Month: September 2018

Elevator Pitches: the good, the bad, and the ugly

Getting ready for another great session of Pitch Practice today at @Atlanta Tech Village, I went back and looked at my notes for some of the best elevator pitches we've seen out of the 2,800 pitches since 2013. The Good There are six very common things that all of the … Keep reading >>>

Wait in line at a restaurant? No thanks!

"OK, thank you. We're looking at about a 40-50 minute wait. Will that be ok?" Well, what choice do you have if you really want to eat there? The old adage is that everyone wants to go to the crowded restaurant, and nobody wants to go to a restaurant with … Keep reading >>>

Airline Food & Beverage Inventory Shrinkage Costs Billions

You know those little bottles of wine and liquor they serve on the airplane? The airline industry purchases $2 billion worth of those and other food and beverage items every year. What used to be just peanuts or pretzels is now complemented by Coke products, beer, wine, those awesome Delta … Keep reading >>>

Planning events is extremely stressful.

Event planners are some of the very busiest and most resourceful people on earth. Weddings, birthdays, Bar Mitzvahs, parties, conferences and other such events are so much fun for us to attend, but an amazing amount of work goes on behind the scenes. A huge piece of that work is … Keep reading >>>

Nest For Your Lawn

Smart Lawn? The internet of things is making certain parts of our lives really easy. One of the first and best examples is Nest, the home thermostat that "learns" your preferences and manages your HVAC system to be more efficient. Best of all, there's an app for that. Nest made … Keep reading >>>

An experiment with Pitch Practice

In 2016, I started "The Pitch Practice Podcast" in order to spread the knowledge of all the lessons we continually learn at the weekly meetup at ATV. That was my first go-round at podcasting, and, while the podcast got some solid early traction, my process for creating the actual content … Keep reading >>>

Hey, Siri, Google, Alexa? Can you run my custom app with my voice?

Siri, Google, and Alexa have given us voice control over thousands of "skills" and devices from our mobile phones and from the various voice input devices that each of these companies provides. But can you "Siri" or "Hey Google" everything on your phone? What about everything on your computer? Not … Keep reading >>>

Have you given up buying or selling cryptocurrency?

When I learned that Bitcoin had risen to more than $20,000 per coin (is that the right way to say it?), I scoured my emails from 2009 on to see if, just by chance, I had bought some Bitcoin from some tech geek I had known sometime in my days … Keep reading >>>

Speakers Crave Feedback on Their Performance

Ask anyone who has ever performed in front of an audience - whether it's speaking, music, sports, comedy, or any other performance - and they will tell you that the audience's reaction to their performance is what energizes them. A former NFL linebacker said, "The roar of the crowd...it's like … Keep reading >>>

Can Non-Technical Founders Launch a Tech Startup?

The problem with tech startup ideas is that most of them never make it to the MVP stage. How many game changing ideas have come and gone without a single user? As the saying goes, ideas are a dime a dozen. It's execution that counts. The issue is that founders … Keep reading >>>

Kevin Sandlin