws intended to protect you?

My choice has been “none of the above”. I don’t see any alternative than letting others drive up prices, watching some people overpay, then waiting for the stock to find its real market price. I’d love to hear others opinions, maybe I’m missing something.

Rather than try to be all things Facebook, this app focuses on pictures being shared by your friends and allows you to quickly upload good pictures.

I have found that good pictures make a world of difference in creating engagement. 

As you can see from the opening screen, it is a clean interface. You have your pictures across the top, and friends recent posts which you can scroll through.

You click on the camera, and are taken to a pretty straightforward camera screen.  The buttons include a flash setting, button to pick front or back camera, and a blue camera button to take the picture with. 

Where it gets interesting is what you can do after you take the picture.  As you can see, you are shown a preview of the picture, along with a crop tool, a wand, and a blue post button.

I have to say, I only rarely take a picture that wouldn’t benefit from some cropping.  My typical post processing workflow involves adjusting the exposure, color balance and basic cropping. 

When you click on the crop icon, you are presented with a grid that you can drag by the corners.  

I wanted to see how it worked, so I moved the window to crop more than half of the picture.  I readjusted to present me with a new frame that I could work with.

You can slide the picture around in the grid once you’ve sized it.  It worked exactly like I would have expected. 

I expect this to be a real plus for events where you cannot move or “sneaker zoom” to compose the picture.

The wand tool takes you to some filter presets.  These aren’t “creative” filters, rather more like white balance fixes to correct for color shifts.

I was able to stand and compare the different filter settings to the actual room, which was kind of useful.  In this case, I liked “Bright” the best.

I didn’t spend long with the filters, but even the more extreme sounding ones like “neon” were still pretty nuanced and effective. 

See the little grid box on the left?  That is one of the best features in my mind.  It presents you with a grid of images on your iPhone and allows you to select multiple pictures for upload.  It is very clean and works!  I didn’t use it on this one, but last week was at a graduation ceremony and took multiple pictures.  Waiting for each one to upload was a pain. 

If you click on the blue post button, you are taken directly to a very familiar looking post screen.  Added some nice words and hit send.  It then took me back to the main screen. 

The Facebook camera app is not a “power tool” for photographers, but it offers the best way that I have seen yet to quickly create and post very good images from your smart phone.   

I thought that the combination of the snow and the textures of the old church would work well.

I am a Deacon at Newtown Presbyterian Church.  Our “old church” was built in 1762.  We use it for services during the summer.  During the revolutionary war, the Hessians that were captured by Washington’s troops on Christmas eve were kept in the church basement.

This is the view of the church, buildings, and some of the grounds from Sycamore Street.

I metered the pictures and it seemed to me that I needed about 2 2/3rd stops differences between exposures in order to capture the range.  

I then ran them in batch mode in Photomatix to create HDR images.  I tweaked the strength up a bit, and then afterwards moved the blacks a bit until they started to get crushed.  For this picture, I put a detail filter on in Topaz Adjust.  I thought it still looked pretty natural, but crisp. 

I found in general that I liked best the pictures that had brick, stone, and lots of textures and less colors.  I think that the HDR processing really does nice stuff with textures.  I put a boost filter on this one to bring up the colors.  I didn’t feel like spending the time to play around with blending this back into the original.  I printed out 8.5 x 11 of all of these and found that the monitor and print versions are pretty different.  What I liked on the monitor did not always print well. 

I hit this one much harder with the processing just to see how far I could push it without it looking too gimmicky.  I printed a “dry” version alongside of this one.  

All of the folks here today liked this one better.

This is one of those pictures that I imagined would be much better when I took it. 

I played around a bit trying to keep some interest in the sky, while also trying to show off the stained glass a bit. 

At the end of the day, I’m not sure that the composition is good enough to spend too much time on it.

I call this “Windows on God and man’s work.  I liked the way that the window on the left actually seems more interesting than the stained glass on the right.  I need to live with this one a while. 

I put some kind of pop on this I think.  Mainly, my approach was just to try some of the different settings and see how things looked.  I was trying to match the processing to the picture.

I call this one “Against the Bleak”.  I was trying to bring out the gravestones and snow against the stained glass. 

Way more processing than I was comfortable with, but liked the feeling.  Another one that I want to live with for a while before I decide how to take it.

Bob wrote a post “Optimizing the Service Supply Chain using Portals”. 

I read through his post, which made me spend a bit of time thinking about things in a different way.  My background and focus has always been on the sales and marketing side of the world.  We study product lifecycles from a planning, investment, and revenue perspective.  We focus on issues targeted around market penetration, etc.

My bachelor’s degree was in marketing, and the first real exposure that I had to supply chain management as a discipline was at Lehigh when I was working on my MBA.  Lehigh has an excellent center for supply chain research.  Some of my favorite professors were associated with the center.

Until I had read Bob’s post, I had not really given much thought to linking supply chain strategy to the product lifecycle, but it seems like an obvious thing to do.  Early stage products may need a supply chain strategy based upon a variety of factors such as quality, proximity, small order quantities, etc.  Mature products, particularly cash cows, need a very different approach targeted to maximizing profits.

It strikes me that a good portal is probably the best way to face the challenge of agility that would come with aligning supply chain to marketing.  The nature of product lifecycles can be very dynamic.  By partnering with supply chain management portals, a business could avoid heavy capital and time investments into software solutions that would then lock them into a process at least until the investment had paid off.

I would love to hear some thoughts from others actually in the field.

I hadn’t really given much thought to having my bank account tied to Paypal. The incident got me concerned about the lack of consumer protections that you would normally have with a credit card.    I got quite a bit more concerned when PayPal refused to remove my bank account from being associated with my Paypal account.  We knew my account had been compromised, but there was nothing they would do other than tell me to wait for the dispute process to work.  I was told to wait for 10 days.

As it turned out, Paypal did credit back the $200 (about a week later) and restored my account.  They also sent me an “RSA like” token credit card, which I thought was pretty slick.

In my mind, that wasn’t enough, the support issues trying to protect my account scared the pants off of me. 

My only recourse was to remove my bank account from Paypal, change the passwords, and never use it again.  What a shame.  I have also instructed my bank to not authorize funding from PayPal.

Fast forward to today.  I just read a post about researchers that have been able to crack SSL technology.  The example that they used was hacking into Paypal. So we now have a situation where a great deal of ecommerce is based upon vulnerable technology with very little recourse for consumers to protect themselves against fraudulent attacks.

This wasn’t the first time.  I paid to take a test to become a certified Google Adwords expert.  I passed the test.  They have never (5 years later) responded to any of my attempts to get this acknowledged.  Every survey they send, and every offer for “free advertising coupons” gets a response explaining that they really need to fix their systems.  There is no actual person or group that seems to be responsible for following up once they have your money.  It is particularly ironic since the point of being an adwords expert is to make them more money. 

Most recently, they sent me an invitation to be part of their Google Engage analytics program.  I was really excited, as I use Google Analytics for many of my different charity projects. 

I guess that I should have been surprised that they could not even follow up on an application that they asked me to participate in.  So now, I’m back to trying to create a better analytics tracking mechanism that will work across web and mobile better.

The need to vent aside, it really makes me wonder about how capable their business tracking systems really could be.  My take on Google is that it’s “good enough for free”.  My experience in actually putting money into the equation has been pretty shabby. 

Am I the only one that has run into these problems trying to actually do real business (ie:  not free stuff) with Google? 

Christopher started as a classical musician, which has a rich tradition of mentoring.  Anthony started his career in the Marine Corps.  I would not have thought that there could have possibly been much in common between the two cultures.  Both Christopher and Anthony told stories about their early mentors, that saw their potential and challenged them to push themselves way beyond what they thought their own limitations were.  Both classical music and the military have cultures that are steeped in discipline and training.

My own experience with mentorship was different, perhaps because it came at a different stage in my career development.  I spent the early part of my career working in the music industry in small business environments.  The business owners and my father-in-law bore the brunt of teaching me how to work hard, cut expenses, and pay attention to customers. 

As I hit my mid-to-late 30s, I started to venture into a larger business world that included angel investors, attorneys, and an entirely new cast of characters.  I was blessed to have been “adopted” by two mentors, Ed Johnson and Mike Wert.  I view this type of mentorship as a relationship that needs to be invested in over a long period of time. I met Mike through a men’s business group that we put together at our church.  Mike then brought Ed in as well.  Over the next few years, these men invested their time and talent in me.  At times, I felt a little bit like a science project, but I valued the opportunity to learn from people that a wealth of experience that I could benefit from.

It’s hard to assess the benefit of more than a decade’s worth of experience from two men that had created vibrant businesses and helped a lot of people.  Much of the advice was practical, much of it was based upon their own experience. What I remember the most is that in their own ways, they challenged me to grow into my potential.  They taught me the importance of ethics and of continuing education.

Speaking on the panel gave me the opportunity to reflect on all of the benefits that I had received from mentoring, and gave me an excuse to call Ed and talk to him about it.  I told him that I was grateful and gotten a lot out of it, but asked him “What did you get out of it?”  He thought for a moment, then answered “I honestly couldn’t imagine not doing it”.  “It just feels like what I should be doing.” 

So, I’ll try not to spend too much time reflecting on that and just try to put it into practice myself.  Please share your experiences with mentoring.  It’s what it’s all about.

Typically, when people ask me “What was <some exotic place> like?”, I have to answer that it looked like an airport, taxi ride, hotel room, and an exhibition center.  This was my first trip to Barcelona, and my take was that the airport, taxi ride, and hotel room were all pretty much what you would expect.  The exhibition center, on the other hand, was something really special. 

While the picture here doesn’t do it justice, the Fira Barcelona is set up on top of a hill in the middle of a bunch of beautiful old buildings.  This is the upper courtyard, which is a decent walk from the main exhibition halls.  The mobile application hall was up here, as well as, hospitality suites and restaurants.  The view looking back downhill was really nice, providing a view of the city as a backdrop.

Walking around this beautiful mixture of old and new must have focused my mind on the challenges of blending the old and new together.  All too often, in the rush to make amazing new things, we abandon perfectly useful older things.  So that was the mindset that I took into Mobile World Congress, and I saw that same dynamic being played out in many of the big announcements being made at the show. 

Microsoft announced Windows Phone 7.  It is a new redesign of their mobile platform, but they have done a pretty good job of making some tough choices about what is worth keeping and building on and what needs to be torn down.  XBox and Zune connectivity is there,  Windows Mobile 6.5 and other false starts didn’t make the cut.  They may have finally gotten it right and realized that with mobile, less is more. 

Much of the rest of the show seemed to center on finding the best ways to combine the old and new technologies.  Everyone is trying to figure out the challenge of how to move from the safe and profitable wireless voice world into an exploding wireless data market where revenues are not going to come anywhere close to keeping pace with bandwidth requirements. Verizon and Skype announced a strategic partnership that combines the Verizon Wireless voice network with the Skype application.  

Today’s working environments are increasingly made up of work groups that are distributed both geographically and culturally. These virtual teams promise the flexibility, responsiveness, lower costs, and improved resource utilization necessary to meet ever-changing task requirements in a dynamic global business environment. These teams rely primarily on virtual interaction only, with almost all communications handled through telecommunications, email, and other forms of digital communication.

We wound up getting strong participation from forward looking companies like Johnson & Johnson, Verizon, and Amdocs.  Out of our respondents, more than two thirds of them were active on three or more teams at the same time.  Most of them also are involved with multi-national teams of varying degrees of experience working together.

This research focused on which types of communications channels and technologies are most useful for virtual teaming.  Not surprisingly, people are most comfortable and experienced with email, but the survey found that conference calls were found particularly effective in important team value creation functions such as recognizing achievements and brainstorming.

I think it’s a great message of hope for anyone and would love to
see you think about spreading it today.

Here’s Ken’s simple message for for giving hope (and maybe saving someone’s life!):

G – Greet and meet: talk to others, smile, say hello, ask someone how they are doing   

I – Involve yourself and others: find a cause you can support, volunteer, pledge resources. Get the people around you involved, especially if you see someone beginning to withdraw. Invite them to participate in some activity, to “get out” of their comfort zone

V - Validate others: tell others that they matter – especially family members and friends that you tend to see daily but may take for granted, give genuine complements

E – Empathize: be a listening ear, take time to be fully present, don’t try to solve – just acknowledge someone’sfeeling/hurt You can find out more about Ken’s wonderful project with his Impact Action Team at:

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=Etbd_&m=1cD3X5wt9vcX_r&b=RporB3_5ICVEsm.UKJDLmw