Netizen

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Twitter: The Obvious Missing Features

Twitter is for real. I have felt that since February 2009 when @jobsworth covinced me to get on the train. Otherwise in 2008 and before I looked down upon the service. I was a full form blogger. 140 characters could not contain me.

Twitter does not have the buzz today that it had for the first half of last year. Following the same pattern, some of FourSquare's buzz is now dying out just when it is getting better and better as a business.

Twitter had major scaling issues last year. That was a high class problem to have. But it still should have walked and chewed gum at the same time. It should have scaled well and it should have added features as well.

My belief is that the best features have to be at Twitter.com itself. I have the Twitter ecosystem in high regards, but Twitter should buy or build the best of the breed.

What are some obvious features that Twitter lacks?

(1) A Four Column View

Just like I am for four or more native inboxes for my Gmail, I am for four columns for Twitter. You log in and the four columns are the default view. Save me clicks. (Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way)

The Stream
The Inbox (@paramendra)
Direct Messages

Okay, so that's three, not four.

(2) Several Lists At Once

I want to be able to view my four favorite lists at once. I might create and follow tens of lists, but this would force me to think which my four top lists are. Give me one click on the right hand side that leads me to four columns that house my four lists.

(3) Threaded Conversations

When someone replies to one of my tweets, I should not have to right click and open up a new tab with that tweet of mine to figure out what exactly that person replied to. Again, save me clicks.

(4) Deleting 20 Direct Messages At Once

Just like I don't have to delete one email at a time, I don't want to have to delete one DM at a time. I want to be able to delete 20 DMs at a time. Select all, and delete. I also want to be able to unfollow 20 people at a time in my DM box. You sending me a DM I did not want is often a good reason for me to start unfollowing you. But if I have to unfollow one person at a time, you have the upper hand.

(5) The @ Reply Ninjas

My inbox is often flooded with people who will put my Twitter handle in a tweet and there will be no message in there, or some unwanted marketing message. Often times they will put my Twitter handle and that of 10 others. They got 10 people's attention, they think.

People who I don't follow, when they send me a tweet, instead of giving me the two regular options of reply and retweet, give me three options: reply, retweet, block person. A blocked person should not be able to show up in my inbox even if they put my Twitter handle into their tweet.

Chris Dixon On Twitter: Not Impressive
Twitter Has To Scale The Signals
Twitter Does The Deed: Ads
Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
Measuring Your Twitter Influence
Facebook And Twitter Suck When It Comes To Searching Their Own Sites
Twitter Visualization: Reading Many Tweets At Once
Twitter For The Masses

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Indian Railways

India Broadband Spectrum Bids

Clogged Rail Lines Slow India’s Development

As the world looks to India to compete with China as a major source of new global economic growth, this country’s weak transportation network is stalling progress. ..... India must invest heavily in transportation to achieve a long-term annual growth rate of 10 percent — the goal recently set by the prime minister, Manmohan Singh. ..... the political realities of India’s clamorous democracy stand in contrast to the forced march that China’s authoritarian system can dictate for economic development. ..... A 40,000-mile, 150-year-old network, Indian Railways is often described as the backbone of this nation’s economy. And in fact it is moving more people and goods than ever: seven billion passengers and 830 million tons of cargo a year. ..... Political analysts say that the current railway minister, Mamata Banerjee, has been distracted by her party’s campaign to win elections in her home state of West Bengal. ..... migrant workers, for example, can travel from Mumbai to their homes in Bihar, 1,050 miles away, for 500 rupees ($11). ..... To subsidize passenger travel, the railways levy some of the highest freight tariffs in the world. India charges $395 to move a ton of freight one kilometer — four times what American companies charge and twice as much as in China. ..... the Delhi Metro, a 118-mile subway system.

A Rail Minister Distracted by Parochial Issues

Occasionally, she shouted back at her opponents, mostly older men, telling them to shut up and let her finish. ......... One of her campaigns forced Tata Motors, India’s largest auto company, to abandon a factory complex where it had planned to produce a new $2,500 car, the Nano. Tata has since moved the factory to Gujarat State, on the opposite coast of the country. ...... “But at the moment her main aim is to be chief minister of West Bengal.”

Indian Railways is the worlds largest employer and one of the biggest and busiest rail networks in the world, carrying some 17 million people and more than one million tonnes of freight daily. It was, however, until very recently, a loss-making organisation heading for bankruptcy. Starting his term in 2004 with a budget of just $200 million with which to save the national institution, Indian Railways Minister, Lalu Prasad engineered a dramatic turnaround. In 2007, Indian Railways revenues amounted to $6 billion. This impressive success story has also been featured in the textbooks of prestigious academic institutes worldwide as a case study. Minister Lalu Prasad is a key ally of India's governing coalition led by the Congress party. He was also the former Chief Minister of the state of Bihar which his Rashtriya Janata Dal party governed for 13 years until 2005.

My Political Resume, Reshma 2010, And September 14

Laloo Yadav: Future Prime Minister Of India
Laloo Should Be Brought Back As Railway Minister

OpenVBX: To Manage Your Office Phones

Image representing Twilio as depicted in Crunc...

Image via CrunchBase

Fred Wilson: Open VBX

With 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.

Twilio Voice Applications with Amazon AWS S3 and EC2

View more presentations from Twilio.

SlideShare: Twilio Voice Applications with Amazon AWS S3 and EC2

What I want Google to deliver: ad-supported free phones.

The Eyes Of Truth

FootyTube
FIFA

Hey Now, Hey Now

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Verdict: The iPhone Is Not Open, Flash Is Not Cutting Edge

Steve Jobs: Thoughts On Flash

.... we met Adobe’s founders when they were in their proverbial garage. Apple was their first big customer ......Apple invested in Adobe and owned around 20% of the company for many years. The two companies worked closely together to pioneer desktop publishing and there were many good times. ....... Mac users buy around half of Adobe’s Creative Suite products – but beyond that there are few joint interests. ...... why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. ...... Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system. ....... Apple has many proprietary products too. ..... Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript – all open standards. ...... Flash is the number one reason Macs crash....... Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. ..... Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices. ....... Flash is a cross platform development tool. It is not Adobe’s goal to help developers write the best iPhone, iPod and iPad apps. ...... the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short..... Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe: The Truth About Flash

The Adobe Flash Player runtime was actually originally created as a technology for tablets with touch interfaces ..... For new content developed specifically with touch in mind, Flash Player 10.1 will provide a complete set of multitouch and gesture APIs. ...... Seventy-five percent of all video on the web is viewed via Flash Player, including videos encoded in the most popular codecs such as H.264 and VP6. ...... H.264 is a video codec (which requires a player), while Flash Player is a complete multimedia runtime that can play back H.264, among other codecs. ....... Flash Player 10.1 will include support for hardware-accelerated video playback across devices from mobile to desktop environments. ....... since Flash Player runs across platforms, all of the optimizations made for mobile will also benefit content on desktops, laptops, netbooks, and tablets when they run Flash Player. ........ The Symantec Global Internet Threat Report for 2009 found that Flash Player had the second lowest number of vulnerabilities of all Internet technologies listed (which included both web plug-ins and browsers). This is significant when you consider that Flash Player is among the most widely distributed and used pieces of software in the world. ....... Flash Player is part of a rich ecosystem of both open and proprietary technologies. ..... The core engine of Flash Player (AVM+) is open source and was donated to the Mozilla Foundation, where it is actively maintained. The file formats supported by Flash Player, SWF and FLV/F4V, as well as the RTMP and AMF protocols are freely available and openly published. Anyone can use the specifications without requiring permission from Adobe. Third parties can and do build audio, video, and data services that compete with those from Adobe. ....... Flex, the primary application framework for the Adobe Flash Platform, is also open source and is actively maintained and developed by Adobe and the community.

Freedom Of Choice: Home
Create Without Limits
The Truth About Flash
Our Thoughts On Open Markets

Fred Wilson: An Unassuming Kind Of Guy

Today Fred Wilson has a post on his blog that should have you drooling: Bits Interview.

Nick Bilton
Joi Ito
Twitter Buys An Analytics Company

the company now processes more than 65 million updates daily from its 190 million users

Taking On The Gulf Oil Spill With Kites And Cameras

The kites are flown to around 1,500 feet where they snap images of the area below at regular intervals....... give citizens access to technology that will let them document the effects of the spill themselves. He is putting the kite images into the public domain so they can be accessed and used by anyone without paying a fee.

My last email to Fred went something like this: "Fred, I think sometimes you underestimate the size of your presence in the NY tech ecosystem. You touch so many lives by simply being in town." There is evidence of that underestimation plenty in this blog post.

I don't really like being profiled much. I would prefer people write about the entrepreneurs we back and the companies they build. That's where the interesting stories are....... he got me to talk about being broke right before hitting it big with Geocities in the late 90s, falling in love in college and following the Gotham Gal to NYC, and why my refusal to carry an iPhone is a "political statement."

I am glad I beat Nick Bilton to profiling Fred, although my profile can hardly be called that, it is a sketch with maybe three strokes on the page: Meeting Fred Wilson In Person.

One On One: Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures

Wilson blogs daily ..... I started in 1986, when I was 25 years old. ...... When I showed up at this firm, it was a sleepy old firm, and they still didn’t use computers. ....... My first investment was a company called Software Developers Company. We put about $5 million into the company, and it wasn’t a good investment. ....... I didn’t think I was a good investor for several years until I had to navigate my way out of the software bubble that burst around 2001. When I came out of that experience in 2003, I really felt like I’d figured the business out. ....... The PC hardware bubble, the software bubble and the biotech bubbles all burst in the mid-80s and 90s. ........ we haven’t seen major risky mobile investments, yet. ...... That’s the beautiful thing about working in the financial markets; eventually, stupid stuff happens. ....... (Geocities) .. Before the sale, we were completely broke. We had to move out of New York City because we just couldn’t afford to live in the city. We had three kids, and I was barely scraping by to pay the mortgage. ........ Right before the Geocities sale went through, my wife went to the cash machine to buy groceries for the week and there wasn’t any money in our bank account. I told her to put groceries on the credit card because I knew we were going to sell Geocities the following week. But before that happened, we were living hand to mouth. ........ (New York City) .. I fell in love and followed my wife here. ....... I thought if I paired engineering, software and finance, that would make me an interesting package. ...... When we started Union Square Ventures in 2003, we didn’t envision the industry would be as big as it is today. Between mobile, social, location and other Web properties, these businesses have become huge staples in people’s everyday lives. ....... The businesses that become profitable are largely influenced by the entrepreneurs, and we are largely along for the ride with their decision. But, when companies are not sustainable, we have a lot to say. We don’t necessarily put a gun to their heads, but it’s not that far from it. ....... We looked at Tumblr before we met David Karp, the founder. When we met him it made the entire company make sense. ...... I sat there that morning and thought, hmmm, what am I? And I thought, I’m a venture capitalist; I’m A VC. ....... I’m not sure I could be a VC without the blog. You have to be out there in the hearts and minds of the entrepreneurs, and that’s the scarce resource with what we have as investors; it’s certainly not the money. ...... it angers me when I go to a Web page with a Flash video and I can’t watch it. Plus the whole porn thing. I’m a free speech bigot ..... I don’t like censorship ....... (Chatroulette) ... We met with him; he didn’t really know what he wanted to do with Chatroulette. I was eager to meet him, but after meeting him I didn’t get the impression that he knew what to do with it.

Fred is a nice person. I used that bland adjective on purpose. Even his niceness is the unassuming kind. As for him being not a story, I seriously doubt that. I would rather read a profile of Fred Wilson than that of most tech entrepreneurs in town, but I would rather not have to choose. There is no dearth of space in cyberspace, we can profile them all. Fred is one of the early people in town. He helped set the ball in motion. I once compared him to Scorsese. He is like a really good movie Director, only he is not a movie Director, he is in the venture capital business. He is really, really good at what he does. You can admire that excellence without being in the tech scene. But if you are in the tech scene, you will admire it even more.

He probably says no to 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 pitches made to him to every one pitch he says yes to. If he invests in two companies a year, and he gets maybe 250 pitches a week, even the 10,000 figure is an underestimate. That is the nature of the beast. Perhaps there has to be a better screening mechanism and he should not have to go through as many pitches. (The Panel Pile Up)

One on One: Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square

co-founder and chairman of Twitter, an angel investor in Foursquare and chief executive of Square ...... The goal is to build another utility like Twitter that will scale to any kind of usage. Anywhere from coffee shops or clothing retail stores, to someone selling their couch on Craigslist, or getting paid back from a friend. ...... The hardware is fairly simple, the software is extremely complex. ...... One of the most successful mobile payment continents in the world has been Africa. ..... Right now we’ve created a really easy way to get the information into Twitter. I think the next big challenge is helping get the information out in a relevant way. ...... I said a long time ago that Foursquare can make cities better. ... Foursquare has started to replace Yelp for me. .... (2010) .. Hopefully a lot more start-ups in New York City. I think the start-ups here are building a really great foundation. .... In terms of technology, we’re going to see a better and more immediate experience around the everyday things we do in life. For example, health care. I expect we’ll see a lot more innovation around health care after the latest initiative goes through Washington.

One on One: Anil Dash of Expert Labs

formerly of Six Apart, which created the popular blogging software Movable Type. Mr. Dash is now the director of Expert Labs, a Government 2.0 initiative that aims to connect United States government projects with citizens who want to become more involved in the political discussion. ....... Apes will always need to groom each other, and Twitter is great for that. So while Twitter is important, a lot of what it’s used for today is not new content. It’s re-Tweeting or sharing links to content outside of Twitter. Gestures like re-Tweeting or “liking” something on Facebook are more akin to applause than to dialogue. I don’t just write for applause, I like to write to start a dialogue. ........ They have iPhones and use Twitter. ...... Bit.ly ends in .ly, which is actually a Libyan domain name. ....... Before Apps.gov, it used to be a very laborious process to distribute applications to the federal government. Now, the entire process is actually more open than the iTunes App Store. It illustrates the huge radical shift that’s happening in what people call Government 2.0.

One on One: Brian Lam of Gizmodo.com

Monday, June 14, 2010

"Where Was This Google All This Time?"

I went to an amazing, amazing event earlier in the evening (NextGen Africa Forum @ NYU June 14), and I am blogging away, sipping - more like gulping - mango lassi I made. Mine does not look as good. I put too much yogurt and ice cream and not enough mango pulp into it.

You had to be there to feel the magic of the moment. Online video will not be able to replicate it. When was the last time I went to an event in town this amazing? It was that good. And the four people on stage, I had never heard of their names only two days ago.

I was hoping some of the crowd would spill over to the after party, but there were maybe a half dozen people there and I left.

I was a few minutes late. Somebody was already speaking. She was in the process of introducing the Vice President of Malawi. After the event was over, I walked over to shake her hand. I tried to muster some protocol, or at least my version of it, in the process.

"Madam Vice President, it is an honor to be able to meet you in person, and shake your hand like this," I said.

"Thanks for coming," she said simply and moved to shake the next hand. I took two steps back, lingered around for about five seconds, walked sideways three steps and walked away. Then I spotted the Goods4Good leader, the emcee of the event.

"You are in some kind of an ad," I said to her. "I looked you up on YouTube yesterday, and that showed up first thing."

She looked amused.

"Good question," she said.

I had asked one of the questions from the floor.

"Hi, my name is Paramendra. There has been tremendous buzz in social media about this event which is how I found out about it, there has been buzz all the way to The Huffington Post. Until yesterday I had never heard of the four of you; that makes me an ignorant person. I looked all four of you up on YouTube yesterday. I am very impressed with the work you have done ...... My question is, would it be possible to scale your good work, because the number of affected children is just so large, or do we not have a big solution to the big problem?"

Ann Veneman gave the best answer. She said ultimately these problems have to be tackled at the policy level. But Dr. Jane Aronson gave the most heart warming answer. When I met her in person later, I said that to her in different words.

"The take away lesson for me with you is," I said, "you have to maintain good spirits, you have to be cracking jokes, and you have to having good time, while you work on big, hard social problems, or you are going to not be able to do much good."

That spirit is exemplified in Jane's funky green Gandhi glasses. Blue? It was green at the time I talked to her.

A few minutes later when I got to pass by Melissa Kushner, the emcee, one more time I said to her, "I sent you a tweet earlier." She reacted like I had sent her a parcel.

"Thank you," she said.

I made small talk with a few people from Malawi. So I met this one woman from Malawi, she said she did her college in Arkansas. I have been to Arkansas, I said. A minute later another woman from Malawi walked into us. I asked if they knew each other. They said no. So I introduced one to the other. One lived in the Bronx, the other in Westchester.

I told them a Westchester story. A family friend of mine - a doctor - from my hometown in Nepal lives in Westchester, bought a house, is raising his family and stuff. Somebody new from that town showed up in New York City a few months back. He got taken to the house.

"He lives in the trees," the new guy said later. He was not impressed. So much for the aura of suburbs.

I showed up for the event dressed formally. Well, that means putting on a white shirt. Otherwise my favorite form of attire has only one thing missing from what I was wearing: the white shirt. And the tie stays out of range. The tie is the most useless piece of clothing ever. Maybe it is good for wiping your nose or something.

The take away quote from the event for me that gave me a belly aching laugh did not come from the main part of the event, or from the four featured panelists, and this might reflect my tech bias.

A Tom Rielly got to talk for a few minutes towards the end, and he showed eight minutes of a film about the guy who is now headed to Dartmouth College.

William Kamkwamba, author, "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind," and......
William Kamkwamba - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
William Kamkwamba | Profile on TED.com
African Leadership Academy - William Kamkwamba

So this guy goes through hell and high water, and years later he gets to access Google, and does a search on windmills, and tens of thousands of diagrams show up that could have saved him so much work, and so he says,"Where was this Google all this time?"

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

William Kamkwamba

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

212Media

Jobs
Twitter: 212Media, Vin Bhat
Blog
Team
WSJ
Time

Friday, June 11, 2010

Employment Authorization Card: It's Here

So my Employment Authorization Card arrived earlier today in the mail. What that means in my case is I can't go anywhere outside America for the next year. As a practical matter, I don't see me going anywhere outside New York City. There is so much to explore right here.

But ultimately I do want to have been to all parts of the world just like I have been to all parts of America. I got time. I plan on staying thin.

Then I show up in immigration court in June 2011 and hopefully the judge waves a magic wand and turns that piece of paper into a green card. Then I become eligible for entrepreneurship. Before that I get to blog about it.

The next best thing to entrepreneurship is joining a small, early stage team. You can not be the founder, but you sure can be a founding member.

There has been more drama behind this little piece of paper than I would have liked. But I am glad to have it in my hand. Now let's go get a job.

"I will prepare and perhaps my time will come."
- Abraham Lincoln

Lady Liberty Whispers
Immigration Status
Job Search
June 3 Immigration Court Date

Tomorrow

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

World Cup 2010: Into Africa - Two Teams, One Cup

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Internet Week: Going To Three Events So Far

World Cup party
Saturday, June 12, 2010 from 1:00 PM - 6:00 PM (ET)
The Parlour Bar
250 West 86th Street (at Broadway)
Downstairs
New York, NY 10024

Pages

Thursday, June 17, 2010

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