johnwilker.com

Work With Smart People. Like @bmf and @lordbron

My friend Mike Lee was in town for 360|MacDev and we had a chance to chat a few times. We also chatted a lot when I was in Amsterdam, that’ll happen when you’re sleeping on someone’s couch :D He’s been around the block; helped found companies, worked for Apple, and most recently starting an international [...]

If Your Customer Wants to Pay You. Figure out a Way to Take Their Money

This will be a short one as it just popped in to my head as I emailed my friend Tim. He sent me a reading list for some Green Lantern comics because i mentioned I was reading some. The Comic reader i use on my Kindle Fire (awesome comic reader, BTW) posts to Facebook when [...]

An Open Letter to the Hospitality Industry

I’m writing this hugely annoyed, so my first draft was simply “You Suck” You know an industry is bloated and corrupt when they’re first and only motivation is profit, even and especially at the expense of return business. That’s the Hospitality industry. They don’t care if your event sucks, another is dying to book the [...]

Startups, who’s in to be Apple?

Like most of Nerd America I started Reading the Steve Jobs Biography last night. I got in some good reading at the gym this morning and started thinking. I haven’t made it to the Apple years yet, but as I was reading it, thinking about Apple, about Jobs, startups and about death, a notion started [...]

We’re all busy, stop saying it and do something

I see this on twitter, and in real life face-to-face conversations a lot, “blah blah, working on something awesome, super super busy” or some other fairly douchey version of that sentence. Typically said by the same people over and over, as if saying something like that makes you cool, as if repeating it somehow makes [...]

sometimes you want to quit

As is typical of life, I’ve had this blog post sitting in a Safari tab to be written about. I’m in a blogging mood today so I sat down to talk about this post, and turns out it’s a company who just signed on as a sponsor of 360|Flex. There’s no real correlation, but I [...]

Tom and @GaryVee made my day

Tom was at a Thank You Economy reading last week, and stuck around long enough to chat with Gary. To my surprise and pleasure, they talked about me, and 360|Conferences. We’re in our 5th year. They (i hate ‘they’ and if I meet them they’re getting punched in the neck) say most startups don’t make [...]

Technology and Conferences, finally some good

Last week was Ignite Denver 7. You can read all about Ignite Denver on the blog, but among all the numerous new things we did to reboot Ignite Denver, we used technology.

It worked awesome!

There were two things we used, Eventbrite’s iPhone app and the Square reader and iPhone app.

If it looks easy, it’s not

It’s weird (both flattering and a little insulting) when people look at what you do, and think, “well if he’s doing it, I can do it” vs. possible partnership, etc. Sure there’s a part of all of us that wants to do things on our own, or own way. But in business especially I think [...]

Open Letter to Apple? Come on

Rather than see Apple go to an exclusive event for executives who don’t want to touch the unwashed masses, I’d love to see Apple support the developer community. Hey Steve, Phil, et. al. Come to the next 360|iDev. Meet the people writing the apps, meet the developers who bought 4 iPads. After all, they (IMHO) more than any one in attendance at Web 2.0 Summit, are the people important to Apple. The Developer community is buying iPads like their going out of style, buying each other’s apps/games, etc. They’re the early adopters, the strongest pro-Apple voices, etc.

I do agree with the letter in so far as the Apple of Today isn’t the Apple I fell in love with. It’s not the Apple of the Powerbook, the Newton, the Performa. Times change, and (as many do) if you argue bank accounts as an indicator, Apple is doing something right. I’m tickled pink (I’d be more tickled if I owned Apple stock) that Apple isn’t $8/share. I remember when it was. As a kid in school, I checked the price daily in the paper before I left the house. I saved and saved and bought a Newton, I bought a powerbook 510 for College (ok well my folks did). But I’d love to see that Apple (tempered by age, fine) come back. The Apple of “Think Different”, the Apple of Ellen Feiss.

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