I totally agree with Frank Bruni’s account of the Facebook’s IPO. It seems to me that if the current price of FB is pretty close to the offering price, then the bankers were doing their job. I mean, as I see it, their job is to open the stock at a price that’s as close as possible to it’s true pric...
I would love to see this trend accelerate: > “The five-year-old [Innovation, Creativity and Entrepreneurship] program, [Wake Forest University’s] most popular minor, requires students to learn the practical aspects of starting a business. It is a sign of change in liberal-arts colleges, which are...
I have often been heard to say: “Ideas are Cheap”, by which I mean to say that my admiration goes more with the implementation, the making real and tangible, of an idea than the idea itself. It’s much easier to come up with something that would be cool and useful (“A solar powered ambulance”, “a ret...
I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about social networks in preparation for the 2012 edition of my Brandeis University Course, “Web and Social Applications“. This morning I was preparing lecture notes for “Current Issues In Social Networks”....
Americans Elect got Tom Friedman to endorse their effort to get a third party presidential ballot in November. He wrote about it and convinced me too that it was a good idea. A month or two ago I started having misgivings and now, it seems like things are really turning sour for Americans Elect. A...
On Facebook you may see something like “George Harrison is watching a video on Socialcam” followed by a video. Beware because if you watch that video by clicking on it, ALL your friends will now see that you watched it too. On two occasions in the last few weeks, some pretty embarassing videos were watched by otherwise highly respectable people. Funny.
A SPANISH Teacher was explaining to her class that in Spanish, unlike English, nouns are designated as either masculine or feminine. ‘House’ for instance, is feminine: ‘la casa.’ ‘Pencil,’ however, is masculine: ‘el lapiz.’ A student asked, ‘What gender is ‘computer’?’ Instead of giving the answer...
This book looks good: “Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the pitfalls that can sink a startup”. I came across it in the “Startup Lessons Learned” Blog, which may be the best blog about leann startups. This excerpt talks about a common scenario with startups, where the founders assume th...
If you are a theatre fan I strongly recommend a play I just saw last night. It’s called “Luck of the Irish”. From a review on Boston.com: > “… It’s one of numerous instances in Greenidge’s superb, beautif...
Listen, I love the New York Times. I read it cover to cover (or pixel to pixel) every day and have it delivered in dead-tree format to my doorstep each morning. But so often I come across an awkward sentence which I have to read and re-read several times to understand. I’ve been noticing this ...
I love this article. It’s by an actual authortalking about whether it matters if a reader reads a book through to the very end. He starts with the basics, claiming that serious (‘mature‘) readers don’t feel self-imposed pressure to read a book to its very last syll...
A provocatively titled article (Why Youth Has an Advantage In Innovation) argues that to innovate you have to be an omnivorous and promiscuous consumer of new stuff. Try this li...