I just attended this talk "Finding the next Google".  Great panel of entrepreneurs who now pretty much own their own venture capital firms. Peter Thiel co-founder of Paypal, Reid Hoffman founder of LinkedIn, Sean Parker co-founder of Plaxo and Napster and Facebook, and Matt Cohler VP of Facebook.  Top Lessons: It's all about distribution.  You must solve your distribution problem first for consumer internet applications. If you aren't embarrassed by your product launch, you waited too long to launch. Don't perfect your product before shipping.  Put it out in the market, find out who's using and respond to requested changes fast. In another VC talk this week Ron Conway said that VC's are still interested in funding more social networking sites and more video sharing sites.  Apparently the market is still huge and they expect there will be plenty of quality social networking sites that can co-exist with Myspace and Youtube being the ...

Proverbs 21: 21 "He who pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity [ a ] and honor." I love verses like these. One stereotype of the Bible is that it's a rule book designed to tell you what not to do. Verses like these instead remind me what I am supposed to say 'yes' to. In Stephen Covey's book "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" he calls it the 'burning yes'. Although Covey is coming at it from a time management perspective: I have to know what my 'burning yes' is because otherwise my schedule will get filled up with things I should have said 'no' to. Right now my 'burning yes' is Village the Game and the things I have to say 'no' to are often things that are worth doing be it taking classes, tutoring, or going on retreats with other Christians. From the Bible's perspective our 'burning yes' is righteousness and love, and sin is what we have to say 'no' too. And...

This is outright ingenious! Researchers at CMU have figured out how to turn tasks still difficult for computers into games for humans. They are creating a new concept called human computation, and they're getting it done by creating simple games playable over the internet that are pretty similar to games like Catchphrase or Taboo. I wonder if this has any application to identifying solutions to extreme poverty? http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143