Grade A Entrepreneurs

Yesterday, I attended the monthly meeting of the Ethos Roundtable (Cambridge, MA), a discussion group that focuses on initiatives aimed at holding a culture together, improving social connectedness as well as leveraging social capital, and was co-founded by Deborah Finn and Josh Shortlidge. The featured speaker was Peter Deitz, co-founder of a non-profit organization, Social […]

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Part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon Part 2: Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena The Convergence of Tribes: The Obama Campaign… While analog and digital tribes appeared independently at the same period, they converged about ten years ago, and are now increasingly hard to dissociate. Even though the expansion of digital tribes does […]

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For part 1: Tribes are more than a trendy phenomenon Urban tribes and digital tribes, two simultaneous phenomena… Godin rightfully reminds us that the creation of a tribe, and its goals, are independent from technology. Tribes didn’t appear yesterday and did not wait for the Internet era. Many of the examples of tribes selected by Godin can […]

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Given that Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us came out at the end of last year, the book has been reviewed extensively, and if you haven’t read it yet, I can only recommend that you do. I recently translated it into French and wrote a foreword for it — of which I […]

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One of the email addresses that intrigued me the most a while ago was the one I received from Whoisylvia@aol.com. I immediately thought of Schubert’s song based on Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona (“Who is Silvia”) and this is the only reason why I opened the message. Good that my love for music saved me from […]

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Coverage of the situation in Iran may be a significant turning point in the overall recognition of the importance of social media by a larger public. Over the last few months, social media has got a head start for promptness over media networks on several occasions. How many times have we heard that Twitter broadcasted […]

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Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back starts with a telling anecdote: the author, Douglas Rushkoff got mugged on Christmas Eve in from of his Brooklyn apartment, and instead of getting sympathy, he was basically urged to shut up by local residents, afraid as they were that the incident […]

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A 140 Sec Pitch: At TWTRCON, attendees were invited to vote for six of their favorite vendors. ObjectiveMarketer (http://objectivemarketer.com) was one of them. Amita Paul, the company’s founder, got the opportunity to pitch her product in front of the audience.  I am not sure she used up her 140 seconds, actually, but one thing was clear in […]

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While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of […]

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“Cisco TelePresence. Bringing people and countries a little closer together. That’s the human network effect.” A company mantra is good when it can be memorized outside the company, and even better when it is also embraced by its employees. This is clearly the case of 22-year old Marie Gassée, who joined Cisco in August 2008 […]

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