In Fifty Days, Payments Innovation Wi... by Aaron Greenspan - Quora. 8/17/2012 Update: Sign the Petition! Most people don't reguarly check the California Senate Committee on Banking, Finance and Insurance for the latest news about potential legislation, and so it's no surprise that most people have never heard of California Assembly Bill 2789. That's too bad, because California AB 2789, passed into law in September, 2010 and effective January 1, 2011 as the Money Transmission Act (see is a ticking time bomb, and the big red numbers are glowing "50" as of midnight tonight.
What the law accomplishes sounds mundane enough: it requires money transmitters--companies that act like banks, but aren't, such as PayPal--to get licenses. As usual, however, the devil is in the details. Previously, California corporations were only required to get money transmitter licenses for international funds transfers, and domestic transfers were unregulated. Who would sponsor such a draconian law? Top News Sites Draw Power Users. ABC News Site Has Least Engaged Users At the other end of the spectrum, ABCNews.com has the lowest level of user engagement out of the top 25 news sites, with 81.8% of users only visiting once per month and 4.5% visiting more than 10 times per month.
Examiner.com has a slightly lower percentage of monthly users (81.7%), but only 0.8% of its users visit more than 10 times per month. Casual Users Dominate Top 25 News Sites On average, report data shows 77% of the traffic to the top 25 news sites came from users who visited just one or two times. The percentage varied among sites, but for all was more than half of their unique visitors for the month. Most News Site Users Visit Less than 5 Mins. Overall, the report indicates the audience pattern for the top 25 news sites in terms of time spent per visit forms a spoon-shaped curve.
The percentage that spends between six and 10 minutes per month then drops to about half that (between 15% and 20%). Biggest Audiences Spend Most Time. Douwe Osinga's Blog: Leaving Google - part 2. This is the second post in a three post series about me leaving Google. If you missed it, the first part was Why not to leave Google. This post is about good reasons to leave Google anyway. The final instalment will be about what I am doing next. Google thinks Big If you pitch an idea or a project to Larry and Sergey, their feedback is quite easy to anticipate.
Thinking big sounds great, but most big ideas start small and go from there. Wave is a case in point. At triposo.com, we use Wave extensively for taking notes and developing ideas and it works great (yes, Wave isn't dead yet). Google has a Plan In building 43 in Mountain View, there used to be a white board with the Google Master Plan, a huge flow chart that started with hiring smart engineers and led ultimately to user happiness by way of steps like flying robots and GoogleOS.
Google's mode of operation used to be best characterised as strictly opportunistic. No longer. No doubt this approach suits a bigger company better. Lucy P. Marcus: Boardroom Diversity Means Better Business. I recently did a Q&A interview on the benefits of not only more women in the boardroom, but also the need for far more diverse representation in the boardroom, and indeed in business more generally.
To me the benefits of diversity in the boardroom are obvious, be it in a public or private company, or indeed in a non-profit organization, but it seems that isn't yet the case for everyone. With Liftstream's permission, I'm sharing the Q&A here. I'd welcome your comments here and via Twitter @lucymarcus. The conversation is as important as the outcome. Given we accept that we need a more diverse boardroom, how do we get the balance right between quotas and meritocracy in order to achieve that goal? I'm not so sure that it is a given in some places that we need more diversity in the boardroom.
You asked about getting the balance right between quotas and meritocracy. The problem is not the lack of evidence and facts and figures but a lack of ability or willingness to see it. The Wall Street Journal Launches a WikiLeaks Competitor, SafeHouse - Alexis Madrigal - Technology. The respected New York-based newspaper has built a site for securely uploading documents to its own internal servers Once upon a time, WikiLeaks was just a place where a would-be whistleblower could submit documents that he or she wanted the world to see. They provided a technologically secure channel and promised anonymity. The site was phenomenally successful in this early iteration and received thousands of important documents about governments around the world. As WikiLeaks grew more popular -- and began its extended series of document dumps and collaborations around files presumably received from Bradley Manning -- journalists began to wonder aloud, "Why didn't we build this thing?
" Indeed, in its purest form, WikiLeaks was simply another way of gathering leaks and tips, long a major part of any reporter's job. And several news outlets have been rumored to be building WikiLeaks-like portals. Al Jazeera's is even already up and running, having launched in January. Chris dixon's blog / Best practices for raising a VC round. Having raised a number of VC rounds personally and observed many more as an investor or friend, I’ve come to think there are a set of dominant best practices that entrepreneurs should follow. 1. Valuation: Come up with what minimum valuation you’d be happy with but never share that number with any investor. If the number is too low, you’ve set a low ceiling. If your number is too high, you scare people off.
Just like on eBay, you only get to your desired price by starting lower and getting a competitive process going. When people ask about price, simply tell them your last round post-money valuation and talk about the progress you’ve made since then. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. PR Industry Fills Vacuum Left by Shrinking Newsrooms. "You would go into these hearings and there would be more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three," Barstow said. "There were platoons of PR people. " An investigative reporter for The New York Times, Barstow has written several big [4] stories [5] about the shoving match between the media and public relations in what eventually becomes the national dialogue.
As the crowd at the hearing clearly showed, the game has been changing. "The muscles of journalism are weakening and the muscles of public relations are bulking up -- as if they were on steroids," he says. In their recent book, "The Death and Life of American Journalism [6]," Robert McChesney and John Nichols tracked the number of people working in journalism since 1980 and compared it to the numbers for public relations. How much better? The researcher who worked with McChesney and Nichols, R. Less money means fewer reporters and editors. The dangers are clear. The only wrong answer is 50/50: Calculating the cofounder equity split.
Posted: April 28th, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: Startups | 16 Comments (Note: there are great conversations about this article happening at Geekwire and Hacker News ) The question of equity brings out the most fundamental differences, perceptions, and values in an aspiring startup. In fact the equity question, more than any other, may strangle a young company before it can even get started. And that’s a damn good thing.
But before we get in to that… Who’s a founder? Facial hair alone proves insufficient to determine founder status As straightforward as this question sounds, it’s a tricky matter. There are, quite roughly, three stages in every company’s life: 1. 2. 3. The rule is this: if you’re working for a company that’s so young it can’t pay you, you’re a founder. A founder is defined by the inability of their company to pay them (or anyone else) for anything. 1) Their contribution 2) The market The first of these is fair. Somebody’s got to get things started (5%) You know. Open letter to Mike Arrington: Please stop investing in startups. Posted: May 2nd, 2011 | Author: Dan | Filed under: Startups | 20 Comments Hi Mike, I’m one of your customers.
We don’t really know each other. We’ve chatted at a few events, you’ve covered some of my antics, but I’m mostly just a guy who reads TechCrunch a lot. I am product guy, not a media critic. I can’t tell you exactly how. I don’t know. I’m not making demands or threatening to leave. Best wishes, Dan Shapiro. Techno Life Skills. [Translations: Hebrew, Japanese, Spanish] If you are in school today the technologies you will use as an adult tomorrow have not been invented yet.
Therefore, the life skill you need most is not the mastery of specific technologies, but mastery of the technium as a whole — how technology in general works. I like to think of this ability to deal with any type of new technology as techno-literacy. To be at ease with the flux of technology in modern-day life you’ll need to speak the language of the technium, and to master the the following principles: • Anything you buy, you must maintain.
. • Technologies improve so fast you should postpone getting anything until 5 minutes before you need it. . • You will be newbie forever. . • Often learning a new tool requires unlearning the old one. . • Take sabbaticals. . • How easy to switch? • Quality is not always related to price. . • For every expert opinion you find online seek an equal but opposite expert opinion somewhere else. . • What do you give up?