The Lean Startup Talk From Web 2.0 Expo

View more presentations from Venture hacks One of our most popular talks at the Web 2.0 Expo SF was Eric Ries' The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products. I've embedded an audio version of his slides above. Eric recommends the talk for people who want to: Identify a profitable business model faster and... http://ping.fm/0T7Ph

Big iron: The ultimate cloud platform?

Get out your notepads and get ready for the mainframe resurgence. Tell your friends you heard it here. I'm not talking about a UNIVAC comeback, or Burroughs Large 2.0. I'm telling you, dear readers, that now's a good time to invest in the few remaining big iron dealers: IBM, Unisys, Hitachi, and Fujitsu, baby. Why, you ask? Because mainframes solve the cloud's impending challenges.

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Active Facebook Users By Country

Since I last posted numbers on Facebook's user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users. I've had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update for each of the regions shown above.... http://ping.fm/4saHQ

Why Aneesh Chopra is a Great Choice for Federal CTO

The news has now been leaked that President Obama intends to nominate Aneesh Chopra as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. The Federal CTO will be an assistant to the President, as well as the Associate Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He will work closely with Vivek Kundra, the recently-named Federal CIO, to develop... http://ping.fm/lBIbI

Four Short Links: 17 Apr 2009

Twitter (not THAT story, though), semantics, gardening, and netbook supercomputers: Retweet Radar -- the phrases showing up in heavily retweeted posts. This is another feature that should be incorporated into desktop clients. Three of the top 10 terms as retweeted by the General Public are "Ashton", "CNN", "followers"; if I wanted to read this drivel, I'd buy US Magazine. The... http://ping.fm/F8FHH

The Change We Need: DIY on a Civic Scale

I've been working a lot lately to imagine what Government 2.0 might look like. One of the most inspiring and thought-provoking stories I've read recently might not look like a Gov 2.0 story, but it is: Island DIY: Kauai residents don't wait for state to repair road. Their livelihood was being threatened, and they were tired of waiting for government... http://ping.fm/fQwIa

Hashmobs

Forget flashmobs. The new thing is the hashmob. A flashmob is, in case it's slipped your mind, "a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual action for a brief time, then quickly disperse." The term is, as Wikipedia continues, "generally applied only to gatherings organized via social media or viral emails, rather than those organized by public relations firms or for a publicity stunt." Flashmobs had their moment of near-fame back in the middle years of this decade. I believe they were particularly popular in Finland. Flashmobs were okay, but they had a... http://ping.fm/c05Bd