Today we’re launching the iFund blog. The purpose is to share (and hear) perspectives around the iPhone and emerging open mobile ecosystem. We’ve been blown away by the amount of entrepreneurial activity in mobile since launching the iFund on March 6th. In 6 months, we’ve received over 2700 plans. To put it in context, that’s about 20x what we received in a similar period last year. Out of that group, we’ve funded five companies totaling more than $30M of investment
Fighting Government Waste One Google App At a Time - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership
Vivek Kundra, CTO of the District of Columbia, says he found two compelling reasons to switch the D.C. government over to Gmail and Google Apps: first, its cheap cost would save the taxpayer money by avoiding bloated software contracts. Second, he believes Google technology will help ensure business continuity and the safety of data in the event of a disaster or disruption. ......... Now we know why Google needs Chrome: they have the killer apps but are in need of a high end Web-App browser to run them in. Otherwise they can't begin to solve the problems of security and business continuity.
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American Thinker: Wrecks, Lies and Barney Frank
But then a caller challenged Frank's continued insistence that the meltdown was brought on by Republican deregulation, citing the 1999 NY Times article concerning Clinton Administration efforts to force Fannie to ease mortgage standards in order to provide more minority and lower-income lending. The caller reminded Barney of his own words as ranking member from a 2003 Times piece reporting Bush's initiative to reign in Fannie and Freddie by creating new oversight under the Treasury Department:
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American Thinker: Time for McCain to Name Names
There is but one issue in the 2008 election. The economy. Or more to the point, the economic meltdown. Whoever wins this debate will win the election. Or perhaps more accurately, whoever loses this debate will lose the election. Period.
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Jeffrey Miron, Economist: Bankruptcy, not bailout, is the right answer - CNN.com
This bailout was a terrible idea. Here's why.
The current mess would never have occurred in the absence of ill-conceived federal policies. The federal government chartered Fannie Mae in 1938 and Freddie Mac in 1970; these two mortgage lending institutions are at the center of the crisis. The government implicitly promised these institutions that it would make good on their debts, so Fannie and Freddie took on huge amounts of excessive risk.
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Online Platform helps create any interface for any device., Salesforce.com
Online Platform helps create any interface for any device.
May 12, 2008 - Salesforce Summer '08 incorporates Visualforce User-Interface-as-a-Service, which gives complete control over Salesforce UI for creating any UI for any Force.com application and extending it to any device. Visualforce Components, also included, enables addition, removal, and reassembly of basic building blocks of Salesforce UI to add custom-built components. ISV-built components can also be brought in to accelerate building of business applications that offer Web 2.0 usability. Visualforce is a new technology for developing powerful user interfaces (UIs) that can be used to enhance the standard Salesforce SaaS applications or to create custom PaaS applications on Force.com. Visualforce includes all the resources developers need to build rich, interactive applications and user experiences for a variety of audiences, applications, and devices. Combined with the powerful logic and workflow intelligence provided by Apex Code, Visualforce offers the flexibility to meet the requirements of applications that feature many different types of users on a variety of devices. Visualforce uses the best of Internet technology, including HTML, AJAX and Adobe Flex, for business applications, making them as innovative and as effective as their consumer Web counterparts.
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ACORN, Obama and the Mortgage Mess: Guilty Party by Mona Charen on National Review Online
The financial markets were teetering on the edge of an abyss last week. The secretary of the Treasury was literally on his knees begging the speaker of the House not to sabotage the bailout bill. The crash of falling banks made the earth tremble. The Republican presidential candidate suspended his campaign to deal with the crisis. And amid all this, the Democrats in Congress managed to find time to slip language into the bailout legislation that would provide a dandy little slush fund for ACORN.
ACORN stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, a busy hive of left-wing agitation and “direct action” that claims chapters in 50 cities and 100,000 dues-paying members. ACORN is where Sixties leftovers who couldn’t get tenure at universities wound up.
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Obama's Leftism - WSJ.com
Community Organizer = Saul Alinsky Professional Radical and Revolutionary: If we discount his absences, Mr. Obama voted to ADA's approval more than 98% of the time.
This touches directly on the question of what, beyond the platitudes of unity, hope and change, Mr. Obama himself believes in. His voting record is one indication. Another is his intellectual evolution.
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Cisco Mashes Up Collaboration | InternetNews Realtime IT News
David Knight of Cisco WebEX:
"Lots of people understand that collaboration is the driver for the next wave of productivity improvements," Knight said. "The real opportunity now is to automate the unstructured interactions between knowledge workers. What we're seeing is varying degrees of success in people recognizing the efficiency gains, and thus, varying degrees of adoption. The ones that are successful are the ones that are tying collaboration to the business process. "
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iFundVC » Blog Archive » Launching the iFund Blog….
Insights Into the iPhone, iFund, and iFund Companies
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Why Google Isn't Enough - Forbes.com
One key refrain that expresses this trend is heard in companies around the world: "Why can't we have a Google inside the four walls of our company?" While at first this seems like a good idea, the problem of using search inside a company is much more complicated than just indexing documents, throwing up a search box and asking people if they feel lucky.
This week, JargonSpy explores just what "enterprise search" means and why it is a complicated challenge that is becoming increasingly urgent for most companies to solve.
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Will Collaboration Pit Cisco Against Microsoft, Google? - GigaOM
the growing popularity of cloud computing means corporate data centers will increasingly start to look like Internet data centers. Cisco has already recognized that as the “network” continues to become the focal point around which our digital personal and work lives revolve, the opportunity to make money will be immense. That’s why Chambers never misses an opportunity to talk about “collaboration.”
For instance, in the press release announcing the company’s latest numbers, he said: “We believe we are entering the next phase of the Internet as growth and productivity will center on collaboration enabled by networked Web 2.0 technologies.” But Cisco isn’t the only one with this vision — Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) are thinking along these lines as well, and are much further ahead in the game.
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20 Great Ideas For You To Steal -- Great Ideas -- InformationWeek
The technologiess used by 20 innovative companies surveyed by InformationWeek are profiled here. Ltos of good stuff. Ideas involving green technology, voice over IP, security, and more are profiled. Heavy use of portaland wki knowledge sharing systems. Data and business process services converge at the portal level to provide some interesting breakthroughs.
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IT Vendors Are Cautious On Web 2.0, Embrace SaaS -- Information Technology -- InformationWeek
IT companies love software as a service. The sector is one of the most enthusiastic users of Web-only applications such as Salesforce (NYSE: CRM).com, according to the 2008 InformationWeek 500 survey. Seventy-one percent of IT vendors use online business apps, making IT one of the top three out of 21 industries in that category.
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InformationWeek 500 Trends: Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More -- InformationWeek 500
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InformationWeek 500 Trends: Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More -- InformationWeek 500
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InformationWeek 500 Trends: Web 2.0, Globalization, Virtualization, And More -- InformationWeek 500
What the InformationWeek 500 data tells us about the use of emerging technologies.
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How to Fund a Startup
Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. .... Y Combination founder Paul Graham explains the many issues and considerations involved with funding a startup.
Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to start driving in third gear.
I think it would help founders to understand funding better—not just the mechanics of it, but what investors are thinking.
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Imagine a goolge search that lists relevant pages, with a search related cutout (object clip). To make sense of the search, i have to walk through the links. What if my searh produces a page of links, and under each link is the relevant comment? Tha treduces the time it currently takes with Google to wade through the links.
The "relevancy" of a search result page (links) might be resolved by analysis of public comment tags similarly to how Google algorithms analyse page links - but with far more accuracy, relevance and communication of meaning.
Knowledge worker and Web runner comments on a page are in many ways a shortcut to the fabled "Semantic Web". The idea of a semantic web is that content creators could metatag information objects in ways that search engines could read and organize vast amounts of information better. Meaning, the human understanding of relvant ontology and metadata can be communicated to search engines and document management machines.
Can our Web machines understand the meaning of our information vessels? It seems to me that comment tags and relevancy based searches could shortcut the human to machine "semantic" problem.
I also think that the DotSpots concept of combining Google Search with Wikipedia participation is a breakthrough idea. But it's an idea that naturally falls into the realm of Diigo. If we can tag our comments, there would seem to be a natural opportunity to then search the objects according to a publicly determined relevancy far outstripping the limitations of Google and the outside the point of interest wikipedia particpation.