via: Raymond Johnson

“If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term, he explains. You don’t have to move out here to do this. There’s this culture in the Valley of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet…you need to do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.” – Mark Zuckerberg

The annual Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation’s “Walk to Cure” is coming up in October. Collectively, our team “Maximum Rays of Hope” has raised thousands of dollars towards finding a cure for Type I Diabetes over the past few years.

This year, I’ll be taking part in JDRF’s Walk to Cure Diabetes, along with one-half million other walkers across the country, as we try to reach our goal of raising $89 million. Type 1, or juvenile diabetes, is a devastating disease that affects millions of people, a large and growing percentage of them children. There is some good news, though. JDRF is our best hope for finding a cure. It funds more type 1 diabetes research than any other charity worldwide and it’s making progress along many promising paths toward better treatments and a cure. Now, more than ever, you can make a crucial difference. Won’t you please give to JDRF as generously as possible? Together, we can make the cure a reality!

Help fund the advance of Type I Diabetes treatment and progress towards a cure by donating here.

Thank you.

http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/17521806

“Biggest threat to productivity today: turntable.fm,” – FastSociety’s Andy Thompson

Turntable.fm founders Seth Goldstein and Billy Chasen sat down with TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about the rise of Turntable.fm

Turntable.fm is a browser-based chatroom that streams music based on the choices of a rotating cast of DJs drawn from whoever is in the room. There are up to five DJs at any one time who create playlists; the station cycles through the playlists one song at a time, moving from one DJ’s pick to the next, as the room votes on how “lame” to “awesome” the track is. A (sometimes fast-moving) discussion takes place in a chatroom on the bottom right of the screen. DJs get points for picking popular songs and if enough people think a song is lame, it skips to the next. You can upload songs or search through the Medianet-powered library to create your playlist when it’s your turn to DJ.

Adoption:
Streaming $1 million songs a day
600000K users
40% active users
some power user sessions lasting 12hrs
10s of thousands of song downloads per day