Why Silicon Valley trumps Boston (data) I love Boston. I lived there for five of the best years of my life, when I was working at D. E. Shaw & Co., and then when I attended Harvard Business School. If anyone asks, I always tell them, “if Boston had the same weather and career opportunities for me as Silicon Valley, I’d move there in a heartbeat.” But the sad fact is that Boston isn’t in Silicon Valley’s league as a startup hub. Professor Vivek Wadhwa, who does a lot of great research into the realities behind startups, was speaking at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, when he explained the policy and environmental reasons why Silicon Valley has done a better job of generating startups than Boston. Wadhwa did so in a recent TechCrunch post, where he points out that Silicon Valley has greater per-capita GDP, per-capita education, and a greater proportion of members of the “creative class” than Boston.
On the financing side, the dominance of Silicon Valley is well-known. The following story is anecdotal but telling. 10 O'Clock Live - Charlie Brooker iPad 2. Twitter Was Act One | Business. One brisk December day, Dorsey, 34, is leaving Third Rail, an artisanal coffee shop he frequents in New York’s West Village. As he walks, he is unusually effusive.
“I just had a meeting I’ve been wanting to have since I was 14,” he says gleefully, “with the taxi-and-limousine commissioner.” Their topic: “Technology in cabs. Making transactions faster and easier and more informational. I said, ‘Anything you guys need. His interest in New York City government goes surprisingly deep. By the time Dorsey was in high school he was writing rudimentary software programs that could be used to dispatch taxis, ambulances, or delivery couriers. Jim McKelvey, who owned the company (which archived documents onto CD-ROMs) and who today is Dorsey’s partner in Square, recalls that first meeting in 1992. McKelvey took Dorsey on as an intern and learned that this awkward teenager could swiftly master most computing tasks. Dorsey kept improving as a programmer. Dorsey had always kept a journal.
Twitter Was Act One | Business. The EDGE Questions: 13 Years of Futurism by Cultural Luminaries. Social media books: Can they stay relevant in a fast-paced industry? In the iconic movie “Swingers”, Jon Favreau’s character “Mikey” laments about his erred perception that television shows were being handed out to comedians as they passed through the airport. His comment was reflective of a time when sitcoms starring comedians were almost instant hits, and networks couldn’t wait to tap the next raw talent to create the next cash cow.
These days, publishers appear to be handing out book deals to social media brains as they pass through the airport, as it’s hard to walk into a book store without getting smacked in the face with a new one. Case in point: Do a search for “social media in books” on Amazon.com and the results will show more than 110,000 books tagged with social media. If you have time to kill, which clearly I do, dig through the pages and determine how many of these books promise to teach users how to use Twitter, market with Facebook, and do almost any other type of task with the social web. Have no fear. 7-proven-ways-to-integrate-social-media-on-your-site. How to Turn Your Email Into a Social Media Hub With Posterous.
In the world of social media, it’s easy to become overwhelmed in a sea of profiles and status updates. With so many services and so little time, wouldn’t it be nice if posting to your social media profiles was as simple as sending an email? With Posterous, it is. Posterous allows you to post to 20 or so social media platforms via email. Posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, even YouTube and Picasa is as simple as sending an email. And we’re not talking simple text-based posts either. With Posterous, you can create full-screen photo galleries, groups for sharing and collaborating or just simply pass on an article you read on the Internet all by sending an email. Add a smartphone and you’ve got a powerful way to create and share content on the road. An example of a Posterous blog page—blogging and Posterous At its core, Posterous is a blogging platform similar to Tumblr.
Getting started on Posterous is about as easy as it can get. If you can send an email, you can write a blog. Autoposting. A Visitors Guide to Silicon Valley. If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some Clean Tech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment. The “official dignitary” tour of Silicon Valley is like taking the jungle cruise at Disneyland and saying you’ve been to Africa. Because you and your entourage don’t know the difference between large innovative companies who once were startups (Google, Facebook, et al) and a real startup, you never really get to see what makes the valley tick.
I’m leaving out all the traditional stops that you can get from the guidebooks. Palo Alto – The Beating Heart 1Start your tour in Palo Alto. Jewish High Tech Community - The Dynamic History of Silicon Valley Design. Cutting Through the Hype Around Hyper Local Numbers. New research from MerchantCircle shows that local businesses are using social media sites - namely Facebook - to fuel their local online campaigns. Facebook has now surpassed Google (66%) as the most widely used marketing method amongst local merchants, and is almost tied with Google search (40%) as one of their top three most effective marketing methods, with 37% rating Facebook as one of their most effective tools. Hyper Small? A new report from Borrell Associates cast doubts on how effective some of these campaigns may actually be, their simplicity notwithstanding. That is because small businesses tend to seek out local audiences with local or hyper local campaigns.
But Borrell finds local site traffic can be deceptive, with the unique visitor-to-actual-people ratio nearly 4 to 1. Emergent Religions. One of the biggest surprises in the last century has been that new religions continue to emerge in modern societies. This was not suppose to happen. By the year 2000 everything was supposed to be rational and logical. And yet religions continue to emerge all around the world. In particular, as Asia modernizes, gets wealthy, and integrates with many Western values, it will continue to witness the emergence of wholly new religions, in varieties unknown to date.
Exhibit A might be the Eastern Lightening church in China, who believe a plain-looking women from Henan is the third coming of God. She has tens of thousands of followers willing to go to jail to follow her. Or it could be the new religion Dhammakaya, based in Thailand. An article in Foreign Policy called Close Encounters of the Buddhist Kind supplies photos and captions of the congregation: Despite outlandish ceremonies and its own television coverage of these events, Dhammakaya has remained mainly under the world’s radar. CAR goodies: A baker’s dozen of free tools to analyze, display data. By Steve Doig The San Francisco Chronicle used Exhibit to show which ZIP codes in its area had the most foreclosures.
The bigger the bubble, the bigger the number. The annual Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference that concluded in Raleigh, N.C., on Sunday was extraordinarily rich in useful free tool for all sorts of data analysis and visualization, thanks to invitations accepted by computer scientists from Google, MIT, Stanford and the like. Here are links to 13 of these free tools that I found to be particularly useful for data analysis in journalism: 1Reaction Exhibit: This link goes to a page with a collection of links from MIT’s Simile project. Exhibit is a JavaScript program that will let you take data that is in tabular form (rows and columns) and see it in a variety of formats: sortable and filterable table, map, time line, etc. Steve Doig Not enough to keep you busy? About the Author The Reynolds Center, created through generous grants from the Donald W.
(Saving...) Why Are Easy Decisions So Hard? | Wired Science One of the problems with writing a book on decision-making is that people assume I’m not terrible at making decisions. As a result, they act surprised when it takes me 10 minutes to pick a sandwich or when I confess that I still get mild panic attacks when choosing floss at the drugstore. They believe that, just because I wrote about the prefrontal cortex, I’m somehow better able to wield mine. But that’s not necessarily the case: there’s an indefatigable gap between theory and life. While it’s true that I’m no longer quite so indecisive — I don’t spend 30 minutes debating breakfast cereals in the supermarket anymore — I still suffer from the occasional bout of “paralysis-by-analysis.”
If you see a guy looking distraught while comparing the active ingredients of various toothpastes, look again. That might be me. Why do I do this? Our central premise is that people use subjective experiences of difficulty while making a decision as a cue to how much further time and effort to spend. Why Failure Drives Innovation. By Baba Shiv, Sanwa Bank, Limited, Professor of Marketing "Failure" is a dreaded concept for most business people.
But failure can actually be a huge engine of innovation for an individual or an organization. The trick lies in approaching it with the right attitude and harnessing it as a blessing, not a curse. I've coined two terms that describe how people view failure: the type 1 mindset and the type 2 mindset. The type 1 mindset is fearful of making mistakes. The type 2 mindset is fearful of losing out on opportunities. We generally start out with the type 2 adventurous spirit as children. So how do you get people and corporations to shift from 1 to 2? One approach is to engage them in rapid prototyping — the process whereby they brainstorm wild new ideas, and then quickly develop a physical model or mock-up of a solution. Because not all prototypes end up as the best or final solution, rapid prototyping also teaches that failure is actually a necessary part of the process.