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It was a classic story as old as time: college kids grow up online, decide that it’d be a great idea to throw a internet culture conference, and unleash sheer ridiculousness upon the world.
Back in April 2008, we put on the original ROFLCon — the first internet culture conference devoted to discussing what makes memes work, why they work, and where it’s all going (and then throwing a big-ass rocking party with the internet celebs themselves). It was a kickass time, not to mention the most important gatherings since the fall of the tower of Babel.
But starting Homicide Watch, the business, took much more.
There are a lot of resources out there for entrepreneurial journalists; unfortunately I didn’t know about any of them when I got started. Much of my learning was trial and error. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to set up your own business, and in this post I’ll take you through my steps and what I learned in the process.
Current Location: Bethesda, MD Current Gig: CEO, Mobiletech Quick and Dirty Resume: Learned to drive small boats fast in the shallow waters with the Norwegian Naval Academy. Used that skill to then navigate through the IT boom in the late 90´s in the banking industry. During this time, I also developed a passion for mobile, which led to creation of Mobiletech in 2005, where I am today –- still at full speed! Six-word memoir: Aim high, watch for returning arrow. Favorite fictional character: That’s easy — Carl Hamilton, or Coq Rouge from Jan Guillou´s famous spy novels. Favorite tech tool? The Sonos music system. Really love having online streaming music from Pandora or Spotify in all rooms. Of course, I can control it with the ease of an iPhone.
What happens during your average day?
“You are Creative, Artistic, and We Love You” read the subject line from my latest email from scroll kit, a website creation service. If I had to rate them just on marketing alone, scroll kit would get five stars. Since when do website companies send affirmations to your inbox? Unfortunately, I also had to grade ScrollKit on usability and experience, which is where we run into some problems.
The Sunshine in Government Initiative (SGI), a coalition of media organizations that includes the Online News Association, the world’s largest membership organization of digital journalists, sent a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) expressing concerns about its new Press Lock-ups Policy, which could inhibit the quality, accuracy and independence of news reporting.
An interesting long read that looks at the relationship between the digital media giant and its online media-sharing service in the context of the social web.
