Kanye West: Blame Game

Does Google Have An Innovation Problem?

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Robert Scoble: Why Google can’t build Instagram: (I was working at Microsoft as Flickr got bought by Yahoo, Skype got bought by eBay, etc etc). ..... Google, internally, knows it has an innovation problem .... is looking to remake its culture internally to help entrepreneurial projects take hold...... how Larry Ellison actually got efficiencies from teams. If a team wasn’t productive, he’d come every couple of weeks and say “let me help you out.” What did he do? He took away another person until the team started shipping and stopped having unproductive meetings. .... At Google you can’t use MySQL and Ruby on Rails .... Google Wave failed, in part, because it couldn’t keep up with the first wave of users and got horribly slow .... Small teams rule

Google is going to fail in the innovation department if it feels like it has to be number one in every emerging trend. On the other hand, it could keep going into new sectors of the economy like it has shown a tendency to do. Google can't beat Facebook on social, but it can beat Facebook and every other web company on wind farms and clean cars.

Facebook's Gmail Killer? Wow

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TechCrunch: Facebook’s Gmail Killer, Project Titan, Is Coming On Monday: @facebook.com email addresses ..... a full-fledged webmail client ..... Facebook has the world’s most popular photos product, the most popular events product, and soon will have a very popular local deals product as well. It can tweak the design of its webmail client to display content from each of these in a seamless fashion (and don’t forget messages from games, or payments via Facebook Credits). And there’s also the social element: Facebook knows who your friends are and how closely you’re connected to them; it can probably do a pretty good job figuring out which personal emails you want to read most and prioritize them accordingly.

Facebook has a huge advantage when it comes to email. Not all people who send you email are equal. And Facebook's social graph lets you determine your social concentric circles. And once you introduce the caste system into your inbox, you are in a much better shape.

Running A Promotion On W

I am a democracy bigot.

How I Unearthed A Scam

It was not that hard. Really.

Model Job Offer Scam

Model Job Offer!

Inbox

from Tammy Thomas tmiy12345@gmail.com
date Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 1:32 PM
subject Model Job Offer!
hide details Nov 9 (3 days ago)

CAFE PRESS.It's all about you and your passions. In a nutshell, we're the world's best destination for expressing yourself through merchandise. From your favorite T-shirt and Woodie, to the tote bag over your shoulder and bumper sticker on your car, we're here to let you express your interests. And what makes our products so unique, and so expressive, is that we don't create the designs on them. Our community of designers do - all through millions of shops we help them run.CafePress is the world's biggest destination for self-expression through merchandise. Each month over 11 million shoppers visit CafePress to buy or create T-shirts, mugs, posters and other gifts that reflect their interests, passions, beliefs and affiliations.Today, CafePress is a growing network of over 6.5 million members who have unleashed their creativity to transform their artwork and ideas into an impressive catalog of over 250 million unique gifts. CafePress is where folks from all walks of life gather online to create, sell, and buy “print on-demand” products. Each brings to life whatever people are passionate about. It can be a white-hot political cause? A gorgeous grandchild? An obsessive hobby? A funny (or flirty?) thought?

Models Naveen, Dennis

Click

Merging Conversations In Gmail

So Adam and I have been talking. He is in San Fran. I am in New York. The Gmail voice chat feature works great. We decided the voice quality on the Gmail voice chat is much better than the one on the Gmail free phone. I have a Google Voice number, he has a Google Voice number. So when I call his number from my number, it feels like rerouting a rerouted call. There is too much white noise. Instead you cut the middle men out and connect directly through the voice chat feature, in many ways better than Skype because chances are you are already logged into Gmail. I mean, do you ever log out?

If You Could Take Your Data Center With You

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TechCrunch: Facebook To Build Its Second Data Center To The Tune Of $450 Million: Apple is building a $1 billion facility that’s expected to be finished this year. Google and IBM also have data centers in the state.

During the first dot com boom, people bought servers. And then Amazon web services killed the idea. You don't need to buy servers, we got them, they said, a ton of them. But now companies like Facebook that are not in the data center business end up with these huge, humongous huge data centers.

Checking In, Tweeting, Spotting, Updating

Image by Em.Cee via Flickr

TechCrunch: Begun, The Sticker Wars Have: Right now, many people (probably most people) have no idea what a check-in is. When Gap launched its free jeans deal, people were actually visiting the company’s Facebook Page to write “checking in“, rather than using the Places function on Facebook’s mobile application.

That would be like someone sent you an email that was 140 characters or less, say over Gmail, and claimed they just sent you a tweet. Emails with such discipline would be nice to read, but are they tweets?

TechStars' Geographical Advantage Over Y Combinator

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TechCrunch: TechStars Launches Ten New Startups In Seattle: six of the first twenty companies to go through the program have been acquired by larger companies, and about 70% of its companies have been funded and/or are now profitable.

Y Combinator is in the Valley. Y Combinator has done something remarkable. I think Y Combinator is the reason we have a new species in town: the super angel. But Y Combinator is in the Valley. Being in the Valley, in the Valley alone is a disadvantage. People don't buy servers anymore. They have Amazon web services. Times have changed. Some of the best programmers I know are self taught people. All the material you need to teach yourself programming is available online for free. And so the idea that you have to be in the Valley to be part of the action, well, that is passe.

Ping On Twitter Is A Few Tech StartUp Ideas

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TechCrunch: iTunes Ping Actually Goes Social With Full Twitter Integration; Careful, It Will Auto-Tweet: not only will each tweet contain a link back to the song or album on iTunes, but these links will work in New Twitter’s right-side pane. You’ll be able to listen to iTunes previews right from there — a huge feature that should lead to a lot of music buying, especially when the 90-second previews kick-in.

90 seconds is a lot of music. We live in the era of good enough. Perhaps Apple is lucky the Facebook Connect thing did not quite pan out for them. This is a better deal. And now everybody and their cousin will be tweeting everything they have in their private domains.

A Boxee Browser

Image via CrunchBaseA few days back I wrote about how I was not too excited about the idea of a social browser. It did not feel like a big shift. You can share stuff from your Chrome browser with a few add ons.

But then I was at the Boxee Box launch party last night - and they got a swell product - but then I kept thinking, what Boxee needs to be is a browser on your laptop, not a box that takes you to a big screen.