Here’s another website that uses the Twitter model: it’s called Sprouter - just launched this week!

Check out their video tour.

I don’t use Twitter anymore, but I’m enjoying this neat little startup though. With Twitter, there is too much noise from too broad of  a network. All I see when I log in to my Twitter account are short, barely-descriptive statuses written by bored people. Too often I see the extended version of these statuses on Facebook, so why even bother logging in at all? (More beef on Twitter later in my upcoming blog post)

I think Sprouter (and also Yammer) did exactly what Twitter needed to do, but didn’t: divide and conquer. There is a need for micro-blogging, but it is important for users to sift through the sea of statuses. Twitter could have done that by implementing filters to segment different interest groups, but they decided to invest in the unfamiliar realm of real-time search instead. This is great, but it requires active involvement – the act of ‘searching’ – too bad people are lazy online!

In the near future, there will be more and more startups applying the micro-blogging concept (or Twitter model). And Twitter will be a dead bird – a martyr for micro-blogging – the Youtube comments of the internet.

You can follow me on Sprouter here: http://www.sprouter.com/peterkao

Peter Kao

Another year, another Entrepreneur Week. And once again, I’m unable to attend but you can!

If you are in Waterloo, Canada (click for Google Maps location) or near it, you can participate in this year’s exciting “innovation festival.”

Here’s some more information (also available on their website):

“Entrepreneurs! start your engines: Entrepreneur Week, North America’s largest annual innovation festival dedicated to the entrepreneurial spirit, will be held in Waterloo November 16-22 and it promises to be another high-octane event to inspire innovation.

Entrepreneur Week is an invigorating week-long festival of events dedicated to celebrating the significant contributions of our greatest community asset – our entrepreneurs!

Waterloo Region is the best place in the world to do a tech startup. Just ask the 200 tech startups doing their thing here. And Entrepreneur Week is a festival unlike any other on the planet. Entrepreneur Week connects entrepreneurs, financiers, students, youth, mentors and the services that support them to success.

Entrepreneur Week 2009 will feature:

Startup Stories: Intimate speaking engagements profiling successful techy entrepreneur founders, including Chris Hughes, co-Founder, Facebook, Tim Bray, Father of XML and Internet Search, Razor Suleman, Founder and CEO, I Love Rewards Jim Estill, the CEO Blogger, Ali Asaria, founder of Well.ca, and more!

The Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Hall of Fame Gala: A black tie formal gala event, celebrating local and international entrepreneurs.  Inductions are made into The Waterloo Way Hall of Fame.

The Leading Edge Youth Entrepreneurship Conference: This one is for the highschool students who dream of making it big with their own venture. A full day workshop and seminar to inspire young entrepreneurs.

StartupCamp Waterloo: the un-conference. An ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees.

Celebrating Entrepreneur Week with Andy Macaulay, President and CEO, ZiG, at the Schlegel Centre for Entrepreneurship, Wilfrid Laurier University as part of their Innovation and Entrepreneurship Speaker Series.

The return of the Founders and Funders Dinner. Founders & Funders is a social event aimed at bringing together the people that start the next big successful company with the people that fund these companiesin their earliest stages. This ain’t a pitch fest.  It is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to meet funders, and each other.  By invitation only.

Strategic Partnering Day: Communitech connects budding entrepreneurs with some big guns in the Tech Industry (including RIM, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Celestica, Open Text, Sybase, Agfa HealthCare, Rogers and ON Semiconductor. Proposals to participate welcome. Now in its fifth year, Entrepreneur Week promises to be another huge success in sparking entrepreneurial innovation in the Waterloo Region. Save the date – and watch for more details coming soon.”

Peter Kao

There are great business ideas, and then there are half-baked ideas. This is where halfbakery.com comes into play. It’s a website that is solely dedicated to ridiculous, improbable, and naturally – hilarious business ideas.

To give you a sense of what the website is like (because, you know, visiting a link yourself is hard) take a look at this invention, entitled, “evil laugh activated hand dryer.” It works as follows: “instead of a button or infrared sensor, people sometimes rub their hands together in the airstream, activate this hand dryer by laughing evilly.” Look! There are even pretty pictures,

Now, this is my kind of humour!

To give the website some credit though, there are some serious ideas. For example, the “Panic PIN“ idea, which is ranked as the top idea on the website, works by “entering [an] alternate ATM PIN number [to summon] help.” The idea is that if you are forced to withdraw cash, you can alert the police without the robber knowing.

Look around, you might even find a solid business idea to stea- err, I mean, examine.

Peter Kao

Here’s a broadcast for all you fire-breathing entrepreneurs. I received an email from a representative for Cornell University regarding their upcoming online video contest.

Details for the contest:

“Now through November 30, eCornell is inviting entrepreneurs who are developing (or have already developed) a new product or service to submit a 30- to 60-second video that explains or demonstrates their process for understanding what customers want and satisfying their needs. The first-place winner will receive a full scholarship (a $3,500 value) for Cornell’s newest online certificate program, A Systems Approach to Product and Service Design, which arms entrepreneurs with a unique eight-step process for effective product development. Second- and third-place winners will have the opportunity to enroll in two eCornell product design courses each, free of charge ($1,250 value per course). Winners will be selected based on quality of response, creativity, and methodology, and will be announced on December 14, 2009.

This is a great opportunity for your readers to connect with the brightest minds in the startup community, generate brand awareness for their respective organizations, and claim their FREE opportunity to win a full scholarship to one of the top universities in the nation. Additional information about the contest can be found at http://www.ecornell.com/l-entrepreneur-video-contest/. “

Go get them, dragons!

Peter Kao

I spend a lot of my time reading online articles. And if you’re like me, your eyes start to get dry and light-sensitive (to the monitor) after a few hours of reading.

To ease the pain, I’ve found two Firefox add-ons that help:

- Greasemonkey + Tired Eyes script (only works with Greasemonkey)

- NoSquint

Now, before you go ahead and download/install the first app, I’ve prepared my own version of the Tired Eyes script – available for download here. I will explain the differences later below.

Greasemonkey is an add-on that changes how a website looks by running user-generated javascript code. One of the script that I use is the Tired Eyes script which changes the text and background colors of any website. I’ve found that the color combination used for the script isn’t ideal for me, so I’ve played around with the colors a bit. The end result is this:

Although the top image is better to read in this example (partially due to pixelation), after a few hours the bright-white background feels like a flashlight in your eyes. The only way to really feel the difference is to try out the script and then turn it off by hitting the assigned (changeable) F2 hot-key. You will soon realize how bright your monitor really is, and how much light is shine through your eyes. No wonder our eyes feel tired sometimes! Really, try it out yourself!  Download Greasemonkey + My ‘Darker’ version of the Tired Eyes script.

The second add-on, NoSquint, remembers the zoom level you’ve set on any website. For example, I always increase the font size of Wired.com articles just because I find their font size a bit too small. This add-on remembers how much I’ve zoomed, and displays the website at the last zoomed level – saving me from having to zoom-in after every visit.

Hope this helps! Protect your eyes, and happy reading

Edit: You can also use a bookmarklet called Readability if you are not using Firefox. It strips a webpage of annoyances and leaves only the necessary text and pictures. Thanks Rajesh for the mention!

Peter Kao