Effort Underway to Replicate Silicon Valley Near Harvard University
January 30, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
Last Friday, inside Harvard University’s Maxwell Dworkin lecture hall, Patrick S. Chung, W. Hugo Van Vuuren, and Harry Weller introduced the Experiment Fund, which will represent “seed money” along with structural and networking support to exceptional student entrepreneurs in the Cambridge-Boston area. Among those eligible for funding will be students from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University.
The fund is also being wielded as a promising cork to a genuinely unflattering brain-drain: Cambridge-centered entrepreneurs tend to leave town for the advantages that California’s Silicon Valley offers. Two of Harvard’s highest high flyers, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, after all, famously dropped out of the school to develop their own tech companies.
The idea behind the fund is to provide budding scholar-entrepreneurs with the tools they need to propel their ideas forward without needing to leave the school or geographical area altogether. With the fund, approximately four to six startups would be eligible for early capital in sums ranging from $250,000 to $500,000.
The Harvard Crimson quoted from an email sent by Harry Weller in which he explained that the fund was “not an incubator or grant-giving organization,” but a resource for investment that can help campus scholar-entrepreneurs “grow with seed capital, consistent guidance, and unparalleled access to experts.”
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http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/27/experiment-fund-seas-investment/
SOPA and PIPA Disowned By President, Republican Senators, and the Public
January 19, 2012 by admin · Leave a Comment
On Wednesday, Internet users came together to denounce two bills making their way through the American legislature: the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act, also known as SOPA and PIPA. Many took directly to the streets, but the overwhelming majority expressed their opposition by spreading information about the issue on online social networks, signing petitions, writing emails to congress, calling their representatives’ offices (incredibly retro for some), and of course, tweeting about it.
Among the biggest organizers of the widespread protests were Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, and Reddit. These organizations have a lot to lose if the bills become laws. The regulatory measures being considered threaten to hold these institutions, already profoundly entrenched in people’s everyday lives and heavily dependent on user-generated content for their business, legally accountable for the copyright infringes of their millions (soon to be billions) of users.
The extent of the opposition demonstrated yesterday even caused two Republican senators to withdraw their support for the bills: Senator Marco Rubio, from Florida, and Senator John Cornyn, from Texas, no longer back the bills. President Obama expressed his non-support Saturday.
Speaking to the New York Times, Cary H. Sherman, the chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America delivered a quip telling of the uphill battle currently faced by the entertainment industry: “It’s very difficult to counter the misinformation when the disseminators also own the platform.”
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Today Is Dump GoDaddy Day
December 29, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
December 29th is Dump GoDaddy Day. That’s today, so will you be joining in the celebrations? The “holiday” came about at the insistence of SelfProdigy, a Reddit user who was very troubled by GoDaddy’s early backing of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill is currently being reviewed by the House Judiciary Committee. If SOPA passes, responsibility for content uploaded to a site, in violation of copyright laws, will be thrust onto the shoulders of the site owners, be that Facebook, YouTube, or their tech peers.
Before kicking off Dump GoDaddy Day, SelfProdigy informed GoDaddy of his disapproval of their position with regard to SOPA. GoDaddy responded to SelfProdigy’s criticism with a “generic letter,” which only served to further enflame SelfProdigy’s indignation. In an interview with Fox News, SelfProdigy said: “My heart was broken. I’ve used them for years. I didn’t like the generic letter they sent back to me so I posted a call to boycott. I didn’t know it would catch on the way it did.”
After Dump GoDaddy Day went viral, GoDaddy releases a public statement abandoning its previous stance and proclaiming that it no longer supported SOPA. GoDaddy apparently wanted to stay on the side of the “internet community” when all the SOPA hullaballoo blew over. But many are saying it’s more than a little too late because GoDaddy registrations are already being “dumped.” Four days ago, 72,000 GoDaddy registrations had been lost. GoDaddy spokesperson, Danica Patrick, appears above.
Read More:
http://blog.zap2it.com/pop2it/2011/12/dump-godaddy-day-is-dec-29-in-response-to-sopa-support.html
IBM Uses Social Media to Look at the Future of High Heels
November 25, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
It seems that every news cycle brings with it a trend piece about women’s fashion and what its latest manifestations portend, or reveal, about the current state of the broader economic climate. This cycle’s trend piece is here, and it comes courtesy of IBM — yes, that IBM.
IBM may not be the first brand that springs to mind when one thinks of fashion, but the famous technology firm took it upon itself to analyze, with the help of its analytics software, naturally, four years’ worth of social media content to gauge the winds of change in the height of women’s shoes, a pop economic indicator that sits right alongside red lipstick sales in econ books.
An IBM press release about the investigation stated that the social media posts analyzed numbered in the billions. Because their analysis suggests that heel height is declining, IBM’s cultural forecasters are also positing that people may be preparing for long-term austerity. The latter is on account of the observed heel height increase during economic downturns and flattening out during boom times.
But IBM had another aim in mind with its experiment: the promotion of its analytics tools. According to the same press release, the point of the investigation was to “highligh[t] the predictive capabilities of social media analysis as a source of valuable insight that can help drive business strategies and results.” IBM believes it has the tools marketers need to incorporate quantitative social media data into their business decisions.
Read More:
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/35985.wss
Gmail Inboxes More Social With Mingly Plug-In
November 11, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Heartening — and social — news are coming to your Gmail inboxes. The source of the scoop is Mingly; and it’s actually the news itself. The self-dubbed “personal relationship management tool” was released as a plug-in for Gmail this week. Think of it as a way to unite, harmoniously, your social feeds and email messages — something that could be irremediably messy, à la Google Buzz, but isn’t, because it’s something totally different.
So, what goodies does this plug-in bring to the table? For starters, it’ll give you the ability to synch your Gmail and (webby) social contacts in a “social address book” of Mingly’s creation. Another thing is that once the tool is in place, and you’re composing an email, you’ll get to see the recipient’s updates and maybe even his or her self-written, character-limited biography. And something that can’t be glossed over is that among its rather substantive nifty features, Mingly will also let you send tweets and Facebook and LinkedIn messages from your Gmail inbox.
If you want Mingly for you Gmail, head over to www.getmingly.com and keep in mind that it works on Firefox and Chrome browsers. The same press release that announced the plug-in’s launch, also stated that Mingly’s makers were working to make their tool operational on other email services.
Read More:
http://ming.ly/mingly-launches-public-beta-and-makes-gmail-social/#more-471
President Obama Riding on Tumblr’s Rise: Opens Interactive Campaign Blog
October 31, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
In 2008, President Obama set the standard for the smart application of social media in extreme politicking. It’s now 2012, and Obama continues on his trail-blazing streak — he’s started a Tumblr, or more precisely, his campaign staffers in Chicago started one for him. Still, it’s more than likely that Obama himself will personally contribute to the blog at some point.
In the meantime, the “fairly nice” staffers have enjoined the American population to make use of Tumblr’s submission feature to share their own stories on the campaign blog, whose exact address is barackobama.tumblr.com. In the words of the staffers:
We’d like this Tumblr to be a huge collaborative storytelling effort—a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it and how we’re getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better.
On Tumblr, readers can submit text, pictures, and even video. After being up for about week, the stories they’ve collected revolve mostly around unemployment and the trials and tribulations of very real student debt. Lady Gaga and Justin Beiber, who are about as popular as President Obama at the moment, are already on Tumblr. Certainly it won’t be long before republican presidential hopefuls establish their own official Tumblr.
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A New Social Network Hits the Block
October 27, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
This week, the San Francisco startup Nextdoor released what it’s calling “the first private social network for neighborhoods.” The service is free and only available within the U.S. The dinero for the whole shebang is being provided by Shasta Ventures, Benchmark Capital, and other private investors, including Rich Barton. Nirav Tolia, Nextdoor’s CEO and co-founder, had this to say about the network:
We “friend” more people than ever and “follow” strangers we’ve never met, yet we don’t have a good way to communicate with the people who live right next door … There are many ways our neighbors can help us, but these days people don’t know their neighbors, or how to contact them. Nextdoor was created to change that.
If a Nextdoor website already exists on your block, you can join on the spot by submitting your home address. If there’s no extant network, then it’s necessary to apply for one. Nextdoor says that it does not share users’ personal information “with any third parties,” but even content that’s “password-protected” and not indexable by Google’s mighty crawlers can end up on the public Web. Nextdoor promises to open up bridges of communication between neighbors, but those living in places populated by hardened gossips might want to think twice before willingly providing even more yammering ammunition to these.
Read More:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/26/there-posts-the-neighborhood/?ref=technology
UCLA Grads’ Janus-Like Social Platform Gains Traction
October 12, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Jono Lee and Eric Sue — both recent UCLA grads — have set their newly created social platform, TwoSides, loose on the Internet to help conceptualize duality. In its current setup, users publicly ponder the duality and merits of political, philosophical, and other more mundane stances with the help of well-thought-out displays and argument compartmentalization.
In the manner of social networking, fellow users contribute to an issue’s elucidation by declaring whether they agree or disagree on the matter and submitting evidence to prop up their case or unfasten the foundations of the “other side.” Welcomed evidence, to be posted directly on the site, includes self-authored ranty texts, YouTube clips, scholarly articles, and anything else that’s relevant.
The site fosters social connections through debate and also through the discovery of shared beliefs, values, or ideas. In TwoSides’ terms: “Common beliefs are a much better indicator of whether two people would connect than, say, mutual Facebook friends. Easily see how your viewpoints match up with other people using our awesome data visualizations.”
A good deal of unabashed giddiness filters through the site’s details. Even TwoSides’ 2011 summer intern, Ken Yu, radiated as much: a bodybuilder with a taste for progressive trance who’s studying Engineering at Berkeley.
Learn More:
http://allthingsd.com/20111012/compare-candidates-debate-issues-at-twosides/?refcat=social
Social Media Urges On a New Statistics
October 11, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
The world’s twitter and Facebook output — along with its googling and cell phone geo data — is about to be stirred, strewn out on a researcher’s desk, and examined like a sacrificed animal’s entrails during the heyday of ancient Greece.
It seems that social media has done wonders for the acceptance of an old ritual of the occult — divination. Online output, as part of “big data,” is about to be put through a major statistical grinder by scientists claiming a humanistic bent in an attempt to derive “sociological laws of human behavior,” as John Markoff of the New York Times so eloquently put it, to “predict political crises, revolutions and other forms of social and economic instability,” much the same way that natural scientists foretell the weather and try to do likewise with earthquakes.
Next year, a division of the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), is funding a three-year study on “big data” involving 21 countries in Latin America. The tools employed by these scientists will likely resemble those being developed by Revolution Analytics, Norman Nie’s company of new-wave analytical tools for “data sets with trillions of entries.” Perhaps the time for a new Delphic oracle has arrived.
Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/science/11predict.html?ref=technology
http://www.iarpa.gov/offices.html
Are Your Online Manners Polished and Refined?
October 5, 2011 by admin · Comments Off
Has life on the digital sphere been making you feel like your manners and etiquette are in need of an updating? It’s likely you’re not alone. Publishers have apparently caught wind of a general clamoring for guidelines for navigating online lives with grace and two books on the subject were recently released: How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age and Emily Post’s Etiquette, 18th Edition.
Both are 21-century updates of beloved American classics: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, which first came out in 1936, and Emily Post’s Etiquette, first released in 1922. No doubt times have changed since then. Unfortunately, if one goes by Dwight Garner’s unfavorable and less unfavorable reviews of the two tomes — published in today’s New York Times’ front page — the books aren’t really up to task.
Garner excoriates the folks responsible for the Dale update, that would be Dale Carnegie and Associates Inc and Brent Cole, and refers to their work as a “retooling” that vitiates the expressive and “homespun” charm of the original. The authors of the Post update, all descendants of the original author, fare only slightly better. Garner says they “mostly repris[e] information to be found in earlier versions” and that the “volume is friendly but largely humorless.” Faint praise, indeed.
But if you’re clueless about proper online socializing, you might still want to take a peek at the two texts.
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