Update: We raised the money within 48 hours! Thanks so much to everyone who contributed (9 donations). Awesome.

Usually I steer clear of posting personal things on this blog, but I wanted to ask for support in helping a great cause.

My youngest sister is part of Teach for America. She’s spent the last year and a half in an extremely impoverished and isolated area of New Mexico, working on a Navajo Indian Reservation as a high school history teacher.

She teaches some great kids, but the unfortunate reality is that her students are even more under-resourced than most; reservations are actually considered sovereign nations and not technically part of the United States. Poverty is rampant.

One item that my sister desperately needs is a projector. The need, as she describes it, is as follows:

Living three hours from the nearest major city prevents my students from having the same exposure to museums, photographs, libraries, stores, and resources as their peers. My students have mostly lived in this area for several generations and have had little experience with travel. Without exposure to other places and cultures, students have trouble gaining perspective and visualizing our discussions on history. As students get older, they will go to college without the same background information that their peers have experienced.

She has already qualified for a 50% grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, so the amount to raise is now only $505

I’m planning a trip out to visit her for Thanksgiving and would love to be able to help her get the projector in time for the Holidays.

Any amount you can give is great; as Matt Damon says to Vince in this past season of Entourage, “It’s for the kids.”

Click the image below to go to her Donor’s Choose Page and donate:

Image of the area:

Parts of the Facebook Movie: “The Social Network” by Andrew Sorkin will be filmed on the Hopkins Campus in Baltimore starting in November.

Note: I’m very involved at Johns Hopkins University, serving on a number of boards both for the overall University and the Carey Business School. I was in Baltimore for several days last week and I’m very excited that this deal got done and can now be talked about publicly! Also a big congrats to a friend of mine who was very involved in making this happen!

This is really exciting stuff. Not only is it exciting because this will be a great movie, but also because it will hopefully generate more interest among Hopkins students/faculty/alumni in startups. One of the initiatives I have passionately advocated for is setting up better resources university-wide for students interested in start-ups and venture capital. Between Hopkins phenomenal medical, public health, business and engineering schools (among others) more amazing collaboration and spin-outs should be materializing than currently are.

I hope the Facebook Movie and filming will be an additional catalyst toward drawing attention to this.

If you’re a Hopkins alum involved in the startup world, please reach out to me.

Past Movie Coverage:

• Mashable
• The Social

The weather is terrible today here in New York.

I think I’ll use it as inspiration to post a few rants (i.e. annoyances) that have been on my mind…

Pagination in Flow Applications

Tumblr (among others) has adopted a convention for pagination that drives me nuts. You click on a button on the right-hand side to move backward in time (Next)  and you click a left-hand button (Previous) to move forward toward more recent items.

I have never understood this. My confusion is that the idea of pagination is essentially derived from books — and with books, right brings you forward and left brings you backward. Same with the Kindle.

Twitter also had this issue until it developed its “more” button at the bottom of the stream — a big improvement for UI, but also creates scrolling annoyances.

Why Tumblr? Why? Can’t someone create a better solution?

Zip Codes & Online Forms

I was talking with Eric about this on Sunday.

Zip codes are unique identifiers. “11201″ means the very specific area within Brooklyn, NY where I live.

So why does every form in the online world require that I enter a City and State?

Throughout the history of the Internet and e-commerce no one has thought to create a database that matches zip code to location? What am I missing?

Nurses who are Addicted to Zynga

Last week I got to briefly visit the Zynga headquarters, it’s an impressive operation, but even more impressive is this anecdote:

Yesterday I was at a hospital in Brooklyn to have several sonograms. Sonograms require various intermittent pauses for a couple minutes each. During these ‘pauses,’ while I was lying there on the bed, I could hear the nurse laughing away as she typed on the room’s computer.

I asked her in a rather annoyed tone, what in the world she was doing? Slightly embarrassed, she replied “playing a game on Facebook.”

Turns out she was playing Café World with her friends. Putting aside my annoyance with Café World being played during my procedure, I started chatting with her and learned that not only do all her friends play, but they all buy virtual goods! “If you leave the food too long, it will spoil” she said giggling.

If well educated nurses are so addicted to Zynga that they are playing during procedures, the Zynga IPO is something I want in on.

I remember reading last summer that Starbucks was offering two free hours of wifi for patrons…

In subsequent months, despite having purchased numerous gift cards, owning an iPhone and spending countless hours in Starbucks across the country, I still had not been able to access this mysterious free internet.

Well, I finally figured it out!

Here’s how get online at Starbucks for free** in under five minutes…assuming a short line :)

1) Get in line and purchase any Starbucks Gift Card (just put some nominal amount of money on the card, such as $5).

My preference is the Mini Card. When you get it, make sure to scratch off the back to reveal pin (see image below):

2) On your laptop (or smartphone) select the AT&T wifi network. You will now be able to access the Starbucks homepage

(see image below):

3) From the Starbucks Homepage, you need to sign-up for the service and register your card.

From the homepage select “Sign up for Free Wifi” (see image below):

4) Now either create a new account (if you haven’t done this before), or you can assign a new card to your account (see my note below on making sure you are using an “active” card)

*Note: you will both be registering with Starbucks and with AT&T. (see image below):

5) Once you have filled out your personal account details, you will receive an email back to confirm your account.

6) After confirming your account, return to the homepage and select the drop-down for “AT&T” wifi.

Enter your User Name and Password and checkmark the Terms of Service.

Hit “Log In” and you’re good to go for two hours! (see below):

Notes:

**If you have a card, but can’t get online… This is a bit confusing. Starbucks only allows you to get online as long as your card has money on it and has been used at least once in the last 30 days. “Using your card” means either adding more money to it, or making a purchase. So once you have purchased a card for say $5 just remember to use it to make a purchase once every 30 days and then add the same amount back to the card to keep it active.  If the card becomes inactive from lack of use you can simply add more funds to the card — you do not need to purchase an entirely new one.

If you need more than 2 hours… There are several option to purchase wifi separately such as a full-day of access for $3.99. Also if you have a Boingo account you can use that.

More Resources:

How to get free wifi at Starbucks via eHow

User Agent Switching for free Wifi at Starbucks and Barnes & Noble via Lifehacker

Free Wifi at Starbucks (Finally)! via Scott Means

First, congratulations to @pistachio on the launch of OneForty! It’s awesome to see such great initial uptake and press; rumors of a Twitter buyout certainly don’t hurt either :)

My question: where is the enterprise app store?

While I know the social business and enterprise 2.0 space as well as anyone, I still find myself frequently “googling” to find solutions and reviews: should I use MailChimp or Constant Contact? Yammer or SocialCast? SurveyMonkey or Survey.io? What’s better to use as an extranet: Drop.io or Box.net?

App stores are brilliant because once they gain traction, they control information and user flow. Salesforce has had breakout success with its Force.com platform because it controls audience – anyone building a sales tool knows they need to work with Salesforce to be successful. Monetizing an apps store platform is pretty straightforward (read what OneForty is doing here) and in the enterprise space this can easily translate to big dollars.

As businesses of all kinds increasingly embrace social business and social business design, the ability to quickly find and evaluate solutions will be critical. Whoever controls the “routing board” to the social business ecosystem is going to kill.

Update: I understand that what I am talking about above (and Oneforty.com) are not true app stores; it’s more metaphor. The technicalities of an app store versus a directory is not the point.

Interactions on the web are increasingly distributed and new applications (and campaigns) must be built with a decentralized model in mind. As web apps become increasingly ubiquitous, Apple’s expression, “there’s an app for that” rings truer than ever. In such an environment, first mover advantage becomes increasingly important as early traction can compound quickly via network effects.

One thing that jumps out to me is that the creation of social identity on new systems (such as profiles, personalization and identity) has not really improved. Yes, stuff like Facebook Connect exists, but it’s really only good for the obvious static data and does little in the way of integration based on your historical interactions or types of activity.

A while back Stowe Boyd wrote a post about building listening devices, i.e. eavesdropping tools, to find and act on data posted to our various interaction streams. It struck me (and one of my brainstorming partners, Mike) that there is an opportunity for more sites to launch with integrated, personalized content already culled from the open web. For example, a bot could easily scour the web and auto-aggregate content on your behalf. It could suck in your data, organize it, make it look prettier, and then alert you that a custom feed has already been created for you — all you do is claim it.

One company I consider an early pioneer in this strategy was Zoominfo. Zoominfo began scraping the web and assembling publicly available data into profiles similar to what you’d find on Linkedin. I recall Googling myself way back when and discovering that I had a profile already populated on Zoominfo. It was actually quite compelling because much of the information there was out of date – it made me want to go in and update it (and I did) signing up for service along the way.

Another company that effectively leverages “auto-population” to create a viral effect is Facebook’s photo tagging. While now it’s difficult to imagine anyone not being on Facebook, the genius of the photos in the early days was to allow others to tag you. If you were not a Facebook member, you’d get an email alerting you that you’d been tagged. Once curiosity got the better of you, you’d sign-up and already have numerous photos awaiting your arrival. Sticky.

[Know of any other examples I’m missing?]

Now a call-out. One of my favorite companies and (IMO) one of the most obvious to employ such a strategy, currently does not. Stocktwits could be crawling Twitter (maybe even old school message boards) and auto-populating portfolio streams for new users (user talking stocks on Twitter, but not current community members). It’s still a self-selecting community because individuals need to claim their accounts. If actions (conversations, photos, links, etc) are already taking place in an unstructured way, why not channel it neatly saving users work and providing an even lower barrier-to-entry and better-customized experience?

Note: With a few friends I’m working on a little side project. We’re hoping to use this eavesdropping technique. Assuming we do, perhaps we will make the code available for others…

Today was the first time I’ve had a chance to hear Peter Thiel talk live and he did not disappoint.

I spent Saturday and Sunday at the 2009 Singularity Summit, held for the first time in New York. Michael Vassar, Singularity Institute’s president, did an exceptional job of assembling an all-star cast of speakers. Talks covered a variety of subjects ranging from quantum computing to radical life extension to venture capital. For those unfamiliar with singularity, a brief description is here. Also, WebMetricsGuru has great coverage of day one here.

The following is a brief synopsis of Peter’s talk (side note: I understand all videos will be available on the SI website soon).

—

Peter starts by taking an audience survey, asking which of seven doomsday scenarios people are most frightened by.

The audience sees two clear winners: a) runaway biotech, e.g. mutated diseases wipe out civilization and b) that the singularity takes too long to happen (title of the talk).

Peter suggests that the recent credit/financial crisis actually has to do with singularity. Our society is on shaky ground: millions of people have money invested in pension funds (and the like) which they expect to produce returns of ~8% per annum, even despite various period of volatility. What people forget is that the past returns we’ve come to expect have been generated during periods of compounding innovation; cutting-edge tech has bolstered all other lines of business that rely on technological gains to increase productivity, etc. Innovation is a necessary component of a healthy, upward market. Innovation has stalled.

Peter recently talked to an LP (endowment) who was thinking of  re-allocating its portfolio to hold less than 5% in venture capital as its recent returns had not matched expectations. Peter told the LP that they’re thinking is flawed: if their 5% allocated to vc eventually does not return a mega profit, the remaining 95% allocation is going to be worthless anyway. ”Investing in technology as a VC is like Pascal’s bet: if that isn’t going to work, nothing will.”

Peter then asks: has recent technological progress really been slower than it should be? He cites as support the fact that a) wages have not increased in terms of real dollars since 1973 b) that California (the most innovate place in the world) can barely pay its bills and c) that VC’s haven’t seen good returns in 11 years.

The credit crisis was really a technology crisis. Credit really is ‘claims on the future’ and credit only works with a background of growth. Peter then suggests that the credit crisis was really an offshoot of the dotcom crash. The dotcom crash in his opinion, occurred because the ‘innovation story’ was not happening as quickly as people expected. People panicked and bailed. When stocks (i.e. those necessary 8% returns) tanked, housing and leverage swooped in to make-up the difference.

Peter states clearly: “the boom-bust cycle is over”. There will now either be a long period of malaise, or we’ll see a great boom (he’s obviously betting on the former).

Peter slams the NASDAQ explaining that most listed companies are actually not technology companies, rather, they are zero-sum bets against technology (ex: investing in Google is feeding a monopoly on search, Microsoft doing well means linux suffers, etc). NASDAQ companies are more like banks than they are true innovators (Sun may be an exception).

The Madoff scandal occurred because people assumed that even despite a drought of innovation, an 8% annual return with no risk was still “safe.” This is crazy. People need to dramatically adjust their return expectations; only great risk will produce great returns.

Peter talks a bit about his fund and where he sees opportunities. Suggests that an under-invested area is optimizing the division of labour between human and computers: it doesn’t need to be all or nothing. He provides an example of how PayPal only managed to save the company from fraud by dividing up the fraud protection process using a combination of humans and computers.

Society currently suffers from a “free riders” problem relating to science and technology. Everyone expects great innovation to manifest, but “someone else” will do it. Large companies have disincentive to think with a long time horizon; they need to make quarterly numbers. If China is to surpass the US (Thiel seems to think this may eventually) it will be due to this time dimension.

—Another point brought up in the QA is around whether competition is a good thing in terms of schooling and career choice? Why are so many brilliant people studying string theory? Due to competition the best and brightest tend to go into the same fields of study. Much bigger contributions can be made by attacking disciplines where little progress has been made, the stuff on the edges like AI.

Batman image via Wikipedia

Jon Steinberg had a great post several weeks’ back where he coined a new term (Approach? Philosophy?); “hackable business development.”

For $500 and four weeks of late night emails to eLance developers, you can basically spec and build simple, rough apps that knit or build upon open APIs to create things that are interesting and potentially valuable.  To be clear, you can’t build complicated apps or the next Salesforce.com on this kind of shoestring, but you can achieve the kind of learning, vetting, and experimentation that is left undone if you don’t.

I call this process Hackable Business Development.  If you’re interested in a platform or service from an intellectual, career, or partnership prospective, you simply must build on it.

I love Jon’s concept, especially because it resonates with two things I have been thinking about: tinkering platforms and Batman. Tinkering platforms I’ll talk about in another post.

“Batman” is the perfect metaphor for an increasingly common entrepreneurial archetype I’m observing. Nearly everyone I meet in the tech/media space these days seems to have two lives: their ‘9 to 5 identity’ typically working away to collect a paycheck and then their ‘late-night identity’ where they throw on the entrepreneurial cape and crank away into the wee hours working on their own startups and side projects.

From my observations many of these projects are like micro startups, small in scale and often involve three of or four individuals teaming-up and dolling out responsibilities. They tend to work on applications of a simple nature. Projects often involve innovating on API’s and typically leverage word-of-mouth conduits like Twitter. Sometimes it’s even the same teams that work together during the day for “the man” teaming up at night. Nobody gets paid; teams are self-sufficient. Business development doesn’t exist.

The traditional manager’s perspective on this is simple: UNACCEPTABLE. For reasons ranging from conflicts-of-interest to less-focused-teams, managers tend to get freaked-out and pissed-off when they learn that a developer has something else in the works, even if it never interferes with his or her ability to perform their job.

However this is the wrong approach. Developers, designers and the rest of us need our own version of Google’s 20% time. Side projects keep talented folks sharp, motivated and happy.  I think this new era of Batmen is both necessary to move innovation forward and a reality that’s here to stay. Managers are best served to embrace the trend rather than hate on it.

Note: Interesting thoughts here by Sam Lessin on why building on API’s may not be a good thing

I’m really excited to be participating in an awesome startup event being run in tandem with The Feast Conference.

The Feast is best thought of as a mini-TED focused on “gathering the world’s greatest innovators from across industries and society to empower, inspire and engage each other in creating world-shaking change.” Sounds like a mouthful, but last year’s talks were some of the most inspiring I’ve heard and the people attending were equally amazing (networking with smart, cool and passionate people is always fun!).

This year Michael and Jerri decided they wanted to also draw attention to great startups working to “make the world a better place” and decided to let eight startups take the stage and pitch their products/missions. There won’t be any crappy web apps here! I had the privilege of helping pick the presenting startups and securing some terrific judges (venture capitalists and angels will be present…). We’ve also got a cool concept to keep the audience engaged and provide the startups with better and more diverse feedback than they would typically get. All in all, the Kitchen Session at the Tribeca Grand is shaping up to be be a spectacular event — sign-up here if you haven’t already done so.

Finally, I have a two free tickets to give away. If you want one, please tweet me (use #feastongood), or leave a comment below explaining why you want to attend.

As far as I can tell, Facebook is the most searched for term on the web.

Several weeks ago over dinner, my friend Peter and I were discussing the growth of Twitter and Facebook. One point we kept returning to was exactly how uncontested Facebook’s dominance is among social networks. While Twitter gets incredible media attention (resulting in the two companies often being talked about alongside each other), the frequent comparisons/references to Facebook and Twitter as ‘equals’ is misleading.

Peter and I ran a few search experiments using Google Insights, an amazing but relatively little-known tool that returns total numbers for search queries in Google over time.

Here is the 12 month chart for Twitter queries. The hockey stick like growth is more than impressive:

However, when compared to Facebook’s growth over the same period you can see Twitter is barely a blip on the radar. What’s interesting to note here is that a) the volume of queries for Facebook crushes those for Twitter, but also that b) Facebook continues to grow like a weed:

Although we had expected this outcome, the relative size difference was still amazing. Facebook has such a dominant presence that we began to wonder how it compared to other keywords we’d expect to also have massive queries. Again, what we found was shocking. We ran comparative searches against all of the following terms:

• Bible
• Sex
• Porn
• News

Amazingly not only did none of these beat Facebook, none even comes close:

It would thus appear that Facebook is now the most searched for term on the internet — a staggering feat for a company that has only existed for 5 years. Despite the opinions of detractors who question Facebook’s sustainability or business model, all I can say is that I’m a believer.

–As a side note, another interesting metric to track is the conversation about Twitter and Facebook on Stocktwits using the new ticker symbols proposed by Howard: $twit & $fbook