Specifically, he discussed:

* What the capital market is really like in Atlanta
* What the challenges exist
* How asset allocation works (great if you really want to know what you’re up against)
* How the real estate industry is affecting early stage capital here
* The funding gap
* Everything you could ever want to know about angel investors
* What sources exist?
* How to do due diligence on an angel investor
* What angels really want
* Handling rejection
* How to smoke out “fake” investors
* What “good” angel deals really look like
* Market validation
* How much funding to solicit
* Your pitch
* Deal killers
* Advisors
* Closing the deal
* Typical investment terms
* Capital-seeking “to-do” list
* Some case studies
* Facts of life in the Atlanta startup eco-system
* How we can repair it

SL #22: Early Stage Capital in Georgia | StartupLounge.com

French explorer and adventurer Xavier Rosset is about to embark on a 300 day trip to live alone on a remote tropical island in the South Pacific. His adventures will be filmed and used for a 52 minute documentary.

Xavier’s only luggage will be a Swiss army knife, machete video camera and a solar panel for charging the camera. He will spend 10 months alone on an island to develop another way of life through an exciting adventure, a return to the elemental sources. Xavier will survive alone on an island without human interference and without polluting emissions.

The ambition of this documentary is to make a reflection on our lifestyle, our current system and our relationship to nature. And the most important thing is to put the dream and emotion at the heart of adventure natural.

He will find timber to build a shelter, feed on the rudimentary fishing, plants and the harvesting of rainwater to survive.

The philosophy of this adventure is quite different than the existing issues which are aimed competition and the elimination of participants through a system of testing and votes. The primary motivation of this documentary is to draw attention to our planet, on our perception of the world around us and different ways to preserve the future.

Most men have forgotten how to live with nature because we have so far arranged the world according to our needs and desires that these bases, so important, have disappeared.

THE PRIVATE ISLANDS BLOG: Xavier Rosset, 300 days alone on an island

Now you know what not to say. Here's what you should say:

"This is what my company does..."

It's that simple. What you're trying to do is get potential investors to fantasize about how your product or service will make a boatload of money. They can't fantasize if they don't know what you do. And they don't want to be your friend, mother, or psychiatrist until they understand what you do, so cut the crap and explain what you do.

Sun Small and Medium Business - Guy Kawasaki on Innovations

In this image made available Thursday May 29, 2008, from Survival International, 'uncontacted Indians' of the Envira, who have never before had any contact with the outside world, are seen during an overflight in May 2008, as they camp in the Terra Indigena Kampa e Isolados do Envira, Acre state, Brazil, close to the border with Peru. 'We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,' said uncontacted tribes expert Jon

I think this started kind of like this:

Jones: Steve! Steve! listen to me! I'm got a killer idea! Lets go take a giant gleaming helicopter, and fly it over a bunch of people who have never seen technology before!

Steve: Brilliant!

...

At least they didn't land and proclaim themselves gods. Because that went really well last time.

Scaring the crap out of unvisited tribes!

US Policies with an impact on Energy:

1. Limited areas available for offshore drilling;

2. Stopped the rise of CAFE standards for automobiles;

3. Restricted nuclear power generation of Electrical;

4. Federal Reserve policies since 2001 led to a very weak US dollar (raising Oil prices);

5. Energy conservation policies? None

6. Iraq and Afghanistan wars contributing to Middle East tensions

7. No major United States funding for R&D on energy;

8. Kept CAFE standards for light trucks/SUVs much lower than autos;

9. Failed to raise efficiency standards for appliances for decades;

10. Provided no tax incentives for consumer purchases of hybrid automobiles;

11. Suburban Sprawl: Americans, on average, live further from where they work than Europeans do;

12. Mass transit system not a high priority;

13. Allowed tax credits for residential solar power to expire;

14. No special capital gains treatment for VC alt.energy investment

15. Ridiculous corn ethanol policy helped drive food prices higher also;

16. Amongst the lowest gasoline taxes in the developed world;

17. No special capital gains tax treatment for clean energy technology development;

18. Created a tax incentive (ADCS) that encouraged purchases of large inefficient vehicles;

19. Game changing breakthroughs over the past decades in solar, battery, or energy generation technologies? None

20. Exempted light trucks, SUVs, and pickups from gas-guzzler tax;

21. Discouraged clean coal, including gas liquification from coal;

22. Limited (or non-existent) state tax incentives for building energy efficient homes;

23. Failed to aggressively promote compact fluorescent light bulb;

24. Limited hydro-electric power generation;

25. Aggressive tax incentives for battery technology development? None

26. Failed to aggressively promote efficiency improvements for residential energy use, transmission of power, or consumption;

27. No new oil refineries built in the USA over the past 25 years.

The Big Picture | The Costanza Energy Policy: 25 Ways to Drive Oil to $150

Summary

Scalability is sometimes called a "non-functional requirement," implying that it is unrelated to functionality, and strongly implying that it is less important. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, I would say, scalability is a prerequisite to functionality - a "priority-0" requirement, if ever there was one.

I hope that you find the descriptions of these best practices useful, and that they help you to think in a new way about your own systems, whatever their scale.

InfoQ: Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay

Madness Interactive Cheats

Cheats for Madness Interactive, a highly addictive shoot-em up flash game. Side-view. Mouse controlled. Whoop ass.

Madness Interactive Cheats - Madness Interactive Codes

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who was live on the Bangalore stage, ‘beamed up’ Martin De Beer, the Senior Vice President of emerging Technologies, and Chuck Stucki the General Manager of TelePresence, live from San Jose, California. Chambers was then able to have a ‘face to face’ discussion with De Beer and Stucki on the future of Cisco TelePresence, demonstrating first hand the potential capabilities of the system in front of the watching audience.

Beaming your job to Bangalore using holograms!

Cisco On-Stage TelePresence Holographic Video Conferencing

While the pain is still fresh. Let's stop talking about my son. Let's start talking about you. Any by you I mean all the web application developers out there that have been mis-using HTTP. Now I've been telling you over and over how to use HTTP correctly, how to build you web applications in a RESTful manner, and the consequences you could face if you didn't. Well, you didn't listen to me, did you 37Signals? Did you? Now Google releases their Web Accelerator and your application is broken. Apparently you used GET to delete items from Backpack and when Googles Web Accelerator pre-fetches that URI in you web app, items get deleted. Let's make this clear, Google didn't break your application, your application was broken, Google was just the first person to point it out to you. Do you feel the pain? Do you feel it?

"See! See! I told you not to use GET for non-safe and non-idempotent actions! I told you your web applications would break!"

Joe Gregorio | BitWorking | I'm sorry, I can't kiss it and make it better.

At eBay, one of the primary architectural forces we contend with every day is scalability. It colors and drives every architectural and design decision we make. With hundreds of millions of users worldwide, over two billion page views a day, and petabytes of data in our systems, this is not a choice - it is a necessity.
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Terracotta is Scalability and Availability for Java Applications. It clusters the JVM itself, which dramatically simplifies development and reduces database dependency.

In a scalable architecture, resource usage should increase linearly (or better) with load, where load may be measured in user traffic, data volume, etc. Where performance is about the resource usage associated with a single unit of work, scalability is about how resource usage changes as units of work grow in number or size. Said another way, scalability is the shape of the price-performance curve, as opposed to its value at one point in that curve.

There are many facets to scalability - transactional, operational, development effort. In this article, I will outline several of the key best practices we have learned over time to scale the transactional throughput of a web-based system. Most of these best practices will be familiar to you. Some may not. All come from the collective experience of the people who develop and operate the eBay site.

InfoQ: Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay