Week of May 30 2011
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Patri Friedman makes waves with 'seasteading' plan
Milton Friedman's grandson Patri has a vision that might have made the economist proud: to build a floating libertarian nation 12 miles off the coast of California. Billed as " Burning Man meets Silicon Valley meets the water," the planned nation flotilla would be constructed on a variety of barges and water platforms within sight of San Francisco. It would include everything from homes, schools and hospitals to bikes for transportation and aqua farms for food.Groupon has filed its S-1 and hopes to raise $750M in its initial public offering. Given they’re currently losing a staggering $117M per quarter, despite revenues of $644M, they’ll be burning through that cash almost as soon as it hits their account. At the moment, it’s costing them $1.43 to make $1, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any cheaper. They’re already projected to make close to three billion dollars in revenues this year.
Short logic (Groupon IPO: Pass on this deal)
Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard
The first question any thoughtful person might ask when reading the title of this essay is, "Hard for whom?" A reasonable question. After all, Chinese people seem to learn it just fine.
The Future Has Thicker Tails than the Past: Model Error as Branching Counterfactuals by Nassim Taleb :: SSRN
Suggested Citation Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, The Future Has Thicker Tails than the Past: Model Error as Branching Counterfactuals (May 23, 2011). NYU Poly Research Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1850428 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1850428Re-Engineering Journalism « Knight Garage
In a special event on May 26, the 2011 Knight Fellows gave the first public glimpses of their work in pursuit of journalistic innovations. The 2011 Knight Journalism Fellows concluded a year of exploring, testing and creating innovative approaches to journalism. In short talks, the Fellows will give you a taste of the amazing work they've done and a glimpse of the projects they've launched that will continue beyond this year.
Tom, don't you think it would be interesting to present Pearltrees at such a conference? by Jun 5
6 ways journalists can use Quora as tool to report, share ideas | Poynter.
Quora, the fast-growing question and answer site, has become increasingly popular among journalists. In a phone interview, Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo attributed the site’s recent growth to an increase in media coverage and traffic from Twitter, among other factors. Because the site auto-follows users’ Facebook and Twitter accounts, it makes sense that its user-base would spread quickly once a few influencers begin using it. “Originally when we built the site, we didn’t have new users automatically follow all their Twitter contacts,” said D’Angelo, former CTO of Facebook. “But since, in the vast majority of cases, people want to see what their friends are doing on the site, we changed it to automatically follow the people who we can detect that they care about via Twitter/Facebook.
Fast and Easy is the beginning of the end of social media 1.0 - Syndicating Brian Solis
Sometimes the path of least resistance unwinds into a far more complicated and arduous journey than we anticipated. In times of change, taking the path less traveled, although initially daunting, proves easier and far more rewarding in the long run. Such is true for social media.
In military circles, a ‘scorched earth policy’ – according to Wikipedia – is “A strategy which involves destroying anything that might be useful to the enemy while advancing through, or withdrawing from, a given theater of operations.” Perhaps it’s symbolic, but that’s exactly the approach I took to my digital presence this past Memorial Day weekend. I started a fresh new site on the future of media over on Tumblr .
I Adopted a Scorched Earth Policy, Closed 2 Blogs & Jumped to Tumblr
Mike Butcher is the European Editor for TechCrunch. A long time journalist, Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. Mike is also involved in a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club environment called TechHub (@TechHub), which... → Learn More
Greylock Partners launches new $160 million tech fund for Europe and Israel
Why some investors vow to NEVER buy stocks again -- The Buzz - Jun. 1, 2011
Even though the S&P 500 ( SPX ) has more than doubled from its March 2009 bear market lows, many investors still don't trust the rally according to a survey from Prudential Financial. Prudential ( PRU , Fortune 500 ), which polled more than 1,000 investors between the ages of 35 and 70 online earlier this year, found that 58% of those surveyed have lost faith in the stock market. Even more alarming, 44% said they plan to never invest in stocks. Ever. Never is a long time. I realize that many investors are justifiably still smarting from the wounds they suffered after the 2000-2002 bear market and the worst of the Great Recession in 2008.
But with the right tools — and the ability to control the urge to play one last game of Angry Birds — the iPad can also be a hefty workhorse. Inexpensive apps and third-party peripherals make the iPad an excellent device for photographers, artists, writers and bloggers to create original content. (It can still help those forced to do more mundane tasks.) Photography Although the iPad 2 comes with a front- and rear-facing camera, the quality of the images it can capture is so low that it sometimes looks as if they were taken with a disposable camera.