Eyes of an Entrepreneur

Redstage Networks has completed development on, and launched our new redstage creative website. Take a look: http://www.redstagecreative.com

It's cool looking site using a unique side navigation system by using Ajax and DHTML. Feedback is appreciated.

Not much more to say about it, I suppose. But if you haven't worked on anything like this I guess it's hard to understand where I am coming from. If you haven't heard of a Pro Forma statement, read a book..

But seriously, these statements are very cumbersome and difficult to put together. One of the issues is making the statement dynamic, so if one of the inputs (say market share for instance) is changed, the whole document updates accordingly. This is different than making sure all of the rows add up.

Anyway, back to work on these, but I'll post more later with my successes/failures.

As always, work has been incredibly busy, but I'm trying not to let that stop me from updating things here. I've uploaded a new layout, and below is a link to a great interview with Bill Gates.

I saw a twitter post from a friend recently who said they were watching this video and I didn't think very much of it. Besides, it's an hour long. Well, two days later, I met up with a friend of a Friend, Paul, who writes for the Hoboken Reporter who told me about this interview. Well, needless to say I thought at this point it was a sign that I had to watch the darn thing..so that's just what I did.

I was busy trying to reinstall Windows on an Older Dell Machine I have at home and I thought I could watch this while waiting for the install. Definitely glad I did! What I found most interesting was Gates' view of the search industry. He said that the reason Microsoft stays in it, even though they don't have a strong market share is because the industry is still developing. He thinks that a technological innovation will help propel this industry to be even better and more efficient than it already is. I guess we will need to see.

There is much more to the video, and everyone should take a moment to watch it. Here is the link: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9875

Check back soon for more updates.

Happy Holidays!
Agbi

OK, so with everything going on at the office, it's been hard to find time to be active on here. Well, that's gonna change starting now!

This will be a short post, but an exciting one. Sell Center LLC has acquired AE3 Interactive, and the partners have collectively decided on a name change. Well, along with a new name comes a new website (or in our case 3). We have completely revamped our company to reflect this change and we think that visitors to our site and our clients will appreciate it.

So without further delay, here are the sites to check out:
www.redstage.com
www.larisonline.com
www.redstagesolutions.com

One last thing before I sign off. I was reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday and there was an article that struck me about Burger Kings new ad campaign. Burger King has taken a page out of Pepsi's playbook and began their own taste test campaign, but with a twist. They are going to remote areas of the world where people are unfamiliar with the Burger King and McDonalds brands, claiming that they are searching for non-biased testers. Well, the campaign launches on Monday and it will be interesting to see how it pans out. I can guess that it will be incredibly controversial. Check back for updates on this soon.

Thanks for reading.

Agbi

Sorry for the "Waterboy" reference, but it's been a while since I've gotten a chance to post something here, and I thought people might appreciate that.

Anyway, turns out that most people's ace-in-the-hole is actually something that makes you less productive. It seems as though trying to do more than one thing at once generally hurts you in the long run.

Having said that, it looks like my days of doing work while watching tv and talking on the phone are over. Guess that means I'll have even less time to blog now..

Anyway, today is going to be a short post. I'll be back later this week with some more information about how to stay productive.

As always, thanks for stopping by.

Agbi

Ok, so I've noticed lately it's been hard to be very productive. Between work and school, keeping on top of everything, before it happens is getting to be overwhelming. Over the next week I'm going to do some research on how to be more productive (not just at work, but in all aspects of life).

Earlier in the month, my partners brought to my attention a book called Getting Things Done. Like most things on this blog, this book teaches you just what it seems, how to get things done. One of the pillars of this system is using lists. Now, I know what you're all thinking and making to do lists isone thing, but these lists are more detailed than that.

So, why lists?

Well, the author notes that remembering things that you need to do each day, or each weeks takes up a big chunk of your short term memory. Consider a computer, you can only run so many programs at once before you overload the processor and your computer crashes. Well, your brain is very similar, you only have a certain amount of space in your short term memory and thus need to constantly move and replace things to remember them. This isn't very efficient and actually creates a lot of stress.

Now, how do you do it?

Like I said, these lists are meant to be more than just that. Each task also has a priority level associated with it. You can use a number scale or colors to prioritize, whatever is easiest to remember (a key would save some of that short term memory that I was talking about before, but I digress). In order to categorize these tasks, you must assign an importance to them. Things that must be done now (1-5 minutes), things that need to be done short term (that you need to block off time for), and things that you will put off (these can be considered the things that you want to do, but are not crucial). Things that can be done in a matter of minutes should be done immediately, so you can maximize your daily output. For longer tasks, you are going to want to block off time to do them and avoid any and all interruptions. If a task has multiple steps, you want to identify what steps are necessary and the order they need to be performed in.

Another tip when creating a list is to do the least interesting tasks first. If you put these off, you will probably never get to them.

Once you have created the list, you have freed your mind from the stress of remember all of the things you need to do, and can now concentrate on what is the most important.

Well, that's it for today, but check back soon for another productivity tip.

Agbi