The US is by far the most entrepreneurial country in the world. I read somewhere its current status is mostly due to the healthy Venture Capital eco-system.
The core problems with the Venture Capital, IMHO, is that investment decisions are not made based on product merit. Sure, they won't invest in a very stupid idea, but they will invest in a mediocre idea if the "team" is a proven team, but that is not what happened to Yahoo, eBay, Google or YouTube. Completely unproven teams.
Just to be clear, VCs decision are very complex, but most will tell you that the experienced team trumps all other criterias, then comes other factors like market, opportunity, product, etc.
I just read (through Jeff Nolan on Venture Chronicles) that a VC from Boston (Charles River Ventures) is creating a new deal flow called QuickStart to make it easier for companies to get Convertible Debt (a.k.a. Bridge Loan) to get started. Fantastic. (Note to self: Send Sampa's business plan).
Here is the deal, nearly 100% of VCs will tell you they do Seed Investment -- it's a lie! Nearly 100% of VCs will tell you they can do Convertible Debt -- Oops, another lie.
Ask your favorite VC when was the last time they did a $250K Convertible Debt investment. Remember to exclude the one's that were done by EIRs (Entrepreneurs in Residence) because that is just you giving your son an allowance and telling people that you give money to the needy every week.
This is a great book from Chris Anderson, a Wired editor, describing the real inovations that they Internet is bringing to the market.
Having worked on MSN Search before, I have to say this is not big news. We always understood the power of the tail. At the time I worked on MSN, the "tail" was responsible for 2/3 of our traffic and revenue.
It is hard to define the "Tail" (since I'm not a writer), but it is easy to understand. In any business you have the "hits", products that sell way more than anything else. On MSN, the "hits" were the top search terms like "sex", "hotmail", "maps", "pictures", etc. The tails are the queries that occur just about a few times a day, like "haircut in redmond", or "how to fix canon battery flap".
In the context of Amazon, their hits are the bestseller, but the tail represents a huge portion of their sales. If you are in any business that has "hits", it certainly has a tail and you probably can tap into that to either grow your business, or to create a new business that is supplying a demand for that untapped market.
So I've got hundreds of log files from Sampa. It has been a problem to figure out how to use that data. We know what we want, but besides building a Log Analysis from scratch I wasn't able to find something good.
We tried AWStats, but we didn't like it. The reports are not nice and what I need is something that I can easily manipulate in Excel and/or import into a database to further analysis.
We want the basic stuff, aggregated for the day, week and month:
Fact: 99.99% of Internet users are nice people, just want to have fun when reading, posting or leaving a comment on the Internet. But then, there are 500,000,000 Internet users in the world, so, there are at least 50,000 idiots out there just waiting to screw with you.
I've been hit twice. The first time was because a friend of mine (Kelly Smith) got targeted by an idiot that thought he stolled his web site design (turns out that the designer used an 'open' template). I had nothing to do with it, but since Kelly had recently written about me and Sampa, people started bashing me as well. These usually occur in the form of threatening or very offensive emails and blog posts.
The second time I was hit was about a post where I wrote that I think using XHTML is a waste of time. Can you believe people would feel so annoyed by it that they would threaten me? But that is what happened. I've got about 50 comments/emails calling me all kinds of name and wishing me all kinds of bad stuff. (That is what you get to be on Digg's homepage).
Anyway, I was just reading Michael Arrington latest debacle (can I call it that, Michael?). He has been hit a few times. The only thing that I can think of is that this is making him stronger and with thicker skin. That is what happened to me.
The only thing I can suggest is for you to either get a thick skin and be prepared to receive absurds, offensive and threatening emails, or, just close your site, close your blog, take your pictures and videos out of the Internet and never share anything online.
Michael J. Fox is right -- No, I'm not talking about Stem Cell research (he is right about that too) -- I'm talking about the phrase "What you do in Missouri matters for millions of Americans". Nobody will question the factual validity of that statement (wait, some idiot will). A Senator from Missouri will be voting on the same laws that a senator from any other state, and most of those laws will affect the entire nation.
Now, I already said that "geography-based voting" is kind of wrong. So, when the US decides to invade or occupy a country, or when the US decides to apply importation taxes on another country's oranges so that local producers can better compete on price, or, when the US decides to build a fence on its border is a matter that affects the entire nation. Heck, it actually affects multiple nations. Sometimes the entire world is affected by US decisions. No question that US is the biggest (only) super power in the world today.
Wouldn't be fairer if the entire world would be able to vote for the US president and senators?
Now, to be fair, most of the decisions on Washington DC only affect US citizens (and foreigners living here), so, the entire world might have a weighted vote of, let's say, only 20%.
For example, if candidate A got 51% of the vote inside the US and the world voted 25% to candidate A, then the weighted total vote for candidate A is 45.8% (51%x80% + 25%x20%), which means that candidate B wins the election.
Now to be fair, this shouldn't be a change in the US election process only. Most countries have affects on their neighboors and trading partners, so the same type of logic some be used. Let's pick any country, like Belize in Central America. This is a small country that doesn't have a lot of international trade, so, less of the world vote should count, and probably only the direct partners and neighbors could have an influence.
Tell me, wouldn't that be much more fair?
PS: Note to self: Can we use PageRank to calculate the weight of each country vote? Better yet, let's do a PeopleRank where each people is influenced by each other and that amount of influence defines how much he can influence back on the original person's life.
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(through Jeff Nolan on 
September, 2007