Houston Farm Corps creator wins cash prize

http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=11874&SnID=1521497554

"Hurricane Ike left more than 5.6 million cubic yards of fallen trees, broken branches and dead greenery in Houston, and Mayor Bill White today awarded a $2,500 cash prize to a Rice University employee who suggested founding Houston Farm Corps, a youth-oriented volunteer gardening initiative that would both get rid of the debris and teach kids the value of growing their own food."

Josh Tabin's post on the Rice Alliance event

http://www.startuphouston.com/2008/12/14/one-crazy-week-part-1/

This is a good post. He has some additional information that I missed in my post.

Rice Alliance Event

I attended a Rice Alliance event last Thursday. It was loads of fun and I learned a ton. The three keynote speakers,

1. Jeff Dachis of the Dachis Corporation
2. Jaime Casap from Google, and
3. Bruce Dunlevie from Benchmark Capital

all gave very interesting talks with good information.

Jeff spoke about "how we got where we are" in terms of the financial crisis. Here are some bullets from my notes of his talk:

• The current crisis is caused by greed, in the negative sense of the word
• It is a crisis of conscience
• Spoke about "TheFunded.com"... there will be more openness in investing
• Businesses will be transformed by the social networking phenomenon
• His new company, Dachis corporation, is focused on bringing this to the enterprise
• Beyond "buddies", currently we are in the "buddy" phenomenon, facebook, linkedIn ("who are my "buddies")
• magnified communication; who should I be working with? how do they do business? business ecosystem of Your Business with Competitors, Customers, Partners, Suppliers, Employees, Stakeholders...
• Technology will enable the strengthening of "weak ties"
• How many of you have had a long-distant friend find you in the last few months, that you had forgot about? This is the strengthening of "weak ties"
• The "Burn rate" mentality needs to go away, people should start companies that meet a market's needs and do it profitably... "basic business model"

Jaime spoke about the "connected generation", or those who are 18-24 right now, and their trends:

• Always knowing a computer
• Always knowing cell phones
• Text messaging and other technologies that are used heavily
• Are you considering these people in your strategy?
• Have you used any of these sites?
• myspace
• facebook
• orkut
• hi5
• linkedIn
• flickr
• yelp
• netlog (I had never heard of it, but apparently 30 million in Europe have)
• meetup
• digg
• bzzagent
• bebo
• xanga
• zooped
• twitter

• Jones Soda - this is scaring Coke and Pepsi

Bruce's talk was a lot about Benchmark... very interesting, here are a few brief points

• Getting money will be harder
• Benchmark turned down eBay 2 times before funding, then they gave it only on a 3-2 vote
• Benchmark turned down Google on a 1-4 vote
• They make money by being "lucky"
• The success stories like eBay fund the "unsuccessful" businesses

Overall, I would recommend this event for anyone interested in early stage companies. If you want to learn how this works, and see the people who are risking it all to be the next eBay or Google, this event is for you.

Crazy snow dog!

http://www.dogwork.com/dogsnow/

New company that helps you manage your finances: http://rudder.com

If you haven't heard of rudder, I highly recommend you check it out. This is a local Houston startup that has a unique approach to helping you manage your finances. I saw their presentation at the Rice Alliance event last Thursday and it was impressive. I met some of their team and they were passionate about what they do.

I signed up for an account myself and set up all of my accounts. It took about 5 minutes to do.

In case you are worried about security, they are a full Verisign-verified / https based service. They use your email as an approach to helping you stay up to date with what is going on. If you spend a little more time telling it about your recurring expenses, it will do forward-looking analysis to help you see where your money is going.

There is a lot this site can do to help people... I am bullish on these guys.

Really Good Food in Chelsea

I just visited my friends in New York. I really enjoyed the restaurant Boqueria. The food and ambiance were both excellent. Check it out.

They had great vegetarian, but also, plenty of other stuff for the carnivores.

Also, this stuff was really good.

Lastly, the wine in the picture listed below was awesome.

Book Review: The Cuckoo's Egg

If you are looking for a fun book, but with some good computer technology (UNIX :)), and a lot of suspense, you should pick up a copy of The Cuckoo's Egg, by Clifford Stoll. This book is an easy read, comes in paperback, and is loads of fun.

The premise of the book is an everyday I.T. guy tracks an international computer criminal. I won't ruin the end for you...

One last thing, the story is true. This isn't fiction.