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What Really Keeps Poor People Poor
The New York Times has a great piece this week about how top colleges (many of which are heavily subsidized by the government) are, in their words, largely for the elite. It’s well worth reading. In it, Anthony Marx, the president of Amherst College, is quoted as saying the following: “We claim to be part of [...]
Continue reading...Post-Education Startups: The Next Wave
8. March 2011
I’ve had a bunch of conversations lately with some really cool startups and couldn’t figure out how to mentally classify them. By all practical appearances they weren’t education companies, at least not in the traditional sense of ever showing up in the BMO Education Book or being asked to present at Signal Hill. They aren’t [...]
Continue reading...Learning Graph + Reputation Graph = Massive Disruption in Higher Ed?
11. February 2011
Here’s an outline of a thesis I’m working on that was also my suggested topic for my application to speak at TEDxSFED: Higher education is on the brink of massive disruption right now. The “cost” of learning has never been less expensive as the Web is flooded with amazing content, tutorials, discussion boards and more. At [...]
Continue reading...Reputation Graph Part 2: Who’s Building It
13. January 2011
A quick follow-up to my first post on the reputation graph (which btw, is now the #1 result on Google for the search term “reputation graph”…) I had a few people in the comments talk about companies that were starting to build the reputation graph so I thought I’d highlight some of them here. [...]
Continue reading...Reputation Graph: One of the Web’s largest opportunities
7. January 2011
I recently replied to a Quora thread with the question of “What will come after social networking?”. My answer was the reputation graph. It ended up creating a fair amount of discussion including the question “What is the reputation graph?”. I listed my definition that the reputation graph is, in its simplest [...]
Continue reading...Hacking the University: Taking the Power Back
30. November 2009
I’m pissed. One of my missions in life is to help make education more equal. Equal as in “more access for everyone” kinda equal. And then I come across stories like this one:The Subprime Student Loan Racket and this one: Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails and I get pissed. Pissed [...]
Continue reading...Content Publishers: I Have A Business Model For You
14. August 2009
OK, this is definitely a theory but part of me thinks it’s well worth exploring…and I’ve heard precious little about this to date. So two experiences this week plus this Fred Wilson blog post got me thinking that content publishers are looking in the entirely wrong place for their business model. They are looking at [...]
Continue reading...Authentic Value Creation: Why Tech Entrepreneurship Rocks
6. May 2009
Umair’s recent talk at the BRITE conference (embedded below) got me thinking this morning on the subject of authentic value creation. I think it’s a fascinating subject. The notion of authentic value creation is creating products and services that make the lives of those who consume better. Pretty basic huh? But [...]
Continue reading...Who will be The Pirate Bay of the finance industry?
18. April 2009
Umair has a great post up here: The Pirate Bay guys were criminally prosecuted for….violating (largely obsolete) copyright. Almost no one in finance has been held even civilly liable for vastly more economically damaging actions. I followed up with a comment along the lines of the fact that the content owner industry (i.e. the MPAA and [...]
Continue reading...Girl Talk and The Grand Unified Theory On The Economics Of Free
11. March 2009
One of my favorite albums of the last year or two is Girl Talk’s Feed the Animals (sample their stuff for free on Lala or MySpace). I’ve probably listened to it 50 times in the last six months. As I posted in a reply to Chris Sacca on Twitter today, it’s pure audio [...]
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26. May 2011
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