Craig Alexander Newmark (Internet entrepreneur best known for being the founder of the San Francisco-based website Craigslist) and Andreas Weigend meet and have a fascinating discussion covering Craigslist, Wikipedia and the Social Data Revolution!
Newmark resides in San Francisco’s Cole Valley and is active at Craigslist in customer service, mostly dealing with spammers and scammers. In 2009 he became a member of the Wikimedia Foundation advisory board.
Craigslist is a centralized network of online communities, featuring free online classified advertisements with sections devoted to jobs, housing, personals, for sale, services, community, gigs, résumés, and discussion forums. Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list of friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco Bay Area, before becoming a web-based service in 1996. After incorporation as a private for-profit company in 1999, Craigslist expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, four each in 2001 and 2002, and 14 in 2003.
As of 2009, Craigslist operates with a staff of 28 people. Its sole source of revenue is paid job ads in select cities $75 per ad for the San Francisco Bay Area; $25 per ad for New York City, Los Angeles, San Diego, Boston, Seattle, Washington D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon and paid broker apartment listings in New York City ($10 per ad).
Andreas Weigend is a former Chief Scientist at Amazon.com and the author of over 100 scientific papers on the application of machine learning techniques to finance and business problems.
He currently lectures at Stanford, Berkeley and Tsinghua Universities on the application of data analysis to electronic business problems. He is an advisor to many technology companies including MySpace and Nokia, and is a limited partner in The Founders Fund.
OAKLAND, California (February 09, 2010) – The Oakland Digital Arts & Literacy Center (ODALC) is teaming up with Whole Foods Market and the City of Oakland to hold a contest that calls upon local artists to design a billboard poster conveying what it is about Oakland that inspires them. The top ten designs submitted to the “Inspire Oakland” billboard contest will be featured in three of the city’s most prominent art galleries, while one lucky artist will have his or her design displayed on a commercial billboard.
“The purpose of this contest is twofold,” said Shaun Tai, Executive Director of the ODALC. “First off, we want to direct fresh, young talent in Oakland towards graphic design and information technologies … these are lucrative fields that will create jobs and reenergize our city’s economy. Secondly, we want to promote a positive image of Oakland that counters negative stereotypes sometimes associated with the city. By giving a highly-visible, public platform to the talent and optimism of our young people, we can instill a sense of pride and hope in the Oakland community.”
The Oakland Digital Arts & Literacy Center is a newly formed nonprofit organization founded with the purpose of training, mentoring, and inspiring Oakland’s underemployed youth to achieve higher career goals. In this increasingly digital economy, business-computing skills are more essential than ever to finding work, yet many young people in Oakland don’t have the resources to develop these skills. ODALC seeks to address this problem by offering free access to computer training courses, keynote speakers from Silicon Valley, professional network referrals, business consultations, and one-on-one career counseling.
The “Inspire Oakland” billboard contest marks the Oakland Digital Arts & Literacy Center’s first major public event. Founded on July 31st, 2009, ODALC has been forced to operate on limited resources in the short time they’ve been active. Yet even with limited funding, ODALC is able to help individuals in one-on-one sessions by appointment. One such individual, ElTyna McCree, owner and operator of “Underground Treasures” on Webster Street, had been unable to promote her business effectively due to posttraumatic stress suffered from a violent hate crime. With the help of ODALC, McCree learned the importance of online tools and is now using Yelp.com to successfully promote her business online.
“All we’re asking is for people to believe and give us the chance to prove that our organization can fill a real gap here in Oakland,” said Tai. “If you believe as we do, that Oakland can prosper into a 21st Century city for the rest of America to emulate, then volunteer, spread the word, and donate to the ODALC.” He added with chuckle, “And participate in our billboard contest!”
Entries for the “Inspire Oakland” billboard contest are being accepted from now until March 21st, 2010. How to enter and official rules: http://www.odalc.org/contest/inspire.pdf
This video is Part 1 of 3, taken at the fbFund REV Demo Day on 9/1/09 that features an introduction by Cat Lee, Sheryl Sandberg, Dave McClure, Thread.com, Funki, Sociable, GeckoGo, DropPlay, Photos I Love, Vittana and Workstir.
This video is Part 2 of 3, taken at the fbFund REV Demo Day on 9/1/09 that features Backlight.org, NetworkedBlogs, Wildfire, NutshellMail, Cash.io, Gameyola, RunMyErrands and Samasource.
This video is Part 3 of 3, taken at the fbFund REV Demo Day on 9/1/09 that features MyChurch, RunThere, Zimride, Sortuv, Life360, RentMineOnline, and an outro/wrap-up from Enrique Allen and Dave McClure.
“fbFund is a fund focused on continuing to create incentives for the development of applications on Facebook Platform. Initially, the fund will make available $10 million in capital which may grow over time.
The fund is now accepting applications for $25,000-$250,000 non-recourse grants from anyone interested in building their business on Facebook Platform. Any individual or company, anywhere in the world can apply as long as they have not raised any formal venture funding.
We are forming this fund to help grow the Facebook application ecosystem. By decreasing the barrier to start a company, we hope to entice an even larger group of people to become entrepreneurs and build a compelling business on Facebook Platform. We hope this is also a funding model that other venture capitalists will follow.
fbFund will be administered by Facebook and funded by Accel Partners and The Founders Fund. The investment committee will be comprised of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, and Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook vice president of product marketing and operations. Facebook board members Jim Breyer (Accel Partners) and Peter Thiel (The Founders Fund) will also be part of the committee. Additionally, the fund will rely upon an advisory council that includes Reid Hoffman, founder and chairman of LinkedIn; Josh Kopelman, founder of First Round Capital; and Rajeev Motwani, professor of computer science at Stanford University and early advisor to Google.”
Widget Summit hosted its third annual conference November 3rd and 4th at Hotel Nikko in San Francisco. Widget Summit is the premier widget conference educating hundreds of attendees a year on business and development best practices in the emerging widget industry.
The Widget Summit 2008 conference program included a detailed look inside the widget platforms changing the way users interact with rich content across multiple environments. Widget Summit will help you reach and engage new audiences across multiple platforms including over 180 million Windows Vista desktops, 25 million active Facebook users, 10 million iPhone smartphones, or the millions of users that call My Yahoo! and iGoogle home every day. The world of widgets reaches beyond a standard web address and into the desktops, mobile phones, social networks, blogs, and personal homepages of today’s fragmented online engagements.
Check out the following Widget Summit 2008 videos:
Jonathan Carrigan of CBC shares business lessons learned while completing his MBA and in practice with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
iPhone developers share their mobile development experience on this new platform. Brian Fling of Fling Media, Tom Conrad of Pandora, Dom Sagolla of DollarApp, and Sunil Verma of Mobclix discuss the iPhone native application platform with moderator Raven Zachary.
Ryan Sarver of Skyhook Wireless and Chris Butler share the current state-of-the-art for geolocation-aware widget implementations and the data targeting available within.
While at the Ogilvy conference a few years ago (February 16th -17th, 2006 in Barcelona | Ogilvy GSM Conference: “Intention, Attention, and Interaction”), Anil of Mobuzz TV sat down and had a chat with Andreas Weigend about Web 3.0 and the future of interactivity.
In this video, Andreas predicts that Web 3.0 will offer “incentives” for the user; with incentive driven sites such as Live.com and their cashback program, Andreas proves himself as a visionary.
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