Tumblr: Casey, Nina, David, Fred

Casey got me started with Tumblr. I got back home from her panel discussion during Social Media Week (Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever) to sign up for Tumblr, and I realized I had already signed up a long ago, but I had not been active. I became active. I started following people. That is my LinkedIn story as well. I signed up as soon as they launched because I read up on them in the news, but tidied up my LinkedIn page only late last year.

Then I came across Nina at Scoble's blog. And I started following her. She shares some of the very best pictures I ever saw online. Pictures she shares tend to be out of the box thinking type. I reblog her so often. I am going to do a blog post about her TED notes, which is how I found her the first time.

I discovered the founder of Tumblr himself, David. The guy has an amazing, amazing sense of humor, and it is fairly consistent.

A little later I found Fred on Tumblr. (Fred Wilson's Insight) Ends up the guy is a major music man. I think I need some help from him to go beyond the obvious names like U2, Madonna, Bob Marley, Nirvana and such. For the longest time I have stayed with mainstream pop. One layer below lies so much richness. Several layers below lies indie music. I left Nepal for America in 1996. That Fredspace occupied by one layer below stuff, for me that has been all the Hindi film music to when I left Nepal.







I use Twitter to broadcast, Facebook to connect, and Buzz/Tumblr to listen. But my blog remains my favorite social media platform. I feed it into my Twitter, Facebook, Buzz and Tumblr accounts. I like the idea of this big, blank white space that I have to fill up. I am wordy, I am linky. I like to pack it up with pictures and videos on top of the words and links. I am long form, if you will. I only jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon after I realized 140 characters involve links. (My Relationship With Ashton Kutcher) And I jumped with gusto. I am one of the top 100 people in NYC on Twitter.

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Broad Broadband

Image via Wikipedia

New York Times: Vast FCC Plan Would Bring Net To More In US establishing high-speed Internet as the country’s dominant communication network..... Already, the broadcast television industry is resisting a proposal to give back spectrum the government wants to use for future mobile service........ broadband Internet is becoming the common medium of the United States, gradually displacing the telephone and broadcast television industries..... the plan should pay for itself through the spectrum auctions....... a third of Americans have no access to high-speed Internet...... remote locations where private companies have little incentive to build networks....... the F.C.C. is hoping to free up roughly 500 megahertz of spectrum, much of which would come from television broadcasters ...... 100 Squared — equipping 100 million households with high-speed Internet gushing through their pipes at 100 megabits a second by the end of this decade

High speed, universal internet is fundamental to America becoming a post-industrial, information age society. It is the very backbone. It is the foundation.

The Obama FDR Parallels



Heartthrob’s Barbed Blog Challenges ChinaWith more than 300 million hits to his blog, he may be the most popular living writer in the world..... The Internet, he says, will eventually prod China toward greater openness. No army of censors can completely constrain free expression. “I think the government really regrets the Internet,” he said, pausing for effect. “Originally, they thought it would be like the newspaper or the television — just another way to get their view out to the people. What they didn’t realize is that people can type and talk back. This is giving them a really big headache.”
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personalthe clash between Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Jobs offers an unusually vivid display of enmity and ambition..... cellphones that physically, technologically and spiritually resembled the iPhone .....“We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business” ...“Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.” ........“You might want to tell me the difference between a large phone and a tablet.” ....Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, considered Mr. Jobs a mentor and, according to a former Apple executive, were regular visitors to Mr. Jobs’s office in Cupertino, Calif., during Google’s early days. ..........Mr. Brin was also known to take long walks with Mr. Jobs near his house in Palo Alto, and in the nearby foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains. ......... Schmidt... relished his position on Apple’s board and the proximity it gave him to one of the most famous figures in American business.......Google continued to push ahead with Android and its vision of a more open mobile phone ecosystem. ......Android’s features were based on longstanding ideas already circulating in the industry and that some Android prototypes predated the iPhone. ........“Google is not a company that is particularly afraid of anyone, including Apple.” ........“Everything iDon’t ... Droid Does.” ........with Android and plans for a computer operating system, Google was “unfortunately” entering more of Apple’s “core business.” .........a wrestling match began on the acquisition front. .......Google, which counts Microsoft, FacebookYahoo on an ever-expanding list of rivals .......Bill Campbell .....had a hand in smoothing over the initially turbulent relationship between Mr. Schmidt and Google’s founders..............Apple, where he is co-chairman of the board .........the old dynamics between Apple and Microsoft being recycled, with Apple still trying to control every aspect of the user experience, and Google, like Microsoft before it, working with multiple partners to flood the market with a large number of devices. ............an unlikely sight: Steve Jobs and Apple, running from the arms of Eric Schmidt and Google, into the embrace of Steve Ballmer and Microsoft.
You're the Boss: The Secret to Having Happy EmployeesI fired the unhappy people.
Findings on Lehman Take Even Experts by SurpriseExecutives at other Wall Street banks professed surprise at Lehman’s accounting maneuvers.Goldman SachsBarclaysCapital and other banks said on Friday they did not use repos to hide liabilities on their balance sheets.
Report Details How Lehman Hid Its WoesThe bank’s bankruptcy, the largest in American history, shook the financial world. ......Lehman reverse engineered the firm’s net leverage ratio for public consumption ........Repo 105 involved transactions that secretly moved billions of dollars off Lehman’s books at a time when the bank was under heavy scrutiny. ......firms essentially lend assets to other firms in exchange for money for short periods of time, sometimes overnight. ......Lehman managed to “shed” about $39 billion from its balance sheet at the end of the fourth quarter of 2007, $49 billion in the first quarter of 2008 and $50 billion in the second quarter.
Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy. I’m Too Busy With My Blog and Building My Brand.the Secret Is in the Sauce, a community of 5,000 female bloggers....... blog, about her life as a mother of three, typically draws about 36,000 page views a month. .......BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners .....a modern-day kaffeeklatsch, a vital outlet for conversing and commiserating about day-to-day travails.......“Through Twitter and blogging, I found a whole community of women going through the same thing as I am at the same time.” ......Just as television viewers have a seemingly insatiable hunger for reality shows, mothers often prefer the warts-and-all experiences of other moms online — and the ability to discuss them interactively — to the dry, inflexible pronouncements spouted by experts in books and parenting magazines. ......“The blogosphere is where authentic conversation is happening” .......advertising on blogs will top $746 million by 2012, more than twice the figure for 2007........some defend the growing alliance between bloggers and corporate America as empowering rather than exploitative, giving women a voice in shaping the brands they consume.
One on One: Andrey Ternovskiy, Creator of Chatroulette
One on One: Esther Dyson, Health Tech Investor and Space Tourist the newsletter Release 1.0, which I ran for 25 years......FlickrDel.icio.us....And I made a lot of money from Google through another investment. .........if you want to run a business, you need to monitor costs and revenues. In the same manner, if you want to run your body, you need to monitor intake and returns ......I don’t actually want to be the guy — I want to foster the guys........Partly this whole start-up phenomenon has been very male .........I have a short attention span. I couldn’t stay doing the same thing for 30 years......I often like to quote what the math professors say: The remainder of the proof is an exercise left to the reader.
One Analysis of the Google Buzz Mess “Nothing that the Buzz team did was technologically wrong,” Ms. Boyd said. “Yet the service resulted in complete disaster.” “Neither privacy nor publicity is dead, but technology will continue to make a mess of both”

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Silicon Valley Vs. New York City

New York Times: New York Isn't Silicon Valley. That's Why They Like It.

This article in the New York Times has been making the rounds this past week in the New York tech circles. I have seen it in a few different tweets, buzzes and blog post mentions. It is an interesting article. What is my take on the topic?

Silicon Valley is the old, established company. New York City is the startup. New York City does not need a silicon name, although I hold no grudges against the Silicon Alley Insider. New York City already has a name. The name is New York City.     

There is tremendous liveliness in the New York tech scene right now. There is a lot of early stage work going on. An ecosystem is being nurtured. Infrastructure is being laid out. When you get into the tech startup scene in New York now, you are getting on the ground floor. Office spaces that look like evicted starving artists to make room for developers, coders, programmers are in a few different places. There are numerous tech events every week, small and big. There is feverish networking. You might see a string of IPOs in a few years.

What does Silicon Valley have? It has become mature and crowded. Google's sexiest offering to date was Google Search, but that was over a decade ago. Yahoo stands eclipsed and stagnant. Windows is on its way out. Wait, that would be Seattle, but never mind. Steve Jobs just finished work on the final product of his career, the iPad. IBM is upstate New York. Okay, so Oracle bought Sun. Intel and Cisco are humming, but those are global companies, tens of thousands hired in India alone. Facebook started on the East Coast, and many of Mark Zuckerberg's college friends are still in New York City. Zuck, it is not too late to move back. Twitter might be out there, but the next Twitter - FourSquare - is in New York. TechCrunch might be out there, but Mashable is in New York.

New York is the place to be.

Personally I am not in the dot com space, but I am so glad tons of others are. To me it feels like they are all working to better my product for free. My company will bring hundreds of millions of new people online. (Fred Wilson's Insight)

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Lady Gaga

Biggest Open Source Company: Oracle, Google Or Red Hat?

Image via CrunchBase

There is a similar thing going on with blogging. Blogging started as a thing far flung individuals do. By now most of the top blogs are all corporate. Open source seems to share the story. So which do you think it might be? Which is the biggest open source company out there? Oracle, or Google?

We are all open-source companies now. Which also means that none of us are. Open source is simply a way that we enable some aspect of our businesses, whether we're Red Hat or Microsoft or Google or Facebook.

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