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

I presented to the Stanford Association for Computing Machinery yesterday, and it went incredibly well! I shared with them about Village the Game and all the technical challenges we must face. It was really well received and the audience asked a lot of great questions. I wish I could remember all the questions and put them into an FAQ post. There's some potential for turning some of the tech work into senior projects. We'll see where things lead. :) Here's a link to the Powerpoint slides from yesterday: HTML -> http://acm.stanford.edu/presentations/1_26_07/village_game_stanford_acm_1_26_07.html PPT -> http://acm.stanford.edu/presentations/1_26_07/village_game_stanford_acm_1_26_07.ppt

Right now, Congress has an incredible opportunity to continue saving millions of lives in the world's poorest countries by fully funding the fight against global AIDS and extreme poverty. The last Congress left nine critical spending bills unfinished and now the new Congress is left with the hard work of deciding our budget for 2007. They're facing tough decisions and at stake is $1 billion vital to continuing to provide clean water, education and life-saving medicines to people in Africa and the world's poorest countries. There are few places in the U.S. budget where dollars translate so directly into lives saved. Without this funding, 350,000 people will not receive life-saving AIDS medicines, nearly 1 million anti-malaria bednets will not be distributed and 120,000 people will not receive treatment for tuberculosis. As a member of the ONE Campaign, I encourage Congress to protect this funding and ensure America's continued commitment to the fight against extreme...

I got this for Christmas and learned an amazing amount about the last 50 years of global warfare and how the AK-47 has "democratized" warfare. They're so cheap nearly anyone can afford them so poor guerillas can fight hi tech behemoths causing a lot of drawn out wars with no real winning going on. And crazy enough, Kalashnikov the inventor is still alive figuring how to make money free market style since he never did under his motherland's communist regime.

Education Graduated May 2001 with B.S. in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering, Baltimore, Maryland 21218. New York Film Academy. Completed One Month intensive course on acting for film. Burbank, CA. March 2006. Leadership Experience (1) Founded and run VillagetheGame.com to immerse gamers in the the world of social enterprise. April 2006 - Present. (2) Recruited geek friends to help me build a customized PC for blind friend with profound motion and sensation deficits. November 2002 – May 2005; (3) Lead and participated in a men's Bible study to help fellow Christians set and acheive their spiritual goals. March 2002 – May 2005.; (4) Organized games of Cashflow to help friends and family better understand investing. July 2004 – March 2005. (5) Project Manager, Web Developer, Students Sharing Coalition, Sept 1997 - 2000 (5.1) Founded and directed high school group to address labor rights of developing nations. (5.2) Wrote successful grant...