The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
@naveen Oh, very nice. Congrats on the new round!less than a minute ago via HootSuite 
jcn
Image via WikipediaNew York Times: A Corporate Campus Made to Mirror Facebook: Facebook, which started out in a dormitory at Harvard, transferred to a rented house in Silicon Valley and now occupies a cluster of office buildings in Palo Alto, Calif., is about to make its biggest move yet: to a 57-acre campus in this small city about 30 miles south of San Francisco. ...... a series of stucco-covered low-rise buildings occupied by Sun Microsystems until Sun was bought ...... s. The campus will resemble an urban streetscape, with cafeterias .... if the campus will be a microcosm of a city, it’s not clear that the real city around the campus — including the largely Mexican-American neighborhood of Belle Haven ....... the Facebook site is surrounded on three sides by water, and separated from the rest of Menlo Park by railroad tracks and a divided highway. ..... The site is so insular that in the two decades it was occupied by Sun Microsystems it was nicknamed Sun Quentin (a reference to San Quentin prison, about 40 miles north). And because Facebook provides its employees with three meals a day in its own cafeterias, there may be little reason for them to venture off the property. ..... the city, which has a population of about 30,000 ..... Sun had 3,600 employees on site; Facebook, with a work force that is growing by 50 percent a year, could exceed that number ...... because Sun’s engineers had private offices, while most Facebook employees work in unpartitioned spaces ...... they can’t have more than 3,600 employees until they get City Council approval. ..... leasing with an option to buy .... walking and biking paths and greater access to public transportation and the wetlands alongside the Facebook site. ..... One team, charged with connecting the Facebook site to the rest of Menlo Park, devised an elevated ringlike walkway that links the campus to the Belle Haven neighborhood, a proposed transit station and the San Francisco Bay waterfront. The architects named it Friends Circle. (Though Belle Haven is a tidy neighborhood, many of the homes are small and flimsy-looking.) ...... Contractors have already replaced rows of small offices in one of the Sun buildings with a loftlike space where desks will be pushed together in groups of four. “We like that you can sit at one end and see all the way to the other,” said Mr. Tenanes, showing off a section of building that had been stripped to concrete and ductwork .... “protecting Facebook’s extraordinary company culture.” ...... he liked the “casual eclectic” look of the firm’s Ace Hotel ..... (The Ace crowd, which tends toward 20somethings with laptops, mirrors the Facebook employees’ demographic.) Unlike the Sun campus, with color-coordinated buildings reminiscent of an upscale resort, Facebook is looking for “an urban streetscape where no one architect or designer” dominates, Mr. Tenanes said. “Random is good” ....... Facebook wanted there to be "life and soul and some idiosyncrasy to the campus.” ...... “They don’t want to buy into that corporate structure,” she said. “They want to continue to feel hungry." ..... Currently, about 40 percent of Facebook employees commute to work on foot or bicycle or by bus (including some provided by the company), Mr. Tenanes said. For those employees, the remote location of the new site will pose a challenge. But he is already planning bus routes and considering opening a pedestrian tunnel that was dug but never used under the Bayfront Expressway, the highway that separates the campus from the rest of Menlo Park. (In case it outgrows the Sun property, Facebook bought a 22-acre site across the road.)The key phrase here is urban streetscape. Facebook wants its campus to look and feel like New York City. My bias for the city just got stronger. New York City is the place to be.
Image by exoskeletoncabaret via FlickrI was reading this story on Mashable, and the paragraph that most got my attention was this one:So, Krieger, a former UX designer at Meebo with admittedly no experience scaling a startup, walked around the Dogpatch Labs coworking space in San Francisco — the locale of Instagram’s first office — and queried other startup founders about what to do. Officemates suggested that Instagram move its service to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).Instagram was in a General Assembly like place. Wow. That should not surprise me. But that part of the story is really inspiring. All those startup folks laboring in all those many coworking spaces should take heart. Big things are possible out of crowded coworking spaces.
Image via CrunchBaseSoraya Darabi has hit the top 5 spot at this blog all over again, this is the third time. This traffic bump is due to the TechCrunch post on her. There are like a thousand tweets about that TechCrunch post. Pretty awesome. 
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Cover of Slumdog Millionaire [Blu-ray]I have taken to dropping by Hacker News near daily after Fred Wilson made the point a few days ago. Today I came across this blog post. Michael Church: Yes, rich kids already won the career game. Here’s why.: Americans like to believe that the modern workplace, like school, is a meritocracy........ Americans prefer to believe that, among those who do work, side-by-side in the same environment, it’s a fair competition. To their chagrin, they observe that their co-workers from wealthy backgrounds advance three times as fast ..... People in offices are out for themselves, not trying to preserve (or to combat) the social status quo. Rather, this is a subconscious and irresistible force, and it comes from one root cause: rich kids don’t fear the boss. ...... The middle-class kid spends the bulk of his time trying not to offend, not to behave in a way that might jeopardize the job he worked so hard to get and could not easily replace if he lost it. He doesn’t invite himself to meetings, avoids contact with high-ranking executives, and doesn’t offer suggestions when in meetings. Thanks to the fear he experiences on a daily basis, he’s seen as “socially awkward” and “mousy” by higher-ups. Nothing recommends him, and he will not advance. ...... Middle-class kids generally fuck up their first few years of the career game in one of two ways. Either they fear authority tremendously, which is crippling from a career perspective and renders them devoid of creative energy, or they show an open distaste for managerial authority, described by the wealthy as having a proletarian “chip” on one’s shoulder, and fail to advance on account of the dislike they thus inspire. ..... The rich kid, on the other hand, relates even to the highest-ranking executives as equals, because he knows that they are his social equals. He’ll answer to them, but with an understanding that his subordination is limited and offered in exchange for mentoring and protection. He views them as partners and colleagues, not judges or potential adversaries. Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but most of his bosses like this. (Most bosses aren’t assholes and don’t like to be feared, at all. In fact, they’d be happy to forget that they are bosses.) His career advances fast. ......He’s neither a cowering weaklingI found this blog post amusing. I am someone who has never had a "job." You know, where you show up eight in the morning wearing a tie? I have never done that. I did note the ode to the technology sector. In a startup, it is not about if you are rich, it is about if you are hungry. For me rich and poor is a global thing. For me it is about dollar a day people and self made billionaires.
Image via Wikipediawho crumbles at the sight of authority, nor an obnoxious brat whose sense of entitlement and dislike for managerial authority limit his progress prematurely. He respects others and himself and has an uncanny air of effortless “coolness” (by which I mean freedom from anxiety) that enables him to actually get things done. ....... the majority of rich kids who are well-behaved and decent are valued more highly when their circumstances are discovered. ...... This advantage held by the wealthy, more prominent on the East Coast and outside of technology, is nearly impossible to compete against in most companies. ....... I would advise those who are sufficiently talented to work in technology, which tends to be more meritocratic than other industries, and to avoid old-style business. Beyond that, I know of no solution.
Image by lizstless via Flickr
Image by Meetup via CrunchBaseUnion Square Ventures: The Opportunity Fund: For entrepreneurs, this means that if you are leveraging the economics of Internet-based networks to transform some aspect of the global economy, Union Square Ventures can be a partner, whether you are just launching your service, funding rapid growth, or spinning your business out of a larger entity. We can work with you if you need $250,000 or $25,000,000. We can invest in New York, San Francisco, London, or Berlin, and most places in between. We hope you'll think of USV as stage-agnostic, highly-focused investors who can add value to your company.Fred Wilson is my favorite solo blogger. I drop by his blog most days. The days I can't, I drop by the following day and catch up on the missed posts. When I drop by, I leave a short comment. I was here!
Image via CrunchBaseWith Open VBX you get free software to build telephony services and a web based telephony cloud to provision the numbers, calls, text messages, and way more. ...... We believe that free and open software opens up markets and new capabilities much more quickly than closed and expensive software products. ........ there are a number of ways to make money with open source software. The most obvious one is the "Red Hat" model of building a services and support business on top of the open source software. Red Hat has revenues of almost $600mm per year and boasts a public market valuation of over $5bn. MySQL, which also used that approach, sold to Sun for $1bn. .......The Wordpress software is available open source. But they also operate a hosted version at Wordpress.com that is a commercial effort.Al Wenger: Twilio Announces OpenVBX
Twilio has done it again: taken something that was previously complicated and made it super simple. This time they set their sights on business telephone systems ...... Like Wordpress, OpenVBX has a plug-in architecture that makes it super easy to extend functionality and to integrate other systems. ...... how many times have you punched in a bunch of information to an automated system only to then have to repeat all the information when you get an operator on the line? ...... I can’t wait to get rid of the existing PBX at Union Square Ventures and replace it with an instance of OpenVBX. I can then connect the foursquare plugin to let people now which city and time zone I am in!Twilio: OpenVBX
Using Twilio's Cloud Communications platform, you never have to worry about scalability, reliability, hardware investments, or long-term contracts. You just pay as you go, and a free $30 trial gets you up and running without a credit card...... As developers, we've built websites, skinned blogs, and integrated CRMs for customers. But phone systems, that was somebody else's problem.OpenVBX.org
OpenVBX is for companies and collaboration.TechCrunch: Twilio Releases OpenVBX, An Open Source Google Voice For Businesses
Ever since it launched in late 2008, Twiliohas a knack for making cool products. ...... has the potential to disrupt business-oriented call routing services in a big way — Twilio is describing it as a sort of Google Voice for businesses, with more flexibility ...... integrated services, like text to speech, voice transcription, voicemail forwarding, and SMS messaging. ....... One plugin Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson showed me hooked into 37signals’ Highrise, a web-based contact manager. Using this, you could automatically check to see if the phone number of an incoming call was already in your contact database, and route the call to a certain sales rep accordingly. A second plugin (which was actually created by a third-party developer) hooks into Foursquare, allowing you to change your telephony settings depending on where you’re located........ When you use OpenVBX you’re charged Twilio’s normal rates, which run $1 per phone line per month ($2 for a toll-free number) with usage charges of 3 cents per minute (or SMS). ........ an enterprising developer could tweak OpenVBX so that it’s perfect for restaurants, and then resell it as their own service. Twilio still gets paid through their per-minute and phone line charges, and the developer can charge a hefty premium on top of it.GigaOm: Twilio Launches Roll-Your-Own Google Voice
Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup whose platform and services marry voice to the web world, is launching OpenVBX, an open-source web application that is in essence a roll-your-own Google Voice. With it, you get toll-free and local phone numbers, which can in turn be used to route calls to existing cellphones and landlines. ..... I’m still playing around with a demo version Twilio shared with us — I’ll update the post when I’m done.GleepLog: Virtual Telephony Changed Today
Twilio flew me out to San Francisco in March to get a look at an early version and I was very impressed. We had a weekend hackathon and created plugins for it… but more about that later. ....... It didn’t make sense for us to continue building OtherNum anymore. Instead I chose to pursue some sub-niches instead of primary PBX-like functionality and to work on plugins for VBX. ..... VBX is an open source web application that interacts with Twilio’s API to implement advanced telephony functions normally found in expensive equipment. It’s exactly the right solution for businesses with virtual offices, remote personnel and startups. ...... If the power goes it in your office your $10,000 PBX is going to go offline. ...... you’ll never have to shell out cash to add extensions or voicemail boxes...... pull it up in a browser and enter your Twilio credentials..... You want to have your PBX interact with your Twitter or FourSquare account or change its behavior based on time of day. You want your PBX to interact with Chirbit, MyCaption.com or BART. If you had a hardware PBX it would NEVER happen. ...... I wrote the plugins for Chirbit, FourSquare and MyCaption during that weekend in San Francisco. The FourSquare plugin caught the attention of a bunch of people including TechCrunch, GigaOM, Albert Wenger and Fred Wilson. My head was spinning all morning! ..... Mark Condon wrote a plugin that allowed you to define prompts in English and used Google APIs to translate your text into French, German and other languages and then speak it to the caller. ..... Jonathan Kressaty wrote multiple plugins, one of which allows you to change the behavior of your phone system depending on the time of the day. ..... I think it’s a great product in a really cool space and it’s going to push the virtual telephony world forward a few notches and in a hurry.Jonathan Kressaty: A Warm And Long Anticipated Welcome To OpenVBX!
Ladies and gentlemen, the way you perceive a phone "system" is about to change..... OpenVBX, an unbelievably killer, deployable, web-based application that allows you to setup an unlimited number of phone call and SMS "flows", allowing individuals and businesses to have an easy to use, manageable virtual phone system. ...... "Like Google Voice has done for consumers, OpenVBX lets business users control when and how they are reached. It also provides a modern web user interface for managing voicemails, sending and receiving text messages and managing phone calls from the browser. Users can drag-and- drop custom business phone applications, such as automated attendants, menus, team dialing, and shared voicemail inboxes for their company phone numbers." ....... I was first introduced to OpenVBX in March, and even when it was in a still-pretty-rough state, it was one of the most impressive apps I've ever seen. You could do nearly anything with a phone call - setup menus, prompts, voicemail with transcriptions and email/text notifications to recipients, and what you couldn't do you could build with an extremely extensible applet and plugin architecture that requires minimal knowledge of PHP. ....... As of today, I have five applets/plugins available for OpenVBX that I've worked on in the last few months: a "scheduler" applet that lets you dictate a call or SMS flow based on the time of day, an applet called "curling" that will perform an HTTP GET request to any URL and say back the contents of the page to the caller, a "restart" applet that will send your flow back to the beginning, a "call log" plugin that shows all call activity for your entire Twilio account, and an "installer" plugin that lets you easily upload a zip file of a plugin so you can avoid using FTP in order to install new applets. ..... We've been using OpenVBX on and off at Ripstyles for a couple weeks now, and it's been amazing. Being able to have a multi-thousand dollar phone system for pennies per call makes perfect business sense, and it's honestly quite enjoyable to use.Fred Wilson, October 2009: Business Model Jujutsu
The big moment in the history of TACODA (a company we invested in early this decade that was sold to AOL in 2007) was when they went from charging customers to paying customers.
Image via Wikipedia
Luxury apartment in SF; swank hotel in NYC?
VIP access to concerts & events?
Input on core product decisions?
Reporting to Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL?
Basically, the internship of a lifetime.
Job Overview
We're looking for one very savvy individual to fill an important position. It's an easy job because all you have to do is be yourself. There's not a job like this anywhere else...guaranteed. Intrigued? Read on...
A Little About You
You're the type of person we can see spending a lot of quality time with this summer. You have the perfect balance of charisma, insight and ambition. You might be thinking, "Sure, but what's in it for me?"
Frankly, a lot.
But we'll get to that later.
First, let's talk more about you.
Like a bloodhound on the hunt, you've got an uncanny ability to sniff out new trends. You go with your gut. Like a sixth sense, it always leads the way.
Your enemy is the status quo. Status updates, however, are your friend. You judge others not only on the content of their character, but also on the content of their Tweets.
People listen to what you have to say, because they know that you know what's up. You’re a social-media butterfly with the wingspan of a jumbo jet—you don't flutter, you soar.
You're comfortable in your own shoes and your friends love that about you.
Why? Because you’re cool, that's why.
Like it's your job.
Which brings us to why we're here...
The Job
For two solid months you'll be an integral part of the Lifestream Team and have the opportunity to work directly with Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL. You'll sit in high-level meetings and speak your mind to our top product engineers, marketers and executives. You’ll tell them what you like and what you don't like about AOL products. We're depending on you to tell it like it is, and we know that you will.
Ok, we know. You’re still wondering what’s in it for you.
Here's The Deal
This is not your average summer internship. In fact, if we didn't know better, we'd think this was some sort of Employment rickroll.
You, friend, will not only receive a paycheck, but you'll also be living the bi-coastal lifestyle. A luxury apartment in San Francisco. A hip hotel in NYC.
Through AOL Lifestream, you'll be sharing all your experiences with your social networks via Facebook updates, Tweets, Flickr uploads, Foursquare check-ins and YouTube videos. Give your followers a glimpse into the behind-the-scenes culture of AOL. Remember, your friends are our friends, too. And if our friends have something to say, we want to hear it.
We've been making a lot of changes around here and we're not afraid to take risks. To inform those risks, we're counting on you to bring us weekly dispatches from the frontlines of the latest pop culture trends. So throughout the summer, you'll have in your possession VIP access to events around the country—the hottest clubs and restaurants, the most coveted live concerts, sporting events and industry social gatherings. Your loyal followers will benefit too, all because they know you.
You'll get all this and more for allowing us to harness the awesome power that is you.
(Oh, and did we mention the expense account?)
Think you can handle it?
If so, please fill out the application.
We can't wait to start working with you this summer!
Key Dates:
June 8th: Last day to submit applications
June 9th: Finalists will be notified; in-person interview may be required this week
Week of June 14th: Videos of Top 3 candidates posted to this site; final winner is determined by an online vote
June 28th: First day on the job in San Francisco
Mid-August: End of internship
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