The Joy of Quiet. Writing -> Papers -> Rant.04. 10 Start-Ups To Watch: COMMON Pitch Finalists. COMMON Pitch, is a new initiative for social good that has put out a call for new community projects, but with a twist. On August 19, in Boulder, Colorado the top ten winning applicants will get their time on stage to present their ideas to a live and virtual crowd of peers, industry leaders, and venture capitalists. Votes will determine winners, who have the chance to fund their ideas to make them a reality. Check out the top ten finalists below! 1. The Bell Light – Marius Andresen, Kristian Bye CommonPitch BELL from Kristian Bye on Vimeo. 2. COMMON Pitch for MediaCause.org from retainer media on Vimeo. 3. 4.
SunSaluter: $10,000 Winner of the EcoLiving 2011 Student Leadership Award from Scotiabank’s EcoLiving on Vimeo. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. The BetaShower from Valli Lakshmanan on Vimeo. 10. PSFK Will be featuring coverage of the event in Boulder as well as interviews with the minds behind the project. COMMON Pitch. Social Entrepreneurs Must Achieve Not Survive (September 15, 2011) | Opinion Blog. The sector needs to shift the definition of success from organizations that survive to organizations that actually achieve their missions. Every week, I read about another social entrepreneur contemplating closing down business due to the recession.
Imagine a world where that could be good news. In fact, imagine a world where on the same day a social entrepreneur launched their organization, they closed it down. Farfetched? Maybe not. We’ve all been to a fund-raising dinner where the executive director wraps up his speech by boldly saying, “Our mission is to put ourselves out of business!” In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Successfully People, Stephen Covey says to “plan with the end in mind.” When social entrepreneurs came on the scene in a big way in the ’90s, they were reformers not institutions. Businesses are built to last; social entrepreneur efforts should not be—they should shed light on necessary reforms, offer solutions, and change systems. 1. 1. 1. They saw results quickly. Rod Garrett, the Urban Planner Behind ‘Burning Man’ The short list includes Georges-Eugène Haussmann, who bulldozed much of Paris in the mid-19th century, and Robert Moses, who remade New York during the 20th. And Rod Garrett, who, beginning in 1997, laid out Burning Man, the annual festival of self-expression in the parched northern Nevada desert.
Mr. Garrett died last week at 74, just short of the 25th anniversary of Burning Man’s founding. But his handiwork will be on display to thousands as the yearly festival begins Monday. Mr. Garrett arranged the grounds, called Black Rock City, in a series of concentric semicircles. At their center is the Man, a giant effigy meant to be immolated on the last night of the weeklong gathering.
Until then the Man is to Black Rock City what the Empire State Building is to Manhattan: a locating device and a reassuring beacon. One of the many ways in which Black Rock City epitomizes thoughtful city planning, Mr. In that approach Mr. Certainly Mr. Mr. But there had never been any plans. Mr. Burning Man, Mr. Growing Pains for Burning Man Festival. One piece of paper and new societal babies - philippa young.
The 99% Occupy St Paul's tent community has been in place for a while now. Most people walk past it without even batting an eyelid. I walked past without batting an eyelid. At least I did, until I spotted a white A4 piece of paper. This piece of paper hangs on the doorway to one of the entrances. Handwritten on this paper it reads "No drink or drugs beyond this point". I saw this piece of paper and my heart sank. Not because I really fancied getting wasted and shooting up in a tent, but because that little piece of paper meant that the 99%, in all their idealism and best wishes for the future, were doing it all wrong.
Here's why: This particular tented society started informally, with few rules. Someone probably made this decision and I doubt that everyone agreed. Ok, so my mind took this piece of paper and ran with it. I'm no major innovator, nor great thinker, but my best efforts to exist in this world of polemic is to sit astride these boxes, and thus be in neither one nor the other. The Foundations Of A Startup Community. Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur who created Onesheet, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. He’s an mentor for 500 Startups, Advise.me and several startups. You can find him on Twitter at @bmull and blogging at Starting Up. For the past few months, my wife and I have been traveling and meeting startups around the world. We’ve met entrepreneurs in Tokyo, Thailand, India, Israel, and Istanbul. In the next week we’ll be meeting with a community leader in South Africa. In addition to meeting with the teams, we have been leading Q&A sessions with larger groups.
It’s an important question, as a lot of the startups’ success in Silicon Valley can be attributed to the strong community. These are the elements I think are important to seed a startup community: Support There are a lot of places where starting a company isn’t seen as an exciting and inspiring pursuit. Collaboration Transparency When collaborating, transparency is a must. Embrace Failure Form Startup Hubs Be Patient.
Stop Coddling the Super-Rich. Tips for Shy People at Burning Man. Photo: Jon O. Hi. Are you shy? Do you have a hard time walking into a camp full of complete strangers and striking up a conversation? Does the idea of walking out of your tent in a crazy outfit strike terror into your heart? Fabulous! The dumbest mistake I made my virgin year was expecting the playa to entertain me. Burning Man is full of 50,000 people who are more-likely-than-in-normal-life to want to talk to you due to our participatory culture, but they’re still just people doing their own thing. Here are some suggestions that have worked well for me, perhaps some might work for you too.
Smile. Have some conversational starters. Wear It Anyway! Float More, Steer Less. Go to an activity you find in the What Where When guide. Meet your neighbors in the next camp over. Go to the Volunteer table near Playa Info in Center Camp, and ask if they need volunteers anywhere. The Nuclear Option. You’ve Got the Love(social) If someone told the five-year-old me — who had just immigrated from Iran to Vancouver — that one day, I would have this palm-sized tool would let me connect with the whole entire world, I would have cocked my untamed little Persian eyebrow and said, “Oh, really now?”
That someone would proceed to tell me this magic tool would, within seconds, let me voice my opinion, rally around the things I believed in, bring attention to things that mattered and learn about just about anything with a whole community of incredible people. Even at that age, I would be hard pressed to think that such a world would be possible. Alongside many, I was born in a place where your opinion is not something that you should can share with everyone—or anyone for that matter. I was born in a place where there politics, ego and inequality is the power in question.
My startup Lovesocial has seen just how powerful social can be. We wanted to create a short video that would put the power of social in perspective. Azita. Steve Jobs’s Real Genius. Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was.
This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’ ” It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created.