Our own Gary Vaynerchuk will be joined on stage by a host of entrepreneurs eager to share their experiences and vision for the technology sphere today and in years to come. The smash lineup of speakers will feature Digg founder Kevin Rose, former Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin, Quirky founder Ben Kaufman, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Travis Kalanick (Formspring, Blippy), Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca, and Founding Partner of the incubator 500 Startups, Dave McClure. Most importantly, after each speaker has briefly addressed the crowd, everyone will return to the stage for a roundtable discussion and Q&A. Rather than speak to the audience, our panelists will be having an in-depth discussion with the audience.

Best of all? The admission price of just $399 includes a one-night stay at the beautiful Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Resort and Casino on Thursday, September 30th. After hours of engaging conversation by day, we’ll relax and hit the gaming tables by night!

Click here for more details and to purchase your ticket today. Space is limited so act fast, this event WILL sell out!

Planning, to come? We want to know! RSVP via Facebook or PlanCast!

This Fall, there was a lot of hype around the fact that Twitter was selling the big search engines access to its firehose of data. The implication was that real-time data would massively improve the relevance of search results. There’s obviously a lot of potential here but it seems to me that neither Google or Bing has really nailed it yet. And perhaps another player will emerge.

Take for example something something that happened yesterday in sports. No, nothing to do with soccer or tennis! Jason Giambi of the Colorado Rockies hit a dramatic walk-off homerun off his former nemesis Jonathan Papelbon to win a (baseball) game against the Boston Red Sox. Suppose I want to see a video of that homerun today–where should I look? I went to search.twitter and found a link to it in about 6 seconds on mlb.com.

How about traditional search? A Bing search provided some interesting content, including Giambi’s box score line from last night’s game, but nothing that screams of influence from real-time feedback:

Yes, at the bottom there is a “News” feed which contains the link to an article describing yesterday’s game. You can also click on recent tweets, which showed me 3 relevant Tweets. 2 were identical tweets by different users sharing an article from MSNBC. No trace of the video.

Next I tried Bing’s video search. There’s a lot of video content on the web related to Jason Giambi. But I didn’t find last night’s video in their pages of results. They certainly aren’t customizing the user experience based on a recent event.

My experience on Google was slightly better. I did find the video footage of the homerun as posted on espn.com by navigating to Google News and sorting by latest. And that’s not unreasonable, but I think they are only scratching the surface of capitalizing on breaking news and delivering the most relevant search results. I do think there is huge potential in integration of crowd-sourced information into traditional online search. Here’s a well written article by Jolie O’Dell last Fall that considered some of the possibilities and implications.

Obviously, it’s a monumental task to tailor the user search experience based upon real-time information. For my money, to date nothing trumps good old Twitter search.

I used to train new customer service reps in the order department at Wine Library. In that case, the job primarily consisted of procedures. Various people served the same role, and essentially needed to be interchangeable. If John Q. Customer called and spoke to Customer Service Rep A on Monday, then called again and got Customer Service Rep B on Tuesday, B needs to be able to pick right up where A left off and understand the status of an order, what the customer wanted, and so forth. The job required little in the way of specific product knowledge (trained wine consultants handle that part of the business), and had everything to do with understanding how the various back-end systems interfaced with each other, what company policy was in each situation, and standard procedures that everyone had to follow in the same way.

Training Phil for the assistant role is a very different kind of training. I have procedures that I use, but they are my own. There are certain things we’ve worked out over the years that will remain the same (for instance, how Gary expects things to appear in his calendar), but other than that, it’s the results that matter: making sure Gary is in the right place at the right time, making sure he takes the meetings and calls he wants at appropriate times, and etc. Some of that takes specialized knowledge, which I am teaching as best I can as things come up. Unlike for the Wine Library job training though, most of the procedural stuff is personal, just the way I keep myself organized. I am sure other people use different systems, and my system might not necessarily be the right one for Phil.

I basically showed him how I do it, but I don’t want him to treat that as gospel. He has to make it his own. At this point he’s spent a few weeks being cc’ed and bcc’ed on correspondence, with me explaining why I made this or that choice or who so-and-so is, but at a certain point he just has to get in the trenches and lean on me when he has questions. And that point has come! I’m creating a glossary document of various people in Gary’s world for his reference, and he’s off to the races. Now he’ll cc me and I can lurk and make suggestions and improvements, and Gary will provide feedback as well.

Wish him luck!

The episode featuring VaynerMedia debuts tomorrow, Friday, May 28, at 6:30 PM EST. This was an extremely positive experience for us, and we hope you’ll tune in to find out what we look for in a prospective employee.

Check out the trailer below, and follow MTV Hired on Twitter and Facebook!

This got me thinking about the old adage of buying low and selling high, and how it applies to hot startups and entrepreneurs. Take a company like FourSquare, which is the talk of the town. They’ve built a lot of momentum, seem to have everything pointed in the right direction, and so on. Then you see rumors that a big company like Yahoo! wants to acquire them for some huge sum of money. Should they have sold? In many ways as an entrepreneur I bet it is pretty tempting to let it ride. You’ve got a homerun concept, everyone wants a piece of it, everyone wants you to speak at their conference. But just like opposing pitchers will be getting a more detailed scouting report for how to get out Casey McGehee over the coming months, there are potential sharks in the water for FourSquare. Direct competitors like Gowalla, the big boys like Facebook and Google gradually dipping their toes into the geolocation ocean, etc. And just like the fantasy baseball owner, it’s natural for an entrepreneur to take pride in their discovery and good fortune, and want to see it through. But maybe they should just sell high and ride that cresting wave ashore (ok, took that metaphor too far).

I don’t mean to suggest that FourSquare should definitely sell–it’s just a convenient example to which we can easily relate. The larger point is, it’s easy to develop an emotional attachment to your company or software solution or product, and it would be a mistake to let those emotions cloud your judgment and miss an opportunity to sell high.

As has been discussed over at Read Write Web, the manner in which users are being prompted to participate in this conversion is a bit insidious, but that’s not what I want to focus on. What are the implications of this switch?

Let’s consider it first from the user side. On the one hand, adding new movies or bands to your profile is fairly slick, with an auto-populating text field and automatic links. You don’t have to go searching through random groups and user-created pages; Facebook does that work for you. On the other hand, it is very sterile. People expressed themselves in a myspacey kind of way in those old text fields, with long lists of bands, ellipses, emoticons, and etc. All of that has been eradicated. Text that Facebook didn’t recognize or couldn’t parse has simply been eliminated with this switch. A lot of that information was extraneous, but some of it did convey information to other users. For example, I like a lot of different kinds of music. I didn’t list every band or artist in my Facebook profile that I care about, just a smattering of bands from different genres including jazz, indie, classic rock, grunge, etc. At the end I remember I had written, “… get the idea?” Facebook isn’t interested in my extra little commentary, or that you can’t live without Dancing with the Stars. It’s either in your profile or it’s not. Many will not like this.

Looking at this from the other side of the monitor, Facebook’s motivation becomes obvious and marketers begin to salivate. Just as with the collection of things you “like” around the web that Facebook is amassing, your self-reported preferences for movies, music, and tv offer a treasure trove of data that can be used to customize your experience on any website. Facebook had this sort of information before–we’ve all been served Facebook ads based on information you provided in those text fields. But by standardizing it, going from long text strings to categorical data, they’ve made it much easier for, say, Last.fm to seed a new account with your favorite artists or Boxee to automatically deliver your favorite tv shows.

But of even greater significance is the potential for Facebook as an ad platform all over the web. Imagine imdb.com presenting you with an ad for the new Vince Vaughn movie because your Facebook profile says you liked Swingers and Dodgeball? It’s coming. Your Facebook profile is now your Internet profile.

I think this rhythmic reliability I’m describing is a huge factor in the way I follow baseball. In general I feel like it is harder to enthusiastically follow something that occurs more sporadically, and the same goes for other types of content.

Even on the web, timing and reliability matter. You can’t rely on every customer or viewer to subscribe to your RSS feed or email notifications (try though you might). There will always be that stubborn class of users out there who just prefer to type in your URL at noon every day or 8 pm on Wednesdays and get new content. But if instead your new content is delivered unpredictably, that user can get lost in the shuffle.

Keep to the beat. Being reliable with your content makes a difference.

What I want to bring attention to is why I even remembered Boris in the first place and could readily find his email address. After the initial pitch from Boris, we flirted a little bit but ultimately decided that the idea wasn’t a good fit for our company (I worked at Wine Library at that time). In my experience, two things usually tend to happen at this stage: 1) I never hear from the person again and eventually probably forget about his/her small company or idea; 2) The person keeps following up with annoying hard-sell pitches and adds me to their distribution list that contains no opt-out mechanism without my consent (this, sadly, is not hyperbole), and I develop an active dislike for them.

With Boris, something different happened: I heard from him occasionally via email, but not the type of email you’d expect. Personalized greetings at Thanksgiving. Happy New Year. Best wishes to you and your family. Not a long drawn out message with updates about the company’s progress and hawking this or that new feature. Just, “Happy New Year.” I even remember responding to one of them and thanking him. And while this could easily be overdone, it was just enough to keep Boris and his company in my general awareness without irritating me. Then, when Eli’s proposal came through my inbox I immediately thought, “He should meet Boris!” And while the intro I made probably wasn’t his intended result, it was a win for Boris anyway.

Needless to say, social media offers a myriad of ways for maintaining contact besides email. There’s a lot of chatter out there about networking… this is just a small example of the indirect opportunities that can result if you do it right.

This isn’t a blog that happens to have banner ads (though they have that too… and indeed, why wouldn’t they?). It’s one big mechanism designed to deliver advertising to viewers. They make it very clear. This is a site that people knowingly visit so they can be an ad target. And yes, he has eyeballs–enough to sell out the calendar year for 2009, and he’s well on his way in 2010.

Now isn’t this the marketer’s dream? Outside of the Super Bowl, when else do people deliberately tune in to receive advertising? Of course, in this case it’s a little different. Jason has carved out a compelling personal brand. He’s funny, creative, and good on camera. People tune in and see what crazy video he’s going to shoot next. Usually it will be directly relevant to the brand emblazoned on his chest, but somehow it doesn’t feel like advertising. Now and then he’ll run a contest with specific copy, but for the most part he maintains the creative freedom regarding the content. And people come back.

I happened to be wearing Jason’s shirt this weekend (here’s me sporting it in a dailybooth shot from a while back), and a friend asked me what the site was all about. After my explanation he asked, “When are we going to reach the limit of crazy Internet ideas that make money?” All I can say is, “not yet.”

Yesterday was a massively productive day for me. Many of us experience that mid-afternoon lull, the one so often portrayed in commercials for candy bars, energy supplements, and the like. Yesterday I powered right through. I looked up and it was 5:30, and I felt great. Throughout the day I also feel like I was just more efficient overall. Why? Now, before I launch into a tired old philosophical Mac vs. PC blog post, the scientist in me wants to consider what else was different about my day and the way I felt.

1) No commute. I spend about an hour and fifteen minutes a day just getting to the office via a commuter train and then the subway, most of which is spent sucking down coffee while huddled over my iPhone banging out one-fingered emails. I suspect this has an impact on my fatigue level later in the day. I can’t really change much about this, other than perhaps putting down the iPhone and maybe doing some light reading on the Kindle instead. Something to consider.

2) No co-workers around. Just kidding, I love my co-workers. But seriously, there were far fewer distractions in my work environment at home and it would be wrong to eliminate this factor off-hand.

3) PC vs Mac. When I first started using the Mac, my frustration level was pretty high. I regularly flubbed the keyboard commands, had trouble switching between windows (programs? am I allowed to call them windows?), you know all that stuff. But I made the adjustment. Yesterday when I approached the PC, I encountered the opposite problem: My fingers are now used to the Mac keyboard shortcuts! Nonetheless, I was able to get things rolling, which brings me to what I think is the crux of the issue.

4) Desktop vs Laptop. While these other factors played a roll, my gut tells me that this was the most important. Instead of hunched over my laptop, constantly squirming around for a comfortable viewing and typing angle, I sat comfortably at my desk, placing the wireless keyboard and optical mouse at the best place for me, while effortlessly sliding things around the big flat screen monitor that occupies half my desk. It felt good. It felt comfortable. And I don’t think it had anything to do with the fact that I was using a PC instead of a Mac. Again, that’s my gut, but when it comes to self-experimentation (and business), sometimes you have to trust your gut and see what happens.

So here’s what I’m going to do next. First of all, I’m going to use a peripheral mouse with my laptop. I did this at the beginning and then I stopped, I think because of something foolish like a dead battery. Definitely switching back. Second, I want to bring a real monitor to the office. I think this will make a huge difference. Finally, I’m going to consider how I spend the time during my commute and whether I can afford to change that part of my routine.

I could get real philosophical here and talk about the proliferation of laptops, the further implications of iPads, and how the Mayans saw this all coming, but I’m not looking for broader conclusions for humanity. We’re all built differently, and we have to know ourselves. My objective is just to maximize my own efficiency, and I think step one may be losing the laptop.

Is there anything in your work environment or daily routine that negatively affects your productivity?

However, I was surprised to learn when I visited their Olympics site that NBC actually has a great deal of social media integration. In fact, they are doing a lot of things right. What’s good and what’s bad? In the screen cap below, check out the neat “Olympic Pulse” box, featuring revolving recent tweets from various Olympic athletes and commentators.

Clicking through on Olympic Pulse takes you to a dedicated Twitter page with pulldown lists of athletes and journalists that tweet, sorted by name or by sport. You can see those individuals’ twitter streams embedded on the page. Clicking on an athlete’s name takes you to their profile page, with not only their tweets, but a brief bio and tabs linking to even more content. It was not immediately obvious to me how to follow that person on Twitter, but they do have a small follow button to the right of the profile. Ideally, that button should be much more prominent beneath the athlete’s name to expand the user’s experience beyond their singular visit to this page.

In addition, on the right side of these pages (though you have to dig pretty deep to find them on the actual home page), there are buttons for the general @NBCOlympics Twitter account, a Facebook application, mobile alerts, RSS, and widgets. They do not link to a Facebook fan page, which is a surprising choice, and the application has no activity (so far). I suspect they’ll use it to publish updates during the Games, but a fan page would afford them more versatility and greater reach.

The general Twitter account features a diverse stream of useful information about athletes, Vancouver, US qualifying rounds, etc. They also smartly use the Twitter Lists feature to make it easy to find other Olympic-relevant Twitter accounts. What’s missing is the interaction. Some of the tweets invite participation via comments on the NBC Olympics blog, but NBC could take better advantage of the social nature of Twitter (and Facebook) by keeping these discussions there, thereby capturing the attention of other users. Then, the ultimate move to engage with viewers would be to ask which athletes people would like to learn more about, or which events merit more coverage, and adjust not only their online content but potentially the actual television broadcasts in response to public opinion.

Overall, NBC is providing a lot of content and making it easy to learn about these athletes if you happen to find your way to their site. They could be using social media more effectively to drive more traffic and spread the word, but it’s a decent start. I’ll be monitoring how all this continues to play out as the Games begin in a few weeks. It will be interesting to see how viewers respond and interact with the network once this unique sporting event gets underway.

As I joined the ranks of the miserable, I grappled with the fact that I had moved clear across the country and spent 4 years of my life, hours upon hours, pursuing this topic. I was good at it. How could I now hate it? Clearly, I had too much personally invested to just quit! Surely things would get better when I finished the PhD, or got that first Post Doc position, or the first real academic job, or finally earned tenure some 6 years after that. This pattern of thinking is extremely dangerous and irrational, yet all too common in life and in business. And it took me months to get a grip on it before I packed up and left.

Behavioral economists call this tendency the Sunk Cost or “Concorde” Fallacy (Concorde after the exorbitantly expensive sonic Jet project undertaken by the French and English governments). When making a decision we ought to be concerned with how best to allocate our current and future resources—be they money, time, or effort. However, as is often the case in Economics, oughts and is’s are not the same. Instead of behaving optimally, we tend to focus on decisions we’ve already made, money already spent, time already elapsed. And we make poor decisions.

This concept itself is far from a new one, but I hope my story will resonate for some of you. When you know in your gut that your current course is doomed, gather the courage to combat this fallacy. In my case it was about changing careers, and as our own Gary V writes in Crush It!, there are options aplenty for anyone who can identify their passion. But I think there is also a broader message for entrepreneurs and businesses. If your website doesn’t convert even though you paid some hotshot a lot of money to make it look snazzy, it’s time to fix it. If you are marketing a product that doesn’t make sense for consumers, move on. If your business model is broken, you know deep down that the little tweaks are not the answer. Re-think it or start anew.

What are you invested in that you ought to abandon?