Possible Names for New Blog

I've mentioned this in a couple of the comment threads, but I'm going to be moving to a new blog soon. The new blog will probably be on Wordpress with a professionally designed logo and a customized theme, and the content will have a somewhat tighter focus on business and entrepreneurship. Here are three domain names I've purchased and am considering for the new blog:

- HackensackVentures.com

- LaunchingInnovation.com

- SteamCatapult.com

The first name has the tie-in with the name of this blog, of course, and continues the semi-ironic attempt at treating Hackensack as a brand. I say semi-ironic, because Hackensack, for those who are familiar with the place, does connote a certain grittiness and lack of concern about image; to the extent that you can spin that in a substance-over-style direction, that's a positive. It's also an ironic take off on the name of prestigious venture capital firms such as Union Square Ventures¹.

The second name is more straight forward, and describes what I plan to focus on: launching innovative business ideas of my own, and helping others launch theirs.

The last one is a play on the second one: a steam catapult is what launches aircraft off of carrier decks. As the unshaven fellow in the video on the homepage of this naming company, A Hundred Monkeys² says, a name ought to have some "mystery". Steam Catapult would have the most "mystery" of these three names. One downside though is that the Navy is apparently moving toward electromagnetic catapults, so when that transition happens, steam catapults might connote retro, which could clash with the innovation theme -- or not, perhaps, since steam catapults will still have been innovative in their time.

I thought I'd take an informal poll of my small handful of occasional commenters and see what you guys thought. Fire away.

The photo above, of a F-14 about to get launched by a steam catapult from the deck of the USS JOHN C. STENNIS, comes from Wikipedia Commons.

¹When you are attempting to attract wealthy investors, you generally use a name that connotes wealth or sophistication, or a combination of both. Hackensack, of course, connotes neither. I knew a Manhattan-based financial planner who came up with the name for her practice by combining the name of a prestigious prep school and adding the word "hill" to it, because rich people often live on hills, or in towns with "hills" in the name.

²I read about this company a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal. Nice work if you can get it, no? This, as with most public relations and traditional marketing businesses, seems to be made possible by OPM. I can't imagine a scrappy entrepreneur starting off with his own savings of those or his friends and family writing a big check to someone to name his business. But if a business is venture-funded, that's a different story.

How to Promote an Online Business

Although my sites are still in development, this is something I've been working on. This week I explored a couple of options: hiring a public relations professional and commissioning a short animated clip. The jury's still out on both of those options, but here are some preliminary thoughts.

First thought: good animation is expensive. If a clip is catchy enough that it gets some viral circulation, it could pay for itself many times over, but that's a lot money to put on one spin of the roulette wheel (e.g, the cost I was quoted by an animator this week for one 30 second clip was almost as much as it will cost to develop one of the programming-intensive sites). I think I've got a clever concept, but it's what everyone else thinks that counts.

Second thought: when looking for a public relations pro (or any vendor, for that matter), try to find one who thinks like an entrepreneur. To put it in military terms, look for a commando, not a REMF. I remembered reading an article a couple of years ago about a commando-style PR guy, someone who generated millions of dollars in sales for his clients through his work alone. I contacted him, but my sites aren't in his sweet spot (he focuses on off-beat household products). He did refer me to a colleague though.

Earlier this week, I had a pleasant conversation with his colleague, who was bright and personable, but no commando. A few days after our conversation, he sent me an e-mail saying he enjoyed our conversation and suggesting some services he could offer me. These were two of them:

Messaging Workshop and Media Materials Development

A messaging workshop will help identify the primary and secondary messages that will help both services further develop their brand and identity. The Messaging Bible we develop as a result of this workshop could also be shared and used by your entire team so you are communicating with one voice throughout all communications vehicles (blog, website, social media platforms, newsletter, bylined articles, etc.). Once these messages are identified we recommend developing a comprehensive online press kit that can help supplement any pitching and marketing efforts.

Fees: $3,500 for a ½ day messaging workshop plus any travel expenses

$1,500 for the initial development and ongoing edits of all materials

Executive Communications & Media Skills Training

Executive communications and media skills training enable your spokespeople to be well prepared to handle media interviews and become a better all-round communicator in your day-to-day life and during speaking opportunities. Such training is based off of the Messaging Bible and allows you to proactively tell your story to existing partners, clients, consumers and especially with the various media audiences while launching both brands throughout the U.S.

Fees: $3,500 for a ½ day communications training plus any travel expenses

He went on to suggest more REMF services in that e-mail. This was what I wrote him in response:

Thanks for getting back to me. It was nice speaking with you as well.

To be candid though, what you've sketched out below isn't what I'm looking for. I'm looking for results, and I'm willing to pay for them. The specific results I'm looking for are getting articles about my online businesses placed in established media. I'm not looking for workshops, boot camps, messaging bibles, etc.

I appreciate you taking the time to speak with me though, and wish you the best of luck with your business. Perhaps we'll be able to work together in some other capacity in the future¹.

¹Offhand, I can't think of a capacity where he and I might work together, but you never know; so instead of burning this bridge completely, I just left it a little charred.

A Visitor From Redmond, WA

A few days ago, this blog's Feedjit widget showed that a visitor from Redmond, WA (home of Microsoft's headquarters) clicked on this post, "Algebra Challenge". Seeing that, I wondered if someone an interviewer at Microsoft was binging math questions for the company's notorious interview questions¹. I happen to have middling math skills myself, but I think this could be an decent interview question, as long as the interviewer just asked the interviewee how he would solve the problem, instead of requiring him to actually solve it (since, the arithmetic is messy, andas commenter J.K. noted in that thread, the actual formula is heavily rounded). The key insight here would be to recognize that the problem can be stated and solved as a system of three equations.

This raises a question I've wondered about in the past, which is to what extent these sorts of questions actually measure intelligence. Maybe it doesn't even matter though, if the questions test for a similarly valuable attribute other than intelligence.

Consider, for example, a couple of word problems I remember from tests I had to take as part of the application process for jobs in the past. Without digging up the exact text of the two word problems this was the gist of them: The first asked how many of each type of coin you would have if you had a certain amount of money in change; the second asked how far apart two individuals would be if one walked so far in one direction and then so far to the left, and the other did the exact opposite. I remember these two word problems for two reasons: I know I got them right, and I know that my getting them right wasn't a reflection of my intelligence or math aptitude. I got the problems right because I had seen them before.

I knew that the first problem could be solved with elementary algebra (using 25x for a quarter, 10x for a dime, and so on), and the second one could be solved with elementary geometry (adding the hypotenuses of the two resulting right triangles). Although these questions didn't measure my intelligence or math aptitude, my getting them right did demonstrate something else: that I had paid attention in math class, or perhaps that I had studied this stuff relatively recently while preparing for a standardized test needed for a graduate degree. So getting those problems right demonstrated either intelligence/aptitude, conscientiousness, or ambition, or some combination of those attributes; and whichever of these attributes a test-taker had would reflect well on him, as far as the employer was concerned.


¹I was reminded of this by a conference call I had today with an ABD finance Ph.D. who is doing some consulting for me and one of my web developers. My finance consultant created an algorithm for me, and he was going over it with one of my web developers. My finance consultant assumed that my web developer, who has a bachelors degree in computer science, would have had all the math background necessary to understand the algorithm. My web developer noted that he had a minor in math, in addition to his comp sci degree, but he just wasn't familiar with a particular function the finance consultant specified (an infimum function). I hadn't heard of the function before either, and if a comp sci major/math minor hasn't heard of it, I guess a question based on that function wouldn't be a good one for a Microsoft interviewer.