Friday, October 15, 2010

Eduardo Saverin: Roommate Does Not Mean Best Friend

Image representing Mark Zuckerberg as depicted...Image via CrunchBase
Mashable: The Other Facebook Co-founder Speaks Out: Instead of moving out with Zuckerberg to Palo Alto to grow the company though, he decided to work as a finance intern and the two began to have major conflicts over the direction of Facebook. Eventually the company was restructured, leaving Saverin out in the cold. His co-founder title was stripped and his share of Facebook reportedly dropped from 30% to less than 5%, for which he sued Facebook in 2009..... making his net worth somewhere in the range of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.... Even his Facebook page is bare; it only has two posts. All it says is that he’s a “technology entrepreneur and investor.”
I don't believe companies have co-founders. It is rare for a company to have a co-founder. The title co-founder denotes equal status, and that almost never happens. Paul Allen was not a Microsoft co-founder. Bill Gates was the founder, the indispensable person, the person who saw where the company might be in 20 years. Bob Miner was not an Oracle co-founder. Larry Ellison was the founder. Bob Miner never was able to make peace with the fact that at some point his net worth surpassed a million dollars. That was not a co-founder.

The big bang of Oracle happened with Larry Ellison and Bob Miner happened to be nearby. Paul Allen happened to be nearby. The big bang of Facebook happened with Mark Zuckerberg. Saverin was not a best friend, not even a friend. Saverin was roommate. He happened to be in geographical proximity. He is the accidental billionaire. The guy did not get the idea. And by that I don't mean to suggest the idea of Facebook did not originate with him. What I mean to suggest is the guy did not "get" it. He never got it, until he realized Facebook was getting really big, and so he sued. His billion should go straight to charity.

The two idiot twins should not have received any money. The justice system is flawed that they ended up with any money.

To some extent Paul Allen was there, he was number two. Bob Miner was with Oracle for years. He did work. These Facebook drama clowns did nothing. The twins were rowing the boat. Saverin had all the wrong ideas about where Facebook needed to go. The guy, if anything, was not even a non founder, he was an anti-founder. If o-n-e of his ideas had been incorporated, Facebook was gone down the tube.

I want the money back.

David Kirkpatrick: "Zuck Is Not An Asshole"
To Make Sense Of The Facebook Movie
I Gave In: Facebook: The Movie
The Social Network: Before Seeing The Movie



CNBC: Facebook Co-Founder Speaks Publicly: What I Learned From Watching “The Social Network”

Enhanced by Zemanta

An Online Social Media Instructor


I am one of the instructors. I think I might be the very first one, definitely one of the early ones. It feels good to be on the ground level. This is a social media startup. The classes will be online. That is not acting cheap. That is not going for the second choice. It actually makes no sense to conduct social media classes in the traditional bricks and mortar setting. You want the instructor online. You want the students online.

I am one of the top 100 people in New York City on Twitter. (@paramendra) I am really into social media. If you are a people person fascinated by technology, social media comes naturally to you, as it does to me. Social media is as much about people as technology. If you have poor people skills that is not to say you are not going to be good at social media, but that is to say you are going to have to work on your people
columbiaImage by paramendra via Flickr skills just as hard as you might work on the
technology part. Just setting up a Twitter or a Facebook account is not going to do it.

I have seen people and organizations set up blogs, and all they do is post what used to be press releases. That is not my idea of blogging. There is a great way to tweet and blog, and there is a so so way to tweet and blog, and there are some lousy ways. There are so so Facebook pages, and there are Facebook pages that grip you.

You don't need a million page hits to your blog. You don't need 10,000 followers on Twitter before you can be a social media success. Social media for small businesses is as much about customer service as customer acquisition. Social media is about making intimate conversations with customers possible. If you really, truly care about your customers, intimate conversations are not chores. If they feel like chores, you need to step up on the customer service pedal. Social media does not solve that. You can have a social media presence and still have a lousy customer service. Stale Twitter and Facebook accounts, and stale blogs are not my idea of getting social media.

I responded to a Craig's List ad by Duane Wells, the founder, and that is how I got started with the Social Media Learning Institute. I have every reason to believe he is pretty ambitious with it. And I like that. I wanted to be talking to an entrepreneur at heart before I signed up. We are still talking, we are still chalking out the details. And the guy is in Pittsburgh. We use social media to communicate. We are eating our own dog food.

(Posted at The Social Media Learning Institute posterous)

Enhanced by Zemanta

Google Car, Google Monorail





Offshoring The Wind Harvesting: Google Wind
Smart Cars Should Talk To Each Other
Robert Scoble's Not Google Car
Self Driving Google Car

This company is going offline, it looks like.

A few problems: for this to be feasible for long distance travel of even a few miles you are going to have to make room for the fact that some people might have mood swings and just stop pedaling half way there, causing traffic jams. Having several tracks might be one way to do it. So when one track jams, you switch traffic to another track. Or having central control so that a stuck "car" is centrally moved with electricity even if the person inside has stopped pedaling.

Got to make room for the human element. The human finds ways to throw a wrench into the cog.

Otherwise the monorail looks like a fantastic idea. Fun, environmentally friendly.

Wait. What about the air inside? How do you maintain the temperature and still make room for the fact that the person inside might want to breathe? You don't want someone to use up all the oxygen inside, and then what?

Looks like there are little holes for air. So it can't be too cold outside, right? Or too hot.

I am mighty impressed with the speed of this thing. The zero carbon promise, and the speed: those might be the two big attractions. And the individualistic bend to having your own little cubicle. I am very interested in the technology behind this.

"The most efficient vehicle on earth," wow. This is like bicycle on steroids. At 70 kilometers per hour, this is practically a car. And, wow, the view you will get to see along the way. It is like there is nothing between you and the landscape. You are floating through the landscape. I can see this being a big hit in all the tourist spots of the world. This could be a great way to watch wild life in Africa, or to gawk at the snow and ice high up in the Himalayas. There though, you might need to carry oxygen tanks.

This feels like ought to be that layer that needs to be added atop all the cities of the world. You buy your monthly metro pass, and you ride these things as much as you want. It is just like a car, minus the hassle. This might do to big city transportation what microfinance has done to poverty in Bangladesh.

50 miles per hour is a car. I could go cross country with this thing. Perhaps there is a room for a hybrid. Bring the smarts of the smart car to this thing, and make "car pooling" possible. You want 100 of these things to move in one rhythm over long distances.
Animation of a spinning bicycle pedalImage via WikipediaThe aerodynamics of this thing is mighty impressive. You spend most of your biking energy fighting the wind, not pedaling the bike, it seems like.

So two or more of these monorail cars can go faster than one? But then how do you avoid the free rider problem? What if I stop pedaling and simply go along for the ride? Again, but that is the human element. That is not a technology issue. The technology of this thing is just fine.

In a smart grid, the best idea could come from anywhere. And now from the part of the world that brought us Google Maps, we get the Google Monorail. Bravo. This thing takes the best of many forms of, perhaps all forms of transportation. This is like flying a small plane. This is like gliding through air. This is like biking on land. This is like riding a train. Air is like water, this is like water transportation. This is like skiing.

If the 21st is going to be a green century - what are the other choices? - then this monorail has a big future.

No traffic lights. Wow. That is like the town I grew up in.





PSFK: Kyle Cameron: Google Explores A Pedal-Powered Public Monorail System: Shweeb is a transportation project that has come out of Google’s Project 10^100 program, where Google solicits and supports ideas that change the world by helping as many people as possible.
I like it that Google is using its surplus money to think outside the box, the box being software. Clean tech is one of the next big things after web technology. Soon enough web tech is going to become utility, it is going to be fundamental, but it is going to recede into the background. Clean tech is a great sector to bet on. The next industrial revolution is going to be clean.

This monorail is a multi billion dollar idea. It deserves to take off like crazy.

Its next incarnation might be a version that is electric powered and weather proof and has two way radio communication. Then we could dream long distances. As long as that electricity is coming from a wind farm, it is still clean. Could you make it much faster then? Could you make the cars bigger? How about 10 people to a car? Then we could have conversation. But then Google has struggled with social.

You don't have to confiscate people's lands to build this thing, or at least not too much of it. Roads ask for land, lots and lots of land.

Enhanced by Zemanta