Good friend Rebecca Saltman turned me on to this piece in the Journal of Philanthropy (ironically, a paid subscription site). It looks at how Steve Case leveraged both Parade Magazine and Facebook to build a socially-focused initiative that funds smaller non-profits.
The competitions, financed by the foundation created by Steve Case, founder of AOL, and [...]

Just finished lunch with Dr. Majid Saalan, who is a professor in Computer Science from the University of Baghdad. He got his masters in speech recognition from the University of Baghdad and Ph.D in biometrics from the Iraqi Commission for Computers and Infomatics. He has been teaching at the University since 2000.
After the [...]

It has taken me the better part of a decade, but I finally think the Economist might understand a thing or two about the business of digital media. Throughout the 90’s and into this century, it seemed they were late to the table, with obvious observations that hit the newsstands six months after they [...]

Shift Happens is a YouTube video highlighting the changes in the world, with a focus on the speed of the impact of globalization and digitization. Shift Happens has been viewed 4.5 million times on YouTube.
Watch Did You Know 2.0 (embedded here), is a refined version with some slightly different facts and emphasis. [...]

It’s off my beat, but we need to keep the pressure on. Truthout is doing a better job covering than I ever will. (edited to add: by the luck of fate, the Economist had a reporter in Lhasa during the riots.  that report is here, and is entirely non-partisan, as we expect from them.)
There’s [...]

I’ve become a fast fan of Pandora, a service that learns about my musical preferences, and plays a stream of music that I can “tune” to my particular tastes.
Their email to me (see right) is a great example of organic (not viral) marketing, as they focus on providing value to me, not leveraging me to [...]

Inventing a new market category to go with your new business is exhausting and time consuming. This I have learned from experience. Painful experience.
So, when I sit down to talk through messaging and the slow pace of marketplace adoption with John Corbett of AWhere, he can end up a bit exacerbated, which I [...]

Yossi Vardi is one of Israel’s most influential tech investors, a role he earned after selling global instant messaging platform ICQ to AOL. Vardi is well known on the elite global conference circuit for his wiry hair, wit and wisdom. He has become a strong proponent of using technology — and the financial dividends [...]

BNet (the business reporting cousin to CNet) reported on an unreleased McKinsey survey that suggested $7.5 trillion worth of business disruption could result from their Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch (free registration required) in December. The trends come packaged in three sound-bite-friendly categories:

Managing relationships

Distributed cocreation
Using customers as innovators
Tapping into a world of talent
Extracting [...]

Today, I went to check an old online workspace at Omidyar.net for Targeted Currencies, a project I co-founded back in 2004. And I found out that the Omidyar network had closed down.
The Omidyar Network (O/Net) was an early phase community collaboration site for progressive global activists, founded when Pierre Omidyar (founder of eBay and [...]