Kevin Ohashi - Entrepreneur I Love Learning New Things.

This is a tale of cron jobs, data mining and algorithms.
Our story begins with a data mining script I wrote to do research for my Master's Thesis (investigating social media buzz - still in early stages, will post more details as it progresses and/or drives me progressively more insane).

Dear Ted,
I am glad you learned how to use email: it's hard and we all make mistakes.

Now quit your deceptive email marketing.

What are you talking about you say?

Lesson 1: I never opted into your email newsletter. Just because you put an opt-out doesn't make it OK to subscribe me. If everyone operated in this way we would all get even more spam. Do you know why all those email services that handle it professionally do double opt-in? Because people hate your spam.

Note: this is just an exploratory piece on my experiences and perceptions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs; all feedback, stories and opinions are welcome.

A little background on me (context does matter in my opinion) is that I have been one of those kids that always dreamed about having their own company/business and started back in middle school with this 'web' thing. I recently finished a Master's in Entrepreneurship from Lund University. I would self-define myself in the serial entrepreneur category.

Can you teach entrepreneurship?

I was watching This Week in Startups (hat tip to Frank Schilling for the link) and there was a little segment about domain names. While interesting to hear the story it really wasn't the most interesting thing I heard in the talk. What he discovered about domain names was easily encompassed in the quote:

What is effective marketing today will not be effective tomorrow. - Michael Robertson

Some of my favorite lessons:

"It pays to do good and be good while running and doing your startup."

Fabulous, my registrar of choice, released an API today. Docs can be seen here. I think it's a great step forward for them and something I wish they had ages ago. It does appear they intentionally limited some of the API commands to keep it for users only (not resellers). I wonder if they will open it up more in the future?

Regardless, great work Fabulous!

Effective?

This article is based off Paul Graham's 'Can You Buy A Silicon Valley? Maybe' and 'How to Be Silicon Valley.'

The question is what city would be ideal to create Europe's Silicon Valley?