20 years ago – Joshua Tree

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:

Serendipity

Just a day after seeing Jeff Jarvis talk about Recovery 2.0, a major earthquake hit South Asia. After the Tsunami and New Orleans, has the online community built the needed neworking and resources to respond effectively? Looks like there is still alot of work to do. Check out some thoughts from Global Voices Online.

update Recovery2 is pointing to South Asia Quake help to organize efforts. I’ve also resized the video of Jeff’s speech to a much more manageable size (less than 5 megs now). BTW, I am new to this media stuff, so if anyone is in the SF Bay Area that would like to give me a few tips, I would be deeply appreciative!

Google has a reader. Yahoo does podcasts.

I’ve got two new podcasts up from the Web 2.1 BrainJam that happened last Friday.

In Breakthrough Session #1 Stefan Klocek, Camilo Ramirez, Susan Tenby and I chat about Discovery and Serendipity. Breakthrough sessions were small groups of 5-8 people that shared ideas about the future of the web and how people fit into it. These sessions lasted 15-20 minutes and then we broke apart and reformed new groups to do it over again.

In Breakthrough Session #2 Our group included Cal Henderson, lead developer for Flickr. In this podcast, Cal discusses the origins of Ludicorp as a MMOG, and shares his view on the basic architecture required for Web 2.0.

Celebrity sighting:

Pete Townshend is using blogger to post his novella “The Boy Who Heard Music”.

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