After getting burned for at least the 3rd time on business deals with friends,  I've been looking into how to invest intelligently outside of the saturated stock market.  Here's a quick summary of sites I've found for investing in debt or equity or some other type of financial instrument related to startups. Investment Portals Prosper.com -  peer to peer lending. It lets you invest unsecured loans I believe with 3 and 5 year terms.  Prosper clearly labels the risk level for each loan and the purpose of the loan. needs docs to prove bank account.  Its to offer debt with no collateral.   I’m just getting an account established here.   YieldStreet.com - only accredited investors. RealtyShares.com - only accredited investors. Fundrise.com - This is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) that you can join online. I have $1000 invested and so far it’s exceeding 8% annual return. I forget what the terms are for when you need to withdra...

It’s been 20 years since my first visit to Puerto Rico to attend my friend’s Ring Dance.  This time there was no all-girls Catholic high school. Getting Around When I booked my trip to Puerto Rico it didn’t even occur to me that the island wouldn’t have Uber.  Turns out my trip coincided with the first week of Uber operating in  Puerto Rico.  It’s badly needed here.  Traditional taxi’s cost over twice as much.  They don’t have a grasp of GPS or smartphones still.  You’ll have lots of fun explaining where you want to go especially if you’re staying in an AirBnB instead of name brand hotel which is the limit of their map memory.  It started on a Monday and then died on a Friday night.  That night I walked home in the rain.  Demoralizing to say the least.    Workcation Besides a government stuck in 2005, I found Puerto Rico pretty charming.   Old San Juan and San Juan do possess potential for a “workcation” lif...

Some time ago I had a dream where my mom was going through family history in one of her favorite photo albums.  (Mom loves reminiscing in real life, too).  In the dream we went back to the 60’s walking along a park.  While she was sharing about grand parents, great grand parents, many cousins,  their faces appeared as people I was walking by in a crowd on what felt like a 4th of July weekend.  Along the edge of the park were many families gathered on picnic blankets.  Overall the whole scene gathered a strong sense of nostalgia and the good old days of mid 1900’s Americana.    A little into the distance a more violent scene interrupted the nostalgia between Mom and me.  Several cops surrounded a Black person, beating on him next to a tree.  Filled with rage and disgust, I sprinted toward the group and tackled one of the cops.  During the tumble I remember looking out towards all the families on picnic blankets and none were look...

Two disappointing experiences with Bank of America.  I started an account recently and nearly every day a new fee has popped up. I called Friday and Monday to address the issue.  There is no email support or live chat support for business checking.  I call in at 9:40am and get a message that the office is closed and to call back after 7am.  Super lame.

plate@car.gov Make all car license plates have an email address. People could warn you before the tow truck, if you parked your car in a bad place. If you’re license is ABH-2342 then your email alias would be ABH-2342@car.gov .  And everyone would just know that. Public problem app.  I wish there was an app to report problems and crimes to relevant government agencies.  It would include some automatic reporting, e.g. your phone automatically reports a pothole when you hit one while driving.  The driver won’t need to pull over and manually report.  The smartphone would just know that a sudden jolt along a road means pothole and report it.   Kidnap app. Make a facial recognition app to that was connected to a database of known missing persons so if people saw something suspicious they could take a pic and check if the person was known missing.   My recent experience with the Overnight Service of USPS further drives the need for an app for tr...

Can we turn Google Chrome into the Ultimate Data Browser? Could we turn Chrome into a Data Management App Development Studio?   Chrome already understands so many data formats and file formats that most ETL tools don’t even think to venture into. It already is the fastest renderer of pdf, plain text, log files, most image formats. Chrome already can pretty print xml, local file system, ftp folders. It renders plain text super fast, faster and better than Notepad.  Chrome renders from local filesystem as fast as any local native app or faster.  It’s faster at pdf rendering than Adobe. The search feature is simple and super responsive.   Why use Chrome over some standard studio like Eclipse? Because Eclipse is slow and clunky and it feels like it was designed by Congress. What we could add?   Some kind of intuition where you open of up tabs to different resources and it knows what you want and creates a synthesis of tabs. Examples: Tab1 is a list of...

Overnight service results in 3 days late service. And further below is what you see when trying to file a complaint. When I called about the package hold time was between 40 min and 60 min. My recent experience with the Overnight Service of USPS further drives the need for an app for tracking the interaction with a company or government agency.  We need something that makes it easy to capture all the emails, chat windows, phone calls sitting on hold, broken email links, broken or just shitty web forms, tweets.   We need an app that makes it easy to also publish to a public site for accountability including the time it takes for a company, agency to resolve the issue. It will need: Datamasking features blackout email addresses,  HIPAA data, financial data specifics, phone numbers, ssns etc.   The public site will be have stats on different companies.  Awards for fastest resolver of issues. Rankings.