Twitter is everywhere, as I write this blog entry Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) is approaching 2 million followers. @TheEllenShow has moved into 2nd place with 1.6mil and @cnnbrk is in 3rd with 1.5mil followers. According to TweetRush, about 8-9 million Tweets are sent each day. When I explain Twitter to my family and friends, the question always leads to: “How does Twitter make money?” Currently Twitter is working on managing the user experience, keeping the site up and running and learning how people and companies are using Twitter as it evolves before they announce their revenue model.  I must admit, each week...

Last Tuesday, May 19th I wrote about a bad experience I had with American Express customer service that resulted in having my card cancelled after 27 years. If you missed it you can read it here. Last Friday, May 22th, 3 days after my post, I got a call from Ms. McGovern from the Executive Offices of American Express.  She explained to me that members of American Express’s Marketing Department monitor Blogs and other social media products for mentions of the “American Express” brand.  My blog entry caught their eye, so they forwarded my blog posting to the American...

American Express, once known for offering exceptional customer support, gets a failing grade in handling a simple, human mistake. Here are the details: I own several small online businesses. Our VeriSign online merchant gateway was purchased by PayPal, so PayPal recently informed us that we needed to switch over using their API on our web sites. Last week our programmers finished rewriting EventMingle to use the new PayPal Gateway API. Credit card companies give us test credit card numbers to use when testing the gateway to make sure it works correctly. They test to make sure it rejects invalid credit cards,...

I must admit, I've avoided starting this blog for years. I'm not sure why, I suspect I just invested my time doing other things, like discovering Bend, Oregon which we moved to in 2006. Or maybe it's been trying to learn the game of golf, a game I had not played a lot prior to moving to Bend.  In any event, here I am. I've been wanting to get some of my thoughts down about my career and to share some of my stories and thoughts about being a founder of two startups: Mustang Software, Inc and Specialty Match Network, being...