Back in the 1960s, he was reportedly bounced out of his family's business for being too much of a maverick. He went on to start his own company and, in the end, he became a household name. Robert Mondavi died Friday, May 16, at the age of 94, according to the San Francisco Chronicle and other news organizations.

"A popular and tireless figure in the wine world, Mr. Mondavi was relentless in his drive to make wines that could compete with the finest in the world," the Chronicle reports. "His winery, established in 1966, became an iconic presence along Napa Valley's Highway 29 and a symbol not only of California's emergence as a wine powerhouse but of the lifestyle that Mondavi embodied - one that placed wine in context with good food and a culture of hospitality."

###

Marc Andreessen will not be picturing you naked anymore. The Netscape and Ning founder writes on blog.pmarca.com that while CEOs used to give a lot of speeches in order to build awareness of their companies, now blogging is much more effective when it comes to nurturing and enhancing your brand and your own personal reputation within an industry group.

"I think I like the direction things are headed," he writes. "Mid-year resolution #1: No more public speaking. Mid-year resolution #2: More blogging." Okay Marc, we'll be watching and reading...

###

Orange County, California is the Silicon Valley of eyes, according to the New York Times.

###

The Times also published an interesting article this week on Da Hui, a small but influential line of surf wear.

"With annual sales of roughly $2 million, the privately held Da Hui is a flyspeck in comparison with mass-market behemoths like Billabong or Quiksilver," the Times' Guy Trebay writes. "But the appeal of the label — now sold at surf shops in 19 states and 12 countries — is that its black boardshorts and no-frills logos both bypass the sport’s floral sartorial clichés and also, for those in the know, summon up a hard-core, roots surfer image of riders like those Da Hui underwrites."

The company grew out of a small surf club: "Formed in 1976 as Hui O He’e Nalu, Hawaiian for Club of Wave Sliders, by the surfer Eddie Rothman and his friends Bryan Amona, Terry Ahui and Clyde Aikau, the club’s evolution and that of the brand it became paralleled other major changes in the sport. ...These days the black boardshorts that once signaled territorial assertion are sold at Costco, presumably to consumers innocent of their original intent."

###

Finally, Valleywag offers this digest of trends in venture capital. It boils down to water, mobile phones, and old people rule; there are two many VCs and customer data should somehow be collated.

At a time when the economy is hitting a rocky patch, companies are being careful about hiring, and every expense falls under the microscope, it can be easy to forget about good old-fashioned customer service. But of course, pleasing customers is an enterprise's first and most meaningful goal. Former Inc. editor Paul B. Brown has written an interesting round-up of customer service advice from various sources on the Web.

The kicker: "When you call asking for help, isn’t the recorded message, 'For customer service, please hold,' a wonderful example of terrible service?"

Speaking of customer service, I had dinner last night with an old friend, Theresa Regli of CMSWatch, at a restaurant in New York called Aquavit. The food was good but the service was pretty lousy—the maitre d seemed in no rush to seat us, the table was not properly set, our order wasn't taken for quite awhile, our bread came without butter ("It's on its way!" the poor waiter said), and an expensive bottle of wine seemed to arrive by Pony Express.

I don't mean to pick on this particular restaurant or waiter (okay, maybe I do), but rather to offer a reminder: In this day and age, a satisfied customer may tell a few people about your business; an unsatisfied customer will simply blog about it.

Meanwhile, do you have good advice concerning customer service? Any links worth sharing? And do you have a company that you want to condemn for its recent treatment of you as a customer? Bombs away....

Companies of all sizes are switching to business cards that are much smaller in dimension than the standard business card, according to the Boston Globe.

Moo.com printed and sold 10 million small cards in 2007, the paper reports: "They're easy to carry, are more environmentally friendly and cost-effective because they use less paper, allow for self-expression, and stand out, users say."

To read more, click here.

The Webby Award winners were unveiled this week. The awards program, now in its 12th year, recognizes the best of the web, and requires winners to give clever five word acceptance speeches. Al Gore won a Webby a few years back. So did Arianna Huffington and The Onion, iTunes and Paul Smith, Gorillaz and Craigslist.

The Webbys, as an awards program, are more like the Emmys, with a sprawling number of categories and subcategories, than say, the Oscars or, well, the Nobel prizes. Most businesses could learn at least something from every single site nominated. But in the interest of making the Webbys digestible, here's the list of this year's winners in the interactive marketing categories.

Among the victors: That clever "Don't Give Up on Vista" campaign and, in the b2b space, this tool from Mediafront, which calculates an ad campaign's effectiveness.

Have you ever overpaid an employee by accident? If so, what did you do about it? That's the question that John Hollen asks on his "Business of Management" blog at Workforce.com. Hollon's posting is a reaction to an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about a group of city workers who were erroneously reimbursed for fuel expenses at $40 a mile, instead of 40 cents. The overpayments from the city to the workers topped $375,000. City auditors discovered the error some time ago, but two of the workers still owe their bosses $40,000, according to the paper. Hollon writes that he was once paid a co-worker's salary by accident for three months during the dot-com boom. Neither he nor (apparently) the co-worker noticed the mistake until the CPAs caught it, and Hollon quickly repaid the money that had been mistakenly deposited in his account.

Has this ever happened at your company? If so, how did the parties involved handle it?

Much has been written about American entrepreneurs setting up shop in China. But with inflation surging in China and the weak dollar, Chinese companies are now looking to America as a place where it is affordable and desirable to set up production facilities, the Los Angeles Times reports.

"Last month, Wyoming's governor toured firms in China's coal-mining country. Georgia's leader brought a team of 40 on a mission to boost trade and attract investment, and Alabama's governor paid a visit too," the newspaper reports.

"Many Chinese entrepreneurs remain wary of entering the U.S., uncertain about restrictive visa rules, language and cultural barriers and the political environment," the Times continues. "Recent tensions related to Tibet and the Olympic torch relay have spurred calls in China to boycott Western companies. But no one says that's slowing the march of Chinese companies into the world's biggest economy."

"They don't want to miss this opportunity to bottom-fish in the U.S.," Mei Xinyu, an economist at China's Ministry of Commerce, told the paper. Plus, having a presence in the U.S. helps Chinese companies achieve much quicker turnaround on some products, and to mitigate rising shipping costs.

To read the article in full, click here.

Inventors and hobbyists and entrepreneurs from all over will gather at Maker Faire at the San Mateo Fairgrounds this weekend. The event, sponsored by Make Magazine, is sort of a massive show-and-tell program for the do-it-yourself set.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran this preview of the event. Most of the inventions mentioned in the article do not appear to be commercial in nature, at least not yet. But lots of businesses get their start at Maker Faire. Among them: TechShop, the Bay Area workshop space that provides members with access to lathes, CAD equipment, and other machinery that helps them build stuff or make prototypes of new products.

After the company's booth was mobbed at the 2006 and 2007 Bay Area Maker Faire, I wrote about them for Inc.'s annual Start-up Issue (here's the link to the article). Since that piece ran, the company has moved forward on plans to expand to nine new cities including Seattle, San Diego, Austin, and Orlando.

With food and grain prices surging worldwide, an organization of rice-producing nations appears to be in the works, the New York Times reports.

"Governments in Thailand, the world’s largest rice exporter, have for many years toyed with the idea of using their dominant market position to influence the price of rice in the same way that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries tries to set crude oil prices," the paper reports. "[I]f successful, a cartel could have far-reaching consequences on the rice market, sustaining prices at their current historic highs and worsening a food crisis that is hurting Asia’s poorest consumers. The price of Thai B-grade rice, a benchmark variety, has nearly tripled in recent months and is now hovering at about $1,000 a ton."

The consortium would include Laos, Vietnam, Burma (Myanmar), and Cambodia. Other major rice exporters include Egypt and Brazil. China and India are major producers, but the domestic populations there consume most of their output.

To read more, click here.

As the first viable female candidate for president barnstorms across the country, Del Jones of USA Today takes a look at the entrepreneurial landscape and wonders where the women are.

"Few fledgling businesses founded by men or women ever grow into giant corporations, but with women launching twice as many businesses as men, some meaningful percentage of the new giants might be expected to have a woman as keystone," Jones writes.

And yet there's no female equivalent of an entrepreneurial prodigy like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Jones notes—let alone a legend akin to Larry Ellison or Bill Gates. Why?

The article doesn't get very close to solving the puzzle, offering the same old unsatisfying answers—lack of access to capital and a desire for controlled growth so that a woman can run a business while still being an active mother. Somehow, this feels to me like only half the picture.

I'd also argue that Jones gives short shrift to companies founded by couples, even though many of the most entrepreneurial women I have met over the years were half of a spousal team.

What I really like about this piece, however, is that Jones identifies and interviews as many of the nation's leading businesswomen as can be found: Marion Sandler of Golden West Financial, Gayle Francis of AMN Healthcare, Carol Ammon of Endo Pharmaceuticals, etc. With statistics that show that few women run gazelle-like companies, Jones's efforts to gather a bunch of them all in one place constitutes a meaningful journalistic exercise.

Joel Spolsky, entrepreneur, blogger extraordinaire, and Inc. columnist has created a new Q&A site for programmers. He's working with Jeff Atwood, a fellow programmer and blogger (his site is called Coding Horror). The idea is that any programmer can, for free, post a question, and the users, together, will try to answer them. The site will be better than (replace? disrupt?) the mostly unread books on programming that are published, and the membership sites that offer information to programmers but only if they pay to join.

As Joel describes it: "When I'm building a new product, my policy has always been to keep quiet about it until I have something to ship. But this isn't really a product. This is a free new community site for programmers around the world and we need your help to design it, to program it, and to build it. We want to hear your suggestions, hear your ideas, and we're going to build it right in front of your eyes. Thus, the vaporware announcement.

"Every week, Jeff and I talk by phone (he's in California, I'm in New York), and we're going to record those phone calls and throw them up on the web for you to listen in on, and call it a podcast."

The conversation promises to be wide-ranging (in other words, "We have a lot of trouble keeping on topic," Joel says) and programmers are invited to come up with ways to make the site better.

Check out the site at Stackoverflow.com.

And check out Joel's most recent columns for the magazine here.