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Tomorrow is a corporate holiday for just about everyone (July 4th weekend), and today is a slow day at work with most people already out of office. Crunch time for me though, and I will be at work tomorrow. Am I seeing patterns now? Hmm ..

This is a cross-post from my other for-own-use developer blog. I’m posting it here because people often ask me what I’m so busy with.

It’s been a while since my last post; I have been real busy. Anyway, just to quickly say this, I’ve made a change in direction in my development efforts.

I’ve said earlier that I am determined learn a new programming language this year because my brain is starting to rot, but have since decided a few months ago that it will not be Cocoa Touch, for various reasons: too niche (the emerging global mobile apps market is highly fragmented by Nokia, iPhone, Android, Crackberry and possibly Palm as a viable contender), and skills here only attacks a small piece of my larger effort, which my gut tells me it’s a task that could probably be farmed out and done cheaper/faster by outsourcing to a iPhone dev shop where Cocoa Touch is their core competency.

A mobile app that does not utilize any connectivity, nay, “intelligent” connectivity, is not much different from calc.exe on your WinXP desktop. It’s fine for a narrow and specific, uninteresting task. An interesting mobile app would tap the cloud for some form of intelligence. Why not leverage that mandatory data plan from AT&T for your iPhone?

When the time comes, if necessary (such as if the iPhone app will be an important part of my competitive advantage), then I’ll pick up Cocoa Touch myself. For now, I do not think that will be the case, thus I’m going to spend more time on laying the groundwork for the more important piece: the back-end, web 2.0 / cloud computing / SaaS piece. And as Microsoft knows, as Tim O’Reilly says - nobody with their right mind would bet against the Web! (Have you seen HTML5?)

The past month or two, I’ve tried real hard to squeeze time in to learn Python, Django and Google App Engine - all at the same time in parallel, not sequentially. Yes, I’m trying to rush - because I am impatient.
More after the jump »

• Amazon.com was started with the idea that they would make money by shipping physical products. Today’s Amazon makes money by building a market place where every link that take you to a product is in fact an ad (revenue share). They make more money, not by shipping goods, but by referring customers to other goods.
• In 2008, 3 billions apps where downloaded on the Internet, most on social network and mobiles. That’s 40-50 million daily active users
• Today < 5% are paid apps, but that's ok because numbers shows that paid apps are trending up
• Average app price people pay for is the price of an iTunes song, $0.99 - $2.99. There may be a threshold where people won’t pay
• Many people have call-waiting which cost them $3.99/month, but do they even use it once a month? But you don’t hesitate paying for it again because they want the convenience of having it. Users will pay for apps
• An app economy is emerging, with lots of little companies. There probably won’t be a big winners, but if you look at the aggregate, this could be a 1 billion revenue stream opportunity, perhaps a $10 billion market cap business.
• It’s opportunity is viable, real, out there, just won’t support a large company today. A real trend that will continue grow. As Facebook grows, as smartphone industry grows, there’s going to be a need for new revenue sources to support these companies & activities.
• Telcos: as voice rates continues to drop for telcos, flat-rate data plans begin to fill in these revenue gaps
• Facebooks of the world: ad won’t support the model, need app-based economy
• Take off your US-centric lens. People in other countries may not have iPhones but they do consume a lot of data apps
• AT&T’s of the world: walled-gardens are coming down, because they are seeing the revenue opportunity. They will build their own app stores and take their 30% margin on the apps
• As iPhone prices come down, AAPL will not be able to make money from hardware, they will increasingly need to rely on revenue from apps

The above is Ram Shriram’s technology trend prediction, from the 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends at the Churchill Club. I couldn’t find the transcripts from that 2-hour long debate, so yours truly had to hit the YouTube replay a few hundred times over to capture the above. Too good to not capture!

You can watch the entire thing here:

The idea, as promoted by the philosopher Daniel Dennett, is as follows: What is the most potent use of our brain? It is precisely the ability to project conjectures into the future and play the counterfactual game—”If I punch him in the nose, then he will punch me back right away, or, worse, call his lawyer in New York.” One of the advantages of doing so is that we can let our conjectures die in our stead. Used correctly and in place of more visceral reactions, the ability to project effectively frees us from immediate, first-order natural selection—as opposed to more primitive organisms that were vulnerable to death and only grew by the improvement in the gene pool through the selection of the best. In a way, projecting allows us to cheat evolution: it now takes place in our head, as a series of projections and counterfactual scenarios.

This ability to mentally play with conjectures, even if it frees us from the laws of evolution, is itself supposed to be the product of evolution—it is as if evolution has put us on a long leash whereas other animals live on the very short leash of immediate dependence on their environment. For Dennett, our brains are “anticipation machines”; for him the human mind and consciousness are emerging properties, those properties necessary for our accelerated development.

—excerpt from The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

So that’s why computer scientists run simulations on computers all day long!

The importance of thinking big, the big picture, scale, a product transcending products (a.k.a. a platform):

I’d much rather be the guy that does a platform that’s capable of running on multiple companies’ phones than just focusing on a single product.

A single product is going to have, eventually, limitations. Even if that was two products that’s going to have limitations. But if it’s a hundred products, now we’re getting somewhere, to the scale at which Google thinks people want to access information.

Proactively anticipating tectonic shifts in the landscape that would create a problem, and proactively attacking the problem now:

We look at it first from the scale perspective. The mission here is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and relevant. So the accessible part: think of a world in which you are somehow prevented from accessing the information you want. When I go to a hotel room and pay the $19.95 to get on the Internet and they have some firewall that doesn’t let me get to my Exchange server, it makes me berserk.

I look at things–and Google looks at things–in (terms of) how could the landscape change in such a way that consumers who want to access Google services can’t?

Full article here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10245994-93.html

Full post can be found here.

You know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night with a vivid dream? And you know how, if you don’t have a pencil and pad by the bed to write it down, it will be completely gone the next morning?Well, I had one of those dreams when I was 23. When I suddenly woke up, I was thinking: what if we could download the whole web, and just keep the links and… I grabbed a pen and started writing! Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming.

I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details and convincing myself it would work. Soon after, I told my advisor, Terry Winograd, it would take a couple of weeks to download the web — he nodded knowingly, fully aware it would take much longer but wise enough to not tell me. The optimism of youth is often underrated! Amazingly, I had no thought of building a search engine. The idea wasn’t even on the radar. But, much later we happened upon a better way of ranking webpages to make a really great search engine, and Google was born.When a really great dream shows up, grab it!

When I was here at Michigan, I had actually been taught how to make dreams real! I know it sounds funny, but that is what I learned in a summer camp converted into a training program called Leadershape. Their slogan is to have a “healthy disregard for the impossible”. That program encouraged me to pursue a crazy idea at the time: I wanted to build a personal rapid transit system on campus to replace the buses. It was a futuristic way of solving our transportation problem. I still think a lot about transportation — you never loose a dream, it just incubates as a hobby. Many things that people labor hard to do now, like cooking, cleaning, and driving will require much less human time in the future. That is, if we “have a healthy disregard for the impossible” and actually build new solutions.

I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges. That is what happened with Google. Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. How can that not get you excited? But we almost didn’t start Google because my co-founder Sergey and I were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program. You are probably on the right track if you feel like a sidewalk worm during a rainstorm! That is about how we felt after we maxed out three credit cards buying hard disks off the back of a truck. That was the first hardware for Google. Parents and friends: more credit cards always help. What is the one sentence summary of how you change the world? Always work hard on something uncomfortably exciting!

As a Ph.D. student, I actually had three projects I wanted to work on. Thank goodness my advisor said, “why don’t you work on the web for a while”. He gave me some seriously good advice because the web was really growing with people and activity, even in 1995! Technology and especially the internet can really help you be lazy. Lazy? What I mean is a group of three people can write software that millions can use and enjoy. Can three people answer the phone a million times a day? Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!

Playing For Change

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

From “Personal Renewal” by John Gardner, posted on PBS. It’s a long post, but full of gems:

“We tend to think of youth and the active middle years as the years of commitment. As you get a little older, you’re told you’ve earned the right to think about yourself. But that’s a deadly prescription! People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison.

Another significant ingredient in motivation is one’s attitude toward the future. Optimism is unfashionable today, particularly among intellectuals. Everyone makes fun of it. Someone said “Pessimists got that way by financing optimists.” But I am not pessimistic and I advise you not to be. As the fellow said, “I’d be a pessimist but it would never work.”

I can tell you that for renewal, a tough-minded optimism is best. The future is not shaped by people who don’t really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall,”

“You’ve known such people — feeling secretly defeated, maybe somewhat sour and cynical, or perhaps just vaguely dispirited. Or maybe they just ran so hard for so long that somewhere along the line they forgot what it was they were running for […] Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage.”

“We learn by accepting the commitments of life, by playing the roles that life hands us (not necessarily the roles we would have chosen). We learn by growing older, by suffering, by loving, by bearing with the things we can’t change, by taking risks.” 

More after the jump »

Excerpt from a book I was reading while on my flight yesterday, a little story about Warren Buffett a.k.a the oracle of Omaha:

Corporate culture is highly competitive. We need to know who is winning and why. The score is kept on Wall St. But neither of us is very good with numbers—in fact, quite the opposite. So we need someone who can take all that raw data and put it in a human context that even we can understand, absorb, and use.

Whoever can do that is our hero. All we really need is a few wise words to set us in the right direction. We are like tourists in a strange land, and we are looking for that scenic overlook, the place where we can pull off the road for a moment and get our bearings. All we need is the right point of view. After that, the rest falls in place.

If you want to understand the American economy as it moves into a new and increasingly global century, Warren Buffett’s point of view is the clearest and cleanest. And as the over fourteen thousand shareholders in his company, Berkshire Hathaway will attest, Buffett is very generous about sharing it.

These events are more like down-home county fairs than your typical proxy-filled corporate snooze-a-thons. Most of Berkshire’s subsidiary companies have booths set up selling their products at substantial shareholder discounts. There is even a not-to-be-missed barbecue. The main event is when Buffett, and his investing sidekick Charlie Munger, take center stage for six hours and answer any and all questions from the audience. These sessions are so open, honest, and informative that many parents have ponied up the almost $100,000 that a share of Berkshire Hathaway costs just so their kids can attend these meetings and see how the world of business works when it is done right.

Comparing his annual meetings to those of other companies, Buffett says, “Many annual meetings are a waste of time, both for shareholders and for management. Sometimes that is true because management is reluctant to open up on matters of business substance. More often a nonproductive session is the fault of the shareholder participants who are more concerned about their own moment onstage than they are about the affairs of the corporation .. Under such circumstances, the quality of the meeting deteriorates from year to year as the antics of those interested in themselves discourage attendance by those interested in the business.

The $100,000 “barrier-to-entry” makes sense, it serves as a waste-my-time-people filter.

“Berkshire meetings are a different story. The number of shareholders attending grows a bit each year and we have yet to experience a silly question or ego-inspired commentary.”

So as the ringmaster of this circus, how has Buffett managed to pull off such a long string of meetings that never go sour?

By very carefully listening to the stories contained in the questions he is being asked. When he responds, he responds with great good humor and not only with facts, but also with the emotions that surround them and make them matter. He puts things in a context that can be easily understood. He can do this because he is not trying to impress anyone. He isn’t trying to get you to see things his way and prove that he is right. He is just opening up his considerable store of experience and intellect and sharing it. That way, when you do naturally see things his way, the awareness arrives with a sense of discovery. You trust that discovery because you are the one who made it. You trust him for helping.

That is what heroes do. They open up complex stories, welcome you in, and make you feel at home. They do it by letting you see the world through the hero’s eyes.

Investing done right, with full transparency straight from the top.

I’m no money-expert like Buffett is, but even in my industry, within the technical circles, a knowledgeable-peer can always suss out the peer who isn’t as honest, sometimes using technical knowledge to take advantage of the less-knowledgeable. I prefer to do business honestly, and rightly. Doing business isn’t about screwing the other guy over (ignore this sentence if you are a used-car salesman)

Shai Agassi is a real genius—one of my rock stars that I’m just dying to meet. I’ve already got to meet the other big name in electric cars, Elon Musk from Tesla.

He has said before that he’s good at break big problems into smaller problems, solving the pieces, then aggregating the results. I’m not familiar with his work at SAP, but clearly he’s proved this with his divide-and-conquer approach to problem solving here. Computer scientists make some of the best problem solvers out there.

In this TED talk, Shai talks about a shift in thinking: viewing the electric car’s battery a discrete unit that’s interchangeable, vs. today’s mentality where the car is one with the fuel tank (who would buy a car without a fuel tank, or vice versa?)

I’ve previously blogged about unbundling production from delivery before with examples of Amazon.com and it’s IT infrastructure, mobile phones as a poverty buster, and this is kind of like that, but with other concepts tied in - e.g. subsidized pricing (e.g. like how cell phones are subsidized by carriers).

The analogy Elon Musk uses (I can’t find where he said this, but I swear I remember him saying this), is like air travel today. I can fly to Europe from California for $500. But that’s because I’m not the first person to ever fly on that plane, nor will I be the last; the same air plane gets reused over and over for many flights. The point here is that the owner of the plane doesn’t have to recoup the cost of the plane with a single flight, it is done over a period of time. The higher the utilization rate, the faster they recoup the investment.

That’s why Elon’s SpaceX goal of building a reusable rocket is so revolutionary (most people don’t realize this) and is an important step for man-kind. Imagine being able to fly to the moon or other planets in our solar system for the price of a flight ticket?

Back to Better Place. In Shai’s talk, he shows how battery for electric cars follow a Moore’s law-like curve; battery prices will drop as its technology increases. By unbundling the ownership of the car and the battery, you can increase the utilization rate per battery which result in people owning these cars having access to the latest and most efficient battery at that time (vs. someone stuck with the same battery for the lifespan of the car). Small but important point.

Shai’s a very cool guy who is literally, changing the world. I’m a big fan.

Check out his TED talk if you haven’t already!

I have been a longtime fan of Tina Seelig, and her talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I was 20″ that she originally gave to some West Point grads. The podcast is here, a high-level summary here. I’m excited to find out today that she’s now making that into a book! (preview available) SIGN ME UP!  I’m a big fan of that book - and _highly_ recommend it to anyone Go Tina!

Browse Inside this bookGet this for your site

Wow. If this guy ever ran for President, I would vote for him. You have to watch him to believe. Full transcript on TechCrunch.

On mobile:

They’re probably the most important of all. Today, everyone here in the audience has a mobile phone. It’s the last thing you would leave anywhere, head phone, has a GPS, knows where it is. The powerful mobile phones have powerful browsers. They have cameras, as we’ve discussed before. You can do a lot with them. Fast forward a few years from now with the content and the capability of that with a new generation of applications. We expect eventually that the important of uses of the Internet will be on mobile phones. Mobile phone usage is growing faster than personal computers. There are many more of them, on the order of 4 billion in the world. In our lifetime, the majority of people, at least 5 billion, maybe 5 1/2 billion will have mobile phones.

The good news is that we work in a technology where prices are improving. Prices — it’s a constant price reduction business. I have no idea, by the way, how these hard earned companies make any money at all. Prices are so low now. But the corollary benefit is the explosion in digital devices where people never could have imagined having access to these things 10 or 20 years ago, the obvious example being in the gaming industry where the game devices are as powerful as the personal computers today. The real story is going to be on the mobile phones to get back to that. Everyone has a mobile phone. And even in the third world, and that’s the worst example, the Israel divide, you can build networks where people use SMS which are these short messages, the 160 character messages to actually do searches and queries, and we do that in those markets. And if you’re a farmer who’s depending on the price, the weather forecast, that query may determine whether you go bankrupt or not –

There are on the order of 250 million users in China of the Internet which is more than the number of users that we have in the United States today. And that’s an important milestone. And they have many, many hundreds of millions to go. There are about 500 million mobile phone users in China.

On technology:

All of those things are uniquely human and uniquely special. The technology has made us closer together. It has also made us more stressed. If you look at the history of technology over a couple hundred years, it’s all about time compression and making the globe smaller. It’s had positive effects, all the ones that we know. So we’re much less likely to have the kind of terrible misunderstandings that led to World War I, for example. Think about it in the Cuban missile crisis. There was literally a red phone that they actually installed over miscommunication over a nuclear weapon. And it was one that one submarine in the Cuban missile crisis that they couldn’t find, and they were worried was about to launch a nuclear weapon. Think about the damage that that would have done to humanity. Today, that’s not going to happen because of, among other things, cell phones. So we benefit from this inter-connectiveness. We have to learn as a society what it means to be interconnected all the time. It means, for example, that not everything is as important as everything else. Since I have access to every, every crisis in the world because it’s always blaring at me on cable television, that doesn’t mean I have to worry about every one of them. This is also known as knowing where the off button is.

On the United States:

Science and education funding and essentially to move the ball forward. One of the things about economics is everyone assumes the economics are static. Real wealth is created by businesses, not by financial engineering. And by businesses that build new products that solve new problems. In American jobs, and this is primarily in American — obviously American stimulus package — need to be high paying for a reason. We’re losing out to low-cost manufacturing economies when we have the best scientists, the best innovators, the best educational system, and it should pay off. And what it pays off is innovation, new products that pay well.

The innovation — the model that we have about faculty, graduate students, all the things that we talk about is — many countries are trying. It takes 50 years to replicate that, and maybe a different culture. So we remain, we America, remain by far the place of choice for education, in particular higher education.

Eric Schmidt:Unemployment is up. We’re not at the bottom here. The quicker we can get through this, the quicker we can get to the other side. I do believe that the recovery, when it occurs, will be led by the kind of businesses that we’re highlighting new, ones that solve a new problem. I, for example, believe that green energy, sort of rebuilding the energy infrastructure of America, is a great project. It’s a great project for this president who can then use that to reduce our dependence upon foreign oil, increase American jobs –[applause] and build a whole set of export oriented industries. And, oh, by the way, help materially solve the climate change issue which is very serious.

Charlie Rose:So we’ll come through this?

Eric Schmidt:Absolutely. One of the things is if you have a choice between being in America and being in the other countries in a global slowdown, you’d much rather be here, although it’s more painful, you’ll get out faster.[applause]

Padmasree Warrior (@padmasree), Cisco’s CTO and until recently, one of the top candidates for America’s CTO position was recently interviewed on Technology Review. I recently watched her interview on Web 2.0 expo and could certainly tell that this is someone who is a real visionary, certainly someone to pay attention to. Some clips from her interview from MIT’s interview below.

TR: But how does more broadband installation boost the economy, beyond creating one-off construction jobs?

PW: There are many areas we can look at, such as modernizing health care with health-presence solutions–like a doctor from a remote area interacting with a patient who might not otherwise have access–and making the energy grid more efficient with smart-grid technologies. Collaboration, virtual networking, and visual communications will be the e-businesses of the next decade, and this will drive productivity. To do all of that, we need to have broadband connectivity nationwide.

Given my interest in using technology to help people (health care an obvious application), I thought this point was interesting. On a related note, there’s a new stimulus bill that mandates MDs to now electronic-ize all patient data, and most doctors don’t know how to navigate these techie waters.

To a techie, it’s quite amazing to see how health care is so .. for lack of a better word, backwards. Systems that don’t talk to each other creating separate data silos (in Web 2.0, data overlayed with other data creates even more richer data), programs written in MS-DOS (seriously?), and they still use the fax to transmit data (have you heard of this thing called the Internet?)

One of the ways entrepreneurs look for opportunities is to ask themselves, “What industry has not seen any innovation breakthroughs in a long time?” Paypal came about because the financial industry have remained stagnant for a long time prior to that. Health care is another area. And now with the stimulus/mandate in America .. it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing some creative software startups tackling this problem.

Tom Siebel (of Siebel Systems) has identified health care as one of the worlds largest looming problems, and will present an opportunity for not just good but GREAT companies to capitalize on.

Wow I didn’t know this, but if you are an iPhone owner, making your own ring tones is really easy. I balk at ring tone prices for feature phones, which I think is a rip off and usually find ways to hack my own .. for the sake of bucking the system. Ok, are you ready for the instructions?

Step 1: If the audio piece you want as your ring tone is not already a file with an .m4r extension, (e.g. if you have an mp3), then use whatever free sound editor to clip the section you want and convert it into an .m4r file.

Step 2: Plug your iPhone to your computer, fire up iTunes, then drag ‘n drop the file onto iTunes.

Step 3: (that’s it, there isn’t anymore steps)

Now .. if it was this easy to make ring tones for all phones, mobile ring tones would probably ceast to be the #1 source of data revenue for mobile operators.

p.s. if you follow TED (which no cool person does not), you’ll be pleased to know that they have their classic intro music as a ring tone .. all ready to go for iPhones in an M4R file. Interview with the piece’s composer.

Tom Siebel (from fame of Siebel Systems) identifies the next opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Using surfing as an anology, these are the waves in the horizon—you have to paddle hard and fast now before it reaches you. The IT wave has already floated us far. And although IT will still play a large role in solving these problems, these are the broader world problems that need to be solved (technology is just the conduit for the solution).

The big problems are .. *drumroll*:

• food
• water
• healthcare
• energy

Counterintuitively for most technologists, these are all “lower in the stack” type problems. Why? Because more people are living longer/child mortality rates improving (thanks to advances in health care), hence an aging population - with inadequate health care infrastructure, especially in China.

Here are some notes from the Mark Logic CEO’s blog (that I mostly cut-and-pasted here, thanks to Dave Kellogg for actually transcribing):

• He (Tom Siebel) did a long riff contrasting the period from 1980 to 2000 with what he anticipates in the period from 2010 to 2030.

• The 1980 to 2000 period was a paradise of government policies, efficient capital markets, and a free flow of capital to information technology that ultimately created a $1T information technology industry.

• IT growth was 17% CAGR from 1980 to 2000. From 2000 it grows, he says, with GDP at a rate more like 3%. “The party here is over.”

• “It’s done. Tell me the next step that’s a replacement technology. Right now it’s all bells and whistles.”

• The big picture from 2010 to 2030, he says, is (1) increased government regulation, (2) exponential population growth, (3) aging population, (4) increased demand for healthcare (of which 85% of an individual’s lifetime consumption is spent in the last year of life), and (5) energy scarcity.

• It took from 8000 BC to 1750 AD to grow the world population to 1B. In 2008, it’s 6.5B. In 2028 it will be 9B. (Says the guy next to me: “and they’re all going to need to buy things — how is this bad?”)

• These trends make for the following opportunities: (1) food, (2) water, (3) energy, and (4) healthcare.

• Per-capita energy population is increasing exponential. So if you combine exponential population growth with exponential per-capita energy consumption, you end up with energy demand that is — pardon the expression — exponential squared.

• He then discussed the concept of peak oil, an idea that I’d heard of but that I hadn’t known was postulated in the 1950s by an engineer at Shell. By 2020/2030, says Siebel, this gets to be a real problem.

• He then said we have two choices: drill / drill / drill or invent / invent / invent.

• He then discussed two initiatives he’s working on: (1) an Energy-Free Home Challenge that is soon to be formally announced, and (2) a new company called C3 that he was involved in founding.

• The Energy-Free Home Challenge is a contest with $20M in prizes paid for by the Siebel Foundation (2007 annual report here). The goal is to find a way to build houses that consume net zero energy at the end of a year, built with no more expense than traditional construction methods.

• C3 (which I think is related to the acronym carbon-conscious consumer) is a new company, run by Siebel veteran Pat House, that will make enterprise software to help companies manage their carbon footprint. The company started by calling together a panel of 29 experts during the summer of 2008. “Deliberations were concluded 12/08.” C3 was founded last month, in 1/09. Operations will begin in 2/09. The product spec will be completed by summer 09. And — if I heard correctly — they will have demonstrable product one quarter later in fall 09. (And one heck of a development team if they can actually build a product in a quarter.)

• C3’s goal is to help companies “monitor, mitigate, and monetize” their carbon footprint. I tried for about 15 minutes to find a website for the firm and failed. If you find one, let me know via a comment and I’ll link it here.

• Almost to the point of comedy Siebel strained to not position C3 as an information technology company, despite the fact that it will sell enterprise software. “C3 is an energy tech company.” “IT is incidental to C3.” “C3 will not have an IT rate of growth.” (How quickly they turn.)

Check the entire podcast for the entire story with stats.

Tom Siebel - Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace

Launch early and launch often! Nuff said .. from Google’s wonder girl.

Everyone has the right to invent and innovate, and to make decisions to buy things without judgment, and if you can free yourself from a life of poverty in doing so, that’s a beautiful thing. “Freedom is just another word for entrepreneurship.” I believe in that.

<3 that last paragraph. From Wokai’s blog (check it out, for the larger context).

This is a shameless plug for a friend of mine who is the VP of Finance at this startup.

StreetStrider! Calling for investors looking to pour at least $30K. In true bootstrap-fashion, preferably investors that can bring something to the table that’s more than just money (but just money is ok too!)

As for the product? This clip says it all.

After World War II, Pastor Martin Niemöller voiced several variants of the following sentiments in his public speeches:

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for the Jews, I remained silent; I was not a Jew.

When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

From the Civil Liberties Examiner, via Digg.

Just in case you’re looking for a problem to solve, real quickly - here’s the current list of world’s top problems:

• Climate Change
• Communicable Diseases
• Conflicts
• Education
• Financial Instability
• Governance and Corruption
• Malnutrition and Hunger
• Population: Migration
• Sanitation and Water
• Subsidies and Trade Barriers

Take your pick!

From Bjorn Lomborg: Our priorities for saving the world

Next Page →

• Change The World Or Die Trying

  Time is the essence of life. It is something we all share. Each of us has a limited amount. How we use our time is the guiding force of our lives. How we spend our time tells other people who we are. We define ourselves by our use of time. We are what we do!

• Quote Of The Moment

  Extraordinary determination: Real leaders are ordinary people with extraordinary determination.
  
  The most valuable asset: The most valuable asset is the willingness to persist longer than others.
  
  —Shamelessly lifted from my high school friend's blog post :P
  
  

  Twitter Updates

• FriendFeed / What I'm Reading

  • Want to get funding? It’s all about research | VentureBeat
  • The Startup Entrepreneur's Guide To Risk Management
  • RT @TechCrunch How to Cross the Digital Divide, Rwanda-Style http://bit.ly/BytMe
  • Free Criticism, Science After Data, and Airport Books - Anil Dash
  • Chris Anderson: Not Just Info Wants to Be Free - BusinessWeek
  • The Summer of the Superphone
  • RE: @dannyroa Hi Danny, cool stuff .. I think you're the first like-minded person that I can actually thank Twitter for!… http://disq.us/t3x
  • @dannyroa Thanks for reaching out :) Like your blog. Have you tried using Facebook Connect on GAE? I'm learning Python+Django+GAE altogether
  • Yelp Launches Facebook Connect
  • SF Business Times: CrunchPad Inc. Formed With 14 Employees In Singapore, Press Event End Of July « Crunchpad Fans

• Wokai: Non-profit China Microfinance

  • The Wokai Blog is Moving!
  • Asian Film Festival comes to New York!
  • Wokai’s very own New York debut
  • Wokai - Blogging for a Cause
  • What's the best way to CONNECT contributors and entrepreneurs????
  • Wokai's QUEST to find our users
  • ARDY's Training Trip
  • The Financial Crisis and the Microcredit industry in brief; Globally, in China and our Field Partners:
  • Wokai at NYU Sensations 2009
  • An Exciting Announcement - Wokai's New York Launch Event!

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