September 3rd, 2012 § Comments Off on cynical reblog: Celebrating Women Entrepreneurs! § permalink
i whole-heartedly agree that this particular gender inequality should be fixed in the future, but are all women really so fond of wearing knee-long dresses that they can be the only representative of the ‘business dress’ ?
This weekend, we celebrate women entrepreneurs for all their hard work! By Angie Chang (Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief, Women 2.0) In the past 15 years, women-owned businesses grew by 54% – there are more women entrepreneurs than ever. The 8.3 million women-owned businesses in the United States account for nearly 30% of U.S. businesses!
via: www.women2.com
August 25th, 2012 § § permalink
Planet example (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
So, everyone is talking about a balloon accident lately, but my Blogspire sent me a version of the report that blew my mind – hungarian project that maps all emergency events on the planet, from major traffic accidents to fly-by-objects.
Here is an example:
EDIS Number: VI-20120823-36303-SVN Date / time: 23/08/2012 14:30:44 [UTC] Event: Vehicle Accident Area: Europe Country: Slovenia State/County: Capital City Location: [About 6 miles south of Ljubljana] Number of Deads: 4 person(s) Number of Injured: 28 person(s) Number of Infected: N/A Number of Missing: N/A Number of Affected:…
via: hisz.rsoe.hu
and they have another project, mapping all grobal warming events.
Both of them are a great addition to a growing list of real-time global dashboards of differenti aspects of the Planet. I’ve been collecting them for a while now, and it seems it’s time to create a dedicated page for them.
Please feel free to submit any dashboard you know of that I’ve missed in the comments.
August 17th, 2012 § § permalink
We live in amazing times – in a couple of years, we will have digitized all books every published (that survived), and we will be able to apply machine learning to the past. It will spur a whole new era of historiography.
#linguistics With millions of books scanned and digitized by Google, a new type of linguistic analysis has become possible – as people are able to delve into hundreds of years and millions of books’ worth of data.
via: io9.com
… that the research has been done by a fellow Slovenian is not a coincidence – lots of talent over here 😉
June 2nd, 2012 § Comments Off on startups, creatives and bankers § permalink
I saw this poster for Brooklyn Northside Festival:
… I was as surprised to see ‘entrepreneurship‘ there as the designer who had to find a way to put it there. It seems we are merging with Arts and creative industries, which I believe is an underestimated revolution. Of course SXSW and TED did that years ago, of course Wired knew all along, but Brooklyn Northside?
don’t get me wrong, I think that’s great. I think entrepreneurs really are rock stars of this age/generation, I think it’s up to us to solve big problems that this Planet is facing, and leave it to our kids in a better shape. I think we are looking to complete the capitalism’s promise, and upgrading it with what we’ve learned from globalization and new age.
And I think that we need to join forces with Arts and Creatives and Everyone else, to make this happen, because if we are to replace a broken and unfair economic system, we have to breathe the same air. Financial industry increasingly feels like new age bureaucracy, pushing pieces of paper around, detached from reality. It won’t survive the century.
A capitalism’s social pyramid (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Related articles
June 1st, 2012 § § permalink
Ólafur_Ragnar_Grímsson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Business Insider has a great interview with Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who has been President of Iceland since 1996, and announced last month he would be running for a fifth term.
It is an incredible read, because he is obviously very smart and very ethical person, a rare gift for politician these days. I wish everyone in Slovenia read this and adjust their expectations on how a public leader should behave, react, lead. He makes several super-insightful points, that clearly come from a lot of experience and thought.
For instance, about the importance of the banking sector:
As everybody knows now, we did not pump public money into the failed banks. We treated them like private companies that went bankrupt, and we let them fail. Some people say we did it because we didn’t have any other option, there is clearly something in that argument, but it does not change the fact that it turned out to be a wise move or whatever reason. Whereas in many other countries, the prevailing orthodoxy is you pump public money into banks and you make taxpayers responsible for the banks in the long run, and somehow treat the banks as if they are holier institutions in the economy than manufacturing companies, commercial companies, IT companies, or whatever.
…
Capitalistic financial markets can exist in many other parts of the world, even without democracy. So in my opinion, Europe is and should be more about democracy than about financial markets. Based with this choice, it was in the end, clear that I had to choose democracy.
… and one positive story on journalism – i wish more media aspired to be this fair when they are judgmental:
One has to hand it to the editorial board of The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, that they supported Iceland’s case all along. And if The Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal, who have never been special friends of Iceland, saw through this argument by the British and the Dutch government, why on earth didn’t the other European governments do so?
… and a match point for creative industries (which includes startups btw):
the Icelandic banks, like all modern big banks in Europe and America and all the other parts of the world, are no longer banks in the old-fashioned way. They have become high-tech companies. High-ranked engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists, programmers and so on and so forth. And their success depends largely on how successful they are in hiring people with this education and capability, not necessarily those trained in business schools or finance, but in engineering, mathematics, computer science and so on.
…
So the lesson from this is: if you want your economy to excel in the 21st century, for the IT, information-based high-tech sectors, a big banking sector, even a very successful banking system, is bad news for your economy.
… about the inherent problem of all ‘ecosystems’ – clubbing
And I said to myself — I know it’s a mistake now — in early 2007, if all the credit agencies are giving the Icelandic banks a clean bill of health, these pillars of European banking are doing integral business with the Icelandic banks, these critical voices are not really onto what’s happening.
… and an example of true collaboration, going on without the media really noticing it…
Fortunately, during this time when there was very little attention to the Arctic, the eight Arctic countries were able peacefully, almost off the radar, to develop co-operation within the Arctic Council, and to consolidate the peaceful and constructive dialogue among Russia, the United States, Canada, and the five Nordic countries.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-iceland-2012-4
May 31st, 2012 § Comments Off on programming the web. this time for real. repeat after me: ifttt… § permalink
ifttt is like programming language of the internet
it’s what bash and perl were for unix,
it’s what ubiquity was for browser
it’s like pipemania and the incredible machine all over again…
San Francisco-based startup ifttt (If This Then That) has built a framework that lets you harness the full potential of the Internet and your web-connected devices. By “listening” to various channels (weather, stock prices, RSS feeds, SMS messages, and many more) ifttt can carry out actions when certain criteria are met.
via: www.businessinsider.com
May 26th, 2012 § Comments Off on White House taps private sector to help feed world’s hungry § permalink
White House taps private sector to help feed world’s hungry By Christopher Doering, Gannett Comments WASHINGTON – President Obama vowed Friday to accelerate efforts to relieve hunger and malnutrition in Africa and unveiled as part of his plan a $3 billion commitment from multinational companies to make it easier for small farmers to grow their…
via: www.usatoday.com
this is a hard topic. here’s why:
- they are trying to raise $3B, which is arguably a lot of money. however…
- semi-random college startup just IPO‘d at $104B market cap, Apple has $10B cash reserves, Microsoft $10B cash reserves …
- also, USA yearly defense budget is over $500B, the new fancy UK aircraft carrier will cost $12B, war in Afganistan cost $500B so far.
- … and in the end, the hard problem is not cash to buy food, but how to actually distribute it in the end. if they have a good plan for that, the cash should be easier to find.
May 25th, 2012 § Comments Off on #1 natural limit of web economy? Land! § permalink
Geeks live their lives peacefully in the online world most of the time, but every now and then reality hits us on our heads – this article beautifully outlines how old-fashioned housing legislation in silicon valley is limiting the ability of online business to grow.
THE financial press went ape this week over the highly anticipated IPO of one Facebook, the Harvard social network turned $100 billion phenomenon. Facebook’s soaring valuation has focused attention on a Silicon Valley that is once again booming, and it has led many to wonder whether social networking isn’t inflating into yet another tech bubble.
via: www.economist.com
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
May 23rd, 2012 § § permalink
iceland (Photo credit: osmium)
Iceland has a unique opportunity to lead the world by defining a Internet Enterprise Zone, Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures defined this term to me while he was in Iceland. What do we mean by this IEZ? We mean a Policy framework focused on allowing innovation in the Internet space.
via: blog.startupiceland.com
I recently visited Iceland (again) and had a privilege to meet some of young entrepreneurs there. The amount of startups and interest in
entrepreneurship is amazing, specially if you consider that the whole country is the size of Ljubljana, Slovenia Capital.
The locals told me that the financial crisis hit everyday people pretty badly, specially because they actually weren’t doing anything wrong –
normal people were as scrappy as you’d expect from a scandinavian. They have also been very resourceful throughout history, probably a result of
harsh weather and soil conditions.
Oh, and every citizen has Facebook profile, which makes them super efficient at forming a new constitution. The rest of us should observe and learn.
May 21st, 2012 § Comments Off on and the geeks shall change the world… of politics § permalink
Springfield, Illinois, USA. Barack Obama, his wife Michelle, and daughters. “The Future First Family Waves. Senator Obama’s family was on hand for the announcement, and he invited them on stage to wave to the crowd before he began his speech.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Everyone around the world remembers Obama‘s superb grassroots campaign nostalgically, knowing that something so organized won’t happen anywhere else anytime soon.
Well, now at least we are getting a proper campaign management system:
Joe Green and Jim Gilliam, the founders of a new software platform called NationBuilder, envision a world where any campaign — from local school board to issue-based protest movement, without regard to ideology — could access the same versatile, inexpensive suite of software and instantly have at its fingertips the ability to connect with voters and donors online, a capacity that was supposed to reshape American politics in the age of the Internet, but has yet to be fully realized.
Via The Atlantic
next step? NationDashboard.
