Vibe Juice List: TJ Chapman

This time they got right!! The Vibe Juice List dubbed the New Power Generation was(In my opinion) the most balanced between the known and the unknown, across the many fields of endeavor. However the highlight was seeing that they FINALLY put TJ Chapman on the list...They say he has "Golden Ears" for discovering talent, but what really makes him TJ is his ability to put people together. He knows who can do what and knows how to call them at their mamma's house. As he did when he introduced me to David Banner before he got signed. Crongrats TJ, not just because he was on the list, but because he's got the Juice for real and now everybody knows it!

TJ Chapman: The Golden Ear
By: Jon Caramanica
POSTED: 13:39 EST, August 14, 2007

For over a decade, TJ Chapman has been breaking Southern rap records - far longer than it's been cool to do so. With his TJ's DJs record pool - and crucially, its website tjsdjs.com, which brings the latest regional hits to a global audience - he's come a long way from his days as a personal manager for Miami bass maestro Beatmaster Clay D. But the father of three still isn't getting much sleep - he co-manages up-and-coming Atlanta rapper B.O.B., who is signed to Atlantic, and he still listens to any song e-mailed his way. "It's a job in and of itself," he says with a heavy sigh. "But you never know what you might find."

PERSONAL MOTTO:
"It's all about the relationships."

Read the entire interview here at vibe.com

Real Talk: Steve Jobs

Mandatory Hustle viewing.... Here's the famous Stanford Graduation Speech. Its really a simple speech but very powerful... Play this at late night after a hard day of grinding, or early in the morning before the sun comes up. Basically, anytime when the world is quiet and you can focus just on yourself and your place in the game.

It goes to show you that none this is impossible, just take your life and make your life.

"Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish"

The Credit Pimp

via-www.adpulp.com

Intimate Connections Pt.2: Dinner With Bevy & T.I.

TV One's coverage of "Dinner with Bevy" in ATL with the "King of the South."




As we covered in Intimate Connections, Bevy Smith has successfully fused the worlds of music and luxury fashion into a powerful social experience, where the meals are expensive but the "connects" are exponentially more valuable. Dinner With Bevy in ATL was a entire weekend of NYC Fashionistas from major brands kicking it with T.I & T.I.P. exchanging ideas and experiences.

The "Bevy Effect" was immediate: A few weeks after DWB, Louis Vuitton hosted T.I.'s album release event.

TI Greets Meg from Louis Vuitton(A DWB Connect)

more photos at Sandrarose.com

Quote of the Day:

I reead a quote I had written down in my notebook and it speaks about our
deepest fear - the fear of our power beyond measure. Thought I'd share..
-Bobby Jones, VP Alloy Access

Our Deepest Fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be this brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. Its not just in some of us; its in everyone.

As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we're liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson

Mo Money!

We talked about money yesterday,and we are going to run it back again today. This ad campaign is from Carlsberg Beer...

£5000 in £10 and £20 notes were individually dropped around the streets of London with a removable sticker that read, Carlsberg don’t do litter. But if they did it would probably be the best litter in the world’.


Now that's how you make it rain on ya Competition.

Carlton Getting his Bank!

Here's an oldie but Funny. See a young Alfonso Ribeiro b/k/a Carlton Banks from Fresh Prince of Bel Air a/k/a The Tap Dance Kid getting his side money together by peddling a break dancing intsructional book. It comes complete with a Cardboard Breakdancing mat and the "right" Music for you to break to..Hahaha.

Get Rich? Or, Die Trying!

How's this for standing behind your product. 3M stacked "Real" money behind their security glass for a bus stop display Ad in Vancuver, Canada. Of course people took their chances with golf clubs and baseball bats to no avail. Now that's what's up, when you not only say your product can do something, but you put it out there for the people to test it--That's bout it.

Just to Get By: Makeda Botswana Redfern

This piece was written by Oakland resident, and entrepreneur, Novella Carpenter, who seems to be new to hood economics. Its about a lady who has come up with a rather creative way of financing her "upstart." Makeda is using her skills to make it day-by-day, but is in a program to expand her enterprise into a legitimate food business. Check it out.

In the morning, when I'm out watering the garden, Makeda flashes by. Her shoes are half-tied, and her long red dreadlocks flop along with her jogging pace. "Hold the bus, hold the bus," she demands. When this tactic actually works, I'm astonished. The bus idles and she climbs aboard.

"Morning, Novella," she calls over her shoulder, and then she's gone.

Makeda Botswana Redfern moved into the yellow warehouse that serves as an art gallery at the end of our block in Oakland about a year ago. As I gradually got to know her, I discovered that she has a special skill: hustling.

"People don't like B.S.," she said, seated at my kitchen table on a recent afternoon, "A hustle doesn't have to be structured over dominance, over cheating someone out of something. I look at my sammich hustle as a fair exchange, like bartering."

[Sammich?? Wonder why she decides to write it like this?]

Her sammich hustle goes like this: Makeda slow cooks pork until it is fork tender, with a special barbecue sauce. She puts all of the fixings together in a cooler, and keeps the pork warm in a rice cooker. Then Makeda hits bars in downtown Oakland. Customers watch her put together the sandwich -- "so they know it's fresh" -- and it comes with an order of brown rice salad with cabbage. For vegetarians, Makeda makes a spinach tofu tart.

"Everyone deserves to eat," she said, "That's my philosophy. I even have a sliding scale for homeless people, sometimes I give them a half for free."

I'm intimate with Makeda's business dealings because about once a week for the past few months, Makeda has been approaching me for what I like to think of as a micro-loan. Twenty dollars is all she wants. The first time she asked, I figured I would never see the money again. But she's my neighbor, and on this block we tend to help each other. So I handed her my last bill and made a note in my head to get some more money from the ATM. The next morning, Makeda handed me a rumpled $20 bill.

After the third time I loaned her money (always $20), she promptly returned it, but this time she included a little plastic bottle of barbecue sauce.

Read full Story

Carlos Slim Trumps Gates As World's Richest Man

"Many people want to leave a better world for their children," he told the crowd. "I'm trying to leave better children for my world." -Carlos Slim

(FORTUNE) By our calculations, the 67-year-old Slim has amassed a $59 billion fortune, based on the value of his public holdings at the end of July. This number puts him just ahead of perennial No. 1, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose net worth is estimated to be at least $58 billion. But Gates is selling off his single greatest source of wealth, Microsoft stock, to fund his foundation, while Slim's fortune is growing at a stunning clip. His net worth jumped $12 billion this year alone. His family's holdings represent more than 5% of Mexico's 2006 gross domestic product, and Slim-controlled companies make up one-third of the $422 billion Mexican Bolsa, or stock exchange.

Portly and often puffing a cigar, Slim could pass for a latter-day Latin American J.P. Morgan. But with his dominant stakes in everything from phones to finance, his business profile more closely resembles that of John D. Rockefeller, who likewise thrived in a loosely regulated environment. (For the record, though, even in current dollars Rockefeller's wealth pales in comparison to Slim's: At his death in 1937, Rockefeller was worth $20.3 billion, representing one fifty-second of 1937 U.S. GDP.) The average Mexican encounters a Slim-owned business when she visits an ATM, drives a car, stops for coffee, and especially when she picks up the phone - Slim's Teléfonos de México controls 92% of the country's phone lines, and his América Móvil wireless service has a 70% market share. George W. Grayson, a professor of government at the College of William & Mary, coined the term "Slimlandia" to describe how entrenched the Slim family's companies are in the daily life of Mexicans.

Read the entire story at FORTUNE.COM

Swagger Jackers

It seems as if the underground has lost another term to the mainstream. The hommie Bevy Smith passed this piece from the NY Daily News for hustle consumption

Swagger sells on 'Mad' Ave.

Americans have always had a thing for swagger.

We don't necessarily like psychotic criminals or arrogant Third World dictators, but people with swagger fascinate us, a truth now reinforced every Thursday night at 10 on the hit AMC series "Mad Men."

Set in 1960, the show tracks players in the ad industry, where swagger is the heart of the game.

Rules? They laugh at rules, including the Golden Rule. Especially the Golden Rule.

In the swagger biz, the whole premise is that it doesn't matter what you do unto others, as long as you do it first.

"Mad Men" also reflects something else that's been brewing on TV for quite a while, however: a long-term shift in the professions to which we look for swagger.

Once upon a time, American swagger was largely defined by physical guys like cowboys, G-men, explorers and soldiers. Think John Wayne.

Sure, there's always been swagger in other fields of endeavor. While Wild Bill Hickok was galloping through the West, robber barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan were accumulating insane levels of wealth simply because there was no one to stop them.

But in general, swagger once had a blue-collar aura, reflected in the Westerns that dominated early television...

Instead of John Wayne, we have Wall Street traders, real estate moguls, lawyers, tech geeks, TV celebs and hustlers like "Mad Men" or Aaron Eckhart in "Thank You for Smoking."

They beat you by making more money, or playing the game better, or stacking the deck.

Series like "Mad Men" and HBO's "Entourage" catch on because we know or recognize people with the swagger on which those shows build characters.

Heck, we see that swagger in Dick Cheney, which is not to suggest he's the first or only political figure who found it easier to make his own rules.

Maybe all this is just one more reflection of America's gradual evolution from a blue-collar economy to a white-collar economy.

Whatever the reason, it seems like it's getting easier on TV, as in real life, to swagger without having to get your fingernails dirty.

Laurel Touby:From Desperate To Digits

How a former desperate freelancer became a networking millionaire.

The media in-crowd [READ:HATERS] always had a hard time taking freelance writer turned networking entrepreneur Laurel Touby all that seriously, which is why there was so much surprise over the news last week that she’d sold her MediaBistro.com (such a goofy name!) to Jupitermedia for $23 million. The animus in the blogosphere was aimed squarely at Touby (Her?! The party gal with the feather boa?!), but you could tell it really all boiled down to self-loathing. As in, What the hell is wrong with me? Why haven’t I figured out how to sell out like that? Wasn’t this sort of instant wealth from a half-baked idea thing supposed to have ended with the dot-com bubble? read more...

Just proves that the "in-crowd" doesn't pay the bills! The clientele does... Go getsome.

NY Post Dream Job: Dresses for the TaTa-Liscious

Here's another Dream Job from the NY Post, the typically sensational newsrag does a career section on Monday's that has some pretty interesting hustle stories...Here's this week's, about the owner of a fashion line who found her niche catering to "large breasted" women. She seems to have had some family dough to start. However, rich or poor, being in business for yourself is a grind and it is always good to learn from someone who has done it.


July 23, 2007-- WHEN Shoshanna Lonstein Gruss graduated from college, she moved back into her parents' Upper East Side apartment and started looking for a job. She couldn't find one she liked - so she created her own. With no design background and a little start-up money from her father, she picked up a sketch pad and began to create Shoshanna, a collection of dresses for large-busted women.

It worked. Within two years, Bloomingdale's, Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys were selling her designs. Since then, her collection has grown to include sportswear, swimwear and now the BabyGirl label, inspired by the birth of her daughter, Sienna, now 2. We caught up with the now-seasoned 32-year-old in her Midtown showroom to talk about how her business has evolved.

What inspired you to start a clothing line at 21?

When I graduated from UCLA, I actually started interviewing for banking jobs. But at some point I realized a career in banking felt more like a continuation of school than a passion. I'd always had this desire to make a clothing line that was more inclusive to all women's body types. Growing up, I had trouble finding clothes because I was curvy, and so I would end up designing my own things. I knew if I was having such a hard time then other women were too. So one day I decided, "I can do this." I created my logo on my parent's computer and started to develop my business plan. And I began to notice that every time I talked about my idea, my heart started to beat fast.

What was your parents' response?

My dad thought I was crazy. He used to say, "You don't even know what you don't know," and he was right. In a way, though, I think not knowing what I was doing freed me, because I just kept moving forward. I sort of had blinders on - I didn't see what was going on around me, only what was directly in front of me.

What was the scariest moment?

When I first saw my line in stores. That's when it really hit me that there was a consumer on the other end of it all, and they were going to have to spend their own money on it. So there was that initial panic. I remember thinking, what if nobody buys it?

What's a typical day like?

When I started this business I was always traveling, and I loved every minute of it. But now that I'm older, I've learned to say no to more things, because I don't have the same kind of time. My life is about the line, my daughter and my husband. So now I wake up very early, like 5 a.m., and I read the papers and then play with my daughter. I'm in the showroom every Tuesday and Thursday by 10 a.m., working on the collection and meeting with my staff of 12 to find out how sales are going and learn about any problems have come up. The greatest part of my job is that I've been able to find a balance between my work and my family. I'm taking my daughter to the zoo this afternoon. When I step into that park with her, everything else disappears.

via NY Post Dream Jobs

Quote of the Day

What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.”

Julia Cameron quote

The Wealthiest Americans Ever

The New York Times did a graphic time-line of the most gettin'est Americans of all time. Included in some are some of the obituaries or background articles, that provide some pretty interesting insight into their characters. For example, here's a passage from A.T. Stewart's obituary:

"His dealings with opponents have been characterized as harsh and pitiless, but that was because he looked on commercial competition as a system of warfare in which the longest purse and the best directed energy were as much entitled to their reward as the most skillful strategy or the most approved weapons of destruction. If the few suffered from such a system, the many were the gainers."

Hence.... The American Way!


hit the link and check it out.
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/business/20070715_GILDED_GRAPHIC.html

The Big Idea:Gauri Nanda + Clocky

On the highway to millions: Gauri Nanda explains how she came up with the clock that runs.

DR Photos

Just a few pics of the DR crew. Island hopping and politicking...

Bevy Smith and President Leonel Fernandez

Rob Hardy of Rainforest Films getting in some work.


Amy Gilliam, Grahame Duffield, Jonathan Zilli and David Lihn

L. Marilyn Crawford pre-flight luxuriating

Monique Chenault + Mollita Muhammad

Jaun Luis of the DR held us down the entire trip

Shiri Appleby, Me, Hillary Rosenman at the National Palace

David Lihn, DR Secretary of State Eddie Martinez, The President Leonel Fernandez, & Henry from LOLA

The View from Villa de Muhammad at Tortuga Bay

Henry from LOLA and Michael John CEO Syntegral Consulting Corp. build

The Donald is Here!!

Guess Who's Bizzack!

We have been on a whirlwind trip through the Dominican Republic with very limited access to the internet. But we are back on US soil getting it poppin'

We'll be back to our regularly scheduled Blogging and I'll be uploading more pics from the DR soon.

Global Connections: Domnican Republic

21st had the opportunity to put together a group of Filmmakers + TV Producers + Financiers to explore the opportunity of shooting projects in the Dominican Republic. We toured various locations, weighed in on legislation that will affect the cost benefits, and met with the President of Dominican Republic, Leonel Fernández.

President Leonel Fernandez met yesterday by almost two hours with producers of Dominican films of cinema, of India, Hollywood, New York, New Mexico and other parts of the world, interested in making great productions in the country.

The encounter, made in the hall the Council of Government of the National Palace, began at 5:15 of afternoon and concluded five minutes before 7:00 at night. via elcaribecdn.com

It was a great experience meeting with the heads of state, and filmmakers from all over.

Muchos Gracias to Eddy Martinez and Jaun Luis for making sure everybody was taken care of.

Grahame Duffield for the Great Stories!!

The Chenault's for the Good time and conversation

Mike Jacobs-For all of the insight on building a studio.

Jonathan Zilli- For the Dirty Sanchez Story

Shiri Appleby- For celebrating the Big News with us!!! Congrats Again on your new Show!!

Anadil Hossain- for DillyWood!!

Hillary Rosenman for Madison Harding go check out her shoes!!

Amy Gilliam-Thanks for the Canada Casino story!

Can't forget AV Shankardass for keeping everyone focused on the business!

Mr.Muhammad on Creme Magazine

Check out an interview I did with Creme Magazine...It always seems like you can say waay more about yourself when someone else asks...Good Look Dominga! Thank you for the opportunity. Also check out all her hustles...She is on the move.

www.creme-magazine.com
www.myspace.com/crememagazine
www.myspace.com/tamboi
www.myspace.com/ahouseofmingfilm
www.tamboi.com