Howard Lindzon

My buddy Andy Monfried is the best salesman I know. Period.

When I started Wallstrip , he just called me up and asked to be included in the angel round. Never had met him. He read my blog and just thought we were onto something.

Andy is ALWAYS positive, but that does not mean he will just sing your praises. That’s why we wanted him on our board and he helped with Wallstrip strategy from day one. It does not hurt that he was instrumental in the success of Advertising.com (Time Warner).

When Andy asked me to be an advisor at Lotame I said sure…’what do you need to me to do?’ . He said just sit back .

Ok. I am sitting and he is running around getting it done. Today, Lotame raised $13 million on top of $11 million and I love their strategy off the beaten path of mainstream social networking.

Look out! You are the man Andy. Call me if you need anything… I am at Pebble .

I am Pebble Beach this week and as I remembered, it’s awesome.

The whole damn coast of California is awesome, save Los Angeles.

As for investing, The California coast reminds me that we are ust ‘Dust in the Wind‘ and it’s best for 99 percent of investors to consider that when allocating their hard earned money to the stock market.

Consider the the government has put into place short selling rules to stem the bleeding of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and that the stocks are still down 10-20 percent a few weeks later.

When the market is a steamtrain in one direction, you must be positioned in the overall direction. When it is down like this with random volatile up days (many over 300 points), you are going to be tossed around. I prefer to stay mostly on the sideline as I have since January.

The occassional long add and the occassional short and the occassional trade with a tight stop. Just enough to keep me fresh and keep a feel for the market, but not enough to ruin my work efforts and leisure efforts away from the market.

We are a long way from easy, non-volatile times right now so don’t get mad, just read less, go outside more and stand further away from the daily pries to get a better picture of where we are headed.

Nerds (I mean it in the nicest of ways this one time)…take down your Avatars!

Yesterday, it seemed like a lot of people I follow were switching to a new Avatar as their picture. Avatar love shows up once in a while in the consumer side of the internet and each time there is great hope and promise. To be clear about my take on Avatars…MAHALO holds more promise.

I don’t mind seeing an Avatar in my securities testing and at all the other dumbass places I have to take tests to renew some useless particular license. In fact, it’s a good business I am sure. But, as it relates to the social and communicative web…ditch ‘em. Don’t we all have a billion ways to take and manipulate a ‘REAL’ DIGITAL PHOTO?

Rant aside, there are a few things really are wrong with the consumer use of Avatars that may salvage a consumer opportunity (Note - nothing will salvage MAHALO ):

1. the Name - Avatar is a dumb word in the era of the social web.

2. the owner designs it

Off the top of my head, just about any name would work better than Avatar, but that does not solve the real problem…you should not be allowed to design your own picture unless you toooook it!

A photo/picture speaks 1,000 words but an Avatar says - THIS IS WHAT I LOOK LIKE TO ME! Wrong.

To have a prayer of a chance once the industry designs a proper word, your ‘compter caraciture’ must be designed by somebody else (hopefully a talented artist who spends more than one minute churning it out) if not your community of friends and followers. Not you!

Don’t make me unfollow you!

Mark is very right about The Platform being the message .

Like my last post earlier today on NBC and Web Video hitting all-time lows on the Olympic web coverage , I don’t need statistics and numbers…just common sense and my own eyeballs.

I have always said on this blog that Television is long from dead. I wish certain parts were dead, but that is not going to happen in this generation.

In the meantime, even Mark Cuban is smarter than the yutz’s running the networks. God help us all.