Happy Memorial Day to all Veterans

Memorial Day is a day that our nation celebrates and pays respect to Armed Forces veterans that serve, have served, and those that sacrificed their life to provide the freedoms we enjoy every day.  As a veteran, I am proud to have served and I thank you for the well wishes you will be giving me and my fellow comrades on Monday.

I’m not soliciting “Thank You’s”.  This message stems from me thinking about the upcoming weekend and "veterans" in general.  I mean by definition, a veteran is someone who has had long service or experience in a particular occupation or field.  If we use that explanation you are a veteran…a veteran of a craft, an expertise, or the life you lead.  One of my favorite quotes is by Teddy Roosevelt.  Here it is:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

See, you are a veteran, because you get up and you get into your arena and you get marred and sometimes come short in things.  You don’t stop, you don’t slow, you don’t quit…you get right back up the next day and enter the challenge ever convinced you’ll do more or better today than you did yesterday.  You run, jump, swim, paddle, whatever in order to get to your goal.  That is the energy and passion that puts you in a place that not many others will venture into because they fear failure.  You are battling like a soldier on a mission.  If you are not doing that or being what Teddy describes, well then, that is the ultimate failure. 

So you veterans of skill, take a minute during the long weekend to update your status, tweet, make a video, write a letter, buy a beer, and/or shake the hand of a Armed Forces member and then continue toward your triumph of high achievement.

Have a Happy Memorial Day weekend,

SGT Benjamin Ortega

Mobile Monday Boston...

Last night my son and his best friend (growing next gen entrepreneurs) attended Mobile Monday Boston at Google's Cambridge office. The place was packed with folks interested in hearing from Google, the Android team, RueLaLa, Fig, and Zazu.

I took some pics and I'm posting them here. If you want a full scoop on the event check out Kyle Psaty of Boston Innovation follow up.







Thanks Mobile Monday Boston and Google for hosting a great event.

Attending Supercomm 2009

The communications industry is an obvious shift right now, and this week at Supercomm 2009 in Chicago, I plan to listen to the leadership of our industry in order to learn more about their technology decisions concerning how we:

- share content with friends
- connect with our social networks
- send texts
- call friends (yes this still occurs)
- send videos to one another

Customers (existing & new) continue to shape carrier revenues and I'm hoping carriers provide more detail into what they are doing to adjust their strategies to meet these newer demands.

A special treat this year is we get the chance to hear from our nations first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. With the amount of funding set aside for broadband stimulus, it will be good to get a clearer picture of where the government is placing their technology priorities for distributing more connectedness.

When attending a show, one of the first things I do is mark down all the companies I'm going to try and learn more about. As much as I enjoy this part of shows, this year I won't be able to do much visiting. My time will be occupied hosting attendees at booth 3517 and then leading a session on Thursday called, "Where has voice gone? What's Next" for the Alliance for Telecom Industy Solutions (ATIS). I'll have to wait until next year for more booth visiting.

Supercomm is an industry conference but with everything going on in the landscape, I think Supercomm this year will be a tone setting session by carriers about what they are doing to deal with the shift we're experiencing.

It should be a good show and I look forward to attending.
Ben

Follow along at Twitter or Facebook.

Signing off due to Twitter...

I've been using Twitter for almost 3 years, well before it became what it is today. I haven't paid much attention to how its changed what I do in the social media sphere until just looking at my last posting for "The Words of Phive Tacos" blog site. I haven't posted since October. If I go back another 6 months, I haven't posted but a few times. So over a year, maybe 2-3 posts...I think I'm finally at the point where I no longer will do full blown out blog posts.

Therefore, I'm signing off from blogging and if you'd like to follow along with my microblogging, you can go to my twitter page where I'm constantly talking tech, entrepreneurship, learning, and startups.

Maybe I'll post again but for the foreseeable future, I'm out.

See you on twitter.

Off to PodCamp Boston 4...

Starting Saturday morning, the staff, audience, and organizers of PodCamp Boston will start its 4th year of educating the New England region about everything social media. (blogs, twitter, facebook, openness, collaboration...)

PodCamp Boston is an opportunity, and for an extremley low price for the experience, to learn more about the technologies, people, and ideas that foster the use of social media in your personal or business lives.

My first experience at PodCamp Boston was a few years back. It was there I learned how to be "social" using available technologies, how to communicate through blogs, and really, what social media is. This time around for me, I'm sitting from on a different side of the event. (there really aren't sides since everyone is on equal ground so as to faciliate ideas/learning)

At 11:15, members of the City of Boston, Boston World Partnerships (staff and connector) and other members of the new media community will host a session called "What is the progress of Boston 2.0". This session will discuss how Boston is helping to connect area entrepreneurs to who/what they need from Boston and/or the global community to fund, launch, or grow ideas and products. We'll also solicit ideas for what else would be needed to make these interactions, connections, happen faster?

I look forward to PodCamp Boston 4 and experiencing it in a different way as well as hearing everyone's thoughts/ideas about making the 2.0 in "Boston 2.0" mean something.

I hope to see you there.

5tacos

Dusting off the blog...

March 6, 2009 is my last post. Just looking at the date seems like it was yesterday but it has been almost 5 months. Sheeze!!

Where have I been? Engaged is where!

Over the last almost 5 months I've had my ear to the ground, listening and identifying the actions I need to take in order to manage through the downturn. Things like:

• What are my audiences needing; how can I fulfill that?
• What do they need as they manage their downturn; how can I help them?
• What has changed on their business horizon; where do I change my product in order to get them to their new goals?

Feels like a reinvention.

I'm obviously committed to writing about the things I see and do, but the time between posts, I felt it was more important to focus on assisting my audiences as they work through their decisions in order to leave them in a better position once this mess corrects itself...and it will!

The actions I've taken over the last 5 months are already producing the outcomes I planned for. When I see that happening, I feel less guilty about not being totally committed to "The Words of Phive Tacos".

Now that I see the road clearer, I'm hopping back into the mix, which is good, seeing all of the good things happening around the globe with technology.

- The State of Wireless Broadband: 225M Subscribers & Growing (http://tinyurl.com/nnt3kn)
- Who can access 3G/4G services in 2013? (http://tinyurl.com/l6pveo)
- How people share content on the web? (http://tinyurl.com/lpjbmn)
- Google Says Mobile App Stores Have No Future (http://tinyurl.com/lfo4va)

Just so much to start talking about again. I'm looking forward to it.

5tacos

Better days ahead...

Almost 3.5 years ago I started following a woman named Carlota Perez. She’s a senior research fellow at the Cambridge Endowment for Research in Finance at Cambridge University, and author of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, a book she wrote to discuss financial cycles in technological revolutions.

Let me digress for a second and I’ll come back to Carlota.

I watch a lot of different things, but the assignment of our country’s first Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra, is the most compelling indicator that the next generation is upon us. If you don’t take the time to read about Vivek, just keep this in mind…he’s all digital, and should he not blow the opportunity as Obama’s CIO, he will have at least 4 years (if not 8) to reshape the way our country operates using IP technologies.

Other present day indicators: (linked to articles)

Reid Hoffman – CEO of LinkedIn
“I actually think every individual is now an entrepreneur, whether they recognize it or not.”

Adeo Ressi – Founder of TheFunded.com
“wants to do his part to help jump start the economy with fresh ideas and leaders.”

The Big Shift: Constant Disruption
“If this premise is right--that the pattern of disruption followed by stabilization has itself been disrupted--then it may be we're facing the mother of all disruptions, a big shift into a world without equilibrium, one that will continue to shift rapidly even once the current recession has passed”.

Back to Carlota:
She answers two questions in her 2005 Strategy + Business interview that I feel shed more light into the environment we are in now and what’s to come:

S+B: On the airplane here, I read two articles about the future. One predicted economic clear sailing and the other foresaw crisis and collapse.
Perez: They’re probably both right. We may well have a jolt or two in the near future, and then a great boom probably lies ahead. But the Nasdaq collapse of 2000 was not big enough to force the changes necessary to get there.

S+B: For people who lost their retirement savings, that’s a difficult statement to hear.
Perez: I couldn’t agree more, but that’s the price we’ve historically paid for our ability to reach great booms. The collapse has to be disastrous enough to make it clear to everyone that the time when the stock market drives the growth of the economy is finished. Finance capital has done its job; it’s brought forth the resources to pave the way for the next wave of technology. Along the way, it’s created an environment in which companies like Microsoft, Intel, and Google could emerge and flourish. Now we need to spread out the new paradigm of our era through all the economies of the world, just as in the past.

Our country is calling for more innovation, business leaders are helping by creating avenues to product creation, the world is in a major shift, and a long wave theorist (with credibility) is saying this is really the beginning and not the end.

When I read items like this, it doesn’t tell me we’re done, it tells me we should be taking advantage of this opportunity by creating new products, opening lines of communications, creating more value with existing products, and driving more innovation into our customer businesses.

This is how we navigate this pullback and ready ourselves for better days.
Ben