FESPA Americas – Chairman

I mostly want to take a few lines to brag about my business partner, JR Kraft. The handsome gentleman depicted below is chairing this years debut FESPA Americas steering committee and will also chair the Global Business Forum at the February show in Florida. FESPA is a really big deal and it’s very exciting to [...]

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Hybrid Business

Glenn Kelman, CEO of Redfin, posted a blog article on TechCrunch on Friday discussing Hybrid Business as a new start up trend in 2011 — businesses that have “one foot in the virtual world and one foot in the real world”. The quote that caught my eye was: “who in technology wants to work with [...]

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The Art of Timing

In a couple of hours my wife and I are headed to see the new Tron movie with some good friends of ours. Unfortunately, not everyone has seen the original Tron movie, but how hard could it be to find given the vast array of digital options available to us? Apparently, very, very hard. Between [...]

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Wow This is Awesome Tech

Here are links to two of the coolest tech demos I’ve seen in a long time sent to me by my great friends Blake and Jimmy respectively. The first one is an iPhone app called Word Lens that automatically translates any words the camera sees. I’ve played with the app and it works very close [...]

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Search Harder

Are you using the Internet enough in your business for research? It really hit home with me today how important online searching is to a growing business looking to expand into new markets and into new product zones — and in an industry like ours that’s full of good ole boys and traditional business models, [...]

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Customer Love

One of the hardest areas of business in which to measure ROI is Customer Service. What’s the value of an abandoned call? An upset customer? A happy customer? What portion of word of mouth business is a result of outstanding customer service? As a business, it’s not easy to put a value number on going [...]

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Facility Hunting

Finding a new facility is a lot harder than it used to be. Over the past 4 years, BuildASign.com has grown to over 130 employees and we are bursting at the seams in the three Austin locations we occupy. The last time we moved, we had somewhere around 20 employees and it took us a [...]

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Ecommerce pushes ‘last minute shopping’ a step farther

With the use of e-commerce rising and the elimination of ‘shelves’ and ‘in-stock’ items (unless you are buying a wii or a kindle), procrastinators such as myself have been able to wait longer and longer to buy Christmas presents, even able to get things delivered lickity split just a few days before Christmas. But what [...]

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Seriously, iPhone, Stop Being Stupid!

It happens about once a week — I get frustrated, then angry then sad. Why? Because the iPhone is such a great product but has a small shortcoming that makes it completely unusable as a business phone for me. That feature is push technology or multiple application capabilities. At work, we communicate via Google Talk [...]

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It’s finally happened – I turned green

At our offices, we are constantly looking for ways to  help out the environment and improve our health – we buy biodegradable plastics,  we provide free healthy snacks and drinks, we have infrared sensors so lights turn off when we aren’t there, and we mark our normal trash ‘landfill’ (taken from my visits to the [...]

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