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Beth Kanter didn't sleep for 2 days, and proved that one passionate individual can make an amazing amount of difference. In this case, over $50K worth of difference.
holy candystripers batman!
i like to think my "Give it Up, Bitches" post and Facebook tag-spamming for charity (fucking for virginity? hmmm)... made all the difference.
hey, every little 4-letter word helps :)
our Stanford Facebook class presentation at BayCHI from Dec. 11th is now available.
check it out here:
Learning to Create Engaging Apps for Facebook
Beth Kanter is an awesome blogger & non-profit evangelist who does terrific stuff to help people around the world, particularly kids in Cambodia (her adopted daughter is Cambodian too).
Right now, she's competing to help raise funds from the largest unique # of donors (not amount of money, rather # of contributors). Interestingly, she's competing as a 1-woman social media-enabled army against other bigger organizations.
So why don't you take one minute to donate $10 to her cause, and help her get over the finish line? She needs 28 donors to catch up with the leader, and i just gave $10 so now she only needs 27.
Hurry the F up! this needs to happen by TOMORROW 3pm (Eastern)
SO GIVE IT UP NOW, BITCHES
-> CLICK HERE <-
(click above, pull out your credit card, & take 60 seconds to donate $10 you cheap bastards you. yes you. right now, dammit. YES I SAID! STOP reading this shit, and CLICK! Click Click CLICK!)
you're still reading this, aren't you asshole? you didn't click yet?
oh you did? ok, good. you can stop feeling guilty that you haven't helped change the life of some poor cambodian kids for ten measly stinking bucks. which you probably spent yesterday on some really shitty ham & cheese sandwich at some fancy-schmancy california foo-foo restaurant. you pathetic piece of slime you.
sorry, you gave that $10 right? much better. kisses. XOXOXO
no seriously, click on that fucking link and give $10.
still feeling guilty? re-blog this & recruit 5 more people NOW.
share it on facebook. digg it. whatever.
(btw, i promise i'll take lunch meetings in Q2 with any startup that can show me they gave at least 5 x $10 donations to Beth's cause -- how's that for pimping with a purpose?)
ok, i think i've exhausted every psychological trick i can think of now. if you folks get creative, pile on in the comments with your best Catholic guilt trip.
friggin' amazing post by Max on developer incentives & "game mechanics" re: social application platforms.
really impressive, deep think stuff. read it.
Are you a starving entrepreneur? A programmer who can't afford two slices?
& you say you've got a BAAAAAAAD case of social networking addiction?
I've got just the thing to cure your SNS shakes buddy.
How about a 1/2-price ticket to Graphing Social Patterns, if you enter our AppNite Developer Contest?
Just submit your app entry here, and we'll give you the secret word. Prizes tbd, but we're talking some really sweet Web 2.0 Pirate Booty.
And while we're at it, here's a brief summary of some of the keynotes coming up at GSP West in March:
(and of course, there will be a game of Werewolf too)
awooooooOOOOOOOOOooooo!
Mike Arrington & Robert Scoble conquer Davos, news @ 11.
great stuff from Michael & Robert at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (so jealous!):
* Scoble on Zuck & Facebook
* Arrington on Mobile Tech Futures
* Arrington on Super-Awesome YouTube Power Room
* Scoble thanks to Yossi Vardi
* Mike's Davos photos
I've been to the Milken Foundation Global Conference, and i'm doing a Startup Metrics talk at SXSW this spring... haven't made it to TED or Davos yet, but if i can ever get invited / get a ticket, those 2 are on my conference wishlist for the next few years...
go Mike & Robert!
"To Whom It May Concern: Please Contact Me Via My Smashing, UltraHip, UltraCool New Compact Telecommunications Device, which also doubles as a Portable Internet Browser & Music Player, Dig?"
... word to your maternal unit.
There's a WSJ article this morning about Bill Gates' new ideas for a more creative "kinder capitalism" that needs to work better to address the issues of the world's poor. That #, depending on how you count it, is somewhere between one-third to two-thirds of the world's 6 billion people. Altho he says the ideas are still a bit fuzzy, he's planning to talk about it further in his speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Here's a brief video clip on his concepts:
I applaud this kind of thinking, and Bill's efforts through the Gates Foundation are groundbreaking & innovative. Other similar-minded groups at Omidyar Network, The Skoll Foundation, & Google.org also do amazing work. I'm a supporter of microfinance accelerator Unitus also doing terrific stuff on economic innovation & emphasizing market forces to make the world better.
Securitizing Happine$$
However, I think there are still a few critical missing market components in what Bill is calling "creative" or "kinder" capitalism. In fact, i'd say there are several hundred-trillion dollar asset classes that don't currently exist that, once created, will dramatically stimulate market forces to address global poverty issues & other beneficial public infrastructure. I call this effort Securitizing Happiness, or in the long form "Solving Global Economic Issues by Making Markets for Individuals, Small Business, & Natural Resources". I think this is along the lines of what Bill's talking about, & i've written about it a few times.
Note that i'm not professing some wacky socialist proposal for redistributing wealth -- i'm talking about unleashing the power of the market via the creation of huge new untapped economic asset classes, similar to the creation of mortgage markets and financial derivatives markets.
In particular, i think these missing asset classes include:
For my more wacky & lengthy thoughts on this topic, please read this post from a few years back. I'm continuing to refine my thoughts on the subject, and the concepts i'm working on with Startup Metrics are related in a somewhat convoluted but very essential way.
hope to do more work on this down the road, and i welcome feedback.
UPDATE: put together a rough slide deck on this here:
---
btw, also mentioned in the Gates article is Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, one of the fathers of modern microfinance, & recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize... and certainly one of the most amazing social entrepreneurs i've ever met. He was in town recently speaking about his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty.
Two other books mentioned in the article are among my favorites:
The Mystery of Capital in particular is a book that really opened my eyes to the value of property rights and housing / mortgage markets in making economic progress. It's worth the read.
Hmm. Curiouser & curiouser, said Alice Kara.
It seems my former PayPal Mafia colleague Max Levchin just launched an alpha geek blog called:
His first post is on how to launch a social networking platform. It's a pretty smart post, for a number of reasons i'll discuss in just a sec.
In the post, Max makes some notable points emphasizing monetization, which i pretty much agree with in my Facebook Monetization post. He also emphasizes making geeks either rich or famous (or both), which i heartily agree with... as noted in this t-shirt design i once created for geek outsourcer oDesk.
Since i used to run PayPal's Developer Program, it's probably no coincidence i share many of Max's observations about geek evangelism (see my preso on same below, from last year's Mashery conference on The Business of APIs). The psychology of geeks is a rather freakishly strange & wonderful looking glass to step into. Andrew Chen also has some useful thoughts on the subject, particularly as it pertains to social networks. Here are some of mine:
Coming from Max, the post carries a lot of weight -- he's pretty much the Geek's Alpha Geek , and his coding & competitive prowess from both PayPal & Slide borders on legendary. Also somewhat surprising, to my knowledge this is Max's first self-authored public commentary. I'm sure he's posted in online forums & message boards before, but i believe this is the first time he's put himself out there on a permanently-visible soapbox, aside from speaking opps & recorded interviews. And i could be wrong, but the only other geek blogger at Slide.com i know of is Tyler Ballance, aka Unethical Blogger. Tyler is also an alpha-geek and is occasionally a speaker at several geek conferences i've put together such as Graphing Social Patterns.
All the more curious, this blog was launched fast on the heels of Slide's recent $50M financing broken first by the WSJ's BoomTown blogger Kara Swisher, a notorious Silicon Valley geek fag-hag (sorry Owen) who nonetheless remains skeptical on Slide's nosebleed valuation. I'm not sure i'm as pessimistic as Kara, but there's no question Slide's current valuation is matched only by Max's naked Schumpeter-esque capitalist aggression (side note: commie-pinko / socialist developers beware... Max vill crush you like bug)
For those who like to keep score, the $50 mil was done on a $500M valuation, which -- if you read Max's NY Times interview from fall 2007 -- is ~1/3 of the way to his stated "now we're talking real f*#@-ing money" goalpost of $1.5B, the amount of PayPal's acquisition by eBay in 2002. And knowing how competitive Max is, i'm sure he's also got the $1.65B YouTube acquisition by Google in mind as well... a feat accomplished by other PayPal Mafiosos Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, & Jawed Karim; financed by former PayPal CFO Roelof Botha, now a partner at Sequoia. One thing Max hates is to lose. He'd rather die trying to get to $2B+, than surrender to a lesser market cap or exit.
all of which makes me wonder just a bit: does the subtitle for Max's blog describe his famously-cynical approach to Life, The Universe, & Everything*... or does it describe Slide's valuation* ?
only time will tell, young paduan... only time will tell.
(*too bad they didn't raise $42M. would have been fucking hilarious ;)
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