The demonstration of the power of a vibrant entrepreneurial community was not lost upon the rest of the world, either.  As news of TechStars, its results, and its community-transforming effects spread around the world, TechStars’ founder David Cohen began to get large numbers of inquiries asking if TechStars could help create something similar in their community.

At the end of last year, David asked if I would help lead the effort to help grow other entrepreneurial communities.  I thought about it briefly before giving a resounding “yes!” answer.  Here’s why I jumped at the opportunity:

Rarely in my career have so many things that I’m passionate about been so coincident in a single job, and I’m very excited about this opportunity!

Bring on the entrepreneurs!

1. WiFi as the new household remote control standard – replacing infrared, X.10, and other standards. For $50, a house can get a WiFi access point that is not only the current and future standard for all things digital, but also is secure, reliable, free to operate, and covers the entire house. There is a whole new level of range, reliability, and flexibility with the adoption of WiFi.
2. Invisible network appliances (NettApps): Sonos uses an invisible network appliance to invisibly deliver music. By invisible, I mean that I will never ever have to worry about it:
   1. The Sonos box will be hidden away and will be unseen by humans for years – it delivers music without being thought about. The functionality is provisioned by the NetApp, but the power resides entirely in the remote. And, we’re now at a place where the cost, utility, and ergonomics (size, power consumption, noise, location requirements) of NetApps are no longer a barrier to purchase/implement.
   2. I’ll never have to manage the box: there will be no concern about rebooting, upgrading the CPU or RAM, etc. Therefore, the Sonos NetApp will never become obsolete. (Okay, it will eventually break and need to be replaced.) The NetApp works; there is no room for thought about updating or upgrading; that is nonsensical, because the box already does everything it is supposed to. There is no “more is better” with this NetApp. Pause for a moment: can you say that about any other hardware you own?
3. A multi-purposed handheld computer as an infinitely flexible remote control. The iPhone (or iTouch) is such an awesome platform that with some relatively easy coding you can build a remote control UX that far surpasses the UX of any other remote control you’ve ever had. Oh, and I already have one on my all the time anyway, because it’s a phone! By the way, although iPhone is remarkable, it’s only the first; there will certainly be other handheld platforms that equal and/or surpass it.

In other words, I can now (or in the very near future), can:

• Take any or all of my hand-held computers (iPhone et al) – think interchangeably, meaning whatever is most convenient or newest or coolest
• Walk into any location ( home or office or restaurant or …)
• Control all the devices that need to be controlled that I have access to.

The future (tomorrow) is gonna be so cool!

• The Cars

I’ve got a lot of friends who have raved about Sonos for a long while. But because I’m a bit of a hack, I’ve always built my own audio & multimedia hardware systems, in part to keep in touch with bleeding edge technology. However, last week I broke down and decided to try the Sonos system.

Opening the Sonos box, the first thing I saw was a card that started off by saying, “Thank you for your purchase. We want your experience to be pure magic.”

In a word, it has been. Our experience has been so good that my girlfriend’s usage started immediately and without instruction and without hiccup. She declared it “totally cool” – the technological advancements are unimportant; the magically created convenience is the new bar.

When a product works so well that it immediately, effortlessly, and subconsciously becomes habit, indeed it becomes an expectation of your environment, without any deeper examination of how or why, then you are in the presence of excellence.

Well done Sonos.

Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial Systems–and Themselves. By Andrew Ross Sorkin. Viking; 624 pages; $32.95. Allen Lane; £14.99
A riveting fly-on-the-wall account of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and what came afterwards.

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World. By Liaquat Ahamed. Penguin Press; 564 pages; $32.95. Heinemann; £20
A history of the generation that invented the modern central banker. Winner of this year’s Financial Times/Goldman Sachs business book of the year award.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. By John Cassidy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 416 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £25
A sharp look at the roots of the financial crisis that turns into an excellent history of economic thought, by a British writer at the New Yorker.

Poorly Made in China: An Insider’s Account of the Tactics Behind China’s Production Game. By Paul Midler. Wiley; 256 pages; $24.95 and £16.99
A useful analysis by a consultant who advises Western companies on what to do about China’s manufacturing problems. Many laboratories protect their reputation by hiding, rather than revealing, what they test and whistle-blowing is punished rather than rewarded.

(re-blogged from Paul Kedrosky)

I wonder if, in their strategic planning, MS considers the long term damage to their brand caused by such consistently “evil” behavior. Even amongst non-technical folks, there is a not-so-subtle quiescent level of distaste for all things MS. It feels to me that as technical superiority and/or barriers to switching for the cash cow products erode, MS will find sales of these cash cows increasingly difficult to maintain.

- Zero time watching cable TV any more. Zip. Nada.

- Hulu rocks! Colbert etc. – not available with my skimpy cable package – is now available when I want.

- Some time browsing the web from my couch. It works OK, but the experience is inferior to a laptop, so this won’t be a heavily used application of my HTPC

- Music rocks! I can now play music on my home stereo using my favorite PC software and/or Pandora. It’s incredibly easy to use, ie a a great form factor, and the sound quality is as good as your home stereo. I believe that HTPC’s are a serious competitive threat to Sonos et al.

- Photos rock! This was the biggest surprise. Remember your father’s slide shows? This is the new shiznit, and photos look spectacular. It’s a significant upgrade in experience from looking at photos on a PC.

My anecdotal experience agrees with my thinking (here and here) about the decline of the cable industry.

Oh, and Henry Blodget has a nicely written post on the topic as well.

I think that this problem is well on its way to being solved by Ray Ozzie at Microsoft, with MS’s Live Mesh product. Live Mesh may be the next killer OS feature: with Live Mesh, you can painlessly have everything about your PC (browsing history and personal data such as word docs and spreadsheets) automagically synced across all your windows platforms – eg laptop, home computer, work computer, or a computer your visiting, just as long as it’s running Windows. (No cheesy hardware eg Pogoplug required!) Sorry, but it won’t work on a Mac or on Linux. I think this functionality will have network effects and is a difficult enough problem that it might keep people like me on the Windows platform just a little bit longer.

The Easy:

• Talk to your customers.
• All Positive, All the Time.
• Be A Character.
• Talk To Other Stores.
• Ask Questions.

The Not So Easy:

• Realize you don’t own your brand.
• Passionate > Passive.
• Transparency Can Hurt.
• Encourage Interaction

Read the post - it’s great.