Day: October 17, 2007

Slikstr – These Guys Rule

About Slikstr

Best business plan I’ve seen yet. User generated content? Hah! How about a User-Generated Company. These guys are fully engaged and have totally figured out social media marketing with an ongoing naked conversation inside of Second Life no less, where we, the users, can have a say in operations. Look for these guys to be on stage at next year’s Web 2.0 Forum.

“With the overwhelming interest in user generated content, Slikstr has taken a more integrative approach to the “wisdom of crowds” and created a company where the users themselves will be involved in the day to day operation of the business from the outset. They have posted their business plan online to allow users easy access to fundamental decisions and they have announced that they will be hosting meetings in Second Life where users will be able to voice their opinions to the companies management team. Corporate decisions made in these meetings will be binding and treated with the same respect that any directive handed down from a company’s Board of Directors would be.”

Here comes your 19th nervous breakdown — Bubble 2.0

Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again – New York Times

Martin Nisenholtz at the Times posts on Facebook that this isn’t going to end well. Damn right, welcome to Bubble 2.0 and its gonna be ugly when the music stops. Facebook at $15 billion? Google valued higher than IBM with eight times less revenue (actually that’s more than I thought they had). Get it while the getting is good. We’ve seen this before and the housing implosion is only going to accelerate it. Nice thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the Crash of 87.

“I have to say I giggled,” Mr. O’Kelley, 30, said of the deal that earned him millions. He has since left Right Media and is starting another company. “There is no way we quadrupled the value of the company in six months.”The trend is described as a return to madness (by skeptics) or as a rational approach to unlimited opportunities presented by the Internet (by true believers). Greed, fear and a desperate rush to pick the next big winner are all adding fuel to the fire that is Silicon Valley’s resurgence.

“There’s definitely a lot of betting going on, and it’s not rational,” said Tim O’Reilly, a technology conference promoter and book publisher.

Rob O’Regan on the same story

The First Clambake

Study: Early humans threw clambakes – CNN.com

Thanks to Cousin Tom for the clamming content. I need to post about middens sometime soon, clamshell trash heaps that allegedly litter the Cape Cod shoreline. College roomie John Hoopes, professor of such things at U. Kansas, may be able to shed some light from his time in Costa Rica.

“This means humans were eating seafood about 40,000 years earlier than previously thought. And this is the earliest record of humans eating something other than what they caught or gathered on the land, Marean said. Most of what Marean found were the remnants of brown mussels, but he also found black mussels, small saltwater clams, sea snails and even a barnacle that indicates whale blubber or skin was brought into the cave.

Marean figured the early people, probably women, had to trudge two to three miles to where the mussels, clams and snails were harvested and to bring them back to the cave. Then they put them over hot rocks to cook. When the food was done, the shells popped open in a process similar to modern-day mussel-steaming, but without the pot.

Marean and colleagues tried out that ancient cooking technique in a kind of archaeological test kitchen.

“We’ve prepped them the same way,” Marean said in telephone interview from South Africa. “They’re a little less moist (than modern steamed mussels). They definitely lose some moisture.””