Ryan Ozimek on Joomla!Day USA and Open Source

Joomla! is an open source Content Management System that has quickly taken a leading position. BGN uses this CMS for its own web site, the BGNentrepreneur.

A new podcast is available of a Peter Russell Joomla! Juice! interview of Ryan Ozimek. Ryan, founder and CEO of DC-based technology firm PICnet, is an evangelist for Joomla! and other open source technologies in non-profit organizations and government.

In this interview, Ryan talks about the open source movement in the United States, constraints to growth, Joomla security, and the first Joomla!Day USA now being organized with community wiki input. This conference (JoomlaDay USA/West) will be held on May 12-13 2007 at the GooglePlex, subsequent midwest and east Joomla Days are planned.

This 25 minute podcast is available in m4a and mp3 formats, and is also available via iTunes subscription.

Technorati Tags: JoomlaDay, Joomla, open source

Amsterdam is sold

The Second Life sim, Amsterdam, recently sold on eBay for $50,000.
According to avatar Stoker in a Wired interview, the sim was bought by an investment group, which is in the Netherlands, and they see the potential for commercialization and marketing.

Technorati Tags: SL, entrepreneur

Catching up with Ogoglio

The emerging virtual world, Ogoglio, is currently "Chalking out foundations":

Cities are made of people. The foundations of Ogoglio City are creative, forward thinking groups empowered by tools for thought and connected by rich communication. This phase consists of advocating Ogoglio City to existing metaverse users and putting together a space hosting platform to serve as a jumping off point for Ogoglio City technical development.

You can follow Ogoglio's evolution, complete with short video clips, on Trevor F. Smiths's blog.

Technorati Tags: virtual worlds, entrepreneur

Virtual World Conference Perspectives

According to Gavin O'Malley, at MediaPost

A recurring theme at this week's Virtual Worlds Conference in Manhattan was the idea of targeted experimentation--or the notion that marketers can onlyprofit from virtual world investments after they have established well-defined goals.

From Daniel Terdiman's much quoted report

At least $5 million in deals were reportedly struck at the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference here this week.
According to Second Life Herald writer Prokofy Neva, a "very knowledgeable and highly-placed (conference) source," when pushed, said there had been $5 million in deals "initiated and signed" during the two days of panels and networking.

Dianne Lynch, of All Things Park (Ithaca College) says It’s dot.com déjà vu, from start to finish. [Thanks for the correction, Kim]

Finally, Charles Henry writes at Covenant Zone that

Those living in fear of the "inevitable" wave of global destruction "caused" by we parasitic human beings living only to suck the limited life out of Mother Earth, may want to read this Technology article [Svensson's Gold Rush is on for Virtual Worlds] on a wholly unexpected and unpredicted source of bounty and creative fulfillment, unimagined 10 years ago.
Maybe these parallel worlds can serve as reminder that when we're off the internet, walking physical footsteps across a physical world, an unseen one exists around us as well.

Technorati Tags: virtual worlds, entrepreneur, innovation

Virtual Worlds Conference UPDATED

More bloggers reporting from the 2007 Virtual Worlds Conference.

Isabel Wolcott Hilborn has several new posts on today's speakers.
Ikatotech
Think2C has a piece on the talk by IBM's Colin Parris.
Check out the SL News Network for a piece on the evolution of virtual world consumers.

Technorati Tags: Virtual Worlds, entrepreneur

ETech 2007 Blog Coverage

ETech 2007 is underway in San Diego.

Some of the blog reports from that conference include:
Patrick O'Connor's Synchronous blog contains running summaries and commentary.
Wired posts on several presentations.
A report on Danah Boyd's "Incantations for Muggles" at O'Reilly Radar.
Event photos from Laughing Squid.
Phil Windley's report on "Applied Web Heresies" at Technometria.
David Ascher's blog.
Doug Kaye's Blogarithms on web services.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, tech magic

Virtual Worlds Conference UPDATE

More bloggers report from the 2007 Virtual World Conference underway in NYC today

Justin Gardner, of Donklephant, who said:

I was sitting next to some guy who Senior Economist for the Congressional Joint Economic Committee. So if the government sees fit to send an economist along, you know there’s some money in it.

Nexeus Fatale
Urizenus Sklar of Second Life Herald
Fabio Grafton of IgniteBlog summarizes a longer article from Marketing Sherpa
Since this conference sold out, a second one is already scheduled for October 10 in San Jose.

Technorati Tags: virtual worlds conference, entrepreneur, event blogging

ManyEyes Swivel

Robert Kosara of EagerEyes has an excellent article comparing ManyEyes and Swivel:

... will users play and interact with data the way they do with other media? Two [social] websites were launched recently to find out: Swivel and Many Eyes.
In terms of capabilities, Many Eyes wins hands down. Of course, Swivel's focus is a slightly different one ... And besides, there are no data analysis capabilities other than the charts and the simple correlation calculation on Swivel yet.
The only big thing Many Eyes is missing is a way to combine data from different data sets into one visualization. This is a big one, though, that they will need to address soon.

Kosara is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His research is in information visualization, specifically interactive visualization of categorical data and understanding the perceptual and representational aspects of visualization.

Technorati Tags: data visualization, innovation, EagerEyes

Virtual Worlds Conference 2007

Blogs reporting out of the 2007 Virtual World Conference in NYC include

Greg Verdino: But today, [keynote speaker] Rosedale recognizes that, "the thing that is so powerful about virtual worlds isn't that they are 3D; it's that there are other people there [with you.] On the internet there aren't."

Mark Wallace at 3pointD
Adam Broitman at A Media Circus
Tony Pearson of IBM Developerworks
Isabel Walcott Hilborn at her blog

UPDATE: Apologies for losing the comment from the IPTV Evangelist, who said:

There are two interviews with Sibley Verbeck and Jerry Paffendorf from The Electric Sheep Company taped at last weeks conference where they spoke about such topics as Machinima, Digital Rights, Life Blogging, The Electric Sheep company and of course Second Life.

Technorati Tags: innovation, virtual worlds

Boston ITEC

Boston University School of Management announces the creation of the Institute for Technology Entrepreneurship and Commercialization (ITEC).

ITEC is dedicated to the new entrepreneur interested in the technologies, products, and services that meet pressing global needs in healthcare, life sciences, alternative energy, and other sectors.

ITEC BU partners include, the Medical School, the School of Public Health, the Law School, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Engineering (including biomedical engineering, photonics, and physics)

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, BU

SL Beginner's Guide

A Beginner's Guide to Second Life has just been released by Arche Books. It is available in paperback or as a pdf file to download, and sample chapters are available in SL as a ThincBook.

The economy within Second Life is dependent on the Linden Dollar (L$) which allows residents to buy and sell the items they have created. The Linden currency can also be traded for US dollars (USD$) via the LindeX service (run by Linden Lab with “controls” restricting volume trades). The economy is closely monitored by LL to insure stabilization of the Linden Dollar. The sinks (things that cause L$ to be disposed of) and sources (things that introduce L$ into the economy) are managed and publicly reported. LL actively watches the indicators and intervenes to prevent swinging inflation or deflation in the value of the L$. Snippet from A Beginners Guide to Second Life.

Technorati Tags: SL economy, SL beginners, entrepreneur

InfoWorld Online

InfoWorld, founded more than 25 years ago, has announced that it will no longer publish a print edition.
InfoWorld is a unit of International Data Group, publishers of Channel World, CIO, Computerworld, CSO, DigitalWorld, GamePro, Macworld, Network World and PC World.

Technorati Tags: innovation, online publishing

Roanoke Entrepreneurship Fair

When was the last time you went to an entrepreneurship fair?

The City of Roanoke and the Virginia Department of Business Assistance are hosting a free Entrepreneurship Expo sponsored by Wachovia and LeClair Ryan all day on Wednesday, April 4 at the Roanoke Civic Center Exhibit Hall. Registration by March 29.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, Roanoke, VA DBA

Crutchfield in Hall of Fame

The Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) just announced eleven new members of the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame, including retailer William Crutchfield, founder of Crutchfield, Inc.

New CE Hall of Fame members:

Founders/Inventors: Paul Allen, Amar Bose, Steve Sasson, Karlheinz Brandenberg, Dieter Seitzer and Heinz Gerhauser
Sales/Marketing: John McDonald
Retailers: Richard M. "Dick" Schulz, and William Crutchfield
Journalist: Art Weinberg
Misc: J. Edward Day

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, hall of fame

YouTube on Review

YouTube is the most recent company reviewed on Startup Review, a series of case studies of successful web businesses. Recent reviews covered HotJobs, MyBlogLog, and Jumpcut.

From their collection of case studies, they have outlined the Top Seven Indicators of Consumer Internet Success, which include:

• Strong ability to leverage natural search as the primary means of user acquisition
• Service that empowers people to make a living

Technorati Tags: startup, entrepreneur, innovation

Economic Development in Hampton Roads

The Hampton Roads Partnership recently received a $915,000 federal grant for promoting three high-tech clusters: computer modeling and simulation, sensors and bio-science.

The two-year effort is aimed at improving the links between technology businesses and the region's universities and research labs to develop, commercialize and use the technologies to spark economic growth. Snippet from the Pilot Online

Technorati Tags: Hampton Roads, entrepreneur, economic development

2006 Angel Investment

Reported in the 2006 Angel Market Analysis, from the University of NH Center for Venture Research: the angel investor market experienced steady growth in 2006, with total investments of $25.6 billion, an increase of 10.8 percent over 2005.
Angel investments continue to be a significant contributor to job growth with the creation of 201,400 new jobs in the United States in 2006, or four jobs per angel investment, according to Jeffrey Sohl, director of the UNH Center for Venture Research at the Whittemore School of Business and Economics.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, angel investor, UNH

Forrester on Web 2.0 Purchases

According to c|net news, a recent Forrester Research report was a classic good news-bad news conclusion for Web 2.0 start-ups: corporate buyers want Web 2.0 technologies but they'd rather buy from bigger vendors. This conclusion was based on interviews with 119 CIOs from companies with more than 500 employees.

This might be a good time to reach back to the O'Reilly Radar Report, Web 2.0: Principles and Best Practices.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, entrepreneur

Traffic Impact of Reddit

Tom Evslin has an interesting piece on the impact of a Reddit conversation about his negotiation article on the traffic to Fractals of Change.

Sample Reddit comment, from ttriche:

This piece could also serve as a howto on writing didactic articles. It is concise, the examples are interwoven with the text, and the message is unmistakable. The points may be subtle but their delivery is not.

Technorati Tags: bookmarking, entrepreneur, negotiation

Paul Graham's Wisdom on Intelligence

Snippets from another wonderful essay by Paul Graham: Is It Worth Being Wise?

But I think it's important to understand the relationship between intelligence and wisdom, and particularly what seems to be the growing gap between them.

The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways.

Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom is how different their recipes are. Wisdom seems to come largely from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from cultivating them.

The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence.

But the really striking change, as intelligence and wisdom drift apart, is that we may have to decide which we prefer. We may not be able to optimize for both simultaneously.

This essay has elicited a great conversation on Reddit.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, essay

2006 Advertising Spending

March 19, 2007- Advertising spending for the full year 2006 rose 4.6% over the same period last year due to gains across major media, according to preliminary figures released today by Nielsen Monitor-Plus, the advertising intelligence service of The Nielsen Company.

Advertising spending increased in most reported media, led by Internet (35%), the top 100 Spot TV markets (9.1%), Spanish-Language TV (8.1%) and Outdoor (8.1%). Growth in a number of media remained flat or slightly down over last including B2B magazines, Coupons, smaller Spot TV markets, Network Radio, and Local Newspaper. “Total U.S. ad spending continues to grow, with the Internet, Spanish-Language and Outdoor [especially digital billboards] leading the way,” said Brian Lane, Senior Vice President of Client Strategy & Product Development Management for Nielsen Monitor-Plus. Snippet from Nielsen Media Research

The report details spending for the top ten among advertisers, product categories, brands, product placements and political advertising.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, advertising

INSEAD in SL

Leading international business school, INSEAD, announced the opening of its Second Life campus on March 20.

INSEAD’s Second Life campus was designed to offer an innovative learning environment in which its participants from around the world can collaborate in real-time and learn from the diverse experiences of faculty and peers. The school plans to integrate Second Life into a range of programmes, including MBA, EMBA and Executive Education.

Thanks to University of Richmond Robins School Associate Dean Dr. Richard Coughlan for this information.

Technorati Tags: SL, education, MBA

Eric Schmidt at iinnovate

An interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, is the latest in a series of interview podcasts with successful entrepreneurs and innovators at the iinnovate blog. This combination blog/podcast series was created by Stanford University graduate students Julio and Matt in the summer of 2006.

Second Life founder, Phillip Rosedale of Linden Lab, was interviewed last November. One of the earliest interviews was with David Kelley, the founder of Ideo, which created Apple's first mouse.

Technorati Tags: innovation, entrepreneur

CIT Venture Fund

Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology (CIT) announced a new startup venture fund.

A new Virginia venture capital fund could help spark startup companies in Hampton Roads that specialize in health care products, officials said Thursday. The initial $500,000 fund, launched by the Center for Innovative Technology in Herndon, will focus on jump-starting "life- science" companies that collaborate on technology transfer with universities and federal labs in Virginia.

The investment fund was made possible by a $250,000 grant from Johnson & Johnson. The Center for Innovative Technology, a nonprofit that receives much of its financing from the state, matched that amount. Snippet from the Richmond TimesDispatch.

Technorati Tags: Innovation, Virginia, startup, venture fund

SL New and Old

Most of the discussion about Second Life is focused on what is new about virtual worlds. The collage below illustrates some of the most recent re-creations of historic clothing, furniture and landmarks.

For contrast, two of the images are uniquely SL.

Technorati Tags: innovation, SL, aHead, Betty Doyle

On Assignment Zero

This is a joint project with Wired News. They’ve provided an editor, Lauren Sandler, and a writer, Jeff Howe. They will be joined by Steve Fox and Amanda Michel and myself [David Cohn] from NewAssignment.Net in this venture. But the team is larger. Much larger. It includes everyone and anyone who wants to join." NewAssignment.Net.

Today [March 14] Wired and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.Net launched an ambitious research project that will use crowdsourcing to research, report and write about, well, crowdsourcing, in all its manifestations. It's called Assignment Zero, so named because we consider it ground zero for a new, hyrbid model of open source-slash-citizen media that we're calling Pro-Am journalism. The idea is to hook a team of professional editors and writers up with what we hope will be a vast team of talented, enthusiastic amateurs. Our goal is to bring the best of both worlds—the professional standards and respect for factual accuracy of the MSM on one hand; the infinite reservoir of knowledge and reporting power of the crowd—to bear. Snippet from Crowdsourcing

The Second Life Journalism assignment.

Technorati Tags: innovation, crowdsourcing, Pro-Am journalism

BGN Entrepreneur's Minute, March 19, 2007

(about 2 minutes)

Talking with Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit.com, after his presentation at the McIntire School of Commerce. He and co-founder Steve Huffman talked about the Life of a Startup to a full house of prospective entrepreneurs.

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute is made possible by the generous support of the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, startup

Reddit in Town

Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, co-founders of Reddit.com, will be speaking on The Startup Life tonight at UVA McIntire.

A tiny Somerville-based online news aggregator that started a year ago with $12,000 in seed funding is gaining visitors and being favorably compared to one of the web's top 200 sites. [...] California-based Digg, ranked No. 166 on the web out of the 18 million known sites, operates with 15 employees and $2.8 million in venture capital. By comparison, Reddit is operated by three full-time workers and a part-time graduate student in a three-bedroom apartment in Davis Square.

Snippet from Mass High Tech

Here's a sample of what you can find on Reddit.com.

UPDATE: TalkCrunch interview with Huffman and Ohanian.


Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, startup

Multi Touch Tech

A extraordinary video of the new multi touch screen technology is available at the new EduGeek Journal.

Jeff Han was a New York University computer scientist minding his own business when inspiration suddenly struck. Looking at a water glass one day, he was intrigued by the way his fingers interacted with the glass and he hit on an idea to take touchscreen technology to a new level. Snippet from Wired.com.

For background: a short video of Han's original presentation at TED 2006, a recent FastCompany article, and a current Wired article. Han's new company is Perceptive Pixel.

Technorati Tags: innovation, Han

Digital Ethnography in Kansas

Dr. Michael Wesch, Kansas State University, is creating a Digital Ethnography group "to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction." He describes his extraordinary short video, The Machine is Us/ing Us, as a video response to Web 2.0.

Dr. Wesch's video has been viewed almost 2 million times, and has elicited more than 4,000 comments since being posted on YouTube January 31.

Technorati Tags: innovation, digital ethnography

Orwell on writing

It [the English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Snippet from "Politics and the English Language".

Thank you to Guy Kawasaki, who recently posted this essay by George Orwell.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, communication

Startup Mistakes

Thanks to Benjamin Yoskovitz, of Startup Spark for the 5 most common mistakes made by startup entrepreneurs. And to Paul Graham for the more detailed and oft-cited 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups. Jason Caplain of Southeast VC has a different list of 5 Startup Mistakes. If you want even more, this is the second of Jon Dahl's series on 100 Startup Mistakes

But: Jeff Texler has advice on How to Avoid Startup Mistakes. And Dharmesh Shah, of OnStartups, asks Are you Making Enough Mistakes?.


Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, startup, mistakes

Rating VCs

The crowd, in its wisdom, can now turn its attention to rating VCs.

The Funded.com is "working to be the leading source of funding information for entrepreneurs". The site seeks to balance the playing field by giving entrepreneurs information about how particular VC's treat entrepreneurs.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, asks if this is Reckoning Day For Venture Capitalists?. He says:

The Funded has a good database of venture firms (6,559 contacts from 3,529 funds), and invite members to rate and review funds after dealing with them first hand.
There isn’t much feedback yet, as the site is still under the radar with just 39 members.

Technorati Tags: VC, entrepreneur, startup, rating

Early Stage Investing

Josh Kopelman's Red Eye VC has a different perspective on seed funding, and failing fast.

I believe that the goal of seed funding is to validate (or disprove) an entrepreneur’s hypothesis, and thereby “de-risk” the opportunity.

He builds on the "all business plans are wrong" theme to present a view of how changing Funding Models are impacting early stage VC and startup strategies as Web 2.0 enables lower cost entry and accelerated failure, which he argues is advantageous for both entrepreneurs and
investors.
John Furrier of PodTech echoes Kopelman.

Technorati Tags: early stage investing, entrepreneur

Tech Review's Emerging Technology

Technology Review's 10 emerging technologies for 2007 include
Neuron Control, Augmented Reality, and Artificially Structured Metamaterials.

Technorati Tags: emerging technology, innovation

Business School Rankings

BusinessWeek just released their ranked list of undergraduate business schools. Five Virginia business schools were in the top 100 nationally:

UVA McIntire (2)
University of Richmond Robins School (23)
William and Mary Mason School (29)
James Madison College of Business (51)
VA Tech Pamplin (59)

[After first-ranked Wharton,] the University of Virginia made a repeat appearance at No. 2, underscoring how different programs can excel on their own terms. A tiny two-year program at a public university, with in-state annual tuition of just $7,845, Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce could not be more different from Wharton...

Yet Virginia rates higher on student satisfaction, sends a larger percentage on to top MBA programs, and is roughly on par with Wharton on key measures of academic quality. A dedicated faculty with a teaching style that demands active participation and teamwork, plus innovations such as a new multidisciplinary leadership program, don't hurt either. Snippet from BusinessWeek

Technorati Tags: business school ranking, innovation, Virginia

Founders at Work

The new book, Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work, is highly recommended by several folks, including Guy Kawasaki and Paul Kedrosky.

Snippets from Founders at Work:

All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.
—Steve Wozniak, founder of Apple, page 36

I originally had my parents moderating, since they were retired, and after a few days I asked my dad how it was going. He said, "Oh, it's very interesting. Mom saw a picture of a guy and a girl and another girl, and they were doing..." So I told Jim, "Dude, my parents can't do this anymore. They're looking at porn all day."
—James Hong, founder of HotOrNot, page 380

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, startup, founder

ITIF Report: State New Economy Index

The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation has just released their 2007 report on the State New Economy Index (pdf file)

Technorati Tags: innovation, entrepreneur, new economy

Graphics Design in Richmond

According to the Richmond TimesDispatch, the top work of graphic designers in the Richmond area was recognized on Feb 8.
Firebrand LLC took Best in Show. The designer and creative director for Play's winning entry was Kelly Redling. Kaitlin Yapchaian was the photographer and the copywriter was Patty Devlin. The entry also won Best of Environmental/Exhibit Design for their Fortune: Innovation Studio.
Sponsored by the Richmond chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, the the fourth biennial competition was held in the Tyler Haynes Commons at the University of Richmond.

Technorati Tags: graphic designers, innovation, Richmond

Zotero is Here

The editors of PC Magazine have voted Zotero, a web research tool developed at George Mason University, as one of their top picks for free software in the February 20, 2007, issue. Mason Gazette article.

Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media is speaking on “Zotero and the Promise of Social Computing in Academia” at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities today.

... what if we could use digital methods to recapture that enormous
amount of scholarly work, the 90% of research that, like an iceberg,
is hidden beneath the 10% of the final product? The Zotero project
(which I co-direct) has released software that allows users to build,
tag, and annotate their own research collections, with a high level of
integration with online texts and databases ... Snippet from Zotero Blog archive

Technorati Tags: innovation, entrepreneur, researcher, zotero

FadCat

According to the Mason Gazette, Kenneth Hintz, an electrical and computer engineering professor in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering, was recently awarded with a patent for his Lexicon-Based New Idea Detector, FadCat.

FadCat works like this: First, users enter specific web sites or blogs from which they get their information and want the system to search. FadCat then builds a lexicon from those sites that enables the system to tell users when additional words are found. Users can then tell the system whether or not they wish to track the words through other domains in search of the new ideas. The system would be most commonly used to handle problems associated with law enforcement — an area that Hintz says is generally “data rich and information poor.”

Patent description from PatentStorm

Technorati Tags: idea detection, innovation, GMU

TED 2007 Awards

From the TED Blog:

Biologist E.O. Wilson, TEDprize 2007 winner: "I've come on a special mission on behalf of my constituency, the millions of trillions of insects and other small creatures, to make a plea for them. Please keep in mind that if we would wipe out insects from the planet - which we are trying hard to do - the rest of life would disappear within a few months."

News photographer James Nachtwey, TEDprize 2007 winner: "I am a witness and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent and do justice to the people I'm photographing."

Former US president Bill Clinton, TEDprize 2007 winner: "Help me in creating a better future for Rwanda by assisting my foundation, in partnership with the Rwandan government, to build a sustainable, high quality rural health system for the whole country, that can then be a model for other countries. We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence (while none of us, most of all me, did anything to help) can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive healthcare to its citizens."

The 2007 TED Program

Technorati Tags: TED, Flash program, innovation

CC in SL

Creative Commons license badges are now available in SL for works created in-world.

The Creative Commons Wiki for Second Life.

The transcript from Mia Wombat's Creative Commons talk last year.

Technorati Tags: SL, Creative Commons, entrepreneur

Lessig - Online Archives

Lawrence Lessig on Online Archiving:

Check out webcitation.org — a project run at the University of Toronto. The basic idea is to create a permanent URL for citations, so that when the Supreme Court, e.g., cites a webpage, there’s a reliable way to get back to the webpage it cited. They do this by creating a reference URL, which then will refer back to an archive of the page created when the reference was created. E.g., I entered the URL for my blog (“http://lessig.org/blog”). It then created an archive URL “http://www.webcitation.org/5IlFymF33”. Click [HERE]on it and it should take you to an archive page for my blog.
Why, you might ask, would you ever want to substitute that long ugly URL for the short and spiffy http://lessig.org/blog? Well first, and most obviously if you’ve ever written something for publication, URLs are not always short and spiffy. Second, the point is to create an archive of a page at a particular moment.

Readers' comments raise issues related to consistency of a page among browsers, as well as to copyright issues, since a page may be archived without the knowledge or consent of the creator of the page.

More on WEBCITE

Technorati Tags: innovation, archiving

New Communications Forum

The Society for New Communications Research New Communications Forum and Expo continues today.

David Weinberger, co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, speaks on Why social media is changing the way we work, communicate and live.

Shel Holtz, ABC, VP of New Marketing for Crayon, will wrap up the conference today.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, social media

MAVA Calling Entrepreneurs

Prior to their annual Capital Connection™ event, MAVA is host to a webinar this afternoon at 2:00 PM EST, Calling All Entrepreneurs: VCs Answer Your Questions About Capital Connection.

Peter Corsell, CEO of GridPoint, a successful former presenter to Capital Connection™, will be among those responding to questions. Registration required.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, vc

Admired Companies of Virginia

CNN.Money has the latest list of the most admired companies; here's the Virginia list.
There is also a Best and Worst list.
The Innovation Best: Apple, again.
The Social Responsibility Best: where else can one see McDonalds, Whole Foods and Starbucks on the same list?

Technorati Tags: Virginia, innovation, social responsibility

The Economist on the South

From the recent Economist article on the American South:

In 1937 southern incomes were only half the American average; today they are 91% of it. The South's share of American GDP has risen from 22% in 1963 to 31% today. Its share of America's population is still growing, but income per head, which peaked at nearly 96% of the national norm in 1981, has struggled to regain that proportion. Does this matter? As Georgia's governor, Sonny Perdue, points out, it is not a race. There are worse fates than remaining nine-tenths as rich as America, a country that is richer and grows faster than any other large rich country.

Technorati Tags: The South, Economist survey

TED 2007

Wired sent Chris Suellentrop to TED Conference this year:

The TED conference hasn’t even formally started, and already my mental batteries have been re-charged—with an unexpected jolt of existential despair. Apparently the organizers have decided that the most efficient way of motivating 1,200 TEDsters to change the world is to remind us that WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

Here's C|net's take on the conference.

From last year's TED, a Wired article about Jeff Han, the surprise hit of the show who became a geek rock star overnight.

The TED blog follows the conference presentations, and provides links to related articles.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, innovation, TED

F2C Blog Posts - Updated

Thanks to the F2C 2007 folks for making exceptional discussions available online. Here's a short list of event observations and summaries.

Organizer David Isenberg's Isen Blog.
Fractals of Change for a nice picture, and summary of Governor Douglas's presentation.
David Weinberger's Joho on Susan Crawford's talk, and many other presentations.
Brough Turner's Communications on the Day 2 Demos.
Doc Searls weblog
The National Journal's Tech Daily Dose
The Berkman Center at Harvard.
Martin Geddes Telepocalypse
O'Reilly Emerging Telephony
Wirearchy
The Lafayette Pro Fiber
Realtime Unified Communications
Cooks Collaborative Edge


Technorati Tags: f2c, e-state, innovation

The Value of Blogs

Dane Carlson just created a free applet to estimate the worth of a blog, neatly illustrating Yochai Benkler's perspective on the value of the decentralized voluntary production that has emerged with blogs. Carlson credits recent analytical work by Tristan Louis.

The F2C Conference opens today with panels on peer production and community networks. Live videocast.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, Benkler, innovation, F2C

F2C Blogs

David Weinberger's Joho has a terrific summary of Yochai Benkler's talk and brief description of the OpenMoko presentation.
Paul Hyland points to Dueling Videos, also from Benkler's talk.
Steve's Tech Journal from Vermont, on the e-state talk by Governor Douglas.

We'll update this list as new posts are available.

UPDATES - Tuesday

Brough on Adelstein's talk.
Susan Crawford's blog, on FCC Commissioner Adelstein's talk.


Jason Z's video of Yochai Benkler's talk at Democracy in Action
Aldon Hynes' Orient Lodge
Brough Turner's Communications
Media on the Go
David Weinberger's Joho
Technorati Tags: F2C conference

F2C Conference Update

Streaming video from the F2C conference will continue tomorrow.

Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, pointed to individual capacity moving from the perifery to the core, and commons-based production shifting authority from the center to the individual capacity to act. This hardly does his complex presentation justice - the book is available as pdf. His 2001 white paper, Property, Commons, and the First Amendment: Towards a Core Common Infrastructure, inspired several speakers, including panelist lc claffy.

Although there were audio issues for online participants, Cory Ondrejk's talk on Second Life was fascinating, and included the surprise that older folks get SL faster - faster than expected and faster than younger people already familiar with the virtual gaming worlds.

If the talks or slides are made available when the conference ends, we will have links here.

Technorati Tags: SL, F2C, innovation

F2C Conference, 2007

The theme for the Freedom to Connect Conference this year is how universal connectivity and the plunging capital requirements of information production are changing our fundamental economic and social assumptions. Full agenda

The F2C live webcast begins this morning at 8:45 AM EST.

The event opens with Tom Evslin, introducing Vermont Governor Jim Douglas speaking about Vermont's drive to be the first 100% e-state in the nation.

The speaker for the 10:30 session is Yochai Benkler on The Wealth of Networks.

At 1:00, Cory Ondrejk will demo Second Life for conference participants.

Technorati Tags: innovation, SL, networks

Tristen Louis on Virtual Worlds

The Tristan Louis blog evaluates the growth rate, and economic activity claimed by Linden Lab for Second Life. His series on virtual worlds from last summer includes a close look at the economies of virtual worlds.

Technorati Tags: SL, entrepreneur, virtual economies

Podcasting at Darden

Stace Carter, of the UVA Darden School of Business, recently produced the Case Study Podcast, for the for Feedburner Podcast blog. He interviewed Deven Gaston of CanineCampus, and Dr. Ken White of the Darden School about " ... how two vastly different organizations are using podcasting and Feedburner to reach their respective markets".

The weekly Darden Business Podcasts feature school activities and other events that are of significance to their community.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, innovation, podcast

Play, from Richmond to NYC

After their extraordinary Innovators Studio held in conjunction with Fortune Magazine's recent Innovation Forum in NYC, Richmond-based Play has made some material available on their site, Look At More Stuff.





One of their photos from the event

Technorati Tags: innovation, play, entrepreneur

Virginia is for Business

Virginia Business Magazine has summarized the factors contributing to Virginia's top rankings in recent evaluations of the business environments of the states. According to Garry Kranz, "Since 2003, Virginia consistently has outperformed the national average in employment growth." This article focuses on Virginia's R&D and employment incentives, as well as the emerging investment in the Virginia work force.

Good examples are the recent announcement of the six year research partnership between The National Institute of Aerospace in Hampton and Airbus North America. (See the Virginian-Pilot for more) and the announcement by the R.L. Polk & Co., a company that analyzes automotive industry data, that "Virginia was among the nation's leaders for sales of gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles in 2006."(See the Richmond TimesDispatch for more).

The Martin Agency Snares Wal-Mart Account With a Richmond State of Mind; the world's largest retailer came to Virginia for creative talent. (See the Washington Post for more)


Technorati Tags: Virginia, business climate, innovation

Grainger Challenge Award - Abul Hassam

Congratulations to George Mason University Professor Abul Hussam on his $1 million Grainger Challenge Award. Most of his award will go toward ensuring that even more people can benefit from clean water with his filtering system.

If you'd like to follow the extraordinary work of the George Mason University folks, watch the Mason Gazette.

Technorati Tags: innovation, GMU

BGN Entrepreneur's Minute, March 1, 2007

(About one minute)

The Sunshine Lady Foundation

J. Gregory Dees on social entrepreneurship

The Charlottesville The Center for Nonprofit Excellence

The Women's Initiative Network, of Hirschler Fleischer law firm

The BGN Entrepreneur's Minute is made possible by the generous support of the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, WIN