Weekly Accomplishments (Mar 1-14)

The last couple of weeks have been slow in terms of action, but exciting in terms of other things. Hence, the summary is for two weeks instead of one.

• I have not been going out (neither entertainment nor networking) much lately as I am trying to catch up with some startup management reading. However, on March 6, I managed to attend a happy hour with the Startup Visa & Lean Startup folks (including Eric Ries) who were in DC for lobbying activities. Despite the late hour and the bar setting, I managed to meet some interesting people, such as David Binetti of 2gov (a company that monitors Twitter chatter for political issues, prepares, and sends the summaries to elected officials based on the ZIP Code affiliation of users) and Nic Perez of ChumBonus (a company that allows people to collect referral bonuses on successful hires even if they don’t work for the employer). I also caught up with some people I know from other DC events.
• All of my instant messengers have been off since about March 9. I did it as an experiment to see whether my productivity would increase because I noticed that I had been spending too much time chatting about nothing productive with some people instead of reading or doing something more useful. Well, I can safely say that the experiment is going well. Whoever needed me has sent me e-mails or other personal messages. This way I do not feel obligated to respond right away (even though often enough my AD/HD takes over and I do it). Though judging from the volume of material I have read in the last week, it is still better than IMing.
• Finally, I shaped an idea planted by an acquaintance a couple of months ago into a feasible and possibly-hopefully highly successful business. Now, I am trying to divide my time between my regular routine and trying to find industry connections to test my assumptions. Hence, if you know anyone in data mining, market research, opinion polling, or anything related to measuring and predicting the demand for consumer goods, I would like you to contact me by any means with the leads.
  Some suggestions where such people could work: manufacturing conglomerates (3M, ConAgra, General Mills, Proctor & Gambler, Kimberly Clark, Johnson & Johnson), retailers (Safeway, A&P, CVS, Walmart, Costco), consulting firms (BCG, McKinsey & Co., The Big Four auditors).
  To the curious ones: the business is a shopping management service that allows to predict the demand for specific goods easily, cheaply, and quickly based on demographics and geography. The pay model is B2B2C.