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.
February 22nd, 2012 § § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
this is really amazing document. at first i meant to quote bits and pieces, but there’s just too many. so i will rather summarize high level takeaways without specific connections to each other:
- to paraphrase my great teacher: “learn enough strategy to be able to lead like this” – specially first time founders/ceos face great challenges trying to figure out what ‘leading’ and ‘strategy’ really mean, and separating the operational hat from the insightful one. in this letter, we can see just how much is possible to infere from a handfull of data – internet was 3 years old at that point, and Bill was able to predict accurately next 15. Strive to become a business thinker like him.
- reading this letter feels like we have not entirely left the era it describes. IP telephony still doesn’t work as good as landlines, streaming media is slowly becoming standardized, 3d is hoping to have a comeback, cross-web collaboration is still painful. i’d say we are in the final years of the first version of the internet.
- mobile and social currently seem to be in the same explosive growth stage as internet was back then. if they actually prove to be as transformative for the society as the web was, i’m not very optimistic. as Bill noted in this memo, internet was built heavily on open values. the mobile is being built based on values of telcos and apple, and social networking is taking us back to the primeval societies, where everyone knows everything about everyone else. next era might bring de-urbanization of our minds.
- i love this site – Letters of note – absolutely best way to learn is by observing great people doing / explaining what they’ve learned.
February 26th, 2011 § Comments Off on Double Recall § permalink
Image by Rev. Voodoo via Flickr
I’m really struggling with sorting out email recently. I think I have a strategy now, just need someone to build a plugin, or tell me it exists already. Here’s what it should do:
Mail client plugin that is constantly building whitelist and blacklist of senders by automatically replying to every new sender with a very kind note asking her to just reply so that we verify she’s human. this happens just once and then the rest of the communication is normal forever.
… Preferably for Google Apps. 😉
