Aaron Shwartz

Been reading the coverage about Aaron Shwartz on Techcrunch.com & BoingBoing.net, which lead me to read about the young developers' Bio at Jottit.com (also created my own login at Jottit.com) and on his website.

It seems that while he was pursuing his courses at Stanford, Paul Graham invited him over to apply for the Y Combinator Startups program which eventually lead him to co-found Reddit (although the articles keep saying he was an early developer there).

Aaron has been a developer at a very young age - 13 years and has been contributing to the internet community in various forms. His unfortunate demise due to some form of low phase has come as a shock to many who have been following his work ..

Pirates of the Silicon Valley

Interview with the Veteran startups of the Silicon Valley.

Capital C : Crowd funding

What is Crowd Funding ?
Intro para from Wikipedia says -

Crowd funding or crowdfunding (alternately crowd financing, equity crowdfunding, or hyper funding) describes the collective effort of individuals who network and pool their money, usually via the Internet, to support efforts initiated by other people or organizations.^[1][2] Crowd funding is used in support of a wide variety of activities, including disaster relief, citizen journalism, support of artists by fans, political campaigns, startup company funding,^[3] movie^[4] or free software development, inventions development and scientific research.^[5]

Techcrunch has a neat article - 2012: The year crowd funding was kickstarted Into The Mainstream that covers the various crowd funding happenings including the Title 3 JOBS Act passed by Obama that allows end-users to jump on the angel funding.

There are a lot of folks/communities ( NGOs, schools, medical aid etc.) who can benefit through crowd funding who would other wise be limited by resources.

Social Scenario
Imagine a scenario where you have started a social project that is much needed for your community and know for sure that it would not scale-up without funding. You could involve people with time as volunteers and get a crowd to help fund the initiative without having to burn your pocket.

What does the crowd in-turn get for their noble contribution, the credit for having participated in helping setup & execute a social initiative which could be any cause like "teach computers for free" or "night school" for working class or "stop corruption".

Different stripes for different types !
There are a variety of crowdfunding organizations that help complete the dots. CrowdsUnite brings order and transparency to crowd funding platforms. You can explore a variety of crowd investors who may want to help in your endeavor.

References :

• Crowdfund Act 2012
• Can Crowdfunding help you launch your next book ?

Foresight without Leadership

Techcrunch published an article - Innovate or die : NOKIA's long drawn out decline ; that discusses NOKIA R&D pioneering the concepts but unable to make it fly -

Leach points to the example of the Nokia Communicator – a pioneering forerunner of today’s smartphones, which launched way back in 1996 — as an example of how Nokia failed to deliver on its own great potential. While the device included the ability to download apps, Nokia missed the opportunity to capitalise on them long before anyone else could have.  “Nokia felt that downloading apps and all of that was only something a minority of people would do,” he says. “It wasn’t really the main point, no one would get that concept. And then a couple of years later you have Apple doing a mainstream TV commercial about downloading apps to your phone.

The ability to download apps directly to your phone and use an app-store were both innovations/ideas that NOKIA could have blown out of proportion if they were able to capitalize on it early. They did launch OVI store formally but it turns out people had jumped the Apple & Google App-Store band-wagon.

References :

• Innovate or die : NOKIA's long drawn out decline
• NOKIA's chief faces culture complacency

Credits : NOKIA Logo ® is a trademark of NOKIA, Finland, Logo collage referenced from techcrunch.com article.