I found Ms. Kennedy's endorsement of Barack Obama over the weekend a newsworthy story. It is posted below.
I hold Ms. Kennedy in high regard as she has managed to create a family and live a life outside the limelight. She has also made a contribution to the American public school system and seems to be a good writer.
A President Like My Father By CAROLINE KENNEDY, New York Times, published: January 27, 2008
OVER the years, I’ve been deeply moved by the people who’ve told me they wished they could feel inspired and hopeful about America the way people did when my father was president. This sense is even more profound today. That is why I am supporting a presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama.
My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined. All my life, people have told me that my father changed their lives, that they got involved in public service or politics because he asked them to. And the generation he inspired has passed that spirit on to its children. I meet young people who were born long after John F. Kennedy was president, yet who ask me how to live out his ideals.
Sometimes it takes a while to recognize that someone has a special ability to get us to believe in ourselves, to tie that belief to our highest ideals and imagine that together we can do great things. In those rare moments, when such a person comes along, we need to put aside our plans and reach for what we know is possible.
We have that kind of opportunity with Senator Obama. It isn’t that the other candidates are not experienced or knowledgeable. But this year, that may not be enough. We need a change in the leadership of this country — just as we did in 1960.
Most of us would prefer to base our voting decision on policy differences. However, the candidates’ goals are similar. They have all laid out detailed plans on everything from strengthening our middle class to investing in early childhood education. So qualities of leadership, character and judgment play a larger role than usual.
Senator Obama has demonstrated these qualities throughout his more than two decades of public service, not just in the United States Senate but in Illinois, where he helped turn around struggling communities, taught constitutional law and was an elected state official for eight years. And Senator Obama is showing the same qualities today. He has built a movement that is changing the face of politics in this country, and he has demonstrated a special gift for inspiring young people — known for a willingness to volunteer, but an aversion to politics — to become engaged in the political process.
I have spent the past five years working in the New York City public schools and have three teenage children of my own. There is a generation coming of age that is hopeful, hard-working, innovative and imaginative. But too many of them are also hopeless, defeated and disengaged. As parents, we have a responsibility to help our children to believe in themselves and in their power to shape their future. Senator Obama is inspiring my children, my parents’ grandchildren, with that sense of possibility.
Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.
I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.
I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.
Caroline Kennedy is the author of “A Patriot’s Handbook: Songs, Poems, Stories and Speeches Celebrating the Land We Love.”
The economy is not looking so rosy. Good luck, one and all in surviving this.
Panic sparks plunge in global markets
Global equities were routed on Monday as concerns over the economic outlook and financial market turbulence snowballed into a broad fear-driven sell-off.
Asian shares led European stock markets into their biggest one-day fall since 9/11 as the prospect of a US recession and growing fears for the financial system prompted near-panic among investors.
Leading European markets suffered their worst one-day percentage points falls since September 11, 2001. The Xetra Dax slumped 7.2 per cent to 6,790.19, while the CAC-40 dropped 6.8 per cent to 4,744.45. The Madrid stock market closed down 7.5 per cent at 12,625.8, its worst one-day percentage points fall since 1991.
In London, the FTSE 100 lost 5.5 per cent to 5,578.2, its biggest ever slide in points terms since the index was formed in 1983.
Some analysts said equity markets have finally realised that the credit market turmoil is spilling over into the real economy. The sharp sell-off in Asia and Europe was not prompted by one immediate catalyst and the US market was closed for holiday.
Additional reporting by Jamil Anderlini in Beijing, Geoff Dyer in Shanghai and Lindsay Whipp in Tokyo
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
VC investments have hit a six year high, of $29.4Bn in 2007 suggesting perhaps early stage companies will survive the recession. (Associated Press)
Venture capital investments in U.S. startups climbed to a six-year high of $29.4 billion in 2007, raising hope that ample money will still be available to back promising new ideas even if the staggering economy falls into a recession.
The amount of venture capital spread across 3,813 deals represents the industry's busiest year since $40.6 billion went into nearly 4,500 U.S. startups in 2001, according to data scheduled for release Saturday by Thomson Financial, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association.
The $29.4 billion invested last year marked an 11 percent increase from $26.6 billion in 2006.
In 2001, venture capitalists were actually curtailing their investments after the dot-com economy pushed the U.S. economy into its last recession.
Although many experts believe another recession is imminent, venture capitalists say there is little reason to believe their investment pace will slacken this year.
In a show of confidence, venture capitalists raised $34.7 billion for future investments during 2007, a 9 percent increase from the previous year.
The industry's optimism stems from a belief that many of today's hottest concepts either are recession-resistant or are developing moneysaving products that may have even more appeal during an economic downturn.
The investment areas spurring the optimistic outlook include: health care and biotech; the Internet; and technology aimed at developing alternative energy, reducing pollution and promoting conservation.
Combined, these sectors attracted nearly $16 billion in venture capital investments last year, accounting more than half of the total activity.
While focusing on specialties less susceptible to economic downturns, venture capitalists have been increasing their investments more gradually in recent years. During the dot-com boom, high-tech financiers had routinely entrusted millions of dollars with young Internet entrepreneurs who had never before run profitable businesses.
The newer, more disciplined approach makes it less likely there will be a dramatic about-face like the one that occurred after venture capitalists invested nearly $160 billion in 1999 and 2000. After that flurry, venture capital investments fell for the next three years before bottoming out at $19.7 billion in 2003.
"There is nothing to suggest we will fall off a cliff" this year, said P. Sherrill Neff, founding partner of Quaker BioVentures in Philadelphia.
Quaker BioVentures focuses on startups involved in pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical devices _ categories that Neff expects to remain in strong demand even in a feeble economy because people won't stop getting sick or growing older.
Other venture capitalists seem to share his opinion, helping to produce a record year for investments in "life sciences," which includes biotech and medical devices. Venture capitalists invested $9.11 billion in 862 life sciences deals last year, a 21 percent increase from $7.56 billion in 2006.
Internet startups also appear better positioned to weather any economic turbulence because the advertisers that generate most online profits appear likely to keep shifting their spending from television, print and radio to the Web even if there is a recession.
Venture capitalists invested $4.6 billion in Internet deals last year, a 12 percent increase from $4.1 billion in 2006.
Venture capital investments in so-called "clean technology" focused on alternative energy and reducing pollution from fossil fuels totaled $2.2 billion, a 47 percent increase from $1.5 billion in 2006.
Although they are expected to continue to ramp up their investment this year, venture capitalists may have more trouble cashing out. That's because the sluggish economy could hinder initial public offerings of stock; last year 86 venture-backed startups made their market debuts, the most since 2004.
"We are very concerned about the public markets shutting down, but it is to be expected in times of unpleasantness," said Deepak Kamra, general partner with Canaan Partners in Menlo Park.
It has been quite a busy week and as a result, I have had little time to blog.
But, next week should be a bit better. So enjoy this YouTube clip on venture and early-stage companies and I will see you on Mon, Jan 21st.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I
Sad news, Sir Edmund Hillary has passed away. In memory:
Nepal, the country of Mount Everest, has been remembering Sir Edmund Hillary, the joint first conqueror of the summit. BBC News.
Sir Edmund has died in his native New Zealand, aged 88, after a heart attack.
He continued visiting Nepal regularly until the end of his life, drawn to its communities as much as to its mountains.
Lamps have been lit in Nepal in his memory and Buddhist monks and others are offering prayers.
Lamps lit
Ed Hillary, as he liked to be known, always felt at home in Nepal, and many people here, especially in the Sherpa community, which is so closely identified with Everest, are now in mourning.
Jamling Tenzing Norgay, the son of the man who reached the summit with him, said the New Zealand explorer had remained a very simple and humble man.
He said he was a father figure to Sherpas and would be greatly missed.
Nepal's tourism minister spoke of his sadness on the death of someone who made huge contributions to the country's social and economic development.
Indeed the charity founded by Sir Edmund, the Himalayan Trust, which is now run by local people, has set up nearly 30 schools and two hospitals in the high mountains - work which the late explorer said had satisfied him even more than his mountaineering.
At the trust, in Buddhist monasteries and in some of the institutions he founded in the Khumbu region over which Everest towers, lamps were lit in the mountaineer's memory.
Buddhist monks are offering prayers with the firm faith that the explorer will be reincarnated into another human life.
And in honour of Sir Hillary, I want to break free- who knows perhaps his conquest of Mount Everest was governed by a need to break free from it all.
Is it possible that a potential competitor to Google has finally arrived in the form of Wikia? I tried Wikia search and decided to do a simple search on Hillary Clinton and found it incredibly slow. That said, the search result for Ms. Clinton wasn't all that bad and I found the top twenty links were indeed quite relevant.
I think perhaps, the most interesting aspect of Wikia is that we can all watch its evolution and see how it develops. I am actually far more interested in its growth curve and how this evolves then anything else.
That said, I did find it strange that I was not able to set up an account & all my efforts just led to a dead screen. Perhaps, a bug that needs to be fixed? If you would like to test it out yourself, try http://www.wikia.com and also read the article below.
Otherwise, the song for today is: hey there Delilah by Plain White T's: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbJtYqBYCV8
Where there's a Wiki, there's a way, Forbes, Anne Greenberg, 09/01/08
If you plugged "Clinton and Obama" into Google's search engine on Tuesday night, you'd get more than 10 million results, leading with a news story about Clinton's narrow victory in New Hampshire. If you searched on Wikia, the newest entry in the search engine race, you'd get 10,836 results topped by a blog site and a spot that would alert you if anyone else was doing the same search. (No one was.)
But that's OK, says Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the nonprofit online encyclopedia that millions have helped write and even more have used as a reference source. "I've been trying to tell everyone for months that Wikia would suck when it starts, but that it's just the beginning," he said in an interview with Forbes.com. "What we wanted to do was get it out there." So he did. On Monday, Wales launched the for-profit Wikia. Months of hype surrounding the human-powered search engine in the press and blogs quickly disintegrated into scathing reviews. Bloggers decried Wikia as an "inexcusable waste of time" and "miles behind the competition."
Even a page on Wikia's own site admitted that "the quality of the search results is very low." But this is another campaign determined to rise from the grassroots up. Wales hasn't admitted defeat. In fact, he argues that all is going according to plan. Unlike Google, which uses sophisticated and top-secret algorithms to compile search results, Wikia will rank its results based on data provided by users and an open-source algorithm.
As a result, the first required step, Wales argues, was to unwrap the engine for the public, raw edges and all. "The concept is to have the community providing the human intelligence. And you can't gather data until you have people searching," he says. "So it's kind of a chicken-and-egg type problem." In its alpha stage, Wikia searches a rudimentary index of the Web built with a pre-existing, open-source algorithm called Nutch. Users can rank results with a system of one to five stars and edit "mini-articles"--blurbs of text that appear above results for certain popular search terms.
Eventually, the search engine will give users more control, allowing them to tinker with the open-source algorithm that ranks sites and even to tailor results for specific search terms. The result, Wales hopes, will be a wisdom-of-crowds effort that's more transparent, less biased and less prone to online marketers' manipulation than Google or Yahoo!
There is much to report in the news, but I feel the need to focus on the unexpected turn of events with respect to the US Democratic presidential election. As you may well know, I am an alumnus of Wellesley College, where the fair Hillary (Clinton) also matriculated. And would never openly question her candidacy as that would be tentamount to blasphemy and soon - my degree might be stripped of me.
However - something is happening, people are beginning to believe that change might be possible and that Obama might be a catalyst of this change? Are you a believer?
Cult of Obama mesmerises the believers
Suzanne Goldenberg in Derry, New Hampshire
Monday January 7, 2008
Guardian Unlimited
Barack Obama addresses a rally in the auditorium of Salem high school,
New Hampshire. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Legal downloads hit all time high during Christmas period, helped in part by MP3 players.
And continuing with my cheesy music theme, yes, I know I have no music taste - but such is life? Why fight it, when one can just accept one's inner music nerdiness?
So here's to when you believe: Whitney Houston verison http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGRgm9ZHG3A or Leon Jackson: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSwHKVinxX0
Record music downloads prove the biggest Christmas hit, Katie Allen, Guardian Unltd., 2/2/08
A rush to download music by those who received new MP3 players for Christmas helped digital download sales hit an end-of-year record high, bringing some welcome cheer for the troubled record industry.
Almost 3m tracks were downloaded in the UK in the week between Christmas and the New Year with X-Factor winner Leon Jackson's "When you Believe" the most popular single, according to figures from the Official Charts Company.
The total number of downloads last week was more than double last year's number - and the largest weekly tally on record for the UK. The week leading up to Christmas also saw a surge in downloads to almost 2m tracks.
It is that time of the year again, yes - crystal ball gazing. Hmm...one should never commit these thoughts onto paper. However, I am feeling quite brave this second day of the New Year. What can I say, it is early days in 2008?
2008, I would like to wager will be about mobile media.
I am not alone in believing this, as there have been a number of blog entries stating the same. And, we all agree that mobile media, umm is not about the mobile, but rather focuses on the mobility of media. Simply put, it is the ability for one to take, access, experience and share one's own personalised media with oneself and others on the move, anytime and anywhere.
Think digital natives and their relationships with their handheld devices and you might be on the right track. Or, one might wish to review the new global study From MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft which Challenges Assumptions About Relationship Between Kids, Youth & Digital Technology - refer to it here: http://sev.prnewswire.com/multimedia-online-internet/20070724/NYTU10924072007-1.html or excerpts of it are posted as a link on my front page.
Well worth a read! In other words, digital natives are already leading the mobile media revolution but 2008 will be the tipping point, I would argue but I might be wrong. Believe it or not, it does occassionally happen.
Any other big trends to be aware of?
Well, there are so many I have come across that I found interesting that I will only share those that hit me as feeling right. First, a brief synopsis of eight predictions from three consultants from McKinsey. What can I say, though I may not be a fan of the McKinsey way, even I can recognise value added thinking. Secondly, some consumer trends from Trendwatching.
First, McKinsey. the full report can be viewed at http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com but the synopsis as provided below is courtesy of Carleen Hawn:
The McKinsey authors begin…
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. … we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
A. Managing relationships
1. Distributing cocreation
The Internet and related technologies … allow companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control.
The Caution:
Companies pursuing this trend will have less control over innovation and the intellectual property that goes with it, however. They will also have to compete for the attention and time of the best and most capable contributors.
2. Using consumers as innovators
Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance… Companies that involve customers in design, testing, marketing (such as viral marketing), and the after-sales process get better insights into customer needs and behavior and may be able to cut the cost of acquiring customers, engender greater loyalty, and speed up development cycles.
The Caution:
But a company open to allowing customers to help it innovate must ensure that it isn’t unduly influenced by information gleaned from a vocal minority. It must also be wary of focusing on the immediate rather than longer-range needs of customers and be careful to avoid raising and then failing to meet their expectations.
3. Tapping into a world of talent
… Much as technology permits [companies] to decentralize innovation through networks or customers, it also allows them to parcel out more work to specialists, free agents, and talent networks…new talent-deployment models could emerge [and] changes in the nature of labor relationships could lead to new pricing models that would shift payment schemes from time and materials to compensation for results.
The Caution:
This trend should gather steam in sectors such as software, health care delivery, professional services, and real estate, where companies can easily segment work into discrete tasks for independent contractors and then reaggregate it … Competitive advantage will shift to companies that can master the art of breaking down and recomposing tasks.
4. Extracting more value from interactions
Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today.
The Caution:
Tere is still substantial room for automating transactional activities, and the payoff can typically be realized much more quickly and measured much more clearly than the payoff from investments to make tacit work more effective. Creating the business case for investing in interactions will be challenging—but critical—for managers.
B. Managing capital and assets
5. Expanding automation
Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes [like] forecasting and supply chain technologies…. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and … this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.
The Caution:
Automation is a good investment if it not only lowers costs but also helps users to get what they want more quickly and easily, though it may not be a good idea if it gives them unpleasant experiences. The trick is to strike the right balance between raising margins and making customers happy.
6. Unbundling production from delivery
Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently… Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems. Amazon.com [has] expanded its business model to let other retailers use its logistics and distribution services [and] independent software developers … buy processing power on its IT infrastructure so that they don’t have to buy their own. Mobile virtual-network operators, another example of this trend, provide wireless services without investing in a network infrastructure.
The Caution:
Companies that make their assets available for internal and external use will need to manage conflicts if demand exceeds supply. A competitive advantage through scale may be hard to maintain when many players, large and small, have equal access to resources at low marginal costs.
C. Leveraging information
7. Putting more science into management
Technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From “ideagoras” (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches… Leading players are exploiting this information explosion with a diverse set of management techniques. Google fosters innovation through an internal market: employees submit ideas, and other employees decide if an idea is worth pursuing or if they would be willing to work on it full-time.
The Caution:
Leaders should get out ahead of this trend to ensure that information makes organizations more rather than less effective. Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures. Environments that celebrate making choices on a factual basis must beware of analysis paralysis.
8. Making businesses from information
Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities… market imperfections include[ing] information asymmetries and the frequent inability of decision makers to get all the relevant data … allow middlemen and players with more and better information to extract higher [prices] by aggregating and creating businesses around it.
The Caution:
But that sword can cut both ways; today’s aggregators, for instance, may themselves be aggregated tomorrow. Companies relying on information-based market imperfections need to assess the impact of the new transparency levels that are continually opening up in today’s information economy.
McKinsey’s authors are: James Manyika, a director, and Kara Sprague, who is a consultant in McKinsey’s San Francisco office; and Roger Roberts, who is a principal in the Silicon Valley office.
FURTHER READING:
A. Managing relationships
- Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
- Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology.
- James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds.
- Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation
- C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers.
- Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
- Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life.
- Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live.
- Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee, “The next revolution in interactions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, November 2005.
- Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika, “Competitive advantage from better interactions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, May 2006.
- Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life.
B. Managing capital and assets
- John Hagel III, Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow through Web Services.
- Claus Heinrich, RFID and Beyond: Growing Your Business with Real World Awareness.
- Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution.
- “Jeff Bezos’ risky bet,” BusinessWeek, November 13, 2006.
C. Leveraging information
- Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning.
- John Riedl and Joseph Konstan with Eric Vrooman, Word of Mouse: The Marketing Power of Collaborative Filtering.
- Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation.
- David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.
- Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Shapiro, The Economics of Information Technology: An Introduction.
- Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.
Second, of the 8 important Consumer trends from Trendwatching- http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/8trends2008.htm; I liked:
- Status Spheres
- Snack culture
- Online oxygen - well, its my world isn't it?
- Crowd mining - again for obvious reasons
- Eco Iconic
On that note, have a lovely day and remember - girls just want to have fun! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH3vvXi8k8M
