Archive for the 'Cool Stuff' Category

This one is funny if you haven’t seen it already.  I hope it helps you get through the work day or even the work week.

Enjoy!

We all know the Internet is creating many new, global business opportunities.  However, much of the press (and even my own articles) in North America are still focusing on American entrepreneurs and their technology ventures.  Sure, one could argue that these companies are global in nature.  But the rest of the world is not receiving their fair share of attention.

In lieu of this, I thought the Business 2.0 gallery of best non-US sites to watch is appropriate to share with this community.   Some interesting names pop up such as Stardoll, Vivapets, and Babytree.  I wouldn’t laugh too hard; some top tier venture capital firms such as Sequoia Capital are backing some of these ventures.  If you haven’t heard of some of them yet, you can bet you will be soon.
Be sure to check out the maps too!

By all accounts, Max Levchin has achieved a level of success that most of us dream about. As a 23 year old entrepreneur, his company, PayPal.com, was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. Now, Jessi Hempel of “Fortune” reports that Levchin is “Cashing in on Blog Bling”.

In the article, Levchin, now 32 years-old, has a new startup venture called Slide.com. The website allows users to post pictures in a slideshow format. Levchin’s plan is to embed advertising into this widget to transform the company into a profitable business.

Cashing in on the online advertising business isn’t new. However, Levchin’s plan is to allow Slide.com users to “..decorate their slide shows with logos, props, and other branded elements” from advertisers. Sounds interesting. Time will tell if Levchin’s venture turns out to be another hit or just a flash in the pan.

Today’s article introduces One Laptop One Child (OLOC), the brainchild of Nicholas Negroponte.  Negroponte is currently on leave from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology.

The goal of OLOC is to provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves.  The origins of OLPC stretch back more than four decades to the primordial days of computing, when most machines were still the size of small dinosaurs and next to no one imagined they had any connection to children. Pioneer thinkers such as Seymour Papert dreamed they would be suitable for children, and time has proved the immense power of the personal computer as a learning tool.

Any nation’s most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children’s innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children’s machine designed for “learning learning.”

XO embodies the theories of constructionism first developed by MIT Media Lab Professor Seymour Papert in the 1960s, and later elaborated upon by Alan Kay, complemented by the principles articulated by Nicholas Negroponte in his book, Being Digital.

OLPC is not, at heart, a technology program, nor is the XO a product in any conventional sense of the word. OLPC is a non-profit organization providing a means to an end—an end that sees children in even the most remote regions of the globe being given the opportunity to tap into their own potential, to be exposed to a whole world of ideas, and to contribute to a more productive and saner world community.

If you mention Seth Godin, what comes to mind? How about “Purple Cow”, “Small is the New Big”, or even “The Dip”? Sound familiar? Seth is a bestselling author of these books and others not listed. He was the founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, which was acquired by Yahoo! in 1998. As if that weren’t enough, Godin is a reknowned speaker and founder of Squidoo.

What is Squidoo?

The following is posted on the Squidoo website:

Squidoo’s goal as a platform is to bring the power of recommendation to search. Squidoo’s goal as a co-op is to pay as much money as we can to our lensmasters and to charity. And Squidoo’s goal as a community is to have fun along the way, and meet new ideas and the people behind them.

Squidoo is quickly gaining popularity through the relative ease of creating a lens and, more importantly, because a well optimized Squidoo page is ranked higher on Google than any other articles on any other websites.

Squidoo has even created an interesting ecosystem for enterprising Internet entrepreneurs. For instance, individuals are monetizing their articles on Squidoo through participation in affiliate and ad revenue sharing programs. In addition, others have written an eBook about how to monetize your Squidoo (”Squidoo Secrets”).

If you haven’t visited Seth Godin’s latest venture, stop on by and see what the buzz is about. You may even want to build your own page on Squidoo. Also, be sure to check out Andrew Johnson’s interview with Seth Godin on Andrew’s Web Publishing Blog.

There’s quite a bit of buzz brewing about a new website that allows you to “own a piece” of the Internet. It is called Agloco that allows individual users to participate in the revenues.

I didn’t pay much attention to it the first time someone mentioned it to me. However, I’ve been hearing more and more people jump on board. Like Facebook, if I hear it enough times, it’s probably worth checking out.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was at a networking event catching up with old friends and making new ones.  You never know who you’re going to meet or what kind of interesting things you’ll find out.  Instead of keeping you in suspense, I’ll just say I caught up with my new friend, Joanne (Joey) Wan.

I met Joey last fall at an event she organized.  At the time, I already knew she was an amazing networker and events organizer.  However, little did I know she held the dubious title of Ms. Web 2.0 as nominated by Valleywag.com.  How did I find out?

When I ran into her this afternoon, we caught up and discussed her new role at GigaOm.  What was an innocent question became a funny story.  “So, how do you know Om Malik?”  It turns out the King and Queen of Web 2.0 tied the proverbial knot in business thanks to Valleywag’s “prestigious” award.

So, rather than let this story fade off into the sunset, I told Joey that I plan to revive her title and award until another can come along and “dethrone” her.  Congratulations Joey!  Read the full article here.

I recently read an article on Business 2.0 by Michael V. Copeland, “What’s next for the Internet”.  The article profiles Nova Spivack who is heading a stealth venture called Radar Networks.  Spivack’s company is planning to bring order to the World Wide Web (also known as semantic Web) and take our Internet experience to the next level (Web 3.0).

Spivack’s company isn’t the only one to tackle this problem.  Many start ups such as Metaweb Technologies and Powerset are aggressively pursuing this opportunity.  In fact, this disruptive technology has the potential to displace existing Internet titans such as Google and Yahoo.

Note: Spivack also happens to be the grandson of legendary management guru, Peter Drucker.

To read the full article, click here.

This one is old but it’s still really funny.

Thanks to Apple’s iPhone commercial, Tyson is now prime time.  I wonder if my sister-in-law’s Westie (short for West Highland Terrier) could learn this trick?

If you really like Tyson, visit his website at www.skateboardingbulldog.com.

by Brion Lau

Here’s a quick update to my post on Oct. 27th regarding the Yahoo! Talent Show.  The voting period will close tomorrow for the five finalists chosen.  Feel free to check out their videos and cast your vote.

If you haven’t been following Yahoo’s search for the “next web celeb” then you probably aren’t aware one of the celebrity judges is the famous Ask Ninja.  However, that’s another article for another day.

In the meantime, if you’re wondering who the host is, her name is Mayleen Ramey.  Feel free to check out her website for more details.

Enjoy!