Thursday, January 20, 2011

Social Media Week Is Back

Whole Foods | Austin, TXImage by That Other Paper via FlickrI was just looking at the Social Media Week site for the first time after spotting a mass email from Toby Daniels. I got lost on first try.

I remember having a lot of fun last year during Social Media Week.

Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever

Not Going Into Any Accelerator Program

Y CombinatorImage via WikipediaThere is no accelerator program anywhere that will help me tackle the last mile in microfinance, the most important mile in my line of work. I have a FinTech startup, but it does not revolve around coding, it revolves around the last mile of microfinance.

Also, I can't think of one iconic tech company that came out of some accelerator program. You could argue accelerator programs are a new phenomenon, they have not had the time to spit out iconic companies yet, but accelerator programs are more for purely web tech companies. Mine is not one.

My Third World Advantage

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...Image via CrunchBaseThere are five broad categories in tech: web tech, clean tech, bio tech, nano tech, fin tech. Each of those five categories are broad. Each has sub categories, and sub sub categories.

There is no next Google in web tech, there is no next Facebook in web tech. Google is the next Google. Facebook is the next Facebook. But the Googles and Facebooks of clean tech, bio tech and nano tech are still out there. They are still small. If you can locate them and put some money into them, you are going to end up uber rich. But it is not easy to locate them, not easy at all. Even the Google of today was not easy to locate when it was small. Yahoo could have had the Google search engine for a few tens of millions, but they passed up on the offer.