Email Solutions

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TechCrunch: Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails

Email has to be completely scalable. There can not be too much email. Not for nobody. That is the ultimate email solution. I could get 10 emails a day, or 10,000, and I still should not have to feel overwhelmed.

On the other hand, email has to have a holistic communication approach. It has to fit into the larger picture. That solution is multi platform.

One direction is condensing. It is about being able to visualize 10,000 tweets at once. Another direction is when you want to spend a lot of quality time with one or more people. Your communication platform should make that possible.

The inbox today is dreaded. That right there is a huge business opportunity, or two, or three. Gmail's Priority Inbox is a good step in the right direction, but it does not even begin to fathom the inbox of those who get deluged with emails.

Facebook helps. You get emails from people you are already "friends" with, or groups you signed up for. Strangers can email you, but they have to send out one email to one person at a time. Facebook email does cut out a lot of noise.

Twitter is my idea of the email client of tomorrow, but Twitter has been dragging its feet forever on adding features and simplifying its service.

The Gmail free phone is great. The voice feature of Gchat is great. Sometimes you want to dig into a conversation, and you want to zero in on a person, and text does not do it, so you talk. You get your headset going.

And then there is meeting in person. FourSquare can be a swell platform for that. FourSquare's social graph is special. While you are zeroing in on a person, you want to cut out all the noise, you don't want to be taking calls, you don't want to be seeing yet another incoming email.

For me blogging is an essential element of the larger complete communication platform. Being able to reach out to complete strangers who might also be talking about some of the same things you might be talking about is so very key.

But then all communication all the time is not what we could possibly be shooting for. Where is the time for non communication work? The time to get things done? The time to acquire new knowledge? Social is not 100% of the territory. Social is not 10% of the territory. The best communication platform knows when you are thinking, and lets you be: a phone that does not ring, a screen that goes into hibernation.

A good communication platform knows when you are on vacation. When you are off, you are off.
I have been impatient with Twitter. (User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town) And I have been impatient with Gmail.

You should be able to visualize 100,000 tweets right on the Twitter website. And perhaps for Gmail the next big push after the Priority Inbox will be the word cloud. I should be able to say, create a word cloud for all my unread emails for the day. And when I hover over each word, I should see the names of each sender associated with that word, with the option to click and go to that specific email.

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Fixing The Economy: Drastic Job Creation

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Drastic job creation by the US federal government - as drastic as the bank bailout, as drastic as the stimulus bill - is what is needed, I think. And this has to be about creating and paying for the jobs of tomorrow.

But we can not take the FDR comparison too far. The biggest difference is that today America is in a global world. The global cooperation has not happened yet. The global institutions have not been created yet.

So many big things have to happen at once. Rapid pace political reform that sets America on the path to total campaign finance reform would be one, but instead you have the drama of old man Rangel dragging his feet all the way to jail time.

There are monetary moves to be made, and Paul Krugman has talked about this. I like the idea of letting inflation go up one notch so it becomes expensive for the private sector to keep sitting on the two trillion dollars it is sitting on.

I am leery of only construction jobs. I have not seen a big push for universal 100 MB broadband yet. A big chunk of that is political work that does not cost the government any money. It is about introducing some major competition in to that sector.

There is one overriding theme though. Most people seem clueless.

How to Fix the Economy: An Expert Panel: a paper forecasting high unemployment, low housing prices, and very low growth through 2017..... An expansion in credit, debt, and deregulating over the past 10 or 20 years got us here. ..... it will take time, but it need not take time. ...... We are unwilling to do drastic things that will improve the situation of households. You can do that by raising their income so they can meet their debt burdens. ...... Without drastic reforms to entitlement programs in the United States, we are really talking about something that will feel like the 1970s—but last for 20 to 25 years. ..... We should be thinking about modernizing our housing sector, improving the kind of mortgages we offer, and encouraging innovation. ...... Half of the budget is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid... Nondefense discretionary spending is 4 percent of GDP. ..... I don't think we are going to modernize Fannie and Freddie very soon. Fannie and Freddie hold the preponderance of mortgages in the United States. ...... Non-Fannie and Freddie mortgages trade in the 6-to-8 percent category, as opposed to the 3½-to-4 percent category [for Fannie and Freddie mortgages]..... Roosevelt did things fast. He created the 30-year mortgage within months of his taking office. We need that kind of spirited innovation. ..... The most difficult issue was Too Big to Fail, and that was not dealt with. We are going to be creating even bigger financial institutions ...... We would have moved toward solving the problem if we had broken up the large institutions where they are not too big to fail. ...... It is jobs that are affecting housing prices, not the other way around. Mainly it is the failure to generate convincing economic prospects that keep people from hiring. ....... 16 percent of [Americans] would like to have jobs but don't. ..... something on the order of a 30 percent cut in Social Security taxes for four years. That would create immediate incentives for hiring. ....... continued backlash against domestic institutions ...... The key reason firms aren't hiring is that the economy is growing so slowly ...... more public projects .... Public projects are part of what we should be doing—New Deal, Civilian Conservation Corps-type projects—because unemployment is sapping the national morale. ..... general revenue sharing ..... the global economy faces a serious structural condition, and that is lack of global aggregate demand in which the developing countries continue to save and the developed countries no longer can finance prior levels of consumption ....... encourage China and other Asian countries to develop internally as opposed to simply externally for export. ...... we are not just broke once. We are broke about six times over ...... When a government is in an unsustainable fiscal position, spending more money does not improve the economy. ....... The only one that has the capacity to borrow in sizable amounts is the U.S. government. ..... to suggest that the government now contract fiscally in terms of reducing its deficits to me is simply going in the wrong direction. ..... people are very upset. They feel that the country is not theirs, and that a small group of wealthy people who get bailed out and bribe the government are in charge....... The issues are not that clearly understood today. The system is more complex. What has been legislated is a Rube Goldberg contraption. And that is wrong...... The engine of global growth is shifting from the United States to other countries ...... Firms are not buying new buildings, but they are buying new computers. ..... The most important thing we have going for us is our entrepreneurship and flexibility. ...... We are creating a Financial Oversight Council which will be worrying about systemic crises, and an Office of Financial Research, which is going to be collecting data. When we had this crisis we didn't know what was happening. ...... create jobs for the future, as opposed to jobs for current consumption ...... for the Federal Reserve to continue the quantitative easing and be even more innovative. They have to do more.

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IBM's Africa

New York Times: I.B.M.: Africa Is the Next Growth Frontier: I.B.M. will supply the computing technology and services for an upgraded cellphone network across 16 nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Its customer is India’s largest cellphone operator, Bharti Airtel, which paid $9 billion a few months ago for most of the African assets of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company, or Zain..... The deal takes the broad partnership between Bharti and I.B.M., begun in 2004, beyond India. ..... in the last five years I.B.M. has invested $300 million in the region to build data centers, add country offices and foster technology training programs — and it plans to expand aggressively in the region..... the next major emerging growth market — Africa .... I.B.M. is targeting the linchpin industries of economies including telecommunications, banking, transportation, health care and energy...... only 23 percent of Africans have access to banking services, but already 8 million Africans use their cellphones for payments.

The for profit route is the route to go. The for profit route is the best way to do good for about 90% of the people out there, be it Africa, China or India. Or America. Most Americans take care of their families with jobs they hold with privately held companies.

In The News

New York Times: Oracle Profit Rises 20%, Higher Than Forecast: for a quarter that closed at the end of August, traditionally one of the slowest selling periods..... Safra A. Catz, a president of Oracle .... “I don’t believe there is any other company in the industry better positioned than Oracle,” Mr. Hurd said. ..... The legal squabble underscores the changing relationships taking place as the world’s largest technology companies begin to step on each other’s toes. .... Never one to back down from a confrontation, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, threatened that H.P.’s lawsuit against Mr. Hurd could wreck the companies’ relationship. ..... Oracle continues to follow a multiyear strategy of acquiring business software makers large and small. The company hopes to become a one-stop shop of sorts .... tends to purchase companies with loyal customers who pay regular maintenance fees for upgrades and other services ... Oracle posted about $1 billion in hardware sales as well ..... Ellison vowed to unveil a host of new products at Oracle’s event next week, including systems that create tight links between hardware and software.
Google Ventures Hires an Entrepreneur-in-Residence: the man behind Google Voice ..... Google bought GrandCentral for a reported $45 million in 2007 and since then, Mr. Walker has been the product manager for real-time communications at Google. ..... Entrepreneur-in-residence is one of those only-in-Silicon-Valley jobs. Smart people get paid to sit around and think about new ideas, and investors get the chance to join an entrepreneur early in a new project, betting that lightning will strike twice. ..... “This business that we’re in as V.C.s is a social business, more about people than companies or products.” ..... the idea is that Google will eventually fund Mr. Walker’s next start-up..... there are still lot of industries like that out there.”

TechCrunch: Yahoo’s Internal Three Year Plan: 1 Billion Users And $10 Billion In Revenue: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.... short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen ... what Yahoo really needs is some serious product vision
How Small Countries Out-perform: A Guide (Spoiler: It’s a lot like Startups): By 2050 the United States will be the only G7 nation that is still one of the seven largest economies in the world. Our new peers... will be China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. .... Israel and Singapore. These are two countries that had little in terms of natural resources and have far out-performed their larger neighbors ..... tiny Singapore has just 2% of the population of its giant neighbor Indonesia but its GDP is 35% of Indonesia’s ..... a culture of entrepreneurship ..... Israel .. indirectly benefited from its instability, in that most of the innovation in the late 1990s spun out of the army. ...... The President of Iceland Olafur Regnar Grimsson, who was on the panel, said his size has been an advantage in doing deals with the global giants because it’s not a threat and there are no political dustups. ...... One huge international giant, like Nokia in Finland, can have a disproportionate effect on the economy as it swings up and down with the market ..... What works best isn’t erecting some incubator but favorable tax policy, labor laws that allow for rapid company formation and failure and incentives for foreign investors. ..... Singapore’s GDP was down 8% last year but is up 18% in the most recent quarter.
Music Lovers, Be Prepared To Fall In Love Instantly – Meet The New Shuffler:Shuffler is excellent for music discovery
Social Payment Startup Venmo Raised $1.2 Million And Has A New iPhone App (TCTV): closed $1.2 million in seed funding last May led by RRE Ventures. Other investors include betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, as well as angel investors Dustin Moskovitz, (Facebook co-founder), Dave Morin (founder of Path, senior platform manager at Facebook) and Sam Lessin (Drop.io CEO)...... Andrew Kortina used to work at betaworks, where he was one of the original engineers on URL shortener bit.ly. ..... if it grows, businesses could start accepting Venmo payments simply by opening an account. .... If it can start collecting enough public data about what people are buying, that data could be very valuable to brands and businesses.

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed: Sparse, But Clean; Source Code Released: All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).... will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability. .... It is by no means bug free or feature complete
Facebook Expands Instant Personalization Program, Adds Rotten Tomatoes As Partner: The feature gives sites that have received Facebook’s blessing the ability to access any information you’ve shared with ‘Everyone’ on Facebook as soon as you arrive at the third-party site, with no authentication required. ... Yelp, Microsoft’s Docs.com, and Pandora .... a personalized web, where sites know what you’re interested in as soon as you arrive.....it was initially frustratingly difficult to opt-out of ..... people will totally freak out when they arrive at a site and it already knows who their friends are ..... “No revenue is ever exchanged as part of this program and user data cannot be transferred by partners to third-party ad networks.” .... reviews, food, travel, music, movies

Alex Payne: The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter: My unintentionally infamous tweet from months ago about a Twitter web experience that would compete with the best third-party clients ..... The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it..... the Twitter developer community needs to adapt to the post-#newtwitter reality. .... decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email

Google Latlong: View Near Real-time Flights Over The U.S. In Google Earth: a snapshot of all the airplanes in the air at any given time over the U.S., all placed at the appropriate coordinates and altitude.

BusinessWeek: Dell Plans More Than $100 Billion Spending In China:over 10 years ..... Steve Ballmer projects the country may replace the U.S. as the largest PC market next year. ..... The company spent about $23 billion in China in 2009 .... Dell China President Amit Midha
China Touts ‘Complete Package’ for California Railway: including financing .... linking Los Angeles and San Francisco .... trains that travel 350 kph (217 mph) and experience from building a 6,920 kilometer high-speed rail network, the world’s longest...... China will have twice as much high-speed rail track as the rest of the world combined by 2014 under a 2 trillion yuan ($297 billion) nationwide construction project ..... California’s planned high-speed rail network would haul passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours and 38 minutes. The journey takes six to eight hours by car or about one hour by plane. ..... will eventually link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco.