3 Ways to Survive the Coming Social Bust | SmallBusinessNewz

Compared to the last boom/bust technology cycle that culminated with the dot com crash of 2000, the social-era combatants are in an even more precarious position. Back then, the engine of the expansion was e-commerce, which at least generated revenue (although clearly not at ROI sufficient to save Pets.com, Webvan.com, Boo.com and legions of other online ghosts). Last time, success and failure was driven as much by expense control as revenue generation, and the huge influx of public market financing through IPOs allowed start-up companies to essentially trade dollars back and forth in a giant shell game.

Read Article.

Interview – Amir Banifatemi | Peter Mehit

Amir Banifatemi is founder of K5 Accelerator, which is based at ChapmanCollege’s e-Village. He has extensive experience developing start up and growth companies in many different markets but focuses primarily on healthcare, internet and media technologies. While he is focused keenly on developing value, he also has an eye toward projects that have significant technological breakthroughs and significant social and economic impact.

Mehit: You’ve been quoted that the center of gravity in OrangeCounty has been around real estate and finance resulting in a very careful and staid culture. What would you like to see changed?

Amir: I would try to improve a certain number of things, one of those would be more collaboration. I think the history of OrangeCounty and how people are disbursed does not promote synergies. Unfortunately, distance makes it difficult for people to meet and collaborate on projects, except on big projects.

Further if you look historically, at San Francisco or other places, when people get out of college, where do they go? They go to Hewlett Packard or the Fairchild or Intel but what do they do here? They go to a real estate company or title company. The appropriate employment environment is lacking.

Finally, people are focused on cash today instead of cash tomorrow. Your attitude, your investment of time and resource in collaboration and how you view society and community are different if you looking at cash tomorrow.

Workplace Distractions: Here’s Why You Won’t Finish This Article – WSJ.com

Office workers are interrupted—or self-interrupt—roughly every three minutes, academic studies have found, with numerous distractions coming in both digital and human forms. Once thrown off track, it can take some 23 minutes for a worker to return to the original task, says Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, who studies digital distraction.

Read Article.

Liberty, Undeterred | El Cipayo

To minimize coverage of an anti government protest in Argentina, the government banned access to the airspace around the event to limit images that could lead a viewer to estimate the size of the crowd, or the actions of the authorities.

El Cipayo simply used a radio controlled model helicopter to get the job done, posting the videos on YouTube.

Big Brother may be here, but the common man is sharing the technology.

Exclusive: John McAfee Wanted for Murder (Updated)

Antivirus pioneer John McAfee is on the run from murder charges, Belize police say.

Read Article.

Too much money and time on your hands? – Ed.

Its Becoming Clear That No One Actually Read Facebooks IPO Prospectus Or Mark Zuckerbergs Letter To Shareholders – Business Insider

Mark Zuckerberg set up the entire structure of the company so he wouldn’t be forced to make dumb short-term decisions by whining public-market shareholders. And he TOLD them that he wasn’t going to make those decisions. They just didn’t listen.

Read Article.

ZNGA Zingered | ZeroHedge

Invest in a company that is nothing, has nothing, and makes nothing, on the hope that it turns into something.  A sure thing.

- Ned Zeppelin, Zero Hedge comment

Read Article.

The Next Industrial Revolution « azizonomics

And even if the risks of global trade disruptions do not materialise in the near-term, as the finite supply of oil dwindles in coming years, the costs of constantly shipping so much around and around the world may prove unsustainable.

It is my view that the reality of costlier oil is set over the coming years to spur a new industrial revolution — a very welcome side-effect of which will be increased social and industrial decentralisation. Looming on the horizon are technologies which can decentralise the means of production and the means of energy generation.

Read Article.

Data Centers Waste Vast Amounts of Energy, Belying Industry Image – NYTimes.com

Nationwide, data centers used about 76 billion kilowatt-hours in 2010, or roughly 2 percent of all electricity used in the country that year

Read Article.

The Next Internet? Inside PARC’s Vision of Content Centric Networking | Xconomy

The fundamental idea behind Content Centric Networking is that to retrieve a piece of data, you should only have to care about what you want, not where it’s stored. Rather than transmitting a request for a specific file on a specific server, a CCN-based browser or device would simply broadcast its interest in that file, and the nearest machine with an authentic copy would respond.

Read Article.

Distracted Walking Injuries Quadruple — Mobile Devices to Blame? | TechCrunch

The number of citizens wandering into ditches, on-coming cars, and each other while staring at electronics has “quadrupled”, according to the Associated Press

Read More.

Shorter Flights at Lower Heights: The Right Way To Angel Invest | OnStartups.com

A more effective model for Angel investing is long overdue. If Angels want to win — they want to lower their risk, create better returns, and help entrepreneurs more they’ll do the following: fly lower heights (avoid trying to fund the next 5 Facebooks) and take shorter flights (avoid riding each investment out all the way to the end).

Read Article.

10 Things I Learned from ‘We Are Anonymous’ | Peter Mehit

I read Parmy Olsen’s ‘We Are Anonymous’ over the weekend. It is the story of the infamous hacker collective that brought down the Church of Scientology, Pay Pal, Master Card, Visa, Sony, the FBI and CIA among their numerous conquests. It’s a fascinating read about a group based on a contradiction: A few very talented, capable, creative people performed truly heinous acts because they thought their lives were pointless. This nihilistic perspective drove them until they were caught.

The participants were young. The oldest was 28, the youngest 16. Uniformly, they were the socially awkward. They were bullied and marginalized for most of their lives. Most left the education system in middle school because they were bored or mistreated. All of them lived with parents or relatives, reeking havoc on some of the largest organizations in the world from their bedrooms.

Anonymous was more of accident than a movement. The book details how the hacker collective transitioned from a  chaotic, leaderless group looking for lulz (fun at other people’s expense) to very small team that stole the private information of millions of people only to give it away to secure fame and respect from the hacking community. Without recounting the book, because it’s worth reading to understand hacker culture and the underworld of the internet, I was struck by several points:

Hacked companies fight back with controversial steps | Reuters

Some experts also say executives should identify their most prized intellectual property and keep it off of networked computers and consider evasive action – such as having 100 versions of a critical digitized blueprint and only one that is genuine, with the right one never identified in emails.

“There is a reason that people fly halfway around the world to have a one-hour meeting,” Joffe said of intelligence agencies.

Read Article.

Pitches From Hell: The Scissor Man | Peter Mehit

Mrs. Mehit and I attended a Tech Coast Angels entrepreneur’s outreach event at Cisco’s campus in Irvine. The intent of the evening was to give those new to TCA a taste of how their process works. As part of the evening, participants were allowed to give two minute pitches of their business ideas to gain feedback from TCA and audience members. TCA had anticipated that four to six people would sign up to pitch. We heard from sixteen.

Some of the pitches were excellent. A few people were unfocused, but nothing that you wouldn’t expect at this kind of event. Everything was normal until the scissor man came up holding a plastic case folder. His product, a kind of safety scissor was aimed at parents.

“As a parent, we all want our children to be safe,” he said, while rummaging around in the plastic case file. “I know I have this picture somewhere….”  He trailed off, digging for the photograph. “You have to be careful with kids, because they’ll run with scissors.” Then he raised the picture he’d been looking for.