Ingress: Four Grant's Tombs In Jackson Heights

When I hit L8, Grant's Tomb up there by Columbia was the top farm for L8 farming. It was small and compact. There were 16 portals to harvest. I did many many train rides to attend L8 farm events there. And now there are four similar compact farms on my home territory of Jackson Heights on stretches that were practically portal-free at the time.

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35 And Over The Hill? Not

Quora thread.

YouTube Commenting: A New Paradigm

Español: Logo Vectorial de YouTube (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So far I have always totally ignored comments on YouTube. They tend to be very low quality, and let me not even get started on the out and out flame wars. But this changes things. This is a great leveraging of Google Plus.

YouTube Announces A New Commenting System, Powered By Google+, With Threaded, Ranked And Private Conversations

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Lifting Up Billions Requires Technology

Imagine, you touch the glass screen, and the microfinance company gets to see your credit history tied to your figerprint. And you get a loan sent to your phone m-Pesa style. You make your minimum monthly payments over the phone. The phone cost you $30 to buy because you agreed to watch ads. And the internet connection to it comes from Google Loon balloons far up in the sky. By the way, the phone also lets you participate in MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses. You have been educating yourself in the middle of nowhere. There was a voice based community of your "classmates" that you have never met. And the phone comes with apps that are as good as a good doctor for the basics.

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How To Massively Scale Zady

Crowdsourcing and Big Data and a rating/flagging system.

I don't need to know Sergey Brin to be able to post an ad on Google. It is an automated process. I don't know Morgan Freeman, I mean Meg Whitman, although I believe I do follow Pierre Omidyar on Twitter ("Can you like tweet back once in a while, Omidi?") but I can list items on eBay just fine.

Zady runs the risk of ending up interesting and small. But it has the potential to be really big. And big is when you make it easy for people to get on the Zady train. I hope the startup has a great CTO who will put the brains to carve out a great tech solution to the scaling issue.

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• Zady
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Zady Makes Me Think Of 3D Printing Somehow

I came across Zady across various social media platforms and streams I peruse regularly when it first hit the "airwaves." Today I looked it up on Google News. It is an interesting twist. Clothitarian? This is like Mark Zuckerberg killing his own meat. What's the source? You want to know the source. It is kind of like blogging. The best bloggers are not professional bloggers but people who are extremely knowledgeable in their domain. They are the source. You should link to them, not just quote them up. Fast food, fast clothing. Fast fashion. Kiva and Etsy.

I kept thinking 3D printing. In that in an era when connectivity is plentiful, information is plentiful, the least you should be able to know is who sewed it up, right? I think it is interesting, I hope it is scalable.

Looks like Soraya Darabi's hibernation is over. She had half a million followers on Twitter. And you thought that was a fluke. And Google Plus launched and she had half a million followers there as well and pretty fast too. How does that work?

And who knew Zady was available as a name! I thought all two syllable names were long gone.

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Through Nokia Microsoft Should Go Down The Food Chain

Image via CrunchBase

With Google Loon attempting free internet access in the remotest corners, the other piece of the puzzle is the smartphone. How cheap can you make it? There Nokia has an edge.

There is argument that the Windows mobile platform does not have a million apps like the iOS and Android do. Most people I know use less than 10 apps, and all the hit apps do exist on Windows Mobile. Windows is decent in mobile. It is workable.

The only way it could become a contender is if it were to go down the food chain with ridiculously cheap smartphones in the emerging markets. That might be the top benefit Microsoft could hope for from the Nokia acquisition, I think.

How cheap is cheap? Under 50 dollars. So, a super cheap smartphone that most people can save up and buy, free internet access from the skies, a Skype phone number that works just fine over the internet, and you get 80% of the world connected. I can't imagine a better boon for democracy, gender justice, and microfinance.

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