The Serval Project and Village Telco and Mesh Potato team up to provide local Mobile service, supporting Android handsets. (Open Cell Phone?)

Microsoft is killing its KIN Mobile product. (more)

Mark Pesce has an interesting idea of using Plexus to generate a bogus FaceBook account for each friend you want to follow there, so you can read it via Plexus without having to share your Social Graph with FaceBook.

As of Jul21, Google sold the last of their Nexus One inventory, and closed their web store. (more)

Giles Bowkett found that coherent user comments had many grammatical linkages. (SpamWars, AI, Virtual Community)

Under *the terms of a 2008 status of forces agreement, all U.S. troops must be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, but they’ll leave behind a sizable American civilian presence, including the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest in the world, and five consulate-like "Enduring Presence Posts" in the Iraqi hinterlands. (more)

New York State has two public payrolls, which makes it difficult to measure/shrink. *ne is controlled by the governor, encompassing about 131,000 employees, who toil for agencies like the Health Department, the parks department and the Department of Motor Vehicles. That payroll has shrunk by about 25 percent in the last two decades — so has the much smaller legislative payroll — and usually shoulders the brunt of layoffs. (more)

The Washington Post has a series on the growth of the Security Theater industry since the World Trade Center. (more)

People are forming private food clubs (like a CSA) to product/distribute non-mainstream food goods without the licensing requirements associated with running a retail operation. (This also supports Locavore Resilience.) BigGov don't like that. (more)

Some Meaningful Use Of EMR guidelines came out a couple weeks ago. Reactions are starting to come out to the 864 pages (!) of documentation.

Steve Blank thinks that linear vesting of Start Up founder-CEO stock is inappropriate, and this causes anger if that CEO gets pushed out before his stock finishes vesting. If the founding CEO gets the company to a repeatable business model (Customer Validation) they deserve to vest all their stock if they are removed. If they fail to find a Business Model, by taking investors money they’ve implicitly agreed they can be walked out the door. (But can keep the stock they’ve vested to date.) Commenters note (and I agree) that setting the Metrics that define whether a repeatable model has been found can be an ugly process, esp if it's after a pivot (because time has passed, the CEO has been there for some time, the investors may be somewhat peeved that a pivot was necessary, etc.).

Scientists from Louisiana State University, Mississippi State University and Texas A&M have “signed contracts with BP to work on their behalf in the Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) process” that determines how much ecological damage the Gulf of Mexico region is suffering from BP’s Oil Spill toxic black tide. The contract, the Mobile Press-Register has learned, “prohibits the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scientists or speaking about the data that they collect for at least the next three years.”

Steve Blank gives a great question to do Customer Validation on your pipeline: if you gave them your product today for free, are they prepared to install and use it across their department and company? If the answer is no, you have absolutely no customers on your forecast who will be prepared to buy from you in the next six months.

Benjamin Rosenbaum doesn't believe that Technological Determinism leads to the Economics Of Abundance. (Whuffie, Network Economy) (more)

Android phone from Google. The ultimate GPhone? (more)

Fred Wilson is playing with a Sony Dash, which is kinda like a Chumby with a big screen. I Commented.

an American science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction writer and computer programmer, whose stories have been finalists for the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, the BSFA award, and the World Fantasy Award. (more)

Finally decided, ordered a Nexus One for me. Waiting for Jihi until I see how it plays. (more)

OsCon includes a couple sessions on Open Source EMR systems: Tol Ven, Open Emr, VistA, etc. (Plus other HealthCare ideas: Quantified Self data -> PMR, etc.) (more)

Buster Benson killed a Lean Startup yesterday. I think I’m going to give myself 90 days to either come up with, build, and become profitable on a new idea and business, or strongly consider re-joining the gainfully employed (DayJob) people of the world. Which, back in the day, I thought I’d never be able to do because I was too spoiled by the luxuries of self-employment (Free Agent), but it turns out that luxuries also mask dangers and anxieties that taunt us in the night. (more)