Diigo Annotation Accumulations

• And The Winner Is.... How To Get To The Top Of Elance

  • Chief Innovation Officer
  • “The bid must use the same language as the customer does. It must be specific, show vivid interest to the project, demonstrate clear understanding of its essence and prove strong competence to deliver,”
  • “At the same time, it must differ from other bids; be personal rather than mechanical; and from the first moment on, it must establish a bridge between the parties turning them into a team,”
  • NIX Solutions is not the only Ukrainian company on Elance. In fact, Ukrainian companies including Zfort from Kharkiv, Anahoret from Donetsk and Onix Systems from Kirovograd, are amongst the highest earners on Elance. Yet, only 3% of 470,000 Elance suppliers come from Eastern Europe. Even with a very small representation, they are known for their quality.

• DARPA’s TransTac, BOLT, and other machine translation programs search for meaning. - Slate Magazine

  • TransTac
  • If you have an algorithm that can make that judgment, you’ve solved a very hard problem indeed.

• The Data Digest: Forrester's Global Online Population Forecast 2009 To 2014 | Forrester Blogs

  • The sheer number of online buyers and the increased online spending per capita will position several emerging markets to challenge North America and Europe from an eCommerce perspective.

• What is Protégé?

  • Protégé is a free, open-source platform that provides a growing user community with a suite of   tools to construct domain models and knowledge-based applications with ontologies.
  • Ontologies range   from taxonomies and classifications, database schemas, to fully axiomatized theories.
  • Ontologies   are now central to many applications such as scientific knowledge portals, information management and integration systems,   electronic commerce, and semantic web services.
  • The Protégé-Frames editor enables users to build and populate   ontologies that are frame-based, in accordance with the   Open Knowledge Base Connectivity protocol (OKBC).
  • The Protégé-OWL editor enables   users to build ontologies for the Semantic Web, in particular in the W3C's   Web Ontology Language (OWL).

• DARPA Awards BOLT Program $7.1 million Contract to SRI-led Team -- MENLO PARK, Calif., May 14, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

  • SRI will lead research activities with the goal of developing systems that accurately translate foreign languages and extract information regardless of genre and media. These technologies are intended to facilitate bilingual conversations with instant interpretation and automatic clarification.
  • The SRI-led BOLT team includes researchers and engineers from Columbia University's Engineering School, Queens College City University of New York, University of Edinburgh, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology R&D Corporation Limited, Estuate Incorporated, Oregon Health & Sciences University, University of Washington, University of Rochester, University of Massachusetts, Aix-Marseille University/National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), and University of Texas at Dallas.

• alpha associates

  • primary fund commitments in the region, sourcing and executing secondary transactions, and making direct co-investments

• From Brink Of Bankruptcy Towards An IPO - The Evernote Story

  • Vilpponen
  • four most important segments; customers, employees, press and the board.

• Free 10 Million Loans For All and Other Wall Street Notes | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone

  • BlackRock
  • It’s one thing when Zero Hedge, William Black, myself, or some rogue Fed officers in Dallas decide to point fingers at the big banks. But when big money players stop trading with those firms, that’s when the death spirals begin.

• Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations - NYTimes.com

  • Ireland’s treaties with European nations, some of Apple’s profits could travel virtually tax-free through the Netherlands
  • invisible to outside observers and tax authorities.
  • Robert Promm, Apple’s controller in the mid-1990s, called the strategy “the worst-kept secret in Europe.”
  • unlimited corporations, which have few requirements to disclose financial information
  • Apple has managed to keep its international taxes to 3.2 percent of foreign profits last year, to 2.2 percent in 2010,
  • Apple reported in its last annual disclosures that $24 billion — or 70 percent — of its total $34.2 billion in pretax profits were earned abroad, and 30 percent were earned in the United States.
  • Apple, which holds $74 billion offshore, last year aligned itself with more than four dozen companies and organizations urging Congress for a “repatriation holiday” that would permit American businesses to bring money home without owing large taxes.
  • includes Google, Microsoft and Pfizer, has hired dozens of lobbyists to push
  • tax break would cost the federal government $79 billion over the next decade

• Apple’s Tax Strategy Aims at Low-Tax States and Nations - NYTimes.com

  • Taxes that would have otherwise gone to the governments of Britain, France, the United States and dozens of other nations go to Luxembourg instead, at discounted rates.
  • Downloadable goods illustrate how modern tax systems have become increasingly ill equipped for an economy dominated by electronic commerce.
  • Michael Rashkin, Apple’s first director of tax policy
  • But the bigger advantage was that the arrangement allowed Apple to send royalties on patents developed in California to Ireland.
  • taxed at the Irish rate of approximately 12.5 percent, rather than at the American statutory rate of 35 percent
  • other profits to flow to tax-free companies in the Caribbean
  • British Virgin Islands, a tax haven

• Sven Lingjaerde - TIME

  • In 1997, he cofounded Vision Capital, with offices in Menlo Park, California and in Geneva. The company specializes in helping emerging European companies enter the U.S. market.  

     Trying to match European tech firms with American investors gave him the idea for the European Tech Tour Association, a not-for-profit organization based in Geneva and Rotterdam.

• Russia's Serial Entrepreneurs Launch A New Crop of Hot Companies | Informilo

  • Russian serial entrepreneur, Stephan Pachikov

• RISING IN RUSSIA Chaos continues to increase, but so does Western investment. Despite great risks, companies large and small still see an ultimate payout. - January 24, 1994

  • Robert Carlson, the former Pratt & Whitney executive, describes Russia as an ''11-time-zone company in Chapter 11,''
  • ''The real jewels are in the research bureaus,'' he says, ''in the vast pools of knowledge. You can quantify the risk in the most pessimistic way, and calculate the rewards in the most pessimistic way, and you still come up with a risk-reward ratio that is fantastic.''
  • ONE AREA in which Russians are highly competitive is computer programming.

• The Fate of the Display Boy // wish i could read Snob…

  • A dream to someday turn labor, talent and success into money and freedom.

     

    Unfortunately, Stepan Pachikov succeeded at this.

     

    He created one of the first Soviet computer firms – ParaGraph, then moved it to the States, where he sold its components to Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Mitsubishi, and a number of smaller companies. And, then the business itself to Silicon Graphics for $80 million.

  • He engaged passionately in online forums about Russia’s potential fates.
  • Incidentally, he happened to meet Gary Kasparov. Incidentally, Gary Kasparov was just given many computers by the Atari company (as payment for an advertising contract). Incidentally, Gary Kasparov gave the computers to Pachikov. Pachikov opened the children’s computer club.
  • Although this was never in his plans, Pachikov met most of the global celebrities of the high-tech world through this club.
  • He not only converted the entire U.S. postal system to sort letter using his technology,
  • He was luck that, while working for RAN, he lived in a dormitory for international interpreter-watchmen, thanks to which he became one of the few computer experts in Russia in the 80s
  • He was lucky that the Perestroika happened and that ParaGraph became the first Soviet computer company  at Comdex – an American exhibition – which instantly made it famous.
  • It was some kind of ridiculous luck. And it made it that much more important to come back to work, to prove that luck had nothing to do with it.
  • He created handwriting-deciphering not for the sake of selling the technology to Apple, but to teach children how to write.
  • Pachikov had, of course, taught Evernote to detect text in images.
  • “To be honest, I would give up a large part of my fortune if that meant having Evernote 30 years ago, rather than today,” he confessed.
  • The unfortunate part of success, one not known to being people who haven’t achieved it to the highest level, is that at a certain moment – that successful person becomes a prisoner of his own achievements.
  • “I love high-tech gadgets!” is what Pachikov thought. What he said was: “I love hi-tech garbage!” No apologies were big enough to undo the insult that had already been made. Pachikov’s relationship with Sony ended forever.

  • It’s possible that life on Earth is the only life in the universe. It’s possible that at some point in the future it will disappear due to some global cataclysm. It’s possible that only the human mind could prevent the disappearance of life.

     

    “This is why, the meaning of your life consists of,” Stepan Pachikov told me, “doing everything to prevent the disappearance of life in the universe

• Mikhail Prokhorov Launches Snob Magazine in U.S. - WSJ.com

  • The name of the magazine does not mean to Russians what it means to Americans. For readers, the title Snob is "obviously ironic," Mr. Yakovlev said, and in fact the title is an acronym of the Russian words for accomplished, independent, educated and thriving.

• Cloud-Storage Rivals Evernote, Box.net Aim for Billion-Dollar Valuations - Bloomberg

  • Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have created billion-dollar valuations by connecting the world. A group of startups aims to do the same by organizing it.
  • The companies are raising venture-capital funding as they set their sights on initial public offerings or big-money buyouts.
  • - the services are potential takeover targets, said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in San Jose, California. Google Inc. (GOOG), Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) are searching for ways to make it easier to sync data, he said.
  • Box.net CEO Aaron Levie expects the industry to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
  • “Evernote has to be more than a note-taking company,” said company founder Stepan Pachikov, who doesn’t participate in day-to-day operations. “Evernote has to allow me not only to remember everything but to analyze, to make decisions, to make me smarter.”

• About - Hunch

  • Hunch is at the forefront of combining algorithmic machine learning with user-curated content, with the goal of providing better recommendations for everyone.

• Ethical or Not, Silicon Valley Bloggers Hit Up VCs for Angel Funds - The Daily Beast

  • Robert Scoble
  • Remember, these guys are bloggers, not journalists. Why shouldn’t they use their blogs to get rich? It sure beats trying to make money selling those crappy little ads in the side column.
  • In a way, what these bloggers are really doing is creating a new kind of PR firm, one where the promoters get paid not in billable hours but in early-stage equity. If you’re a startup, this makes a lot of sense. Why pay a PR agency millions of dollars and hope they can get you some favorable coverage when you can just bring on an investor who will write the articles for you—and reach a bigger, more targeted audience than mainstream media outlets like the New York Times could ever do?

• Web freedom faces greatest threat ever, warns Google's Sergey Brin | Technology | The Guardian

  • balkan
  • "There's a lot to be lost," he said. "For example, all the information in apps – that data is not crawlable by web crawlers. You can't search it."
  • Brin's comments come on the first day of a week-long Guardian investigation of the intensifying battle for control of the internet being fought across the globe between governments, companies, military strategists, activists and hackers.
  • In China, which now has more internet users than any other country, the government recently introduced new "real identity" rules in a bid to tame the boisterous microblogging scene. In Russia, there are powerful calls to rein in a blogosphere blamed for fomenting a wave of anti-Vladimir Putin protests. It has been reported that Iran is planning to introduce a sealed "national internet" from this summer.

• Objective-C - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • Objective-C is a thin layer on top of C, and moreover is a strict superset of C; it is possible to compile any C program with an Objective-C compiler, and to freely include C code within an Objective-C class.

• Long-Form Journalism and Multimedia at The Atavist - NYTimes.com

  • “The Web is good at creating short and snappy bits of information, but not so much when it comes to long-form, edited, fact-and-spell-checked work.”
  • Since opening for business at the end of January, The Atavist has published three long pieces that are native to the tablet in concept and execution, and it has had over 40,000 downloads of its app. Writers are paid a fee to cover reporting expenses and then split revenue with The Atavist. For the time being, an article costs $2.99 for the iPad and $1.99 for the Kindle or Nook.
  • The most remarkable thing about these can’t-look-away pieces of multimedia journalism is that Mr. Rabb devised a content-management system that allows a writer to build it alone. Before taking on The Atavist, Mr. Rabb had never before worked in Objective-C, the code used to build most apps for Apple devices, but he bought a book about the code and developed a prototype within a month.

• Chris Langan:The Smartest Man In The World-3 - YouTube

  • Social psychologists define practical intelligence as the ability to say the right thing at the right time to the right person.

• Why internet/GDP ratios make no sense | Felix Salmon

  • the Czech Republic, for instance, apparently has a big internet security software sector.

• The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | Wired.com

  • “total information awareness”
  • NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

• Analysis: Chinese PC Market Will Grow 12% In 2012 | TechCrunch

  • Enterprise around the world still hasn’t hit the refresh button on their internal IT so it’s clear that things probably won’t change much until after Windows 8 launches.
  • Considering most machines made in the last six years can run just about any heavy duty app thrown at them – my own Mac Pro is from 2008 and it runs like a clock – there’s little need to upgrade. That will change when Snow Lion obsoletes a number of Mac models while Windows 8 potentially forces a move toward touchscreen devices.

• New Study Reveals How Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) Spur Internet Growth in Emerging Markets - MarketWatch

  • IXPs serve as critical hubs for data traffic exchange in the   global Internet infrastructure. Over 350 IXPs around the world enable   local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Internet backbone carriers   to efficiently and cost effectively exchange Internet traffic
  • Many emerging markets do not have well-established IXPs, forcing   domestic Internet traffic onto long-distance international links,   resulting in significantly higher costs and latency.
  • The Internet Society is the trusted independent source for Internet   information and thought leadership from around the world.

• List of unsolved problems in computer science - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • List of unsolved problems in computer science

• Factual’s Gil Elbaz Wants to Gather the Data Universe - NYTimes.com

  • identify every fact in the world, and to hold them all in a company he calls Factual.
  • “What if you could spot any error, as soon as you wrote it? Factual is definitely a new thing that will change business, and a valuable new tool for computing.”
  • Mr. Elbaz also serves on the boards of the California Institute of Technology, his alma mater, and the X Prize Foundation, which offers cash prizes to teams that meet challenges in space flight, medicine and genomics.
  • The company he sold to Google, Applied Semantics, is the basis of Google’s AdSense business, which brings Google close to $10 billion in revenue annually.

• Why Berlin is poised to be Europe’s new tech hub — Tech News and Analysis

  • Frankfurt is home to the German bourse and hence the investment banking elite
  • Munich and the south of Germany have become the epicenter of global car business, and those traditional heavy industries that Germany is known for are spread across the south of the country
  • Berlin does have politicians – a whole lot of them
  • Berlin has lots of real estate. And that means low rents – catnip for artists, musicians and yes, the start-up community.
  • But to be candid, I think Berlin is a long way from being a booming tech-town. Even though it has a lot of entrepreneurs, the city still lacks a formal venture capital structure.
  • Berlin needs a big company to rise from the rubble. Berlin needs one such big company to emerge in next few years – one that employs hundreds (if not thousands) of people.
  • It doesn’t matter where you are based, but as a startup or any other business you need a domestic market which in turn can be used to grow overseas.
  • Silicon Valley startups have two advantages – the domestic U.S. market that has enough early adopters willing to try new Internet services. This gets the attention of tech media, which in turn allows companies to get more people signing up for their products. (Twitter, according to a MIT study, is a good example of this virtuous cycle.) That sets off a chain reaction and gets companies the global attention.
  • The overseas companies are on the opposite end of the spectrum.

• Apple Of Our Eye: Gartner Predicts 665 Million Tablets In Use By 2016, Over 45% Of Them iPad Devices | TechCrunch

  • In terms of actual apps — developers should take note here — there is a very strong correlation between smartphone and tablet apps: Gartner’s analysts have found that 40 percent of apps that users have are actually the same on both devices. In other words, if you are making an iPhone or Android smartphone app, you might find you have an easy sale in the form of a corresponding tablet-optimized app.

• Techmeme Leaderboard is live - Techmeme News

  • Techmeme, in surfacing the latest tech news, also identifies leaders in tech reporting.
  • The configurations that make Techmeme a tech news site embody some of that bias. Beyond that,
  • headlines are also skewed by Techmeme's emphasis of business news over areas like video game reviews, developer news, gadget arcana, and green tech. Finally, influencers that communicate mainly in links don't figure prominently on Techmeme. Slashdot is widely read, yet absent from the top 100.
  • Archives begins on September 30, 2007, so there's little to see as of yet.

• European Tech Bloggers Are Getting Angry And Why That's Awesome For Startups | TechCrunch

  • TC Europe has evolved as part stand-alone site, part “Correspondent’s blog” attached to a much larger entity. It’s a model. And in fact, TC Europe has consistently punched above its weight in Europe (a fragmented market) according to regular surveys from Wikio.
  • Other big guns have parked their tanks on the European lawn. GigaOm now has a European writer, Bobbie Johnson (based in Brighton), so does WSJ Europe (Ben Rooney, in London), VentureBeat has Ciara Byrne in Amsterdam and The Next Web (especially with Martin Bryant in Manchester) has done a pretty good job internationalising in English (although good luck trying to monetize that Dutch language blog guys). Wired UK‘s magazine’s site has become an important adjunct to the print title. Some might say it’s already the ‘Vanity Fair’ of tech.

• Silicon Valley, London, NYC: Startup Genome Data Reveals How The World’s Top Tech Hubs Stack Up | TechCrunch

  • Typically, startups plant themselves close to extant networks of support, be it financial capital, human capital, or technologies
  • “yield insights for entrepreneurs deciding where to start their company, investors deciding where to allocate their capital, large companies looking for acquisition targets, and policymakers who want to make their entrepreneurship ecosystems flourish.”
  • the three most active startup hubs: Silicon Valley, New York City, and London.
  • Silicon Valley’s ecosystem is currently 3-times bigger than New York City, 4.5-times bigger than London, 12.5-times bigger than Berlin, and 38-times larger than Boulder.
  • Silicon Valley startups raise two to three-times more money in the first three stages of development: Discovery, Validation, and Efficiency.

• Will The Need For Tech Talent Become Obsolete? - Business Insider

  • I think we're just at that point where we're crossing over from developing to utilizing the development. The means and the back-end development will just get simpler and simpler as creativity and front-end development will get more complex and challenging.

• Movie industry declares war on piracy - Media - Michael Wolff - GQ.COM (UK)

  • What he means is this: all careers, business models, relationships, economic scale and future residuals in the modern media business are founded on bundled delivery.
  • Who controls video controls the media business, and, too, the culture. And, in a sense, everybody's lives.
  • Video is about power.
  • The upstarts are geared to giving consumers what they want (new products as well as the Establishment's products) when they want it; while the latter closely regulate who gets what, when and how, and on what complex and baroque payment method and terms.

• How Russian Tycoon Yuri Milner Bought His Way Into Silicon Valley | Wired Magazine | Wired.com

  • phumpher
    • To stutter one's speech in such a way as to inhibit comprehension. 2. To be evasive in speech or action. Possibly derived from the Yiddish
  • It is the age of the takeover artist—Michael Milken, Carl Icahn, Ronald Perelman, Henry Kravis—and Milner falls in love with them all: “These are very romantic figures for me—and they are very American.”
  • It is the apogee of the dotcom moment, 1999, and Milner fastens onto an American business theory
  • The theory holds that the Internet is an advertising medium where users themselves create the vast amount of content.
  • but without the offsetting costs of having to actually create content.

  • Mail.ru, then the biggest Internet company in Russia, valued at its height at $100 million, crashes too.

       

    Milner, with his macaroni cash flow, buys it on the cheap.

  • Milner is the new boy in town. He obviously knows few people, does not travel in elite technology circles, and fails most of my name-dropping tests—he doesn’t even pretend to know who he should know. Correction: Through Mail.ru, he does know the Goldman Sachs money guys in Russia. Indeed, Milner seems to have been almost personally inspired by the Goldman-propounded view of the BRIC countries—that capital accumulation and high growth rates in Brazil, Russia, India, and China could alter the economic balance of power in the world.
  • The G8 Internet colloquiums will include a series of high-profile speakers from among the digital elite: from the US, Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt; from Japan, Hiroshi Mikitani, CEO of online retailer Rakuten; from France, Maurice Levy, head of ad agency Publicis Groupe, and Stéphane Richard, CEO of France Telecom. And then Milner.
  • Dmitry Medvedev, in an effort to jump-start online entrepreneurialism (and distinguish himself from his predecessor, Putin), has become as anti-regulation and laissez-faire as anyone in the West. Next to his government, France, Germany, and even the US represent the hoariest conventional views. Milner is presumably here to represent non-American entrepreneurialism at its most ambitious and successful.
  • Successful people, it should not be a surprise, are often trying to explain their success to themselves as much or more than to others.
  • There is always something vaguely oppositional about the relationship VCs have with the companies they invest in. They are trying to maximize their positions, to pay as little as possible and cash out for as much as possible. Milner—now the singular link between the major players of social media, Zuckerberg at Facebook, Mark Pincus at Zynga, Andrew Mason at Groupon, Jack Dorsey at Twitter, Daniel Ek at Spotify—is not thinking about individual deals but is aligning himself financially and strategically with the founders and reaping the benefits. Already, he competes with the topmost VCs in terms of personal wealth, and he is arguably now more important—Milner is setting the price.

• Rostelecom starts building the largest data centre in Russia

  • 14.03.2012
     Rostelecom starts building the largest data centre in Russia

    Press release

  • The main objective of the national cloud computing platform is to increase the ability to share key information and telecommunication services and broad access to it will lead to socio- economic benefits as public and private enterprises use the platform. 

• How to become a billionaire – leaked DST document

  • • 13% of all time spent online globally is on Facebook (23 billion minutes per day)
    • Global internet users are set to double in the next 5-10 years
    • 361m internet users in 2000. Close to 2bn today; $8bn worldwide advertising spent in 2000, $72bn in 2011 and global e-comerce valued at $680bn
    • Opportunity for global internet users to reach 5bn in coming years
    • Reach will grow faster than ever before and new companies can scale quickly through targeted marketing using social networks as a distribution platform
    • There’s still a world of investment to be made: “Currently there are numerous high-growth private internet companies across the world that are highly profitable and cashflow positive”
    • Nice set of facts

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