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A New Kind of Venture Capitalist Makes Small Bets on Young Firms - NYTimes.com →
I think this is a very interesting article… and a very interesting firm. Something to think about. The model of small VC investment seems to be one that is catching on and is beneficial to VC’s AND Startups.
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Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians. He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush’s misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform. Mr. McCain could have seized the high ground on energy and the environment. Earlier in his career, he offered the first plausible bill to control America’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Now his positions are a caricature of that record: think Ms. Palin leading chants of “drill, baby, drill.” Mr. Obama has endorsed some offshore drilling, but as part of a comprehensive strategy including big investments in new, clean technologies.
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Prototype - If No One Sees It, Is It an Invention? - NYTimes.com →
Out of fear of being “too political” as one reader put it to me yesterday, I wanted to share this article from todays New York Times. It is about innovation and invention and an interesting chap (formerly) from MIT and is now at Microsoft.
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Sushi Azabu is a hidden restaurant, in the manner of Freemans and La Esquina. These hideaways are always catnip for ever-competitive New Yorkers, who relish inside tips and inside tracks that friends and colleagues don’t have. It’s unmarked, of course. To find it you enter an unremarkable-looking multi-ethnic restaurant named the Greenwich Grill, tell the host just inside that you’re sushi-bound, and then wait for a server communicating with unseen co-conspirators via a headset to escort you to a staircase off the Greenwich Grill’s dining room. Down the steps you go to a dark subterranean lair with a blond wood sushi bar, three enormous circular booths, a pebbled floor that makes you feel unsteady as you walk across it and a ceiling of tightly clustered, rounded pipes of bamboo.
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Calling Tina Fey. Here’s Palin defending herself on the contention that she got confused about Africa: “My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.” And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.
Maureen Dowd. Op-Ed Columnist - Boxers, Briefs or Silks? - NYTimes.com
First. I can’t stand that this woman is STILL in the news.
Second. There should be a rule. No talking about the 2012 presidential race for at least another two years! We just went through a 2+ year election cycle… give us a break!
Third. Did you just read that quote? Come on! Give me a break!
That is my ROTD (Rant of the Day)
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…somebody ought to call Steve Jobs, who doesn’t need to be bribed to do innovation, and ask him if he’d like to do national service and run a car company for a year. I’d bet it wouldn’t take him much longer than that to come up with the G.M. iCar.
Thomas Friendman. Op-Ed Columnist - How to Fix a Flat - NYTimes.com
Too good ta pass posting!
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…our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle. It will be remembered as pouring billions of dollars into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet. What business model am I talking about? It is Shai Agassi’s electric car network company, called Better Place. Just last week, the company, based in Palo Alto, Calif., announced a partnership with the state of Hawaii to road test its business plan there after already inking similar deals with Israel, Australia, the San Francisco Bay area and, yes, Denmark.
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So whether its cars, Kabul or banks, we have to stop wishing for the worlds we want and start dealing with the things themselves. If Obama does, his first year will be excruciatingly painful, but he could have three years after that to be creative. If he doesn’t, I fear that cars, Kabul and banks will dog his whole presidency.
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Year in Ideas 2008 - NYTimes →
I thought this piece was very VERY interesting. While I usually do not care for ‘year in review’ articles, this piece really makes you think about what was going in in the world this past year. (also is layed out really well)
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Starbucks may be forced to reduce the number of its New York locations to 12,000. This doomsday scenario, should it come to pass, would mean that the average New Yorker would have to walk 2.4 blocks in order to purchase a $5 cup of coffee. Treasury Secretary Paulson and whatsisname, the Bernanke guy, are reportedly at work on the problem and may request a $200 billion “loan” to Starbucks.
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French Teenagers Charged in Attack on Jewish Girl - NYTimes.com →
This is very unpleasent to hear about but it does not seem like it gets attention in “the press”.
This might seem funny because this article is in the NY Times via the AP, but its not being talked about, at least the news that I LISTEN to…
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KENKEN Puzzles - NYTimes.com →
I tried an easy 4x4 puzzle and it was tricky!
Think sudo + arithmatic
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The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?
It’s a reasonable question. Twitter unleashes the diarist in its 14 million users, who visited its site 99 million times last month to read posts tapped out with cellphones and computers. Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane.
But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it.
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