Brandon Paton

I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I founded Impact Eleven. At its inception, I honestly believed that ImpactEleven would be my first real success. A year later, I can comfortably call it a failure.

Impact Eleven was born during January 09′ while I was lying in bed. With the TV on, I was slowly drifting into sleep. For the better part of an hour I was fighting to stay awake to make it to the end of the show. On that January night, while half asleep, I had my first “Ah-hah!” moment.

You may have experienced something similar. While on the phone, taking a shower, or cooking dinner, a light bulb flashes above your head…

I Suddenly Envisioned the Next Big Thing!

For the following week, I did nothing but think about the idea. I damn well thought that this idea could be the next million-dollar, industry-changing company. But money wasn’t my main motivation. My excitement was fueled by the prospect of entrepreneurial success.

Impact Eleven was supposed to revolutionize advertising on YouTube. My vision for the business was to connect major advertisers with YouTube publishers, providing publishers an alternative to the YouTube Partner Program (which overlays ads on popular videos and gives a [low] percentage cut to whoever uploaded the video). Impact Eleven’s main advantage over the YouTube Partner Program would be that there would be no minimum channel popularity pre-requisite, and that the average revenue per 1000 views would be much higher than the Partner Program currently delivered.

The business model I envisioned for Impact Eleven relied on short pre-roll video advertisements that publishers would manually insert at the beginning of their videos before they uploaded them. An example of a 15 second pre-roll is embedded to the right.

The YouTube publishers would download the 5-20 second pre-roll video ad and insert them at the beginning of their videos that they upload. Advertisers would sign contracts with Impact Eleven agreeing to pay $xx CPM for the first 15 days, with an initial X number of target video views. We would attempt to match their target impression count by predicting the amount of views each of our publishers usually delivered. The advertiser would agree on a CPM for the first 15 days, a lower CPM for the following 3 months, and an even lower CPM for the following 6 months, since there is no way to remove the ad once it is attached to a video without removing the video altogether.

Read more for “Finding Our First Customers” and “Inexperience, Naivety, and Blind Passion.”

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I wrote a simple script last week that sends email alerts when you have new twitter mentions. The script simply searches your @username every five minutes, or whatever interval you choose, and sends an email if a new mention is found.

If you want to try it, click here to download the zip file.

Instructions: This script requires PHP 5 and the ability to setup cron jobs.

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Last week, Daniel Bruvosky was an intern at one of the most influential tech blogs in the industry. Yesterday, he was fired from TechCrunch.

The reason? Daniel Brusilovsky asked a startup to give him a MacBook Air in exchange for writing a post about their company. (More info here and here.)

Like all teen entrepreneurs, including myself, he made a mistake and has a lot to learn. TechCrunch gave Daniel a front and center position for which his mistakes could be amplified, as is occurring now.

To be clear, I think Daniel Brusilovsky fully deserves the consequences of this offense. Daniel should have made better choices. And given this experience, he probably will in the future. He’s still young, as am I, and there’s a lot of the world that we have yet to experience.

It’s important to keep in touch with reality even when your accomplishments keep you in a constant state of ecstasy. Set expectations for yourself, and always live up to them. No matter what.

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The predominance of humans as a species is driven by our extraordinary capacity to learn. Through advances in science and technology, our understanding of the biological elements that facilitate human education has rapidly expanded. From birth to death, our brain is constantly changing itself, responding to new experiences and stimuli from the outside world. The human brain allows us to learn from, adapt to, and interact with the very environment that supports our existence.

Scientific research that supports our understanding of the brain stems from three primary sources. The first source of research comes from studying the anomalous brains of patients who have sustained a brain injury, stroke, or a debilitating condition that has affected specific regions of the brain. Documented changes in behavior, correlated to damage to certain regions of the brain, can facilitate novel insights into its functioning. Secondly, the advent of technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) allows us to noninvasively scan and study the brains of healthy individuals. Thirdly, many functions and mechanisms of the brain are best understood under the vantage point of evolution.

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Over the past several weeks I have formulated some predictions for 2010. Overall, I am excited for the new year. If you would like to argue for or against any of these predictions, definitely leave a comment. I hope everyone had a good Christmas, and happy holidays.

Search & Advertising

1. Wolfram|Alpha will be acquired by Google or Microsoft. If Microsoft acquires Wolfram, it will be in an effort to differentiate Bing, which it must to do in 2010 to gain any additional market share. On the other hand, Google would love to take Wolfram Alpha’s API out of Bing’s reach.
2. Real-time search will become more ubiquitous. The value of real-time will become largely evident, and will be more heavily incorporated in search engines.
3. Mobile advertising will remain a challenge in 2010, but progress will be made. 2011 will be the year for mobile advertising.
4. Local advertising will heat up.
5. More major brands will participate in social media.  Social media will become a standard and will be part of nearly all marketing efforts by the end of 2010.

Read more to see all predictions.

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If you haven’t yet heard of Blippy.com, it’s a startup that lets you share your credit card purchases with your friends. It launched yesterday in private beta, and has caused many people to question the fate of privacy.

Judging by the comments on a TechCrunch article (and this one) about the launch, there are a lot of people who don’t like Blippy. Afterall, the concept of sharing credit card purchases can be intimidating. As someone pointed out in a comment at TechCrunch, you wouldn’t want a message like “Mary just spent $500 at XYZ Abortion Clinic” showing up on your Blippy feed.

Then again, the negative response might be a good sign. Take a look at the early reaction to Twitter. People didn’t understand why anyone would want to publish private “SMS messages to a public webpage.” No one saw utility in messages limited to 140 characters. The most remarkable companies were sometimes doubted at inception.

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In the most general sense, the degree of “work” an individual puts forth is equivalent to the “reward” they receive; as I work harder, the reward I receive increases. A simple example would be studying for a test. The more I study, the higher my grade.

But what causes me to study in the first place? It may be for the satisfaction associated with receiving a good grade, or possibly to avoid the dissatisfaction of receiving a bad grade. Nevertheless, there is a positive correlation between the work I apply and the reward I receive.

In short, two factors motivate people to do work:

• Possibility for future satisfaction
• The avoidance of future dissatisfaction

The happiest workers, of course, are the ones who work for the satisfaction of the reward. Nevertheless, working to avoid dissatisfaction can be equally motivating. After all, we spend time and money having our cars inspected in order to avoid having an inspection violation in the future.

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Amazing ideas can fail with weak execution. A significant factor that determines a company’s potential for execution, and therefore success, are the values a company lives by.

Facebook’s co-founder, Dustin Moskovitz, is working on a new startup called Asana, which has raised $10.2 million to date. At the bottom of Asana’s landing page is a list of 15 core values that the company holds. Moskovitz’s values, or some variation thereof, are ideals that every startup should live by, and not merely aspire to.

Asana is currently hiring designers, developers, and business people in the Bay Area. However, you need not apply if you do not concur with Asana’s values.

Asana’s Core Values

• Reason
• Action in the face of fear
• Honesty & transparency (internally and externally)
• Leverage
• Pragmatism
• Craftsmanship
• Chill-ness
• Being a mensch
• Company as collective of peers (vs. command-and-control hierarchy)
• Investing in people
• Perseverance
• Admitting when you’re wrong
• Diving in and fixing problems, even if they’re not yours
• Intellectualism
• Trust in wisdom over rules and incentives (explanation)

You should follow me on Twitter here.

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Depictions of the end of the world frequently portray a one-world government that takes control of the world. Control is often obtained through empty promises made to “world citizens” during times of distress. In this article, I will attempt to outline a way in which a world government may come to be and how it might eventually control the human race.

For the purpose of this article, I define a successfully “controlled” human race to have the following characteristics:

• -A single entity defining social norms
• -Limited free will with no sense of self-conscious
• -Perfect order and harmony in societal relations
• -Little instances of rebellion from orthodoxy

Disclaimer: The ideas presented below, if enacted, are radical and dangerous. They do not reflect my personal beliefs and I do not endorse these ideas by any means. This article was written to demonstrate the susceptibility of the human race, and how we may be exploited in the future. I give credit to the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley for many of these ideas.

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