• T-mobile “Lifes For Sharing” flashmob ad at Liverpool Street station, London, LINK (YouTube)
• Media agency Curb takes advantage of the London snow and launches snow tagging campaign, LINK (Springwise)
• Google Proves Humanity Is Sick and Sad, Yet Absolutely Hilarious, LINK (Gizmodo)
• Seth Godin’s 9 Alternative MBA students list 999 business ideas, LINK
• Charlie Rose interviews Marc Andreessen, co-author of Mosaic, founder of Netscape & Ning, LINK (video)
• Why Can’t The Ford Foundation Buy The New York Times? LINK (Forbes)
• Video of Googler Matt Cutts’ State of the Index 2008 presentation at PubCon, LINK (GoogleBlog)
• Glam edits Oscars Twitter feed and makes money, LINK (Venture Beat)
• Mickey Rourke’s Best Male Lead Acceptance Speech at the 2009 Spirit Awards, LINK (YouTube)
• Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore take fans backstage via Twitter, LINK (NYTimes)
• Evangelists Turning Bearish on Online Advertising, LINK (Techcrunch)
• Who’s counting how many people visit websites? LINK (Technology Review)
• Mashable looks at Why Big Brands Struggle with Social Media, LINK
• French Town Changing its Name to  Improve Google SEO, LINK
• Mad Men’s Don Draper pitches the Carousel  to Kodak video, LINK (YouTube)
• Techcrunch’s Sarah Lacy Explains why Social Networks are Good for Kids, LINK

You want to spend $20 billion of taxpayer money creating jobs? Fine. Call up the top 20 venture capital firms in America, which are short of cash today,… and make them this offer: The U.S. Treasury will give you each up to $1 billion to fund the best venture capital ideas that have come your way. If they go bust, we all lose. If any of them turns out to be the next Microsoft or Intel, taxpayers will give you 20 percent of the investors’ upside and keep 80 percent for themselves.
If we are going to be spending billions of taxpayer dollars, it can’t only be on office-decorating bankers, over-leveraged home speculators and auto executives who year after year spent more energy resisting changes and lobbying Washington than leading change and beating Toyota.

 As we invest taxpayer money, let’s do it with an eye to starting a new generation of biotech, info-tech, nanotech and clean-tech companies, with real innovators, real 21st-century jobs and potentially real profits for taxpayers. Our motto should be, “Start-ups, not bailouts: nurture the next Google, don’t nurse the old G.M.’s.”

Fred Wilson a venture capitalist and a principal of Union Square (an early stage venture capital fund) has a contray opinion and wote a great post on his A VC blog against the idea, A Stimulus Plan For Venture Capital? No Thanks. He believes that the venture capital business, has too much money, not too little, and that the top 20 firms are least in need of the money.

So Tom’s idea, while it looks good on paper, is a dream. The top venture firms don’t want, don’t need, and are never going to take government money. The same is true of the top entrepreneurs.

Stop bailing out the losers and give VC’s the money

Fortune has a long article on the rise and history of Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg. The article mostly repeats what has been said in many places, many times before. I found one item, the statistic and graph on the time it took various technologies to reach 150 million users or units sold to be fascinating. While it’s true that Facebook is a free website and the other technologies they cite are items you have to buy, it is still quite amazing how fast Facebook has grown. What took Facebook only 5 years, the same feat took the telephone 89, TV (television) 38, the cellphone 14 and the iPod 7. Even disregarding Facebook it is interesting how each of the successive technologies reached 150 million units sold in approximately half of the amount of years as the previous technology. 

Facebook…175 million strong and, Facebook says, growing at the astounding rate of about five million new users a week, making it a rare bright spot in a dismal economy. If Facebook were a country, it would have a population nearly as large as Brazil’s

As a final thought: What will the next technology be and how fast will it reach 150 million?

Thoughts?

Barry Schwartz studies the link between economics and psychology, and is currently studying wisdom, with Ken Sharpe. He is the author of several books including The Costs of Living and The Paradox of Choice (2004), which looks at why the rate of depression is so high in socities with the highest level of freedom and choice in history.

 For more thoughts I like from around the web, check out my delicious bookmarks in the sidebar ( right side).

Today’s thought comes from the king of suprise Andy Nulman of Airborne Mobile and Montreal’s Just For Laughs festival fame. He thinks INcredibility is more important than credibility and experience.

Here is what Andy had to say on his Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Blog  today in his post on Who Needs Credibilty? (Theory 23)

The promise of a loud, eye-popping, surprising tomorrow trumps the achievements of one’s past…no matter how big they are. (If this were NOT the case, John McCain would now be President.

Credibility is overrated.  It’s yesterday’s news.

Really now, who cares where you’ve been?  Does it matter? As they say in the fine print disclaimer of every investment prospectus: “Past performance is not indicative of future results.”  And given the current state of the investment industry…well, you get my drift.

These days, we all live in the present, and have access to the same amount of influence.  A student video can overshadow a Hollywood blockbuster.  A blog post can overthrow a government. As Crosby, Stills and Nash sang: “Don’t let the past / remind us of what we are not now.” 
These days, it’s all about where you’re gonna go.  And, trust me, you’re gonna go further if you’re Incredible.

Searching on google.com I realized that the google suggest feature has created a new alphabet song. Very different from the days of “A,” you’re adorable, “B,” you’re so beautiful… and it is created and changed by us every time we search.

Google Suggest Alphabet (Nov 2008)

A = amazon
B = bebo
C = craigslist
D = dictionary
E =

F = facebook
G = google
H = hotmail
I = imdb
J = jennifer hudson
K = kohls
L = lowes
M = myspace
N = next
O = obama
P = photobucket
Q = quotes
R = runescape
S = sarah palin
T = target
U = utube
V = verizon wireless
W = wikipedia
X = x factor
Y = youtube
Z = zip codes

The thing that really amazed me was when I checked the google suggest again recently (February 13) how much had already changed.

The major change is the rise of retail to 36% of the total: best buy, jcpenney, sears, walmart and zappos join amazon, kohls, lowes and target on the list. The only retailer to fall off the list is Nex, replaced by nfl which is probably due to the superbowl and xbox 360. There is now only one person on the list (Obama of course) down from 3 with the replacement of sarah palin and jennifer hudson. The most suprising change for me was the fall of wikipedia to walmart which really shows the economic climate and maybe that zip codes has been replaced by internet darling Zappos.

Google Suggest Alphabet (Feb 2009)

A = amazon
B = bebo best buy
C = craigslist
D = dictionary
E = ebay
F = facebook
G = google
H = hotmail
I = imdb
J = jennifer hudson jcpenney
K = kohls
L = lowes
M = myspace
N = next nfl
O = obama
P = photobucket
Q = quotes
R = runescape
S = sarah palin sears
T = target
U = utube
V = verizon wireless
W = wikipedia walmart
X = x factor xbox 360
Y = youtube
Z = zip codes zappos

Happy Searching

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