see Revolts Of 2011

Saudi Arabia Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal said Monday that he and his investment firm, Kingdom Holding Company, are purchasing a $300 million stake in Twitter... The prince's Twitter shares were bought on the secondary market, according to Fortune reporter Dan Primack -- which means that Twitter didn't directly receive any of the cash... Alwaleed's investment firm, KHC, owns a 7% stake in NewsCorporation (NewsCorp) (NWS) along with a host of high-profile investments, including a 29.9% stake in Saudi Research and Marketing Group. KHC's other investments include C N N Money parent company Time Warner (TWX, Fortune 500), Apple Computer (AAPL, Fortune 500) and CitiGroup (C, Fortune 500). Alwaleed also has plans to launch a privately owned news channel. (more)

Jack Dorsey has dumped 4 Product Manager-s at Twitter. This move is said to be led by Dorsey as a final measure to remove those still closely affiliated with the old Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Jason Goldman regime. Those three, of course, all left Twitter in recent months and just re-launched the Obvious startup incubator where Twitter was originally born... The move was led by Jack Dorsey and will see key product guys Kevin Cheng, Josh Elman, and two others we’ve yet to confirm, leave the company... Update: We’ve now confirmed that Anamitra Banerji (@anamitra), who started Twitter’s ad platform, and Jean Paul Cozzatti (@jeanpaul) will round out the foursome of PMs who are leaving. Interesting update on 2011-03-24-DorseyReturnToTwitter. (more)

Updating from 2011-01-29-EgyptUprising... (more)

Matt Webb has built a tiny app called Glancing which is a different sort of Presence Detection app for a Creative Network. A group is intended to be less than a dozen people. A person may belong to several groups simultaneously by running separate instances of Glancing... It lets you "glance" at them in idle moments, and it gives all of you an indication of the activity of glancing going on... To model a group of people online who occassionally glance at each other, which is a small social transaction. This is done using a group model which stores the glance state: High if people have been glancing recently, low otherwise. It uses AOL's Instant Messaging network (why not Jabber?). It jiggles a group state, which seems to me to limits its applicability to anything (other than jumping into an all-members Live Chat). A slightly different spin which seems more useful to me is Jiggling each individual's state, as a measure of his willingness to be interrupted. Just idleness might be one way (except that you "look" idle when you're on the phone or talking to someone f2f). I suppose if one were using a Universal Inbox as a front end to all your activity, then you could associate different buckets with availability (if I'm reading A-list EMail then don't bother me, if I'm reading outside blogs go ahead). (more)

The NSF is going to run contests, awarding 100 science and engineering projects/year $10k plus membership in a class based on Steve Blank's Lean Launchpad course (2011-03-09-Blank[[Lean LaunchpadCourse]]). The common wisdom was that for scientists and engineers to succeed in the entrepreneurial world you’d have to teach them all about business. But it’s only now that we realize that’s wrong. The insight the NSF had is that we just need to teach scientists and engineers to treat business models as another research project that can be solved with learning, discovery and experimentation. I Commented. (more)

Processing of buyers coming together to make a single bid/transaction for an offering, in order to get a lower price. (more)

The R Open Source StatisticalAnalysis language is competing with SAS. (Statistics, Exploratory Data Analysis) (more)

*What has publishers riled, behind the scenes, is aggressive moves the retailer (Amazon) is making in its demands on co-op and discounts. A number of sources in the industry, all of whom spoke to PW on the condition of anonymity, said the retailer is, in certain cases, threatening to stop selling titles from companies who won't pay up... The demands regarding co-op have some particularly on edge. Not only are many publishers frustrated about being asked to pay more money for content they are providing, but the whole notion of co-op at the online retailer is unsettling. While the case can be made that co-op in a bricks-and -mortar store is a worthwhile investment--money is spent on getting books to physical areas of the store, such as front tables, where consumers will see those books first--it's much less logical on a Web site. Does having a video or an author Q&A on a book's page on Amazon really encourage a customer who has already clicked on that book to make a purchase? (more)

when government goes beyond Welfare State into Micro-Management of your life (taking on Risk Management for you: requiring Motor Cycle helmets, boring Play Ground-s and Chemistry Set-s, etc.) (more)

Nova Spivack product (more)

Edd Dumbill says: Check Vist is an online OutLiner, similar to applications such as OmniOutliner on the Mac. Fundamentally, you can use it to create hierarchical outlines. Checkvist has a lot of extra bells and whistles that facilitate its use for basic Project Management (Issue Tracker). Items can be assigned to other users, given due dates, and have annotations from members of your team. You can also tag an item with a Hash Tag. None of those fetaures get in the way of straightforward outlining, however... Crucially for a web app, Checkvist speaks the standard file format of its genre, in this case OPML. You can both import and export OPML. Other import formats include PlainText and Confluence Wiki syntax (WikiText). Those formats are supported for export, along with simple HTML. (more)

There was a Financial Planning Blogger Con in Chicago the end of September. Close, and only $120! I'm bummed I didn't know about it. (more)

NYC parents are creating Pre-School CoOp-s to deal with the market shortage. (Educating Kids In Nyc) Beyond the effort was the challenge of getting different families to work together. When matters as personal as education, values and children are at stake, intense emotions are sure to follow, whether the issue is snacks (organic or not?), paint (machine washable?) or what religious holidays, if any, to acknowledge. Oh, and in many cases, forming a co-op school is illegal, because getting the required permits and passing background checks can be so prohibitively expensive and time-consuming that most co-ops simply don’t. (Too Many Laws)

Statistics package (more)

Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data. It also provides tools for prediction and forecasting based on data. It is applicable to a wide variety of academic disciplines, from the natural and social sciences to the humanities, government and business. (more)

paperwork for bureacracy, regulation (more)

The prisoner's dilemma is a canonical example of a game, analyzed in Game Theory that shows why two individuals might not cooperate, even if it appears that it is in their best interest to do so. It was originally framed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher working at RAND in 1950. Albert W. Tucker formalized the game with prison sentence payoffs and gave it the "prisoner's dilemma" name (William Poundstone, 1992). (more)

Dave Winer notes how Platform controls (e.g. Apple Computer, Twitter) leaves ISV-s with the Prisoners Dilemma. A few years later, I asked a room full of them, just out of curiosity, if any of them had made money on this deal they did with Apple. Of course not. Apple, Microsoft and Aldus (which later became part of Adobe) made all the money. The bottom-line is that the developers would have done better, imho, working with each other, than each of them making separate "deals" with Apple. Because to Apple, they weren't deals at all. Their motive, as people, not so much as a company, was to regain full control of everything that happened on their platform. The other developers helped them do that. Once that was over, they weren't important to Apple... My advice to developers who seek partnerships with Twitter is to spread your bets out. Sure, Twitter may buy one or two of you, but what if they buy your competitor? Would you like to have some hope for the future if that should happen?

page was renamed from z2011-12-12-SpivakStreamBottlenoseUniversal Inbox (more)