Author Archives: tagami

The conversation

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The light flickers as if we spoke by candlelight.
Memory and thought dance between reality.
The idea: in focus,
Lucid and clear, now fading again –

Throwing itself into the distance of time and space.
It is there.
I must rummage to find it.

End of Oil

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When a lifetime oilman like T. Boone Pickens suggests that Peak Oil has occurred while making massive investments in Texas wind farms, or when you read that Andy Grove is on a mission to electrify the exisiting cars of the world, something is afoot.

By tapping into the ubiquitous power grid and moving to battery storage and exchange instead of filling tanks with gas, A new company, Better Place, looks to fundamentally change the way we power our individual vehicles. Israel and Denmark are rebuilding the entire way the automotive infrastructure works, and automobile manufacturers like Nissan-Renaut plan on bringing full electric vehicles to the US by 2010. It appears the fulcrum for all of this will probably be hitting in 2010. I guess I won’t be driving my SUV for too much longer. On Better Place, I just created a pretty cool “minifesto” on why we need to get off of oil:

What are your thoughts about energy, and the future? What is your minifesto?

I've fallen into the Lifestream!

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5+ months. Way too long for an update to the blog. Many of the things I would like to talk about I cannot share due to my daily work at Millions of Us. There are so many amazing things coming this summer to virtual worlds.

Lately, I’ve found my thoughts taking seed in conversations on sites like twitter.com, and over the last few weeks, friendfeed.com.

I’ve embedded my FriendFeed here, because it may be months again when I find time to update this site! FF is definitely a place worth exploring. Add me when you are there!

20 years ago – Joshua Tree

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Yeah, I was a 20-something — about 20 years ago.

I just got a big flashback reminder of those “golden years” earlier today with the announcement of U2 remastering Joshua Tree – a quintessential masterpiece I rocked out to in my first (and hopefully not last) IPO, Good Guys.

Those summer days in the late 80′s were where I refined the fine craft of salesmanship: greeting, establishing rapport, qualifying (today known as being an active listener and asking great questions), presenting, proving value, overcoming objections, and closing the sale. We’d have a chance to do 20-30 transactions a day. The sales cycles are longer now — 2-5 months, not 20-50 minutes, and the value of each sale is substantially higher. In my 22 years of selling, I’ve come to realize zeros are just placeholders, and at the end of the day we are rewarded for solving a problem or meeting a need.

There still is a great need to end world hunger. Have a look at freerice.com. It is a very clever site that will donate grains of rice for each successful word definition you answer correctly. You will have a chance to stretch your mind, learn new words and word meanings, and I think you will be amazed at how fast you can fill a bowl up to feed a starving person somewhere in the world.

Here’s is a great clip from iLike with Bono singing “Wave of Sorrow”, which was conceived during the recording of Joshua Tree, but was just recently completed, and will be included in the remastered Joshua Tree. It is an incredible story of Bono’s first hand experience of Ethiopia during the famine of 1984-85. Have a listen: