MoTown was machine, a solid gold hit making machine.

Talent + Creative/Catchy Musical Hooks + A marketing/promotion machine = solid gold hits for 40+ years. Just from 1961 to 1971, Motown had 110 top 10 hits. They developed a repeatable hit making process, a formula, a hit machine. Talent goes in once side, Hits exit the other.

MoTown also led the charge integrating black music mainstream. They launched acts like Stevie Wonder and The Supremes.. exposing “black” music to white listeners everywhere.  This was pre civil-rights. Can you say Disruptive? Game changers.

Is it possible to find a similar formula for business? A process that put’s smart talent and ideas in one end, and cranks out hit companies on the back side? Is this what the likes of TechStars, and Y Comb are doing? I dont know. Just asking the question.

Say a startup business formula does exist. Can it exist here in the desert?

Could the Fractals, Dojo’s, Gangplanks, organize the technical and creative talent? Can the AIGA’s and AZIMA’s lasso in the hardcore creatives and digital marketers? Can we entice the TIEAZ’s and other business development, management, and sales people away from their Paradise Bakeries to co-mingle with the other parties? Could we get the ATIFs, Arizona Angels, SociallLeverages of the valley to invest? Finally can we get the local governments to understand their future tax base will be built on upon the jobs created by these these other groups working together?

Can these moving parts and energy forces be harnessed into some sort of formula, where each feeds off of and feeds into the other?

Smart people with solid business ideas, partnered with and advised by smart business people, with their ideas refined and executed by smart technical and creative classes, funded by local money, and supported by local government.

Could such a machine exist in Arizona? Naw, Lets build more houses.

Soda’s as big as your head.

4 dozen tube socks.

3000 POP3 Mailboxes.

The hosting consumer has been trained to shop on “Checkmarked Columns” as I call them. Below is an example of one. This is what the customer is buying, but this is not what page.ly is selling.  If you want checkmarks, page.ly is not for you. If you want super fast setup, hassle free updates, and a dedicated wordpress host.. page.ly may be right for you. Just an observation.

As most of you peeps know. Ward Andrews and I made Suntweets many months ago. We have/had plans to take it further into more of a real time, live game -> social media hybrid experience.

These cool cats at http://www.fanchatter.com/ have now done it, With funding from Y Comb.

Another Classic coulda, woulda, shoulda but didn’t and now someone else has. Great for FanChatter, their investors, and sports fans.. and a missed opportunity for me.

Lesson to me: STFU and DO IT.

Lesson to you: STFU and DO IT.

I am not going to pine on about the state of startup funding in Phoenix… I’ll leave that to Derek.

A few years ago we built a small business website solution based on wordpress called flare9.com. I am updating the brand and revamping the whole backend and will be re-launching the service as page.ly this summer. The service lets you create your own website, on your own domain name, with email service.

It is aimed at the startup/micro business that needs something professional looking, fast, without spending a ton of money.

It will also be available for white label soon after launch.. where resellers may set up their own site builder service.

Took all of about 6 hours to fully integrate OpenId into bestpartyever.com using the widgets from RPXnow.

Did not have to change a single db field. Most of the time spent was writing controller code to correctly handle what happens when one of the current 9000+ users decides to start using an OpenId.  A bit of conditional logic, and new views.. away we go.

Big shouts to @marcusnelson from UserVoice for tunring me on to RPXnow, and big shouts to RPX for making it so dang easy.

AuthorityLabs.com a new Search Engine Rankings monitoring tool came to me and asked for some marketing help. What else could I do then leverage the photo voting tool I wrote a few months back to ask the poignant question: Who is the BEST SEO EVER?

In this one and only case, rankings don’t matter, it is all about the photo skills.  The best seo ever is determined by photog awesomness. Are you an SEO? Are you the best SEO ever? Upload your mug today and challenge the best. And check out Authoritylabs.com for easy search engine monitoring.

Pix.ly Little side project I have been working on that allows you to pull in flickr photos by tag, photoset, group, or user and rate them in a vs. style head to head matchup.  The photo competition Winners and losers are logged so one can see what is the best user rated photo from any particular battle.  Hot photo vs photo action.  I would love your feedback and ideas on how to make it better.

And get your will.i.am hologram tshirt.

So Startup Weekend Phoenix is this weekend at Gangplank HQ, and it promises to be a frenzy of startup energy.

Last night about 6pm I was going through some domains I own and an idea for what to do with some of them came to me. So about 11 hours later I launched Best Costume Ever, which is like a  CommandShift3 or Hot or Not, but in this case for Halloween Costumes and other cosplay type stuff (which I have zero interest in).

Why? It is a strategy to build juice for our main property bestpartyever.com. I own many dozen best___ever.com’s and many of them can be photo vs. sites like I just made.  If a few of them get some traction, it funnels people and juice back to bpe.

So after 11 hours coding I couldn’t sleep, and it was about time to wake up anyways.. so at 7:00am I went for a 45 minute jog, then shower.. now this blog post.  Sally will drive as we pick up @penguin from the airport on our way to gangplank to do what else: launch more startups.

UPDATE: Do you have the best mustache ever? Or are you ready for Mullet wars?

Quick run down of what I have been up to…

• Working with and advising at new Tech Incubator/Phoenix Co-work campus Gangplank
• Launched BestPartyEver.com into Beta, and went “post revenue” with our first paid customer shortly after, where my term sheet?
• Intentionally throwing juice to the party ideas lens cause it will pass juice to bpe {SEO}
• Revisiting the summer of 1994 with the Ghetto sounds of Too $hort
• The PHX suns were booted from the playoffs.. so looking forward to next year
• Working with Wardo on some projects
• And went to SF  with the Unicorn  to horn the digg party.. was awesome.

That is all..

Say you were rich and famous, okay say you are more rich and famous than you are now. How would you give back? How about interweb celebs doing quirky self-effacing things for charity?  Okay done.  Check it out >