The Conversation is on Facebook, Geeks!

July 20, 2009

I’m not an engineer, so my life is made up of individual datapoints, not formal tests. But last night I posted a link to a NY Times article on sub-prime mortages and loan modification scams to Twitter, so my friends there would see it. This morning, I awoke to six or seven email notifications on […]

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What InterSolar Told Me About the US

July 16, 2009

I walked the floor of InterSolar, the big solar trade show show in San Francisco yesterday. It was full of huge booths, the kind that used to belong to semi-conductor companies ten years ago. Clearly there’s an enlarging market for solar, and I saw solar collectors, including Solyndra’s interesting spherical collectors, sun tracking mechanisms, mountings, […]

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Is Social Media a Waste of Time?

July 15, 2009

No way. Social media has given me a platform on which to share my knowledge of things I care deeply about. Health care and the environment are two of those, and still another is the current economic crisis and how it is affecting me and my world. Without social media, I’d be in a far […]

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To Change Education, Change its Funding

July 13, 2009

How we fund schools determines how we learn, and the funding mechanism is way out of date. This guet post by a long-time friend of mine, Ted Kraver, who has been an advocate for educational transformation for twenty years, suggests a legislative strategy to modernize K-12 education. You can contact him directly using the information […]

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LiveBlogging #CrunchUp for the Folks at Home

July 10, 2009

There’s no way not to love Ron Conway’s experience. Here at Crunchup, he’s talking about the startups he has invested in with John Borthwick from BetaWorks, Steve Gillmor, and Mike Arrington. He has made two fabulous points so far. The first is very general, but tells the story of the difference between Silicon Valley and […]

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Legal Ramifications of Social Media in Enterprise 2.0

July 9, 2009

We all know social media is difficult to “control,” from a central corporate location. It has gone way beyond the marketing department, where it started as a means of listening to the customer and responding with carefully crafted “messages,” into a free-for-all in which digital natives come in to corporations with expectations about what they […]

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What is Necessary for Sustainability in Business?

July 6, 2009

Information. Sustainability initiatives can’t succeed unless you know where you are starting out, what you are doing, and where you are going. Especially if the Obama Administration’s cap-and-trade bill becomes law, which seems likely, companies will need good raw data, because that information will be translated into dollars on the carbon market. If you were […]

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Are There Economies of Scale in Medicine?

June 27, 2009

I’ve been listening avidly to all the different points of view about health care reform, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that almost anything is better than what we have. On Bloomberg the other day, I heard a call for a systemic approach to the practice of medicine from Dr. Eliot Fisher, Director […]

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A Different Kind of Crowdsourced Design

June 19, 2009

In November, we’ll be hosting the Fourth Annual Arizona Entrepreneurship Conference, with a roster of great participants, cool networking opportunities, and even good food. But a web site that doesn’t brand the conference or do it justice. I put it up last year i a hurry, and I looked at it this year and hated […]

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Flow and Wellness for Facebook and Twitter

June 15, 2009

There is brilliance in the wisdom of ancients. Especially in India, I’ve found information that guides my life in the 21st century world of the Internet. Last January, I was lucky enough to meet a Sanskrit scholar in Vrindavan, a town between Delhi and Agra. He is part of the Jiva Institute, an organization I’ve […]

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