Dan Kantor

What happens when you pair seven visual artists with seven engineers and technologists? The New Museum in New York City is about to find out. An upcoming exhibit called Seven On Seven will put together artists and programmers for one day and tell them to come up with something together. It could be an application, a work of art, a full-blown product, or anything they want. Some of the participating technologists include Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, former Facebook data dude Jeff Hammerbacher, and Tumblr founder David Karp.

Here are all seven pairings:
Artist / Technologist
Cao Fei / Jeff Hammerbacher
Evan Roth / Joshua Schachter
Aaron Koblin / Matt Mullenweg
Monica Narula / Andrew Kortina
Ryan Trecartin / Hilary Mason
Tauba Auerbach / Ayah Bdeir
Marc Andre Robinson / David Karp

Schachter, for instance, is being paired with artist Evan Roth, who has created open-source software to analyze graffiti tags and has even created a Graffiti Markup Language (GML). Schachter, of course, pioneered the use of data free-form tags to categorize Delicious bookmarks years ago. Mulennweg is being paired with Aaron Koblin a digital artist who creates art based on the input of thousands of individuals. He is also the artist who created Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video using no cameras (embedded below)

The seven pairs of collaborators will present their final project at the New Museum on April 17. We have 50 discount codes good for $100 off the $350 ticket price (just enter the code “techcrunch” here).

The idea to pair programmers with artists came from betaworks CEO John Borthwick, who is also a board member of Rhizome, the New Museum affiliate which is put the program together.

Suppose there is a pre-profitable company that is raising venture financing. Simple, classical economic models would predict that although there might be multiple VCs interested in investing, at the end of the financing process the valuation will rise to the clearing price where the demand for the company’s stock equals the supply (amount being issued).

Actual venture financings work nothing like this simple model would predict.  In practice, the equilibrium states for venture financings are: 1) significantly oversubscribed at too low a valuation, or 2) significantly undersubscribed at too high a valuation.

Why do venture markets function this way?  Pricing in any market is a function of the information available to investors. In the public stock markets, for example, the primary information inputs are “hard metrics” like company financials, industry dynamics, and general economic conditions. What makes venture pricing special is that there are so few hard metrics to rely on, hence one of the primary valuation inputs is what other investors think about the company.

This investor signaling has a huge effect on venture financing dynamics. If Sequoia wants to invest, so will every other investor.  If Sequoia gave you seed money before but now doesn’t want to follow on, you’re probably dead.

Part of this is the so-called herd mentality for which VC’s often get ridiculed. But a lot of it is very rational. When you invest in early-stage companies you are forced to rely on very little information. Maybe you’ve used the product and spent a dozen hours with management, but that’s often about it. The signals from other investors who have access to information you don’t is an extremely valuable input.

Smart entrepreneurs manage the investor signaling effect by following rules like:

- Don’t take seed money from big VCs – It doesn’t matter if the big VC invests under a different name or merely provides space and mentoring.  If a big VC has any involvement with your company at the seed stage, their posture toward the next round has such strong signaling power that they can kill you and/or control the pricing of the round.

- Don’t try to be clever and get an auction going (and don’t shop your term sheet). If you do, once the price gets to the point where only one investor remains, that investor will look left and right and see no one there and might get cold feet and leave you with no deal at all. Save the auction for when you get acquired or IPO.

- Don’t be perceived as being “on the market” too long.  Once you’ve pitched your first investor, the clock starts ticking. Word gets around quickly that you are out raising money. After a month or two, if you don’t have strong interest, you risk being perceived as damaged goods.

- If you get a great investor to lead a follow-on round, expect your existing investors to want to invest pro-rata or more, even if they previously indicated otherwise.  This often creates complicated situations because the new investor usually has minimum ownership thresholds (15-20%) and combining this with pro-rata for existing investors usually means raising far more money than the company needs.

Lastly, be very careful not to try to stimulate investor interest by overstating the interest of other investors. It’s a very small community and seed investors talk to each other all the time. If you are perceived to be overstating interest, you can lose credibility very quickly.

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written and reported by Steven Rosenbaum, the CEO of Magnify.net.

Today, the world of music, film, and the internet converges on Austin, Texas for what is fast becoming one of the key places to launch new software products. For the folks at AOL, South By Southwest—known also as SXSW—will be a debutant party for AOL’s new Seed form of journalism.

AOL has it’s hopes pinned on that fact that SXSW will be the perfect place to both introduce the new Seed content machine to a large audience and test the concept of mixing freelance and pro-journalists to create a huge amount of original content. Seed has been operational for a few months now, but SXSW will be it coming out party, according to former New York Times writer Saul Hansell who is now the Programming Director of Seed.

How’s this all going to work? Well, fielding an army of freelancers to cover SXSW’s 2000 bands is certainly a baptism by fire. AOL solicited freelance writers on its music site Spinner. Those interested in contributing were redirected to Seed, where they signed up. Hansell asked for work experience, music tastes, and clips. He says: “I can tell you now that we didn’t read the clips. We looked at these things to see if people can follow directions and if they didn’t write us 1,000 words when we asked for 100. And that was the criteria.”

Next, each of the more than two thousand bands that will play at SXSW were assigned to a Seedster to interview. Hansell says he had his fingers crossed. “I think we’re over the hump of my darkest fears,” he says, “and I had many of them. The first dark fear was we’d get total losers. The second fear was how good the interviews would be. “

Now, with first results surfacing on Spinner, Hansell says, “The people who sent us e-mails back were entertainment writers for weekend publications, kids in J-school who are also in bands, exactly the right type of people.” But they aren’t treated exactly like journalists. Hansell points out that Seedsters don’t get a press pass—if they want to hear the bands live they’ll have to buy their own ticket. But he expects some number of folks to try and hustle their way into shows by waving around their AOL clips. “That’s just expected.”

With clips like these, Seed writers are held to the same standards as any other freelancer on the AOL site. AOL Music’s managing editor Melissa Olund and her team edit the submissions and have final say on what runs and what doesn’t.

Why launch at South By Southwest? For Hansell, that was a no-brainer. “I know it is communicating our ambition. We are about reporting. We are about doing big and interesting things.” The big SXSW bet is that Hansell and his Seedsters can make more content, faster, better, and cheaper than anyone else. In addition the distributed community of potential contributors on Seed, AOL already employs 3,500 professional journalists on staff or as regular freelancers. And AOL has some interesting content search technology from its earlier acquisitions of Relegence and Truveo.

Man vs. Machine: The Bionic Solution

AOL has built a three legged stool to create content: part professional, part freelance, and part aggregated . . . but its model is far more hand-crafted than the other new players in the mass content creation space. “The essence of journalism has always been separating signal from noise,” says Hansell. “It’s all judgment. It’s all selecting the best bits.” What AOL hopes to create with Seed is an editorial machine which automates the assignment process as much as possible, but keeps the final selection part in human hands.

“I call it Bionic Journalism,” says Hansell. “Left brain, right brain. We are trying to take the best of a machine, which does lots of things over and over again, and a person.” It’s a tall order, and will take a lot more than a couple thousand band interviews to prove it works.

Is AOL trying to beat Google at the news gathering game? Hansell says it’s far more than that. “Google News will give you a whole clump of things that are probably about the same thing with a reasonable degree of accuracy. But it can’t tell you what it’s really about. It can’t summarize it. It can’t translate it into people language.”

The Ugly Economics: Not My Problem

So, what about cost? Some freelancers are complaining that the web doesn’t pay a living wage. “That is not my problem” Says Hansell. He quickly rephrases, “It is my problem but I didn’t do that, the world did that.”

He is however trying to sort it out. Asks Hansell: “How do you deal with the fact that the economics of the Internet can’t let you pay what people think that a freelancer can get paid? One way is you give them a bundle. If you give them ten of the same assignments, even if the price is low, by the time they’re done with the tenth one, they can do the tenth one in half the time they could do the first one.”

Here’s another one of Hansell’s analogies: “Seed is to freelancing as Ebay is to classified ads.” AOL’s Seed may be the future of freelance, but the math remains daunting; “The fact that we gave somebody ten interviews to do after she did one or two before, she’s delighted. That’s 500 bucks. That’s 500 bucks more than she was going to make doing something else, and it’s fun.” Well, “delighted” might be pushing it. Pumping out ten assignments for the price of what many professional freelancers charge for one will favor quantity over quality.

But if it all works—if Bionic Journalism can attract a massive audience and save AOL—what’s the home run? Here Hansell gets a little bit ahead of himself, but at least he is thinking big:

“It’s the most high risk improbable outcome, but the most exciting, which is that we become the most dominant force in journalism, broadly defined, in the Twenty-First Century. That’s what we’re shooting for. That’s what Tim is shooting for. That’s what I’m shooting for.”

And it all starts this weekend with 2,000 indie rock band interviews.

Steven Rosenbaum is the CEO of Magnify.net, a video curation platform that powers more than 68,000 web sites. Rosenbaum is a serial entrepreneur and Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker. Watch his video notes of Saul Hansell talking about Bionic Journalism and AOL’s larger journalistic ambitions by clicking in the two previous links. .Follow Steve on Twitter.

Here's something you might not know. There's enough food in the world to feed pretty much everyone. So why are more than 1 billion people — nearly 20% of the world's population — either starving or malnourished? And why, over the last two decades, has global hunger steeply risen?

The answer has everything to do with the past — and future — of advantage.

Over the last few months, I've discussed in depth the tectonic shifts rocking the macro and micro economy. Let's put it all together. Here's what the 21st century demands from firms of all stripes: a paradigm shift in the nature of advantage.

The past of advantage was extractive and protective. The future of advantage, on the other hand, is allocative and creative. I made a little Prezi to illustrate it, below. Let's go through each category in turn.

The future of advantage:

Allocative. Google's advantage was built on allocating attention to content and ads better than its rivals. Google's real secret? Relevance, media's measure of how efficiently attention is allocated. Match.com is building an allocative advantage in, well, matching people with partners. Allocative advantage asks: are we able to match people with what makes them durably, tangibly better off — and can we do it 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Creative.

Apple's advantage is, of course, radically creative: built on creating insanely great stuff that turns entire industries upside down. Next month, the iPad promises to do what the iPhone and iPod did before it. The power's in the creativity, not just the technology: Apple's thinking different yet again. Creative advantage asks: is our strategic imagination 10x or 100x richer, faster, and deeper than our rivals?

And the past:

Extractive. Over two decades, Microsoft has honed its extractive edge, coming up with cleverer and cleverer ways to extract profits from customers and suppliers. But Microsoft's just a flea on Wall St's elephant — who mastered extractive advantage by finding ways to, ultimately, extract trillions from you, me, and our grandkids. Extractive advantage asks: how can we transfer value from stakeholders to us, 10x or 100x better than our rivals?

Protective.

These dimensions are mutually exclusive. When a company pursues an extractive or protective advantage, it cannot hone an allocative or creative advantage. The opportunity cost of protecting yesterday is creating tomorrow. The opportunity cost of extracting resources is allocating them in better ways.To extract or protect is to forgo finding better ways of allocating or creating.

Microsoft has achieved an extractive advantage — but what Microsoft hasn't done is allocate software production and consumption more efficiently, or, of course, create better software. Lately, Google seems to be making mistake after mistake — and the root cause is the placing an extractive over an allocative advantage. Apple's reportedly on the offensive, suing rivals — and that focus on protecting yesterday might just cost it its creative advantage.

Monsanto has locked farmers into crops — but what it hasn't done is create better food, supermarkets, or markets. But perhaps the steepest price of a protective advantage has that Monsanto, like all its agro-giant rivals, has turned a blind eye distributing the vast surplus of food to the poor and malnourished. Putting protective advantage above allocative advantage is why, though there's enough food to feed the poor, the poor don't get fed.

That's so 20th century, it hurts. Here's what's so obviously, painfully wrong with the picture of people starving in the face of agricultural giants thriving: The profits earned don't represent real value created — just a massive transfer of value from people, farmers, and communities to shareholders.

The future of advantage is radically different from the past for a simple reason: because it's economically better. 20th century advantage focuses firms on simply extracting resources from people, communities and society — and then protecting what they extract. 21st century advantage focuses firms on creating new resources, and allocating them better. The former is useful only to shareholders and managers — but the latter is useful to people, communities, and society. The old Microsoft was useful to shareholders, but a lot less useful to society — and that's exactly how Google and Apple attacked it, and won.

Those that are mastering allocative and creative advantage, in contrast, are learning to create thick value: authentic economic value, that's meaningful to humans. That's why allocative and creative advantage are the equivalent of economic superweapons. They are letting today's revolutionaries stun, stagger, and vaporize rivals, no matter how big, bad, or historic.

And that's never mattered more. An economy built on extractive and protective advantage is a giant, endless Ponziconomy. Value is transferred from one party to the next — but little is created anew. That's what we're finding out the hard way. Only through creative and allocative advantage can we rebuild a more meaningful economy.

Most companies can only achieve 20th century advantage. If you're one of them, kiss tomorrow goodbye. In the 21st century, advantage belongs no longer to the wealth-eaters and the misery-feeders, but to the constructive: those who can help fuel a more authentic prosperity from the ground up.

Filed under: Mozilla, Beta, Browsers

Mozilla begins testing Account Manager for Firefox to simplify web logins originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The album’s not dead yet - well, not in Pink Floyd’s case at least. A judge has ruled in favour of the prog rock band, which went to the UK High Court for the right to have its material sold online only the form of albums, not individual singles, which have became the dominant form of digital download.

Pink Floyd’s contract with EMI - which was signed 11 years ago ago, before the online music boom - says its albums must only be sold as a whole and in a set order. EMI argued this applied only to “physical product”, but, according to Justice Andrew Morrit’s ruling, via Bloomberg: “There is nothing in the terms ‘album’ or ‘record’ to suggest they apply to the physical product only.”

So Pink Floyd has taken a major to court to maintain its creative wish (and has further shaken EMI’s increasingly rickety foundation in the process) - but does its victory really mean a resurgence for the album online, or is it just another brick in the wall… ?

—We live in a single world, at least online. Digital singles outsold digital albums in the Floyd’s native UK nearly tenfold last year - likely because collections of songs still feel better on plastic. And 98 percent of British track purchases are now digital.

—But albums are coming back faster. Global single-track growth of only 10 percent last year is causing the industry to worry about a plateauing of its biggest earner - but digital album sales are now growing by 20 percent a year, twice as fast as singles, IFPI says. In percentage terms, there’s more opportunity for digital migration growth from what is still a considerably analogue segment.

—Digital stores aren’t geared to albums: iTunes Store atomised the album industry, and other retailers have followed suit. Sure, iTunes Store has “Buy Album” options all over its Pink Floyd page - but, to iTunes, an “album” is just a sales multiplication opportunity - and songs purchased can be played in any order buyers want. Apple’s “deluxe” iTunes LP - offering albums with artwork and multimedia extras - seemed like a reluctant concession to labels for exploding the album as a form; stocks a paltry less-than-30 releases, as Gigaom observes. Still, the IFPI says the iTunes LP version of Michael Bublé‘s latest release outsold the standard edition 3:1 this way.

—What about new models? Much consumption is set to move to the cloud or, otherwise, to ad-supported platforms. It’s unclear whether a contract like Pink Floyd’s accounts for music that isn’t “sold” but, rather, streamed or subscribed to. Even if a la carte retailers are forced to offer true albums for download, what’s the equivalent of “album” in a streaming environment? Being forced to listen to all 43 minutes of Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety and in its intended order?

—Artists are embracing the single: Not every artist will put art before income as Pink Floyd have done, nor will necessarily feel that bundling is an artistic consideration. Former EMI band Radiohead, too, was, for many years, creatively opposed to track-by-track downloads - but it’s now relented (indeed, last time around, it even released the individual stem components of songs for fans to remix). This case could prompt similar actions from a small number of acts who feel the same way as the Floyd, if they have a similar old contract - but it’s likely most will just take the royalties.

If you've ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven't, let us tell you now - there's a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

Sponsor

SuperGlued is a can't-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new "Where My Friends At" feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it's any better.

A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you've seen long after they've ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

"The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there - it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought," said Doshi. "We built SuperGlued to be that place."

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn't there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

Betaworks, the New York City-based holding company investing in the realtime Web, just raised a $20 million Series B. The round was led by RRE Ventures and Intel Capital, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures, The New York Times, Softbank Japan and Softbank NY, Lerer Investments and Founders Collective, also participated, along with investors from the last round, which was $7.5 million

The company both invests and incubates realtime media startups, including Summize (acquired by Twitter for realtime search), bit.ly, TweetDeck, StockTwits, SuperFeedr, Outside.in, OMGPOP, and gdgt.

CEO John Borthwick says that the funds will be used to do more of the same, invest in and create realtime media startups.

No wonder Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement over its Android phones. In the three months between October and January, Android’s overall share of smartphone subscribers in the U.S. rose 4.3 points to 7.1 percent, according to mobile market share data released by comScore.  Android showed the biggest single gain of any of the top five smartphone platforms.  Apple’s share was virtually flat at 25.2 percent (up 0.3 percent), while RIM’s Blackberries saw a 1.7 percent gain to 43 percent.

Overall, 42.7 million people in the U.S. owned a  smartphone during the period, up 18 percent. So even though Apple’s relative share didn’t go anywhere, it still grew with the market.  But watching RIM and Android phones take share cannot be pleasant for the folks at Cupertino.  The iPhone still rules the mobile Web, but again here Android is catching up fast.  Time to release a new iPhone.

Meanwhile, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile and Palm saw drops in their shares.  Windows Mobile was down 4 percent and Palm was down 2.1 percent.

Photo credit: Flickr/svensonsan.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Adobe, Freeware, Open Source

Synergy is a cross-platform, open source application that allows you to navigate between multiple computer systems using a single mouse. Each system has its own screen, and once Synergy is installed and configured correctly, you can simply move your mouse to the edge of one screen and watch it seamlessly jump to another screen, which is a completely different computer.

We've talked about Synergy before, but unfortunately, development on it stagnated in 2006. Thankfully, there is a project on Google Code called Synergy+ which has taken the source code of the original Synergy, written by Chris Schoeneman, and updated it with numerous bug fixes. The team behind Synergy+ seems to want to continue improving the product, and they would welcome Schoeneman back, even to the extent of hoping that he would merge the two projects if he ever returned to active development on Synergy.

Synergy+ shares one mouse and keyboard between multiple computers originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The HTML5 specification introduces the and media elements, and with them the opportunity to dramatically change the way we integrate media on the web. The current HTML5 media API provides ways to play and get limited information about audio and video, but gives no way to programatically access or create such media. We present a new extension to this API, which allows web developers to read and write raw audio data.

The above quote is from the Audio Data API extension that joins a bunch of juicy developer work in Firefox 3.7.

Thomas Sturm has taken that API and created a spectrum visualization a kin to some of the great work by Scott Schiller (using Flash).

There is a new onaudiowritten attribute:

that lets you get access to info such as the spectrum:

Add to that the ability to write audio....

Nice work all around.

In the coverage of New York Times writer Zachary Kouwe, who resigned recently amid accusations of plagiarism, much has been said about the demands of writing for the always-on web, and how this might have contributed to Kouwe’s missteps -– something the writer himself referred to in a discussion of the incident as described by NYT public editor Clark Hoyt. But Reuters columnist Felix Salmon was the first to put his finger on what I think is the real culprit: a lack of respect for the culture of the web, specifically for the value and necessity of the link.

Kouwe describes in an interview with the New York Observer how he felt under pressure to cover offbeat news items for the blog as they came up, and would pull together bits and pieces of coverage from elsewhere on a story and then rewrite them into his own post or story. This, he says, is how the plagiarism occurred: by not realizing which pieces of text he had pulled from somewhere else, and which he had written himself. As Salmon notes, what a blogger would do in this case (or at least a good blogger) is link to other sources of material on the same topic rather than rewriting them:

Anybody who can or would write such a thing has no place working on a blog. If it’s clear who had a story first, then the move into the age of blogs has made it much easier to cite who had it first: blogs and bloggers should be much more generous with their hat-tips and hyperlinks than any print reporter can be.

Linking isn’t just a matter of etiquette or geek culture (although it is both of those things); it’s a fundamental aspect of writing for the web. In fact, the ability to link is arguably the most important feature of the web as a communications or information-delivery mechanism. Before the web came along, journalism and other forms of media were like islands unto themselves, each trying to pretend that it existed alone, without any connection to what came before it. Links are like bridges and roads, allowing these islands to connect to each other, and making it easier for readers to draw connections.

Links also make it easier for readers to understand a writer’s perspective, and thus are an important tool in disclosing bias (in an eloquent discussion of how transparency is the new objectivity, author David Weinberger said that objectivity was something “you rely on when your medium can’t do links”).

Unfortunately, however, those bridges and roads can also take readers elsewhere, and if your business depends (or you think it depends) on keeping those readers on your island, you might think twice about building that bridge. So you might recreate information that exists elsewhere, in the hope that readers won’t notice. Is that part of what pushed Kouwe to rewrite material for the blog? Salmon suggests that it might be. And if it did, the NYT writer is far from alone.

That’s not to say web-only sites are free from this kind of behavior. Some news sites have become notorious for either rewriting an entire post from a competitor, or excerpting huge portions of the content on their own sites, with just a small link that credits the original source. The economic incentive is the same, whether it’s a web-only outlet or a traditional media web site: to aggregate page views and sell them to advertisers. But at least most web-only sites that do this tend to include links (even if they are in small print at the bottom). Similar behavior in print publications usually comes with no links at all.

Plenty of mainstream publications have avoided linking out until relatively recently, or at least have linked as little as possible. The New York Times is in that group, despite its status as a leader in so much of what we think of as “new media” online. For a long time, the newspaper’s web site would only link (when it linked at all) to internal NYT topic pages. It has started adding more links to external sites, but many stories still contain no links at all. Lots of newspapers do the same thing.

In some cases this is a technical issue, in that print-based content management systems often make it difficult to include links. But an even bigger part of the problem is cultural. Traditional print media workers are used to thinking of themselves as the be-all and end-all of information, the only source that anyone could possibly need (despite the fact that many stories are based either wholly or in part on reporting by wire services such as the Associated Press and Reuters), and are loathe to give anyone else credit. That has to change.

The ethic of the web, as Jeff Jarvis repeatedly points out, is “do what you do best, and link to the rest.” If Kouwe or his employer had fully embraced that approach, he might not have had to apologize for anything.

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr users Skedonk and Lujaz

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What is an economy? Is it just rivers of money and stuff, flowing back and forth between consumer and producer, resting on a bed of information? That's more or less the way we've conceptualized it. It's why economists often say that banks and funds make up the "financial economy," while industries that make stuff are the "real economy."

When we conceptualize an economy that way, the implicit goal for both "producers" and "consumers" is merely accumulation of money and stuff. More, more, more. That's what I call a "thin" economy. That kind of economy is thin in three ways: it's brittle, easily broken; it's fragile, crisis-prone; and it's as shallow as Paris Hilton.

Consider Adam Smith's famous quote:

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we can expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest."

The First Law of Economics, the big bang that sparked the discipline, expresses a thin economy perfectly. Stuff flows in one direction, money in another.

It's funny how much has changed since Smith's time. We don't have so many butchers, brewers, or bakers anymore. We have meat "processed" by the ton in city-sized factories, mega-scale manufacturing of "soft drinks," and, of course, industrialized agriculture.

And that's kind of the problem.

An economy is more than just money and stuff, glued together by information. It is flows of opportunity, creativity, passion, trust, and happiness — glued together by ethics. Its goal isn't just accumulation, but prosperity, flourishing, becoming. That's a thick economy: one that's resilient, lasting, and meaningful.

We're deeply in debt. But the real debt crisis isn't financial.

We're in debt to each other. There is a real real economy glimmering beneath the sharp machinations of money, corporations and stuff. It is the thick economy; it's that which makes us human. The way we conceptualize the global macroeconomy leaves out everything that, well, mattered to people. That is the debt we must repay.

The real roots of the crisis, as I said in my last post, aren't just in banks, bonuses, or bailouts — but in our culture. The real crisis isn't just a crisis of financial debt: it is a crisis of debt to each other, and the debt we to owe to another is not delineated in dollars, euros, or yen.

So how do we discharge that debt?

By updating Adam Smith's First Law. Here's how the First Law of 21st Economics should read:

"It is not from benevolence towards the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we should expect our dinner, but from our regard to our own interest."

Why is it in our own self-interest to expect our dinner from the baker, brewer, and butcher — instead of the big-box store, the strip-mall, and the frozen foods section?

Because that's when our towns and communities will thrive again. Because that's when meaningful, purposive, careful work meant for humans will return again. Because that's how the power of the vertically integrated agricultural giant, the bundling-and-tying pharmaceutical behemoth, and the prop-trading Medusa will start to evaporate.

Yes, tomorrow's organizations must be engines of more than merely money and stuff. They must learn to contribute to — and become essential components of — a thriving thick economy. Some companies are making a thicker economics peripheral to what they do, taking baby steps, like Pepsi's doing with Refresh, still trading stuff for money, but using some of that money to do slightly more meaningful things. Some companies are making thicker economics central to what they do, taking great leaps, like Wal-Mart's doing with zero waste: no longer just trading money for stuff, but zapping unnecessary stuff in the first place.

Yet even that's just a beginning. The economy is "constructed" by us: built anew every second of every day by each of our billions of tiny decisions, emergently. The real change begins with each of us, and the choices we make.

Adam Smith's famous quote — so often taken entirely out of context — wasn't merely a paean to greed. It was a recognition of the power of self-interest. Yet, on its own, it is unbalanced. Yes, the butcher, baker, and brewer offer us dinner out of their self-interest. But it is in our self-interest, too, to choose them. Because when we don't, we — with every choice we make, every step we take — enact a thin economy, one of merely money and stuff. When we do choose them, we enact a thick economy: one made up of stuff that matters to humans.

Smith was the archetypal Enlightenment thinker. Today, economics is undergoing a new Enlightenment. Geniuses with a billion times the brainpower of a snot-nosed punk like me are reconceiving it.

But even that's not enough. The roots of the recovery begin with each of us bringing a thick economy roaring back to life. The only lasting recovery is the transition to a thick economy — one that's not just a glorified Ponzi scheme that rips off the natural world, the powerless, and the future. That transition will only be sustainable when each of us lives it. An economy isn't built by big governments, giant evil corporations, or nerdy academics. It's built by the tiny choices of individual people.

There is no more left to borrow from each other. The Ponziconomy has had its day. Every day, with our actions, we construct a new economy, and create the future. Today, perhaps, it's time for the 21st century to be handcrafted with love, purpose, and meaning — not by Barack Obama, Wen Jiaobao, or Ben Bernanke. But by each of us.

It doesn’t have all the API’s needed and it’s missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we’re getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we’re going to make this available sooner than we originally planned.

The core ethos here was to create a light save and bookmark retrieval process that matches the no-bulk mentality that was taken with Chrome. There is no sidebar. If you click anywhere on the page while the Save frame is opened, it’ll disappear. Some error messages are missing. These are relatively minor issues, but ones we plan to address in the very near future. However, we do most definitely want to hear from you. What rocks, what sucks, what do we need to add and whats going to happen in the last episode of LOST? We’d like feedback on these in our forums.

To install the extension, click here using Google Chrome.

To give you some insight on how this extension came to be, here is the lead engineer Vivek to give you the background:

Yes. We are available on Google Chrome!

That’s true. Delicious has added a new add-on to its belt and that’s for Google Chrome. It’s been a marvelous journey being in the ‘recommended’ list of Firefox Extensions and enjoying the luxury of being downloaded by more than 5 million Delicious lovers. Now it’s time to catch up with the latest browser!

“This missing Chrome plug-in is the main reason I haven’t switched completely from Firefox.” – Delicious user

All the Delicious users who feel the same can now enjoy the availability of Delicious bookmarking on Google Chrome with this add-on. The Delicious add-on for Google Chrome was initially developed as a hack at one of Yahoo!’s in-house hack events. The story goes like this…

“I always believed the hack event is a great platform for developers to demonstrate their ideas that have potential to become a product. I wanted to take advantage of this platform and started by actively participating in the in-house hack events. In 2007, I presented a hack called ‘Delicious on Mobile’ and I could see the product m.delicious.com shaping up.

In 2009, I had a strong feeling that we needed to increase our presence so that we could reach out to a wider audience. So I came up with two different hacks, one of them was ‘Delicious Compact’ which was written in .NET Compact Framework and it would run on all the latest Windows Mobile Devices.

Secondly, I read about Google Chrome and thought let’s build an add-on for this new browser. Since the extension API was under development, I had to use the Dev Channel builds of Google Chrome to experiment. The add-on I developed was simple, just a Delicious button in the address bar (page action) which would open a new popup window containing the Delicious Bookmarklet with current URL information being prefilled.

I was lucky enough to have good Product support at Delicious who encouraged this idea and we started working on a full version of the extension. As the APIs were under development we had to wait until they became available to provide the best possible features for the Chrome extension.”

Sync your Delicious Bookmarks

Now you can sync your Delicious bookmarks in Google Chrome using the add-on. All you need to do is just login to Delicious and all of your Delicious bookmarks are there!

Get your Delicious bookmarks right there in Omnibar

Once all your Delicious bookmarks are synced up you will notice them popping up in the Omnibar. i.e. the address bar of Google Chrome. You don’t need to search for your bookmarks separately as they will come up when you start typing matching words in the address bar.

Bookmark with a button

Now you can bookmark a URL on Delicious just by clicking a Tag button present beside the address bar. You can share the URL on twitter as well as with your friends using the same Tag button.

Regards,
Vivek

The latest release (3.2) introduces auto-updating sites. This means that songs will automatically be added to your library, from the sites you have already visited, as those sites post them. You do not have to re-visit sites to get new songs. This all happens in the background.

The All Songs List view has been tweaked a little with timestamps to better reflect this new ‘Music Activity Stream’:

All sites have auto-updating turned on by default. You can turn this off on a site-by-site basis by right-clicking on a site in the All Songs Pane View:

You can now also remove an entire site and all of its songs by right-clicking and choosing delete:

If you would like to remove individual songs, you can still right-click on any song in All Songs Pane view and choose delete. If you remove all the songs from a site, the site will still remain and continue to auto-update if you have not chosen to turn that off

The ease with which they finished each other’s sentences, completed each other’s thoughts was so graceful, seamless that they could have been sisters. They’ve worked together for years and as they sat on the couch in my living room, on that Sunday afternoon, they nervously fingered the agenda they’d brought.

It was a list of the issues they’d wanted to discuss, a list of potential solutions to their problem. They’d wanted feedback on their proposed solutions. They wanted to remain positive.

“Okay,” I said, “but before we go to the solutions, can you tell me about the problem?”

The eyed each other, paused. K turned to L: “Go ahead. Tell him about the article in the Times.”

An article about a rival organization had come out on a Saturday.  L had read it and understood how the Times had positioned the rival as moving directly into their space, becoming even more competitive. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was how her boss would take it. She knew he’d go ballistic. But, drained from the years of withstanding his tirades, she finished her coffee and did nothing.

She paid for that coffee on Monday morning. The boss came storming into the office, blowing past all of L’s staff, and started screaming at her. He was angry that the Times had gotten it so wrong. He was angrier still that L hadn’t jumped all over this “problem” and alerted him over the weekend. He was angriest that his board members were concerned and had emailed him. He had been unprepared and he was furious.

Of course this wasn’t the first time. It was a long-standing pattern. But K and L wanted to be strong women. They didn’t want to complain. They wanted to find a solution. They wanted to see what I could help them dream up in terms of changed structures or changes in the way they respond to get their boss to stop yelling.

I said, “Other than in case of fire, there’s no excuse for yelling.”

They were shocked. I repeated my line, adding, “If a friend came to you to tell you that their spouse was hitting them, would you sit with them and concoct ways to make sure the spouse didn’t get angry? Abuse is abuse—plain and simple.”

We’ve all worked with bullies and, unfortunately, in the business of early-stage businesses—where so many companies are run by founders and funded by investors—there are a lot of bullies out there.

I was 13. Living in Gravesend, Brooklyn. My bully was named Sal Quartucci. He was a bit of a manic, hyper Chihuahua-type of kid He’d hope around, spit out his ideas for cool things to do, and try to get you to agree with him. One summer night, we were hanging out in front of Sts. Simon and Jude church on Avenue T when Sal got a bright idea. He wanted to cross McDonald Ave.  to “beat up the Jews.” We lived on Italian side of the avenue and there was a fairly large community of Orthodox Jews who lived on the other side.

I was disgusted. I was afraid. I was pissed. Mumbling something about the whole thing being stupid, I turned to go home. Sal leapt in front of me, calling me a faggot, a pussy, for not wanting to be up some old Jewish guys. I pushed past him and he ran in front of me. Again, goading me, hounding me. Suddenly, scaring the crap out of myself, I grabbed his shirt, threw him down on the ground, punched him the nose. I can still hear the crack and still see the blood on my hand. Our friends pulled me off him and I ran home, shaking.

I thought of Sal as K and L told me of the bullying, the screaming, the berating they’d withstood for more than ten years. Part of me wanted to deck their boss but I searched my head, my experience, my heart for advice on how to respond to them.

I then thought of M.

M and I started working together only a few weeks ago. At the December board meeting, one of his board members—his core investor—told him his job was on the line. This investor had put a few hundred thousand dollars into the company 18 months before. It was a first round, and it’d be combined with some friends and family money. This was M’s first business, his first time as a CEO.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about an investor or director expressing their view that the company may be failing, that the CEO may be failing. Indeed, their implicit responsibility is to identify problems in advance.

But what made this bullying was the style. No warning. No discussion. In fact, the month before the same director had told M that he was the best first-time CEO he’d yet worked with. It was the whiplash that was so troublesome.

In our first session, M and I worked through some of his options. When he called for his second session, he surprised me.

He’d gone to lunch with the director and confronted him.

“When you said that to me, “ he reported he told him, “It had the opposite effect of what you’d wanted. Instead of focusing me, and challenging me, you scared me. All I could think about for weeks was what a terrible job I was doing. How does that help our shareholders?”

I was thrilled. “What’d he say?” I asked.

“He apologized. He told me I was right. And then we started talking about the challenges to the business model.” In the end, confronting the director changed the whole dynamic.

A few years ago, a VC friend of mine called me about one of his portfolio company CEOs. The young man is brilliant, innovative, brash and terrific at fund-raising. In some ways, a VC’s dream but he’s also unpredictable, impulsive and a screamer.

I sent the VC  a copy of Michael Maccoby’s HBR article, Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons.

“That’s him,” the VC emailed me, “that’s the CEO. What do I do?”

Maccoby recommends getting the leader a “trusted confidante,” someone who can pierce the narcissism with a straightforward “Cut the shit out.”

I shared the suggestion and added that this guy could use coaching—probably even therapy.

K and L sat quietly as I talked about possibly talking to the boss (as M had done). I suggested trying to engage a board member—we rejected that thought because the boss is so paranoid.

I suggested the Maccoby’s “trusted confidante.” The guy had fired everyone who could play that role.

I suggested trying to implement 360-degree reviews so the board—which is no doubt fully aware of this guys antics but for a variety of reasons unwilling to confront him on his behavior—would have no choice but to deal with it.

In the end, though, I was frustrated. I had little to offer them. I could counsel them, help them get through the week, help them deal with the residual fall out of these tirades but there was nothing they could do to change this guy’s behavior entirely. They could build little coping strategies but they were not going to change this guy.

As they got up to leave, they thanked. ‘This was so helpful,” one said.

“Why?” I asked. “We didn’t really change anything.”

“But we did,” they explained. “You helped us realize this isn’t our fault.”

I realized then beyond making dysfunctional organizations more dysfunctional, beyond getting in the way of actually executing on the business at hand, the true cost of bullying is the damage it can do to one’s self perception. And that’s the real tragedy.

Filed under: Concerts and Tours, News, New Music

Each of these versions are inspired by the original Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Each was made with commercial motives in mind, not some urge to set information free (and generally made a lot of money for their creators to boot). Each, at least according to the descriptions in the Times, is bizarre. However what is most striking is that each is bizarre in a way that was probably unanticipated by Alice's original author.

Even though they are strikingly different in almost every imaginable way, we can understand them to be related through that original story. Beyond that, they are stronger works because we understand them in the context of a shared cultural touchstone. They aren't all just freaky movies about some girl and a rabbit. They are Alice in Wonderland stories. That changes how we watch them, think about them, and talk about them.

One of the reasons that the creators of these many versions (who, again, didn't do it for free -- they made the movies to make money) felt free to be as strange as they wanted was because they did not need permission to create their version of Alice. They could take the original story, freak it up however they wanted, and create something new. Creators are better off because they had a way to link a new story to something that people understood (and probably made more money in the process). The public is better off because they can choose between a number of freaky Alice in Wonderlands, or even make their own. Even Alice is better off because she lives on as a cartoon, a little girl, a warrior princess, and whatever else people can dream up for her.

A couple weeks ago I went down to Miami for Future of Web Apps (FOWA). It was a great event and I highly recommend it to web developers and entrepreneurs. I did a keynote talk and the next day I did a three and a half hour workshop. I knew the keynote was being recorded and I had that in my head as I was talking on the stage. I did not know the workshop was being recorded but it was.

After the workshop was over, Ryan Carson, the founder of Carsonified which puts on FOWA and a number of other interesting events, asked me if he could post the 3.5 hour workshop video. My immediate reaction was "hell no" but instead I said, "let me look at it first." 

On Friday I posted two videos that came from the talk I gave at InSITE last wednesday. The entire 1.5 hours of conversation was recorded and is available here. Again, I did not know that the entire talk including Q&A was going to be posted on the web and friday morning, I spent 1.5 hours of time I did not have watching each and every minute of that video to make sure it was cool to have it on the web.

If I seem paranoid about this stuff, I am. I watched what happened to my friend Mark Pincus when he said something highly candid and off the cuff last year in an impromptu talk to entrepreneurs that was unfortunately being filmed. Some entrepreneur asked Mark about keeping control of your startup and Mark said that the only sure way to do that is get revenues early. He went on to say that they were so focused on revenues in the early days of Zynga that they did some things he didn't like. He then mentioned the Zwinky toolbar and said he installed it on his machine and couldn't get it off. And then went on to say that he told his developer to take that lead gen offer down.

Of course, that's not what everyone saw when TechCrunch posted a clip from that unfortunate video. They just saw the comment about the Zwinky toolbar without the context. 

So when I see a video of me on the web, I watch the entire thing and look at every minute in that light. I am paranoid about someone taking a 30 second clip and leaving out the rest. If I see anything that is risky in that way, I ask them to take down the video or better yet I ask them not to put it up.

That's why I wasted 1.5 hours of my time on Friday morning at 5am watching a video of myself. And that's why I may have to waste 3.5 hours of my time watching my FOWA workshop at some point. I was highly candid in that FOWA workshop and asked people not to Twitter some things I said. That's how I can provide the most value to the people in attendance (as Mark was trying to do). So that FOWA workshop video is risky in my mind.

Of course, I can simply ask people not to videotape me or ask them not to post it on the web. But that's not a great option either. There were thirty or forty people in the room at the InSITE talk the other night. Almost 1000 people have watched the first video on YouTube and over fifty have watched every single one of them. That's the power of the web, to reach way more people that can attend in person.

So that's the world we have to live in now. One that assumes when you talk in public, it will be recorded and posted on the web. One that assumes that someone will look at that video and seek an opportunity to pull a clip out of context and post it. And so if you do a lot of public speaking, you simply need to speak with that in mind. It makes me feel like a politician to tell you the truth. It's a horrible feeling but honestly I don't know if there is any other way.