"I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people." Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan
Atlanta's Security Cluster: Spotlight on ISS
Topic: Technology
5:02 pm EST, Dec 15, 2009
Chris Klaus founded Intenet Security Systems in 1994, while he was a sophomore at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Chris’s product, the Internet Scanner, offered well being to companies connecting to the internet as the world wide web emerged, and it did so under a freemium model. Beginning as a side project in his dorm room where $1,000 checks started showing up, Chris asked a professor where he could find a good lawyer for his business, and that lawyer introduced him to Tom Noonan. Chris dropped out of Tech to pursue the business full time, John Imlay and Sig Mosely invested, and Internet Security Systems grew rapidly in an emerging market. ISS’s rapid growth culminated in its initial public offering on NASDAQ in march of 1998 and in an acquisition by IBM for $1.3 billion in October, 2006.
- Install latest Mac OS X R build 2.10 - Install latest tcltk - In R, execute: install.packages("igraph"); install.packages("twitteR"); install.packages("ggplot2");
A California State of Mind (As a Cancer on Atlanta)
Topic: Technology
9:58 am EDT, Jun 19, 2009
There is just one problem: In Atlanta, The ‘California State of Mind’ is a Cancer. It is a disease. It has no applicability here and it destroys lives. The commonly stated idea that the differences between Silicon Valley and Atlanta is one purely of scale is false, and the implication of these differences cannot be understated. There are emergent properties of a startup economy that large, that do not exist at our scale whatsoever.
I can’t say that strongly enough. In Georgia, the California State of Mind will try to kill you and will ruin your life. Its not like us. It wants to kill your family. It belongs on the terrorist watch list. Without the supportive environment of the Valley, the valley game-plan has disastrous effects on human lives.
Jello wrote an article for Techdrawl as part of the series he is doing on Startup Geography. It is also up on Hacker News (presently the #1 item).
Kanye West "Can't Tell Me Nothing" video (Zach Galifianakis version)
Topic: Arts
8:55 am EDT, Apr 9, 2009
got a one line email from Zach that said, "this sounds like a joke but it is true. Kayne West wants me to lip sync his new video. can you fly to nc to shoot it? " There was very little discussion in advance other than that. Hiring the cloggers was Zach's idea, and Inman was able to track them down.
Twitpay has raised an undisclosed amount of angel financing and will launch a service that allows users to order and buy downloadable content, via Twitter.
The Atlanta-based social payments startup, launched four months ago, allows users to make payments of up to $1,000 through the micro-blogging phenomenon that Twitter has morphed into.
Twitpay is part of an eco-system of services and applications that is transforming Twitter from a social media site into a communications — and now an ecommerce — platform.
CEO Michael Ivey was tight-lipped on the details of the fundraise. After some prodding, he ventured to say that seed funding for Internet startups at Twitpay’s stage is generally less than $300,000.
Congratulations to Twitpay, the hottest concept to come out of Atlanta in some time.
Today, we’re taking Twitpay out of beta and putting it out there for everyone to use. (If you don’t like to read long blog posts: we’re turning on “real money” powered by Amazon Payments. We’re excited. Twitpay is awesome.)
Congrats to twitpay for going live with real money!
On February 10 at approximately 1656 GMT, the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 communications satellites collided over northern Siberia. The impact between the Iridium Satellite LLC-owned satellite and the 16-year-old satellite launched by the Russian government occurred at a closing speed of well over 15,000 mph at approximately 490 miles above the face of the Earth. The low-earth orbit (LEO) location of the collision contains many other active satellites that could be at risk from the resulting orbital debris.
The following videos, interactive 3D Viewer files, 3D models, and high-resolution images are available to better understand this event.
See also:
... POSSIBLE SATELLITE DEBRIS FALLING ACROSS THE REGION...
Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn » Wifi Cat: The Backstory
Topic: Business
9:54 am EST, Feb 27, 2009
The following is my account of the Wifi Cat ruse we pulled off last week at Startup Riot 2009 in Atlanta. This is from memory, so the timeline may be a bit off here or there - but it will give you the gist.
GT VentureLab: It's the Execution, not the Idea that Matters
Topic: Technology
8:37 am EST, Jan 9, 2009
Frank Herbert, author of Dune, told ... how he had once been approached by a friend who claimed he (the friend) had a killer idea for a SF story, and offered to tell it to Herbert. In return, Herbert had to agree that if he used the idea in a story, he'd split the money from the story with this fellow. Herbert's response was that ideas were a dime a dozen; he had more story ideas than he could ever write in a lifetime. The hard part was the writing, not the ideas.
Herbert might as well have been talking about technology. Don't get me wrong. Ideas are important. Research is critical to advancing our society. But when it comes to commercialization, it is only a small part of the puzzle.
History suggests that, all other things being equal, a society prospers in proportion to its ability to prevent parents from influencing their children's success directly.
I couldn't help but think of copyright extensions when I read this passage.
