Netizen

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Model Job Offer Scam

Model Job Offer!

Inbox

from Tammy Thomas tmiy12345@gmail.com
date Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:32 PM
subject Model Job Offer!
hide details Nov 9 (3 days ago)

CAFE PRESS.It's all about you and your passions. In a nutshell, we're the world's best destination for expressing yourself through merchandise. From your favorite T-shirt and Woodie, to the tote bag over your shoulder and bumper sticker on your car, we're here to let you express your interests. And what makes our products so unique, and so expressive, is that we don't create the designs on them. Our community of designers do - all through millions of shops we help them run.CafePress is the world's biggest destination for self-expression through merchandise. Each month over 11 million shoppers visit CafePress to buy or create T-shirts, mugs, posters and other gifts that reflect their interests, passions, beliefs and affiliations.Today, CafePress is a growing network of over 6.5 million members who have unleashed their creativity to transform their artwork and ideas into an impressive catalog of over 250 million unique gifts. CafePress is where folks from all walks of life gather online to create, sell, and buy “print on-demand” products. Each brings to life whatever people are passionate about. It can be a white-hot political cause? A gorgeous grandchild? An obsessive hobby? A funny (or flirty?) thought?

Models Naveen, Dennis

Click

So Adam and I have been talking. He is in San Fran. I am in New York. The Gmail voice chat feature works great. We decided the voice quality on the Gmail voice chat is much better than the one on the Gmail free phone. I have a Google Voice number, he has a Google Voice number. So when I call his number from my number, it feels like rerouting a rerouted call. There is too much white noise. Instead you cut the middle men out and connect directly through the voice chat feature, in many ways better than Skype because chances are you are already logged into Gmail. I mean, do you ever log out?

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: Facebook To Build Its Second Data Center To The Tune Of $450 Million: Apple is building a $1 billion facility that’s expected to be finished this year. Google and IBM also have data centers in the state.

During the first dot com boom, people bought servers. And then Amazon web services killed the idea. You don't need to buy servers, we got them, they said, a ton of them. But now companies like Facebook that are not in the data center business end up with these huge, humongous huge data centers.

Image by Em.Cee via Flickr

TechCrunch: Begun, The Sticker Wars Have: Right now, many people (probably most people) have no idea what a check-in is. When Gap launched its free jeans deal, people were actually visiting the company’s Facebook Page to write “checking in“, rather than using the Places function on Facebook’s mobile application.

That would be like someone sent you an email that was 140 characters or less, say over Gmail, and claimed they just sent you a tweet. Emails with such discipline would be nice to read, but are they tweets?

Image representing TechStars as depicted in Cr...

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: TechStars Launches Ten New Startups In Seattle: six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable.

Y Combinator is in the Valley. Y Combinator has done something remarkable. I think Y Combinator is the reason we have a new species in town: the super angel. But Y Combinator is in the Valley. Being in the Valley, in the Valley alone is a disadvantage. People don't buy servers anymore. They have Amazon web services. Times have changed. Some of the best programmers I know are self taught people. All the material you need to teach yourself programming is available online for free. And so the idea that you have to be in the Valley to be part of the action, well, that is passe.

Steve Jobs, portrait by italian artist Grazian...

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: iTunes Ping Actually Goes Social With Full Twitter Integration; Careful, It Will Auto-Tweet: not only will each tweet contain a link back to the song or album on iTunes, but these links will work in New Twitter’s right-side pane. You’ll be able to listen to iTunes previews right from there — a huge feature that should lead to a lot of music buying, especially when the 90-second previews kick-in.

90 seconds is a lot of music. We live in the era of good enough. Perhaps Apple is lucky the Facebook Connect thing did not quite pan out for them. This is a better deal. And now everybody and their cousin will be tweeting everything they have in their private domains.

Image representing Boxee as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBaseA few days back I wrote about how I was not too excited about the idea of a social browser. It did not feel like a big shift. You can share stuff from your Chrome browser with a few add ons.

But then I was at the Boxee Box launch party last night - and they got a swell product - but then I kept thinking, what Boxee needs to be is a browser on your laptop, not a box that takes you to a big screen.

Paramendra Bhagat: Model

Model Mayhem: Scam

Model Job Offer!
Nov 9 (2 days ago)

CAFE PRESS.It's all about you and your passions. In a nutshell, we're the world's best destination for expressing yourself through merchandise. From your favorite T-shirt and Woodie, to the tote bag over your shoulder and bumper sticker on your car, we're here to let you express your interests. And what makes our products so unique, and so expressive, is that we don't create the designs on them. Our community of designers do - all through millions of shops we help them run. CafePress is the world's biggest destination for self-expression through merchandise. Each month over 11 million shoppers visit CafePress to buy or create T-shirts, mugs, posters and other gifts that reflect their interests, passions, beliefs and affiliations. Today, CafePress is a growing network of over 6.5 million members who have unleashed their creativity to transform their artwork and ideas into an impressive catalog of over 250 million unique gifts. CafePress is where folks from all walks of life gather online to create, sell, and buy “print on-demand” products. Each brings to life whatever people are passionate about. It can be a white-hot political cause? A gorgeous grandchild? An obsessive hobby? A funny (or flirty?) thought?

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

CNet: Chrome could preload pages for 'wicked-fast' Web: Google has begun work on a feature to let Chrome load pages before they're needed, the latest instance of the company's relentless focus on Web performance..... scheduled to arrive in the browser's code base in February .... When a person clicks on a preloaded Web page, the browser could simply activate the page rather than load it..... Google has many other fast-Web projects under way, including a technology called False Start to speed encrypted Web pages, rewiring Web server communications with the SPDY protocol, support for the WebP image format as an alternative to JPEG, and switching to the libjpeg-turbo library for when JPEG images need to be drawn.

Maybe Google is a software company and it is coming from a coding angle, but the road to the wicked fast web I would like to travel is one where competition is introduced into the broadband sector and prices come down, speeds go up, like in some other countries. It is one of those People-People-Rise issues.

Brazil

Image via CrunchBaseAbout Orkut you could argue perhaps Facebook was late coming, you could look for cultural reasons. But Twitter is the same Twitter in every country. Why is Brazil so much more into Twitter than every other country? How do you explain this?

Lula's great work as president has its roots in when he joined the labor union and rapidly rose up its ranks. But much more attention has been paid instead to his earlier years, like when he quit school after only a few years. This is a man of tremendous people skills, and he spent decades sharpening those skills. He is more labor leader than mechanic.

The Guardian: Brazil awarded 2014 World Cup: The Fifa president Sepp Blatter today confirmed that the 2014 World Cup will be staged in Brazil, who will host the tournament for the first time since 1950. .... Brazil were the only country bidding to host the finals .... five times world champions

Brazil's Lula: The Most Popular Politician on Earth - Newsweek: grew up so poor, he didn't find out what bread was until he was 7 ..... made the 1,900-mile journey from the country's northeastern dustbowl for a life in the slums of São Paulo ..... dropped out of school in the fifth grade, shined shoes on the street, and went to work in a factory at 14, losing a finger to a lathe ...... rose through the rank and file to become an internationally respected union leader ..... practically shut down the continent's industrial powerhouse
Image via Wikipediain the name of the steelworkers. ..... blunt, bearded ..... approval rating above 70 percent. .... "That's my man right there," Obama greeted him at the G20 summit in London in April. "The most popular politician on earth." ...... Brazil has withstood the global crisis better than almost any other nation: not a single bank went under, inflation is low, and the economy is growing ...... outpacing Russia and joining India and China ..... has repeatedly pumped up the minimum wage (up 67 percent since 2003 ...... long hours of practice have refined his shop-floor grammar and vocabulary ..... nothing vexes Lula more than being trapped in his office ..... 'I need to get out and travel, and meet people.' His connection is with the little guy. ...... likes nothing more than to ditch protocol, go off script, and (to the despair of his security detail) wade into an adoring crowd. ...... Starting in 1989, he ran for president three times, surging in early polls only to hit a wall on voting day. By the late '90s he was on the verge of quitting politics. Instead, he did something bolder: he remade himself. He stopped his fist-waving harangues, climbed into a suit, and hired a speech coach and a marketing wizard. ......... a "Letter to the Brazilian People," pledging to honor contracts, pay down the country's debts, abide by the International Monetary Fund's requirements, and generally play by the rules of the market. ....
Image via Wikipedia... To convince lenders Brazil was serious, Lula increased the "primary budget surplus"—the money the government puts aside every year to pay debt and interest—and boosted lending rates to a scorching 26 percent a year, throttling growth in order to kill inflation. He also kept government wages and pensions under control. "The unions and many people in the party hated it ........ was like a piece of blotting paper. ..... putting pragmatism ahead of ideology and, for the most part, fiscal restraint over the quick fix. .....With a web of hydroelectric stations and half its fleet of cars running on clean-burning sugar-cane ethanol, the country has long been the benchmark in renewable energy. ..... , exporting more beef, soybeans, and frozen chickens than any other nation ..... his aggressive diplomacy has rallied poorer nations to demand free trade and a new deal in the international economy. .......... his ability to sell unpalatable reforms to a largely poor population that looked to him as something of a savior ..... He gave the central bank a free hand to control inflation ....... He blamed the subprime market mess on "white-skinned, blue-eyed" bankers and ridiculed the champions of deregulation and the "minimal" state. "In the '80s and '90s it was fashionable to deride the state," he says. "But in the blink of the eye, the [free] market nearly bankrupted the world. And who did they go to for a bailout? The state." ...... He even defends the ham-fisted rule of Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. "Give me one example of how Venezuela is not a democracy!" ...... Then he turned the tables: why not hold the next G7 meeting in Brazil, he challenged. "After all, in 20 years maybe only three of you will still be around." Not everyone was amused.

Lula reminds me of my own Laloo. Laloo was also a self described "man of the people." It is India's misfortune that Laloo is no longer Railway Minister. Rahul Gandhi felt Laloo had prime ministerial ambitions, and so Rahul cut him to size in Laloo's home state of Bihar.

Image representing Orkut as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBase

ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Growing Fast in Brazil, but Orkut Still far Ahead: Google's social network Orkut never quite caught on in most countries, but it remains the most popular social network in Brazil. .... Facebook is only the third most popular social networking site in Brazil .... The second largest social networking site in Brazil is Windows Live ...... Google's site remains far ahead of all of its competitors in Brazil. The site's visitors also spend far more minutes on the site than the users of any of the other popular social networks in Brazil. ..... average Orkut user spent 275.8 minutes on the site in August, while the average Facebook user only spent 29.3 minutes on Facebook. ..... the highest Twitter penetration in the world. Twitter is especially popular among younger users (15 to 24) ..... also interesting to note how popular the relatively new Q&A site formspring.me has become in Brazil. .... the fifth most popular social network in the country.

Image via Wikipedia

Time: Why Is Twitter So Popular in Brazil?: the regular appearance of Portuguese phrases on Twitter's popularity charts. ...... 23% of Internet users in Brazil — compared with 11.9% in the U.S. — visited Twitter this past August, the highest rate of participation by any country in the world .... In a country known for its vast gulf between the rich and poor, Twitter has managed to cut across the class divide. "It's not something that's just for rich Brazilians" ..... "The main reason Twitter is so huge in Brazil is because it gives access to normal people to contact their idols." ...... the country's soccer stars were among the earliest proponents of Twitter. ..... Twitter's success in Brazil .... is tied intimately to the history of the country's rise from the shadow of authoritarianism to its newfound status as a budding global power. ..... the fact that Brazil is away from the rest of the world motivates Brazilians ..... "There's a tremendous thirst to find out what the latest trend is." ..... Much of Brazil's transformation can be seen through the spread of telecommunications and the growth of social media...... Twitter, which entered the Brazilian market first as an SMS service. ..... the country's "Popular PC Project" of installing cheap computers in poorer areas has become a model the world over..... The civic participation of a once nonexistent middle class has also fueled Twitter's rise in Brazil. .... "There's a big bias in mass media against Lula" ..... the champion of Brazil's poor who himself only has a fourth-grade education. "The Internet's a way to fight back."
Image via CrunchBase .... Brazilians have taken to social-media websites other than Twitter. Google's social-media venture, Orkut, has found little success in the U.S., but in Brazil, the website was the beneficiary of 36 million unique visits in August, according to comScore. Facebook, too, is taking off in Brazil. In just one year's time, Facebook saw a growth of 479% in membership, leaping from 1 million to 9.5 million Brazilian members. It's a phenomenon that's planting deep roots. "My sister is 10 years old. My grandmother is 82," says Simas of MTV Brasil. "And they both have Twitter."

Cults and new religious movements in literatur...

Image via WikipediaThe fluidity of globalization and the internet can lead to feelings of rootlessness. That is where religion comes in. A lot of mobile populations get their sense of belonging from religion. That is the intersection between tech and religion.

Various cell phones displayed at a shop.

Image via WikipediaA government that is in a zero sum battle for power with its citizens loses power when citizens get more and more digital, sure. But what if a government defines its "power" in terms of how much empowering it helps bring about for the citizens? Then the more the citizens grab the power digitally, more involved they become, the government in the process will have become more powerful, it will have become a better government, one that delivers more for less. I think we have to choose our words right here. An engaged, informed citizenry will lead to grassroots governance.

Image via Wikipedia

AllThingsD: Khosla Wins the Bidding War for GroupMe, New York’s Startup of the Moment GroupMe, a New York startup that lets users send group text messages to to their cell phones, didn’t exist in April. Now it’s worth about $35 million..... Original investors including First Round Capital, Betaworks, Lerer Ventures and Ron Conway’s SV Angel, who put some $850,000 into the company earlier this year, are all slated to invest again. ..... a bidding war for the right to fund GroupMe broke out in the past few weeks. The company ended up with multiple term sheets to pick from before signing with Khosla Monday. ..... GroupMe works on any run of the mill “dumbphone”, and part of the company’s pitch is that salt of the earth folks (Church groups! Hunters!) have been using it since it opened up in August. ..... Hecht and Martocci left jobs at very red-hot startups — Tumblr and Gilt Groupe, respectively ..... The two formally hatched their plan at TechCrunch’s Disrupt Hack Day event in May. .... what investors are really hoping for, at least right now, is that GroupMe follows the same trajectory of another zero-to-hero New York startup — Foursquare. It’s worth nothing that Khosla tried very hard to fund that company’s last round, but missed out.

Larry Ellison Cracks Me Up

Image via CrunchBaseReuters: Oracle enlists private eyes to find HP CEO

Oracle Corp has hired private investigators to track down Hewlett-Packard CEO Leo Apotheker, believing testimony by the former SAP chief will help its efforts to claim about $4 billion in damages for software theft .... Oracle has subpoenaed Apotheker -- who began his job only last Monday -- but HP has refused to accept the subpoena, saying the U.S. software corporation is trying to harass him. .... their new chief, whose appointment surprised Wall Street and Silicon Valley ..... Oracle and Europe's top software maker are engaged in a legal battle that has transfixed Silicon Valley ...... Apotheker's lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher also
Image via CrunchBaserefused to accept the subpoena. If he is overseas, Oracle will be unable to serve him and have to await his arrival in California

I can see the point behind the lawsuit. SAP admitted guilt a long time ago. And I can see why Apothepo needs to be deposed. I guess I even see the point in hiring detectives. But it does get quite dramatic at that point. That hiring detectives part is signature Larry Ellison.

Image representing RockMelt as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBaseIt's an idea but my hunch says - pun intended - this might not take off. This is like Maradona returning to World Cup Soccer and Argentina losing big earlier this past summer. There is a part of Marc Andreesen that feels that Netscape should have perhaps attained a Google like glory but did not because Microsoft played unfair. ("Life is unfair." -JFK)

Image via CrunchBaseThere is just something about the name Boxee that bothers me, has always bothered me. It is that the name is too boxee, it reminds me of a box of some shape, size. And that is not a great image in my mind. The idea should be to get rid of boxes. I might have liked the name boxit, as in box up that TV, bury it in this box, you don't need it. Liberation.

Image representing Yipit as depicted in CrunchBase

Image via CrunchBaseI first visited Vin Vacanti's blog perhaps a year and a half ago. We might have exchanged an email: hello! Back then his blog looked like it got updated once every few months. I had never met him. It was the depth of the recession. Although to a startup that has not made it yet, can look like the curtain is down for no explainable reason.

Image via WikipediaSo I was at this event at the Hunch offices. Chris Dixon was hunched over a computer. Gosh, this was a while back. Grrls In Tech? No, this was Change The Ratio, a different gang.

"I wear the same outfit every day," Fred Wilson said.

Vinod Khosla: For Profit Poverty Alleviation

Image by brettwayn via Flickr

New York Times: Sun Co-Founder Uses Capitalism to Help Poor: commercial entities can better help people in poverty than most nonprofit charitable organizations .... an increasingly popular school of thought: businesses, not governments or nonprofit groups, should lead the effort to eradicate global poverty..... Rich Indians “are more into temple building and things like that” ..... moneymaking versions had grown much faster and reached many more needy borrowers. ..... He said he wanted to help create a new generation of companies like SKS, which started lending as a commercial company in 2006. It now has 6.8 million customers and a loan portfolio of 43 billion rupees ($940 million)..... CashPor, a nonprofit Indian lender to which Mr. Khosla has also given money, has 417,000 borrowers and a portfolio of 2.7 billion rupees ($58 million) even though it started operations in 1996. ..... Besides growing faster, SKS, India’s largest microfinance company, has become a stock market darling. The company floated its shares on India’s stock exchanges in mid-August, and they have risen 40 percent since then. .... Khosla’s 6 percent stake in SKS is worth about $120 million, about 37 times what he invested in the firm in 2006 and 2007 ..... Khosla said it might take at least a year to set up his new venture fund. ..... these “social enterprises,” as they are sometimes known, cannot be solely relied upon to address the many entrenched causes of poverty. ..... “I am relatively negative on most N.G.O.’s and their effectiveness,” he said. “I am not negative on their intentions.”

I have admired Larry Ellison over the years. The guy's biography reads like fascinating. Now I have found a dude who is less dramatic, but not less towering. Khosla speaks to me. He came to America as an international student

Image by ptufts via Flickr like I did. He thinks of where he came from. The idea is not to go back, but to take back, to give back, to do. His clean energy drive over the years has been about all those cars he sees crowding the roads in China and India over the next 50 years.

Vin Vacanti On That Techie Cofounder

Image via CrunchBaseVin Vacanti of Yipit, one of the hottest tech startups in New York City - not long back the not so hot, not so funded, but always promising tech startup - has produced a series of rather insightful blog posts on a topic that I have seen more early stage entrepreneurs in town struggle with than probably any other. The search for that techie cofounder beats the search for funding.

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.askalo.com

Over 1,000 cities, 38 countries, 5 languages. Askalo is a web community. It is a platform. It is local. Ask questions. Share tips about your city. The Q&A format - Quora comes to mind - seems to be the latest craze in social. And Askalo brings that to city discovery.

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it..... TechCrunch: Quora Has The Magic: Benchmark Invests at $86 Million Valuation ...... GigaOm: Former Facebook CTO Launches Quora, Competes with Yahoo Answers, Aardvark, Hunch

James Blake: Limit To Your Love

(Via David Noel)

Google, Please Don't Be Evil

Image via Wikipedia“[A] Nicaraguan military commander, using Google Maps as his guide, brought his troops into Costa Rica. He insists that he was just following what Google Maps said, and that he never intended to go into the neighboring country. Yet… the report also notes that there was a Costa Rican flag there, which the Nicaraguans took down and replaced with their own flag. You would think, at that point, that everyone involved might double check to make sure they were on the right side of the border. After raising their own flag, the Nicaraguans apparently set up camp, cleaned up a nearby river (nice of them) and then dumped sediment into Costa Rican territory (not so nice of them).”

— Nicaragua Accidentally Invades Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps (Via Matt Lehrer)

Ben Horowitz: Hip Hop Mogul

Ben: As Kanye says, hip hop is 1/2 what you say and 1/2 how you say it, so I put the tracks up on the blog http://bhorowitz.com
Me: @bhorowitz The hip hop quotes make your blog stand out and gets me to keep coming back. Although the posts are also good.

Google's Street View Camera Car in Wangen-Brüt...

Image via Wikipediahttp://www.mapcrunch.com

This site is so cool. It taps into the Google Street View database to show you random pictures from all over the world - I just saw one from Antarctica - and it is quite a feeling. In some ways this feels better than Google Earth, although Google Earth is an experience of its own.

You hit the N key on your keyboard and the next picture shows up, and next, and next.

You can view pictures by continent or country. Not all countries are available yet, but that's okay. I will wait.

And there is the obligatory slideshow option. And, of course, full screen mode.

Bon Voyage.

Image via CrunchBaseIt is not that people are saying, oh no, the internet got us addicted to the text, we have no more love for the video format, or that we are cutting down on both French fries and video content.

The demand for TV shows and movies is bigger than ever and growing. So what gives? Why are people in the TV/video/movies business worried? Why are the cable people scared? They are scared because the times, they are a changing. And they are refusing to change with the times.

Google's Foreign Policy

(Source: Mashable)

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: Google To Facebook: You Can’t Import Our User Data Without Reciprocity

The use of the word data by Google here is key. That further confirms the point I have been making at this blog over months. Social is not in Google's DNA. Google does data, Google does information, Google does not do social. When it goes into local and location, it is hung up on data.

Image via Wikipedia

Search Engine Land: Nicaragua Raids Costa Rica, Blames Google Maps

As of recent I have been thinking in terms of Costa Rica as the country where to have the pilot project for my microfinance tech startup. A member of the exploratory team suggested a small, central American country might be a good idea. And so I have been mulling over the name.

Image representing Facebook as depicted in Cru...

Image via CrunchBase

TechCrunch: 2010 State Of The Blogosphere: Facebook And Twitter Drive The Most Traffic (Slides): They use many types of social media (LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, StumbleUpon, Digg), but when it comes to driving traffic back to their blogs only two social media services really count: Facebook and Twitter

I have long suspected this. People have been like if you want traffic for your blog, become a regular on Digg, go visit StumbleUpon, and I have resisted. I have put my efforts only into Facebook and Twitter.

So I met this guy at Digital Dumbo last week, and we exchanged cards, and we exchanged emails later. And we are talking and he is like, how would you like to come to this event I am co-organizing? I forget precisely what, but it was nothing to do with movies.

Google Needs To Reinvent Gmail

Image via CrunchBaseI have heard this over and over again over months from many, many people. Gmail has slowed down to a trickle. Email continues to be a massively popular program. Google might have tackled the web over a decade ago, but no one has been able to tackle the inbox. The inbox is ripe territory.

TechCrunch: Hey Gmail, 1994 Called, It Wants Its Dial-Up Level Performance Back

TechCrunch is a blog that mostly talks about which startup got funded. But today it has been talking about the slowness of Gmail. Fast is a good reason to be in news, not slow. Slow is no good.

Zuckerberg Interview: Scoble's Recording

(Source: Robert Scoble)

Andy Bechtolsheim: 100K To 1.5 Billion Through Google

This is a remarkable story. A hundred thousand dollars turned into a billion and a half dollars in a decade: that is utmost remarkable. There is no lottery, no Vegas that can give you that kind of a return.

A lot of people could cough up the 100K if they had to. The question is what was Andy doing at the right time at the right place? What was he doing at that Stanford faculty's home that particular morning?

Facebook: Mobile, Social, Local, Deal, Check, Deal

Watch live streaming video from facebookinnovations at livestream.com

(Via Rachel Sterne)

Facebook's Aggression

Facebook Blog: Making Mobile More Social
Search Engine Land: Big Deal: Facebook Emerges As Major Player In Mobile And Location-Based Services
TechCrunch: Facebook Revamps The Mobile Log-In Process With Single Sign-On
BGR: Facebook has 200 million active mobile users, improves iOS and Android applications
TechCrunch: Facebook Gives All Developers Access To Full Set Of Places APIs (Including Their Venue Database)
Inside Facebook: Facebook Launches Local Deal Service for Places

Animation of the structure of a section of DNA...

Image via WikipediaFacebook's out to conquer the web. Facebook is the biggest competitor that Google ever had. It is not Microsoft. To compete with Google, you needed to be online, and Microsoft is not exactly online. And this competition did not come from search, it did not come from the government stepping in with some anti-monopoly lawsuit.

I have missed three NY Tech MeetUps in a row. That is uncharacteristic of someone who used to show up when the NY Tech MeetUp was half a dozen people at a Lower East Side bar. But I missed. And livestreaming does not work for me, I never really went that route. So I showed up for the after party last night: 218 Sullivan. No presentations, and no beer, I decided, and it was such great fun. I worked the room like a politician.

Image via Wikipedia

TechCrunch: The Times UK Lost 4 Million Readers To Its Paywall Experiment: saw its online readership decline by 4 million unique visitors a month worldwide to 2.4 million, or a 62 percent drop. Pageviews fell off an even steeper cliff, plummeting 90 percent from an estimated 41 million in May, 2010 to 4 million in September, 2010. People did what you’d expect them to do when faced with a paywall at a news site. They said, “No, thanks” and clicked away to another site.

Paywalls make no sense at all. The internet is a global medium. People anywhere should be able to come over to your site. Just like net neutrality is so basic to what the internet is all about, the idea of paywalls runs counter.

Intelligent Manufacturing

Factories getting carted away to Mexico was that "huge suction sound" Ross Perot heard way back in 1992. That image still persists. The Great Recession has made those fears much more concrete and real. Those jobs that are gone are gone. That seems to be the thinking.

the human in the loop: The Audio Medium: A Third World Revolution Waiting to Happen Even a cheap feature-phone can be made to play audio content. And cellphones have high penetration in the developing world .... Cellphones will need to support easy phone-to-phone transfer of audio content ..... Podcasts may be a niche medium in the U.S., but there will be enough demand for audio content in the developing world that it will be as ubiquitous as blogs are in the western world. And like blogs and other long tail text content, content publishers will create content without the expectation of revenue; this audio content will be free and/or ad-supported...... All the existing content in text form can automatically be converted into audio form. This is huge, because it makes all existing text content accessible to the developing world...... 5 centuries ago, the written word replaced the spoken word as the dominant means of information transfer. I am rooting for the spoken word to stage a comeback.

Lykke Li: Get Some

(Via Fred Wilson)

Dropio Acquired

Image representing Sam Lessin as depicted in C...

Image by jessica vascellaro via CrunchBaseI was just over at Mark Peter Davis' blog for this blog post and learned there Dropio has been acquired - wow - and by Facebook? Congrats, people.

FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
The Far Future Of Databases At The Dropio Offices
A MeetUp Has Me Excited: Y + 30

How Companies Get Valuated

I don't know a whole lot on the topic. I have a broad idea. I get the concepts. But I have not bothered to master the details. There are too many versions, too many ways they get done. Android is not fragmented, what is really screwed up and fragmented is how companies get valued.

How companies get valuated reminds me of when they taught me several pre-Charles Darwin theories of evolution at high school. They were all over the place. They all lacked the basic beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution.

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