Tom Printy’s Blog

A recent video that featured David Heinemeier Hansson from 3t signals talks about having a business with being small as the main goal. This is a business that will sustain you and the people that work for the company. It it a company that you can have for the rest of your life and be perfectly happy with. This type of business will give you the freedom to live comfortably while still being able to pursue your interests. I am happy that this philosophy is being put out there. I think that this business philosophy more closely resembles what I would like to achieve and the types of companies that I would like to work for

Watch live video from HackerTV on Justin.tv

All I can say is WOW about Rober Byrds recent activity on the Senate floor. Take a look and see for yourself.

Blogging Experiment is giving away $100 this week

All you have to do is place a link on your website (either a blog post, text link on a content site, etc) to the blogging experiment. You can link to any page on this site, but I’ll give you some sample link ideas below you can use if you want…

Once you post the link on your site, leave a comment below with the URL of the page the link is on and also use your paypal email address in the email field so you can get paid if you win.

Here’s the catch (always a catch right?)…

You will have to send at least 30 unique visitors to blogging experiment from that link between now and Monday night at 10pm eastern (when I announce the winners). That’s a whopping 5 visitors per day. In other words, it just means you need to put the link someplace where people will see it and click it, not buried at the bottom of your site somewhere.

To make the drawing fair, I’m going to let you pick the winners. I don’t feel like dealing with the whining again like last contest : -)

On Monday, I’ll ask you to pick 4 random numbers and I’ll use those to select the winners.

I thought that it would be fun to see if I can actually send the required amount of traffic to his site. So help me out and click the link

Does Elgin IL need a coworking space?  I would like to think so. There is a small tech community in Elgin that is growing. I can’t help to think that most of these people work out a home office.

What is coworking:

Coworking is cafe-like community/collaboration space for developers, writers and independents.

Or, it’s like this: start with a shared office and add cafe culture. Which is the opposite of most modern cafes.

To prevent spam, we have a password on this wiki. It is coworking with the two “o”s being zeroes!

Welcome, have a look around! The best places to get started are right below:

 http://coworking.pbwiki.com/

I think it would be really neat to have a space like this in Downtown Elgin.  Anyone want to help me put one together?

From mashable.com

Goodrec, a new social recommendation engine, has received $900,000 of a desired $1.05 million in funding from their series A round.  According to PEHub, the funding for this round included SoftTech VC and Chance Technologies Seed.

Little is known about the company to the general public as it is in locked testing for the moment.  What is known is that the service is looking to build a new system for remembering and sharing recommendations.  The project is the brainchild of Mihir Shah, a former product manager at Yahoo Search.  There is no word when the site will open to a wider testing, or even go public, but we’ll be sure to let you know.

I am not sure what “social recommendation” are, and how this differs from del.icio.us  or other bookmarking services.  I guess we will have to wait till they open up.

From alarm:clock

Israel’s Jinni has raised $1M in a first round from Start-Up Factory.

Jinni is developing a content search and discovery systems with personalization for consumers to discover movies, TV shows, and online videos. They plan to launch an affiliate program for Internet TV operators as well as to license its solution to global TV operators.

The premise is that consumers all gravitate to Iron Man and other blockbusters because they have a tough time discovering films and TV shows that suit their tastes. Yes and no on this. Consumers gravitate to IronMan because $200M was spent on it and because its nice to talk with others back at work who have seen the same movie. They can easily scan the film section to find other films that may or may not appeal to them but most don’t want to take chances on wasting a precious Friday night on a dud.

Jinni was founded by CEO Yosi Glick who was VP Marketing & BD at Orca Interactive.

There is a lot of competition in this space. It will be interesting to see if they are able to differentiate themselves.

Has either of these companies participated in the Netflix Challenge?  If they did and were able to score a decent RMSE they might have something.