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The hiccups have been cured. Want to know what the secret is?

It’s simple, whenever you get the hiccups, all you have to do is think to yourself “I am not a fish. I am not a fish. I am not a fish…”

Laugh it up. Everyone I have told this since February has laughed and called me crazy. But they shut up when their hiccups suddenly stop. It has now worked 100% of the time, instantly, every time I have shared it.

The inventor of the cure is Neil Shubin, who looked at brain patterns in fish and humans with the hiccups. Electrical signals in the brain trigger hiccups. In fish, these signals run automatically to keep the gills working and the fish breathing. We descended from fish, and at some point these automatic electronic signals to hiccup became unneccessary. But every now and again they turn on. All you have to do to turn them off is remind yourself you are not a fish, and can breathe just find without an automatic hiccuping signal.

Here’s the article that gave me the secret back in February.

Should work anytime, all the time. I’ve seen 100% instant success rates. Let me know if it doesn’t work for you.

Decided to try out one of these book social networks to see if I can find some important books I should be reading. The idea is you enter the books you’ve read and rate them, as well as the books you want to read. Then the site will show you people who like similar books and you can hopefully stumble upon some books that they’ve read that you will like.

The three main sites I found were Shelfari, GoodReads, and LibraryThing. The idea is pretty cool, because a good book recommendation, unlike a movie recommendation, can possibly change your life. So the chance of getting a huge payoff from these services is relatively very high. Not bad for spending no money and just a couple minutes or even an hour or two entering your book list and exploring the shelves of others.

My primary goal is to find business and technical books. Finding good fiction or literature to read is not a problem for me–there’s plenty of it out there. Really what I’m looking for is books that have been read by people I respect in a business/technical role. That’s why I think a service like this could be more valuable than Amazon’s recommendation engine. I’m looking for quality books read by quality people. Amazon generally recommends popular books. The books I want to read don’t necessarily have to be popular among the masses, just popular among the people who I want to learn from. 

I started with Shelfari, then checked out Goodreads, and then on to LibraryThing.

They are all pretty good. I will update this post later with more detailed reviews, but I have to say if you sign up for one you might as well sign up for them all. You will increase your chances of finding “diamond in the rough” books that way. Of course, it takes time to input your books into all 3 of them, but there could be a quicker way to do that(I’m gonna look into existing sites, otherwise might roll one myself).

The traffic stats:

Compete.com shows goodreads pulling away from the comptetion.

shelfari(red), goodreads(blue), librarything(orange)

Google Trends for Websites also shows goodreads in the lead and growing fastest.

Seth Godin wrote a post yesterday with a bunch of brainstormed ideas. They were somewhat related to the concept that passively collecting behavior data would allow for very useful decision support. Here are some my thoughts on these ideas.

1. Let me see the percentage of people who have bought a book and actually finished reading it. (The Kindle knows, right?) Even better, let me see Kindle books that are finished by people who finish books that I finish!

First of all, this measurement would only be worthwhile for novels. If you want a measurement of the usefulness of a book, a better statistic would be the number of times a book is reopened. Sometimes I don’t finish a non-fiction book precisely because it is good–I’ll take my time to get through it because each chapter could have a month’s worth of great ideas to absorb. But if you are talking about reading for entertainment, this would be a pretty good measure. This would alert you to the types of books that you “can’t put down”.  But even then there are problems. What do you mean “finished reading it”. Would someone who read the first 490 out of 500 pages finished? What about someone who read only the last 10 out of 500 pages? What about someone who “read” all 500 pages, but did so in 5 minutes?

2. Let me see a map of my town with the location of pedestrian accidents highlighted by color.

This way, I can be on my guard in Spot A, where pedestrian accidents are common, and let my guard down in Spot B, where there’s never been an accident. The beauty of this is that I’ll have to return to the website every month, because everyone became so careful in Spot A and so reckless in Spot B that there’s a new pattern to learn.

3. Give me a listing of all the houses in my city sorted by (value of house/taxes paid). That would go a long way to bringing equity to the assessment system.

I thought you lived in a town? (See idea #2).

4. Sort restaurants on Open Table by the percentage of reservations booked by returning diners.

A lot of people have consistently bad tastes. I know many people that frequently go to chain restaurants. There also are people who are afraid to try new things. And even if some people would rather go to restaurant A, restaurant B could cost half as much and see many returners.

5. Sort Facebook invitations in order of how many times someone has been unfriended.

Let’s also find a way in real life to stop being friends with somebody just because other people do.

6. Sort credit card offers based on data from Mint or Wesabe… show me the credit cards with the fewest bankruptcies/financial troubles among recipients first.

Delete all credit card offers period. Show me one independent study, that proves a net benefit to the cardholder from using a credit card. (Debit cards excluded).

7. Sort corporate email by how many people in my company have indicated that a sender is important.

Thus ensuring the even slightest difference in initial popularity level can send someone to the top or the bottom of the corporate ladder even faster.

8. Let me see stocks ranked in order of recent purchases by successful investors.

That way simply by virtue of being known as a “successful investor”, you can become an “even more successful investor”, simply because people will watch and follow your every purchase decision. You can then dump stocks after the price bump(which your purchase caused) and handle a nice profit.

9. Let me review bids from builders ranked in order of complaints filed or the length of time between first application for a building permit and finished building.

Make sure to account for difficulty of the project.

10. Let me see potential online dates sorted by how frequently (or infrequently) the person goes on first dates.

This would only help those looking for a casual hookup to find each other. If someone says “i date a lot of people”, you can be pretty sure that they mean it. If someone says the opposite, you can’t be so sure. Unless there was a 3rd party monitoring tool, but if 1984 were to ever arrive, I don’t think this tool would be a top priority.

11. Sort car models by crash and repair data.

I think Consumer Reports/Kelly’s Blue Book do something like this.

12. Let me see my salesforce ranked by closing rate or cold call rate or customer satisfaction.

Why can’t you do this already?

13. Let me see my inbound call data by hour, sorted by number of rings before answer, or by percentage of calls unanswered.

This would be revolutionary. I bet my income would take off if I could decrease my “rings before answer” average. But seriously, phones should have better APIs for extracting usage data.

14. Let me sort my customer service requests by customer value. (Including loyalty, purchases and referrals).

Many companies do this already.

15. Let me choose a doctor by malpractice suit rate.

Just look for an attractive, friendly doctor. They are much less likely to be sued than an ugly, gruff one, irregardless of medical competence. Studies have been done on this.

16 .When I watch TV online, recognize the pundit and flash historical accuracy rates on the screen while she talks.

Just flashing “No better than than a coin flip” for every pundit would do the trick.

17. Blank out comments on posts that agree with my point of view.

This is a bad, bad idea. I hope you never implement this idea. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Disclaimer: I reserve the right to disagree with every comment I made on each idea. I often intentionally tried to disagree with Seth(see #17), although for some ideas I believe my comments were better.

 The Value of Science by Richard Feynman

I’ve been involved with two great business plan competitions: The Duke Startup Challenge and the MIT 100K. These are just two out of hundreds of competitions out there. On top of all the existing groups, many more new competitions are created every week. The problem is, many of these organizations face similar needs yet are constantly forced to reinvent the wheel. For instance, I’ve been helping the DSC a bit with its registration system. The goal is to make the registration process as easy as possible for contestants AND the volunteer organizers. I bet a few competitions have better systems, and I bet many have much worse systems(I’m talking using paper forms and manual data entry to register teams). I personally really want to help the DSC, but think the best solution to the problem is for someone or some group to form a low key organization to support Business Plan Competitions. I’m thinking just a few people who will take it upon themselves to increase communication and collaboration among the hundreds of BPlan competitions out there for the benefit of all. This new group could foster the sharing of techniques, marketing materials, website code, etc. Since these are generally non-profits, I think this would be welcome by all.

And it would be a lot more efficient than current methods, which consist of either reinventing the wheel or only small communication by different organizations.

Let me know what you think and especiallly let me know if there is a group out there already–I would love to connect people with them.

Every successful person in the startup world will tell you that the most important part of any startup is the team. From my own experiences, I wholeheartedly agree. But everyday I talk to people who think the most important thing is the idea. For instance, I just met a nice young woman at Logan Airport. She was wearing a well-pressed white blouse and grey skirt, dressed to impressed for her job at a prominent Boston-based health care consulting firm. We started talking about Facebook, and she repeated something I’ve heard at least a dozen times “[Zuckerberg] is going to make so much money. Facebook was such a simple idea. I wish I had thought of that.” I smiled and agreed pleasantly while trying hard not to roll my eyes.

Facebook is amazing, don’t get me wrong. But it is so much more than one idea. By this point I would say that millions of ideas have gone into Facebook. Thousands have been executed and are part of the site and company; many more have been considered, iterated, and shed. And most importantly, the Facebook team(now at over 300) has spent countless hours engaged in hard at sometimes grueling work. To say that Zuckerberg is going to make a lot of money because of one idea is to ignore 99.9% of the reasons behind Facebook’s success.

I am very skeptical that any one idea–no matter how great–is worth much. Even the “simple, big ideas”, are worth squat on their own.

My philosophy on ideas is this:

• Some ideas are more important than others. These are the simple, general, big ideas. These ideas don’t bring in any money, and are worth very little by themselves.
• The simple, general, big ideas each require dozens of more medium-sized ideas. These ideas put together are worth more than the big ideas, but still not much.
• The medium sized ideas each require hundreds of smaller ideas. These ideas are the ones that finally allow a startup to actually make money. These ideas put together are worth more than the big and medium ideas combined.
• Coming up with all of these ideas takes creativity and intelligence. Some people are better at it than others.
• Finally, coming up with and executing every single one of these ideas requires something that not many people like to admit: work. Without work all of these things are worthless.

So, while most people can identify and easily understand the simple, general, big ideas that are behind successful companies, very few of them see the 99.9% or ideas and hard work that actually lead to these big ideas making money. And very few people have the ability to do more than simply come up with simple, general, big ideas, which I believe are worthless because they are always unrealistic until that 99.9% of the work is done to make them real.

While any one person can come up with a simple, general, big idea, it takes a team of smart, cooperative, hard-working people to do the 99.9% of the idea creation and work that turns that big idea into a money making reality. That’s why the team is so much more important than any idea.

I think the best entrepreneurs are the ones who can build and lead a team to ensure that the 99.9% gets done so that the .1% of the company that is the big idea becomes reality.

I wish there was a way to open the current tab in a new window. I have about 15 tabs open usually, and now that I have the cool Switcher Program, I want to pop my tabs into their own windows. Or at the very least I want to open a few of the important ones in their own windows. Right now I have to open a new window and navigate to the same page(requiring another call to the web server).

I also want to be able to display the favicon for each site in the windows taskbar (as opposed to the Firefox logo over and over).

Are there already extensions that do either of these? That would be great. Otherwise I plan to start them sometime in the near future.