“Here’s the sum­mary. The mar­ket for seed cap­i­tal is clearly bro­ken. Most indi­vid­ual angels will only do about 1 deal per year, which means their port­fo­lios lose money 40% of the time due to insuf­fi­cient diver­si­fi­ca­tion. Even pre­mier angel groups like the Band of Angels say they only do about 8 deals per year. Our math says you need to do 125 to achieve good diver­si­fi­ca­tion. On the other side of the table, only 14% of entre­pre­neurs who want angel fund­ing will find it. Those that do will spend about 6 months look­ing for money instead of build­ing their businesses.”

“Adver­tis­ers face a bar­rier because in social media, human bonds do not require third-​​party spon­sor­ships. There is no exter­nal con­tent to spon­sor. Data col­lec­tors, who now hope to turn Facebook’s social streams into the Exper­ian of the future, also may hit a wall when human con­nec­tions can no longer be intercepted.”

“There’s only one rule at hack day: build some­thing you can demon­strate at the end of the event (Pow­er­point slides don’t count). Impor­tantly though, our hack days are not restricted to just our devel­op­ment team: any­one from the tech­nol­ogy depart­ment can get involved, and we extend the invi­ta­tion to other parts of the organ­i­sa­tion as well. At the Guardian, this includes journalists.

For our first hack day, I put together a list of “tools for non-developers”—sites, ser­vices and soft­ware that could be used for hack­ing with­out pro­gram­ming knowl­edge as a pre-​​requisite. I’m now updat­ing that list with rec­om­men­da­tions from else­where. Here’s the list so far:”

“The Empir­i­cal Game Analy­sis Toolkit (EGAT) is a project designed around com­pil­ing var­i­ous game-​​theoretic tools into one com­pre­hen­sive suite.”

“The con­ven­tional ratio­nale for copy­right of writ­ten works, that copy­right is needed to fos­ter their cre­ation, is seem­ingly of lim­ited applic­a­bil­ity to the aca­d­e­mic domain. For in a world with­out copy­right of aca­d­e­mic writ­ing, aca­d­e­mics would still ben­e­fit from pub­lish­ing in the major way that they do now, namely, from gain­ing schol­arly esteem. Yet pub­lish­ers would pre­sum­ably have to impose fees on authors, because pub­lish­ers would not be able to profit from reader charges. If these pub­li­ca­tion fees would be borne by aca­d­e­mics, their incen­tives to pub­lish would be reduced. But if the pub­li­ca­tion fees would usu­ally be paid by uni­ver­si­ties or grantors, the motive of aca­d­e­mics to pub­lish would be unlikely to decrease (and could actu­ally increase) – sug­gest­ing that end­ing aca­d­e­mic copy­right would be socially desir­able in view of the broad ben­e­fits of a copyright-​​free world. ”

“As the speed of tech­no­log­i­cal progress con­tin­ues to accel­er­ate, inno­va­tion threat­ens to out­pace archi­tects’ and design­ers’ work­ing knowl­edge of mate­ri­als thereby lim­it­ing their applic­a­bil­ity. In order to stay at the cut­ting edge of design, a knowl­edge of the uses, prop­er­ties, and sources of new mate­ri­als is essen­tial. A com­pan­ion to the Trans­ma­te­r­ial books writ­ten by Blaine Brownell and pub­lished by Prince­ton Archi­tec­tural Press, Trans­ma­te­r­ial online is intended to be a clear, con­cise, acces­si­ble, and care­fully edited resource that pro­vides infor­ma­tion about the lat­est and most intrigu­ing mate­ri­als com­mer­cially available.”

“Judg­ing by the qual­ity of much of the pop­u­lar press, most of what gets pub­lished these days doesn’t get edited in any mean­ing­ful way. Some of that is prob­a­bly the fruit of cost cuts over the years, but I worry that some of it is a loss of the sense that it’s sup­posed to hap­pen at all.”

“Richard Florida’s exotic city, his cre­ative city, depends on ghost peo­ple, work­ing behind the scenes. Immi­grants, peo­ple of colour. You want to know what his ver­sion of cre­ative is? He’s the relo­ca­tion agent for the global bour­geoisie. And the rest of us don’t matter.”

“Although many use the terms “news” and “jour­nal­ism” inter­change­ably, I think that jour­nal­ism also encom­passes some­thing much more impor­tant — con­text. News cer­tainly has its place. But I aim to use this site to advance the dis­cus­sion of how we can bet­ter use the Web to deliver con­text in journalism.”

This needs to hap­pen to Uni­ver­si­ties: “…yes, we lost a lot of peo­ple. The peo­ple that just wanted to tell other peo­ple what to do were gone. They either left or were removed. The peo­ple who liked sit­ting in cubes and being told what to do left also.”

“Chi­nese police are inves­ti­gat­ing the case, includ­ing whether or not Sun was bru­tal­ized. But the Chi­nese media and blog­gers have surged to the case as a sign of work­place pres­sure gone awry. They have posted what they say is a Fox­conn con­fi­den­tial­ity and non-​​compete agree­ment, which promises fines for work­ers who break it. More fun­da­men­tally, they have enshrined the story of Sun Dany­ong as a bit­ter sym­bol of China’s indus­trial age.”

“Our con­fer­ence sys­tems forces researchers to focus too heav­ily on quick, tech­ni­cal
and safe papers instead of con­sid­er­ing broader and newer ideas. Mean­while we
have focused much of our time and money on con­fer­ences where we can present
our research that we can rarely attend con­fer­ences and work­shops to work and
social­ize with our colleagues.”

“Pres­i­dent Obama’s top antitrust offi­cial and some senior Demo­c­ra­tic law­mak­ers are prepar­ing to rein in a host of major indus­tries, includ­ing air­line and rail­road giants, mov­ing so aggres­sively that they are find­ing some resis­tance from offi­cials within the administration.”

“It turns out that many of the great waves of cre­ative destruc­tion that have rein­vented Sil­i­con Val­ley didn’t start there. More impor­tant, they didn’t even start with the profit motive.

Rather, they started with inter­est­ing prob­lems and peo­ple who wanted to solve them, exer­cis­ing tech­nol­ogy to its fullest because explor­ing new ideas was fun.”

“I am 6.5 times as likely to be happy that I have spent my time read­ing one of the top sto­ries in my RSS reader as I am to be happy that I have spent my time read­ing one of the top sto­ries printed by the New York Times and the Wash­ing­ton Post.”

“The press has become journalism’s curse, not only because it now brings a crush­ing cost bur­den but also because it led to all these myths: that we jour­nal­ists own the news, that we’re nec­es­sary to it, that we decide what’s reported and what’s impor­tant, that we can pack­age the world for you every day in a box with a bow on it, that what we do is per­fect (with rare, we think, excep­tions), that the world should come to us to be informed, that we deserve to be paid for this ser­vice, that the world needs us.”

“Ven­ture cap­i­tal is where job cre­ation will be, and ven­ture cap­i­tal is way behind pri­vate equity in devel­op­ing crit­i­cal mass in the state,” he said. “If you’re really inter­ested in build­ing the Michi­gan econ­omy, you do what is being done in Ohio and Okla­homa and other states: You spend Michi­gan money in Michigan.

“This web­site pro­vides data on busi­nesses with and with­out employ­ees. These are referred to as “employer firms” and “non­em­ployer firms.” Employer firms have the lion’s share of receipts and pay­roll, while non­em­ployer firms are far more numerous.”

Non­em­ployer busi­ness demo­graph­ics, by sec­tor and industry

Trends in non-​​employer and small busi­ness firms, estab­lish­ments and com­pa­nies from 1997–2006, United States. Note the rates at which non­em­ployer and <20 employee firms are grow­ing, com­pared to larger firms over the same period.

“The esti­mated 27.2 mil­lion small busi­nesses in the United States:

Employ about half of the country’s pri­vate sec­tor workforce

Hire 40 per­cent of high tech work­ers, such as sci­en­tists, engi­neers and com­puter workers

Include 52 per­cent home-​​based busi­nesses and two per­cent franchises

Rep­re­sent 97.3 per­cent of all the exporters of goods

Rep­re­sent 99.7 per­cent of all employer firms

Gen­er­ate a major­ity of the inno­va­tions that come from United States companies”

“The site-​​based pro­duc­tion offers artists and audi­ences alike the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence large-​​scale instal­la­tions and exper­i­men­tal per­for­mances that tran­scend the usual and explore the unknown–this is not a gallery, club, con­cert hall, or street fair. The young FFIH cura­tors aim to expose and expand their own com­mu­nity of unseen tal­ent by pro­duc­ing a series that is free from expec­ta­tion, free from cen­sor­ship, free from tra­di­tion, and free of charge. Forth From Its Hinges seeks to rep­re­sent local art, not as it exists today, but as what it can and will be in the future.”

“The slower traders began issu­ing buy orders. But rather than being shown to all poten­tial sell­ers at the same time, some of those orders were most likely routed to a col­lec­tion of high-​​frequency traders for just 30 mil­lisec­onds — 0.03 sec­onds — in what are known as flash orders. While mar­kets are sup­posed to ensure trans­parency by show­ing orders to every­one simul­ta­ne­ously, a loop­hole in reg­u­la­tions allows mar­ket­places like Nas­daq to show traders some orders ahead of every­one else in exchange for a fee.”

“The empha­sis shifts from con­tracts and legal sanc­tions to trust and trans­parency as com­pa­nies work together, aligned with their cus­tomers’ interests—sharing core val­ues, busi­ness prac­tices, infra­struc­ture, and sys­tems. Amazon’s mar­ket­place and eBay’s webs of buy­ers and sell­ers are early pro­to­types of these fed­er­ated net­works. Apple and Face­book are strug­gling to under­stand the rules of engage­ment that should gov­ern rela­tion­ships with their appli­ca­tions devel­op­ers. You can see them climb­ing a new learn­ing curve through trial and error as they fig­ure out how to build and sus­tain economies of trust.”

“One per­son who hands out a lot of leaflets these days is Lynne Price, a local activist known affec­tion­ately as “Gobby Lynne”. Yet she gets much of her infor­ma­tion about plan­ning pro­pos­als, crime and so on from the inter­net. This illus­trates one effect of the digi­ti­sa­tion of infor­ma­tion. As news­pa­pers weaken and die, most peo­ple prob­a­bly become less informed about local affairs, but a few moti­vated folk grow extremely knowl­edge­able. Ms Price will miss the Bed­worth Echo, but not as a source of news. It was, she says, a use­ful way of get­ting the word out.”