BACK IN THE BLOGOSPHERE . . . BITCHES!!

I know, I know -- what kind of a person abandons their blog for so long?! Me - that's who. I won't try to defend my excuses as good ones, but they'll have to do. Actually all of my excuses roll up into one fat one - LIFE!

Right around the time of my last post, my first kid was turning 1 and I was coming off my self-imposed hiatus and into a new gig leading the digital practice for GameStop.   From there it was a proverbial roller coaster of sorrow (losing my dad & best friend in August ’11 after almost a year of health issues), change (moving the family to Northern California in September ’11) and pure joy (the birth of our second kid in December ’11).

As amazing of a job as that has been for the last 3 ½ years, one of the unfortunate by-products of the gig was a “no public commentary without prior approval” mandate that made the act of blogging one of process and permission rather than harmless rants and observations.  Aren’t public companies fun?! 

Besides this small bump in the road, the GameStop gig was an amazing opportunity to yet again help a large incumbent leverage its place in the ecosystem (this time in gaming) to evolve its business to one that not only continues its market dominance in its core business but also boldly strikes out into new and adjacent businesses as a path to helping ensure future viability.  In my time there we accomplished quite a bit in a relatively short period of time, taking the companies revenues from sub-$100MM in ’09 to over $600MM in ’12.  I’m extremely proud of what we accomplished there and I look forward to the next chapter in my career, which will continue to include advising and mentoring early stage companies.

So now back to my blog.  The cool thing about reading through your old posts is that you can reflect back on how right on or full of s**t you were about stuff - and I gotta say the shovel is pretty light. One service that I blogged about (Groupon) has had quite an epic ride these last few years, two others (Tunezee and Timebridge) were acquired, another (Rixty) is still chugging along in the games sector and another (The Peek) is pretty much off the grid as predicted.

While this walk down memory lane was fun, I gotta say that the best part of getting this blog post up was surfing through all the stuff that came up when I went onto Google Images looking for an "I'm Back" image. This was the best (and safest) one I could come up with - thanks to whoever created it.

So now that I'm back on the grid I'll do my best post a bit more regularly. Looking forward to seeing what the future brings!

T.A.P. SERIES #3 - MAKING VIRTUAL SCHEDULING EASIER

We all know how painful it can be sometimes to try and schedule things with other folks via email - especially those outside your office and/or company for work-related things like meetings, conference calls, lunches, etc. If your experience is anything like mine, it take at least 3-4 back and forth emails to settle on a date and time that works -- and that's just when trying to schedule something with just one other person that's in the same vicinity or time zone. Multiply that by 2 for every additional person involved in the process and you get the picture.

I recently came across a company by the name of TimeBridge that offers a consumer-friendly (and more importantly, free!) meeting schedule product that is entirely web-based and allows you to not only integrate it with office-based calendars like Outlook but, more importantly, with home-based calendars like Google or iCal. There's also a business version, which I assume has some kind of price tag associated with it.

The process is pretty simple -- sign up for an account, create a meeting proposal - which includes selecting/suggesting days and times for the event, send it out to your intended recipients and wait for them to get back to you. Once everyone is on board the invite can be integrated into your calendaring system of choice (assuming it's one of the three mentioned above) and you're all set.

Feel free to send any and all feedback about the product once you've given it a try - I think you'll find it worthwhile.