Usually I steer clear of posting personal things on this blog, but I wanted to ask for support in helping a great cause. My youngest sister is part of Teach for America. She’s spent the last year and a half in an extremely impoverished and isolated area of New Mexico, working on a Navajo Indian Reservation as a high school history teacher. She teaches some great kids, but the unfortunate reality is that her students are even more under-resourced than most; reservations are actually considered... Read Full Story

Parts of the Facebook Movie: “The Social Network” by Andrew Sorkin will be filmed on the Hopkins Campus in Baltimore starting in November. Note: I’m very involved at Johns Hopkins University, serving on a number of boards both for the overall University and the Carey Business School. I was in Baltimore for several days last week and I’m very excited that this deal got done and can now be talked about publicly! Also a big congrats to a friend of mine who was very invol... Read Full Story

The weather is terrible today here in New York. I think I’ll use it as inspiration to post a few rants (i.e. annoyances) that have been on my mind… Pagination in Flow Applications Tumblr (among others) has adopted a convention for pagination that drives me nuts. You click on a button on the right-hand side to move backward in time (Next)  and you click a left-hand button (Previous) to move forward toward more recent items. I have never understood this. My confusion is that the id... Read Full Story

I remember reading last summer that Starbucks was offering two free hours of wifi for patrons… In subsequent months, despite having purchased numerous gift cards, owning an iPhone and spending countless hours in Starbucks across the country, I still had not been able to access this mysterious free internet. Well, I finally figured it out! Here’s how get online at Starbucks for free** in under five minutes…assuming a short line :) 1) Get in line and purchase any Starbucks Gift Card... Read Full Story

First, congratulations to @pistachio on the launch of OneForty! It’s awesome to see such great initial uptake and press; rumors of a Twitter buyout certainly don’t hurt either :) My question: where is the enterprise app store? While I know the social business and enterprise 2.0 space as well as anyone, I still find myself frequently “googling” to find solutions and reviews: should I use MailChimp or Constant Contact? Yammer or SocialCast? SurveyMonkey or Survey.io? What’s better to use as an... Read Full Story

Interactions on the web are increasingly distributed and new applications (and campaigns) must be built with a decentralized model in mind. As web apps become increasingly ubiquitous, Apple’s expression, “there’s an app for that” rings truer than ever. In such an environment, first mover advantage becomes increasingly important as early traction can compound quickly via network effects. One thing that jumps out to me is that the creation of social identity on new systems (such as profiles, p... Read Full Story

Today was the first time I’ve had a chance to hear Peter Thiel talk live and he did not disappoint. I spent Saturday and Sunday at the 2009 Singularity Summit, held for the first time in New York. Michael Vassar, Singularity Institute’s president, did an exceptional job of assembling an all-star cast of speakers. Talks covered a variety of subjects ranging from quantum computing to radical life extension to venture capital. For those unfamiliar with singularity, a brief description is h... Read Full Story

Batman image via Wikipedia Jon Steinberg had a great post several weeks’ back where he coined a new term (Approach? Philosophy?); “hackable business development.” For $500 and four weeks of late night emails to eLance developers, you can basically spec and build simple, rough apps that knit or build upon open APIs to create things that are interesting and potentially valuable.  To be clear, you can’t build complicated apps or the next Salesforce.com on this kind of shoestring, but you can ach... Read Full Story

I’m really excited to be participating in an awesome startup event being run in tandem with The Feast Conference. The Feast is best thought of as a mini-TED focused on “gathering the world’s greatest innovators from across industries and society to empower, inspire and engage each other in creating world-shaking change.” Sounds like a mouthful, but last year’s talks were some of the most inspiring I’ve heard and the people attending were equal... Read Full Story

The investor syndicate received 65% ownership in Skype for about $1.9 billion in cash and $125 million in debt New venture fund, Andreessen Horowitz invested $50 million, or 1/6th of its  fund a stake of ~2% This deal valued Skype with a valuation of ~$2.75B Skype has 405 million users, meaning the buyers paid about $5 per registered user Registered Skype users increased by 47% in 2008 over 2007 and Skype continues to attract hundreds of thousands of new users each week According to Peter Fa... Read Full Story