Business Bricks

Depending on who you ask, the perfect group size is variously 7 ±2, or 8 to 12, or 3 or 5 people (”companies that make the INC 500, a list selected for extraordinary five-year growth rates, tend disproportionately to be founded with 3 or 5 employees, rather than 4 or 6.” - Dean Brooks, comment #10 on the same post). I say prime numbers work best, because they don’t divide.

If you’re a freelancer or homeworker or zeitgeistist of a certain stripe you too object to paying for wifi¹; can’t understand why, if parks can offer free wifi, costly hotels can’t²; concur that wifi is too expensive when it’s not free³; and would put money on FON⁴ to be the next Skype.

Apols for the long breaks in transmission here recently: I’ve been spending time travelling along my E1 line, and figuring out how to turn some uncurrent nonprojects into current projects. Normal service will resume shortly.

Here, from a second old post at kottke.org, 177 people discuss whereabouts in the world there’s “maximum Starbucks density” - where density is defined as the number of Starbucks within a 5 mile radius of a given point. Instructions: “Put your address into the Starbucks locator and see what your Starbucks density is. (Note: to find the number of stores, scroll to the bottom of the search listings and find the “(Showing 1-20 of xxx Stores)” text.)” - the maximum is 194, central Tokyo; my old postcode, N16 8BY, scores 126; my new postcode, BN1 3JH, scores 4. About which I’ll add little commentary on corporate culture clustering, other than to point you to Starbucks Delocator.

“You’re a point (Y). Off in the distance somewhere is a line that represents your death (D). Two other lines (E1, E2) - the extremes of what you can do with your life - radiate at an angle (A) from Y, eventually crossing D.” From a very old post (early 2000) I just stumbled across at kottke.org (post by guest editor Greg Knauss) - this might be on-topic or off-topic depending on your situation, but there’s something here that really makes my mind whirr.

I think when it comes to names and naming (a subject I’m temporarily expert on) there are only two things you really need to know: (1) Pick names with few syllables. The number of syllables matters more than the number of letters. Proof? Apparently, and you can bet your house on this, easily pronounced stocks do better on the stockmarket. (2) Don’t expect analytical feedback. If research shows that people are more likely to buy things if they share letters in common (e.g. Matt, Marmite) then you can’t expect people to give you anything but idiosyncratic feedback on the name you picked.