Paul Carr's Frank Talk On Race

I believe in having frank discussions on race, although the guy who I supported mightily in the presidential race, Barack Obama, proved a polar opposite approach can work wonders. He has done as much for race relations as anyone in history and he has done so by not bothering to have fluffy discussions on race.

Paul Carr, in this TechCrunch post, talks frankly about race, and that is of interest to me. "If I am wrong enough to think it, I am wrong enough to say it," Eminem once said in defense of his homophobic lyrics. What I like in addition to the frankness is Carr's exploration of the online medium and how that impacts the social discourses on that touchy topic: race.

TechCrunch: NSFW: #Ebony and #Ivory – The Brave New World of Online Self-Segregation

......the more recent story of a British holidaymaker who demanded that a hotel in Florida keep all “people of color” (or those with “foreign accents”) away from him and his family.......“black people represent 25% of Twitter users, roughly twice their share of the population in general” ......Twitter feels like one of the whitest sites in the world to me: full as it is with self-important middle-class hipster kids retweeting New York Times stories and the fact that they’re having sushi for lunch.....If apartheid or the new laws in Arizona represent the 1984 future, then there’s a real possibility that the Internet – and social media specifically – will eventually lead us into an even more terrifying Brave New World future. A future where the tools that once promised to help us meet people with different backgrounds and ideologies from our own actually end up being used, quite unintentionally, to segregate us from those same people......

Since when did having sushi become a white thing to do? This world is becoming cosmopolitan by the day.

I am a Third World guy. For me race talk has to go way beyond fluff to make sense. If you want my attention, talk to me about Kiva, for example.

Paul Carr: Bringing Nothing To The Party

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Direct Messages From Ann Curry, Steve Case, Robert Scoble

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@anncurry
@stevecase
@scobleizer





Breaking The Glass Ceiling With Ann Curry
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever

Who Is Chetan Bhagat? 2010 Time 100

My first name - Paramendra - is extremely rare, so rare I don't think anyone else has it. My parents saw Google coming. My last name - Bhagat - is also very rare. But then you have a Chetan Bhagat listed in the 2010 Time 100 list, I realized earlier today. Who is Chetan Bhagat?

Chetan Bhagat A former investment banker, Chetan, 36, broke out as a writer with his novels One Night @ the Call Center and Five Point Someone, which inspired the film 3 Idiots, the biggest Indian hit in history. His latest book is about his marriage and the obstacles he and his wife faced coming from different regions of India..... He often writes about following your dreams and not bowing to others' expectations. That isn't easy in India, where family opinion matters and some professions are regarded as more serious than others.

Chetan Bhagat- Official Website
Chetan Bhagat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
3 Idiots may sue Chetan Bhagat - News Interviews - Bollywood...
Chetan Bhagat, 3 Idiots' team in story credit row - India - The...
I got a generation waking up, says author Chetan Bhagat‎
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Chetan Bhagat (chetan_bhagat) on Twitter

Chetan Bhagat: In NYC.
Me: For real? Can we meet for coffee? I was just blogging about seeing a Bhagat - my last name - on Time 100. I am in NYC.

A Day In The Life Of New York City

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Jon Stewart: Appholes

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Appholes
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Venmo And Frictionless Payments

Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?
Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
The FourSquare Appeal For Me
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

Venmo | Thrillist if you send funds to a Venmo newbie, they'll get a passcode & instructions to set up an account and claim the funds, although unfortunately, without the added benefit of aiding a misunderstood, exiled Nigerian prince ..... deals with a number of University City food trucks (Coup de Taco, HubBub, Don Memo...) to accept Venmo payments, and're currently wrapping up similar arrangements w/ Starr Restaurant Group and Marathon -- who you'd pay through the nose via any method just to never have to run in one.
Venmo: The Future of Payments | innonate many of us have friends and contacts we'd trust enough to take money right out of our wallet! .... where this will get super interesting is when restaurants and other venues get into the mix.
Text your bill to Venmo| The Daily Pennsylvanian The system is intended to replace cash, and will be the future of payments ..... “Our goal is to become the number one payment processor in the country” ...... Kortina and Magdon-Ismail came up with the idea when they were at a concert and could not buy the band’s CD because there was no way for the musician to accept credit card payments. ....... they did not want to create something internet-based just for the iPhone because not everyone has one. “But we liked the simplicity of text messaging” ...... e used to send money to friends for utilities or splitting bills. ..... for sorority and fraternity fundraisers ..... make purchases off of Craigslist. .... useful even for businesses that already accept credit cards but want to better engage their customers. .... “In about a year, everyone on Penn’s campus will be using it,” said Magdon-Ismail. “It’s the future of how we’re all going to pay for things.”
Venmo: Mobile Payment Start-Up | Peter Kafka | MediaMemo | AllThingsD Venmo, a stealthy but buzzy start-up that just closed its first funding round. The four-man team gathered up something in the $300,000 to $400,000 range ..... . Investors include Betaworks, Lerer Media Ventures, and, oddly, given that it’s a modest angel funding round, RRE Ventures. ..... The big difference between Venmo and its much bigger mobile payment competitors–both Boku and Zong, for instance, have millions of venture capital dollars behind them–is that Venmo doesn’t involve the mobile carriers, which can take 30 percent or more of each transaction they process. .... charging commercial users–your local coffee shop or flea market vendor or whatever business sets up an account–a 3.5 percent fee for each transaction. ..... The Venmo team–headed by Betaworks veteran Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail
Venmo| CrunchBase Profile
Announcing Our Investment in Venmo all transactions are reversible and the exchange of money is capped at $500.
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Episode 65 –Venmo: SMS-based Payments – The Web 2.0 Show
Venmo: Texting its way to a cash-free future
"We allow people to make cash transactions without the hassle of carrying cash", says Jameel Farruk of Venmo ..... It's the lack of fees that Venmo believes will allow it to become popular..... Currently, it is free to add money to your Venmo account, send money, receive money and even withdraw money to your bank account. There is no minimum to load on your account, send and receive money or to withdraw to your bank account. In the future, Venmo plans to make money by charging users a fee for an expedited transfer to your bank account, which currently takes about the same amount of time as a standard bank transfer. ..... three basic functions of Venmo; Pay, Charge and Trust. ..... the ability to reverse a trusted charge for 24 hours and a maximum transaction of $500 ...... one of the best solutions yet.
Venmo is hot sh-t « eat. shop. love. nyc.
Venmo gets viral for Haiti relief, text payments
Venmo
Venmo Voted Best Mobile Company in the Eastern Region, and Raises... In less than a week, the Relief Foundation has raised over $15,000 through Venmo text message donations, $600 of which was raised in the 3 minute demo during the presentation.
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Frictionless Payments - 10 Tech Trends for 2010 - TIME Micropayments were a $1 billion industry in 2009. .... A startup called Venmo 
Friction in online payments | Institute For The Future In a world where almost 4.6 billion people have a cell phone, we should be leveraging cell phones more for payments. .... services like m-Pesa in Africa that enable mobile phone users to transfer money via mobile phones. .... Zong and Boku ... the payment amount is added to the mobile phone bill.
The Future of Money: It's Flexible, Frictionless and (Almost) Free What if people could transfer money over Twitter for next to nothing, simply by typing a username and a dollar amount? ....But now engineers can focus on building applications, while leaving the regulatory and risk-management issues to PayPal. “I can focus on the social side of the business and not on touching money,” as Ivey puts it.
Frictionless - and Almost Free - Payments? tear down the stronghold the banks and credit card companies have built
M-Banking Kiva M stands for mobile and Pesa is Kiswahili for money. ..... a service that Safaricom, the most popular cell phone service in Kenya, offers (Zain, its largest competitor offers a similar service). Touted as a “branchless banking service” M-PESA users can deposit and withdraw money on their phone by utilizing a network of agents stationed throughout the country – mostly airtime vendors and phone salesman. .... weekly group repayment and disbursal meetings instead of home visits, decreases costs significantly ..... having these borrowers repay their loans via mobile might vastly improve efficiency ..... here are only a few other countries/companies that offer this service: Afghanistan, Tanzania, South Africa, a pilot program in Uganda and two very successful services in the Philippines.... there were $93 billion in remittances transferred from abroad to Africa every year.

Venmo's Restful Coolness (rafer.tumblr.com)
Venmo's Simple, Loaded Premise: Pay Your Friends From Your Phone (gigaom.com) Kortina recently left his job at Bit.ly and took a bridge loan from Sam Lessin and other individuals to pursue Venmo full time. ..... you can Venmo someone $3 with the message “grab me a coffee” ...... he casual spectrum of transactions ...... after the major earthquake in Haiti earlier this year, people donated more than $35 million through $5 and $10 text messages
Q&A: The New Digital Cash (blogs.wsj.com) Venmo, a tiny start-up launched in April 2009, has developed a system to let anyone exchange money through a cellphone text message...... About a year ago, [Venmo co-founder] Iqram [Magdon-Ismail] was visiting me in NYC for the weekend and had forgotten his wallet in Philly. He did have his phone, though. I covered him for the entire weekend, and he ended up mailing me a check to pay me back. I don’t think I ever cashed it. ...... a guy with a food truck in West Philly who does not have email, but has a cell phone and accepts Venmo ....... payments that may not have necessarily ever happened before....... A friend of mine tips the bartender *before* arriving at the bar, and has a drink waiting for him when he arrives. ..... I don’t see any reason why you should not be able to use Venmo to pay a Square merchant. ..... . The part of Venmo that is most exciting is Trust...... I get a notification anytime someone I trust charges me and I have the ability to reverse charges ..... you tend to only trust people that you actually trust in real life

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Could 2011 Be Venmo's Year?

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

2009 was Twitter's year. 2010 is looking to be FourSquare's year. Twitter is in a better shape today than ever before, but it no longer has the buzz it had last year around this time. FourSquare's buzz will also subside. That is the nature of the innovation market. If they don't make the mistake of selling the company, (FourSquare Must Cut A Deal With Yahoo) I think FourSquare will go on to be a viable business that is no longer always in the headlines. Some company will take the space that FourSquare will at some point exit. Which company will that be? I might be proven wrong, but if I had to take a guess, if I were forced to come up with one name, the horse I am betting on is Venmo.

2011 could very well be Venmo's year. Venmo is a hot possibility that some venture capitalist wanting to strike gold needs to lap it up fast. The Venmo team deserves to go work full time on their beautiful product. They are onto something big.

Granted 2009 was 2009, the year of the Great Recession, but plenty of companies were getting funded despite that, and FourSquare was not one of them. They landed at South By Southwest last year with a thud. They were not going anywhere trying to raise money. They approached Yelp. Yelp would not invest. FourSquare's fortunes started picking up only later in the year. Location became a buzz word, and by now all that pain from early last year must feel like a distant memory.

Venmo does frictionless payments. Venmo is in the mobile web space. But it can do the old web good too.

I don't think Venmo will get called the next FourSquare like FourSquare is being called the next Twitter, and I don't think the buzz will be with any one company in 2011, likely it will be fractured and distributed among a few different names, and we might not even have to wait for 2011 to roll around; it might happen earlier. But Venmo sure is in sweet space.

When I said to Iqram (@iqram) last night at the Digital Dumbo party (Digital Dumbo: Here I Come) that 2011 could very well be Venmo's year, he immediately sent $10 to my Venmo account for my "kind words." That's what the email says. At the after party of the NY Tech MeetUp when they presented, Kortina (@kortina) sent me 40 cents, and that is how I got started on Venmo. That was a few months back.

Frictionless Payments - 10 Tech Trends for 2010 - TIME
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Frictionless - and Almost Free - Payments?

@iqram, @kortina, @venmo

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Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

If You Like Your Inbox, Keep It

Like Obama never tired of saying on the campaign trail for health care reform, if you like your current coverage, you get to keep it. So if you like your current inbox where you get emails from your friends and family and those dictators in Nigeria, you get to keep it. You actively would have to choose to go for the multi inbox option. (Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November)

The Inbox As A Spectrum

All human beings are created equal, but that does not apply to emails. All emails are not equal. And the inbox has to reflect that.

Inbox 1

This is the inbox that you see when you log in. These are emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts. These are emails sent only to you and not to a group of people.

Inbox 2

Emails sent by people whose emails you have saved as contacts, but these emails have also been sent to other people at the same time.

Inbox 3

Emails from mailing lists I might have subscribed to.

Inbox 4

Emails from everyone else. This is not the folder for the spam emails. The current spam folder gets to hold ground.

Addendum

An email that should have showed up in inbox 3, if it shows up in inbox 1, you get to tell the system it belonged in inbox 3, and all future emails from that address would end up in inbox 3. You teach the system as you use it.

Also you get to set an expiry date on the various inboxes. All emails in inbox 3 that are more than a month old, please delete them without asking, something like that. Because even Gmail has a space limit.

And there should be an easy way to delete contacts. If you ended up saving an email address you did not mean to save, delete. Free the soul.

I think with this simple change, the inbox could see new life. Inbox 1 could again become something to always look forward to. And this suggestion is not to displace the already in place concept of threaded conversations and the other goodies.

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Dropio's Indian Cofounder Darshan

Me: I just found out you cofounded Dropio http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drop.io Why did you leave?
Darshan: yup! helped build out the tech team there, and then hopped to a startup i began in high school - http://bit.ly/4DLylg

In case you did not realize, the Indians are statistically significant.

Darshan Somashekar - LinkedIn
Video Interview With The Founders of Drop.io
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Darshan Somashekar| Facebook
Darshan Somashekar| Guest of a Guest
Darshan Somashekar (darshan) on Twitter
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The FourSquare Appeal For Me

(1) Cutting Edge

FourSquare is on the cutting edge. (Fractals: Apple, Windows 95, Netscape, Google, Facebook, Twitter) I would add FourSquare at the end if I were doing this blog post today.

2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments

(2) New York City

I love this city like no other geographical location on earth. FourSquare is the hottest technology company in town, and it is one of the hottest tech companies out there, period. They are a hometown gig. That is illustrious. I take unabashed hometown pride in FourSquare.

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(3) Mobile

The mobile web is bigger and growing faster than the old web. There location is key. Location is the starting point of the FourSquare experience, and that is so in sync with the mobile web.

The iPhone, Nexus One, Or Droid?

(4) My People

This is key. I am a Third World guy. This is existential to me. This is spiritual. This is religious. This is fundamental. I was born in India, grew up in Nepal next door. I was in my 20s when I landed in America. I have to move towards one world. The First World, Third World dichotomy is a little too much for me. It makes me uncomfortable. My startup that I have put to rest after a rough 2009 wanted to bring a ton of new people online. But I perhaps made the mistake of thinking in terms of the old web. Mobile is perhaps the way to go. Four billion of the six billion plus people already can access mobile phones. And so perhaps software is where it is at. How simple can you make it? If they can do voice over their mobile phones, could they do a mightily stripped down version of FourSquare? Before, way before, a full web experience? Could they check in as a way to protest and tell the world that they are protesting? Checking in even the illiterates could do.

This is the number one reason I want to work for FourSquare: 4:16 PM @ FourSquare.

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The First Major Revolution Of The 21st Century...

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Reshma Saujani: Innovation, Ethnic Pride, Thought Leadership

Start-Up NY: Innovation and Technology Startups in New York

Reshma Saujani's Innovation Advisory Board is hosting an event on the evening of May 3rd called "Start-up NY: Innovation and Technology Startups in New York".

Moderated by prominent tech blogger Meghan Asha, Saujani has gathered six panelists with backgrounds in venture capital, education, politics, entrepreneurship and social networking to discuss technology and innovation in New York City.

Panelists include:

Albert Wenger, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures (The event is near Union Square)
Dina Kaplan, Co-founder, Blip.tv
Evan Korth, Clinical Associate Professor, NYU; Organizer, NY Hackathon
Franklin Madison,Technology Program Director, ITAC (Industrial and Technology Assistance Corporation)
Nate Westheimer, Executive Director, NY Tech Meetup; Co-founder, AnyClip
Reshma Saujani, Community Activist and Democratic Congressional Candidate, NY District 14

A question and answer session will follow.   The event will be broadcast live at Livestream.com and recorded for a broader audience.

Reinforcing Saujani’s commitment to entrepreneurship, economic diversity and innovation in New York, the “Startup” summit is the first in a series of ideation panels. In the coming months, additional summits will focus on cleantech, biotech and public-private partnerships.

We hope you can join us for the event.

WHEN
May 03, 2010 at 6:00 PM
WHERE
833 Broadway
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10003
Google map and directions

Reshma Saujani: Innovation, Ethnic Pride, Thought Leadership