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Stimulus Optimization: a model to save the economy

Trickle Up Stimulus Optimization Theory

I’m going to give you what I believe is the best strategy for Stimulus Optimization, and then layout the logic that got me to my conclusion. (Note: since we’re talking about an economy at large, I’ll be doing a lot of generalizing for demographics. I obviously know not ALL people in that demographic are like that).

1. Money should stay circulated in old lower income males, small businesses (but not large corporations), social enterprises and non-profits.
2. Money should be put into industry-creating technologies, but not just for technology development but also the commercialization of the technology. The government should support tons of startup entrepreneurs but pay them just enough for them to survive.
3. Money should be put into essentials of society like Education, Healthcare and Tech Infrastructure.

Some of this may seem unintuitive, or possibly biased/humanitarian, but I do believe that this is most economically efficient. Let me explain why.

Continue reading Stimulus Optimization: a model to save the economy

TrueTwit defeats its own purpose by helping spammers

truetwit spam

TrueTwit helps you figure out who are the spammers and who are the real people

Lately I’ve come across this Twitter App service called TrueTwit. This is a service that is meant to identify who are the real people who are following you, and who are the spammers.

It works pretty simple:

1. Someone follows you
2. TrueTwit sends a DM with your account asking the new follower to go onto their site and fill out a captcha and prove s/he is human
3. TrueTwit shows you a list of people who are validated to be humans and so you can safely follow them back.

TrueTwit’s big flaw

So far so good. Neat concept, and definitely trying to solve a pain that is in the Twittersphere. Now the problem comes with this rule of TrueTwit:

If you are a signed-up user of TrueTwit, you automatically pass the test and will not be prompted to prove you are human if you follow another user.

From a conceptual level, this is smart, because TrueTwit will get a lot more signups since people want to avoid the hassle of doing captchas over and over again.

However, here’s the problem:

Continue reading TrueTwit defeats its own purpose by helping spammers

Out of the Country. Not out of the Game. Thanks to the Virtual Office

As some of you guys know, due to family reasons and a bit more, I have temporarily left the US and am now operating from the lovely Vancouver in Canada. Leaving the Golden State was tough, and the team wondered if I could still be running the company from here.

But afterall, our team was virtual even before I left the states. We had members from a variety of places, and even team members from the same city don’t sit and work together. So as long as the time zone wasn’t different, it was not as terrible.

To prove this point, we recently entered a Vator.tv competition for $10,000 sponsored by Elance, called “A New Way to Work“. We previously got 10th place in a competition out of 140 startups and pitched the Viralogy idea in front of a number of different investors. We also won 1st place at a VC Pitch Competition.

This project was designed to illustrate the advantages of working virtually on a team without an office. Since we have people from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Vancouver, Seattle, Texas, New York, and even Turkey, this was fun to make as we each share our experiences.

An excerpt:
Breaking the mold of a localized business allows me to plan my hours and my days the way I want. Whether I work at 2 p.m. or 2 a.m. is up to me, and it allows me to manage my productivity effectively. If I need to spend more time with my dog or my fiancée during the day so that I can burn the midnight oil at night, I can do that. If I want to spend my day working on my netbook in a coffee shop, I can do that too. It’s a large responsibility that can be incredibly rewarding if managed well.

Working virtually means that our staff is extremely flexible and respectful of each other’s needs in terms of time. For example, we hold a weekly company meeting at 8 p.m. Those meeting times are extremely rare in the normal corporate culture, but we have found it to be a perfect time to collaborate and think creatively. When you can work in a virtual workplace, you have increased flexibility not only with respect to location, but time as well.

If you want to run a virtual office and don’t know how, check out the blog de Viralogy!

Business as usual. Death as usual.

This was an old video of me when I was much younger, however, the principles are evergreen and gold. Enjoy!

Businesses must be able to innovate or adapt

Companies need to innovate and constantly be able to adapt. If you do business like the past, you will become the past.

Business as usual fails

The world is moving so fast these days, you need to do things in news ways every year in order to beat your competitors.

For Huffington Post readers who don’t know what’s the point of Twitter

george-bush

OK, so first of all, I did not mean to publicly correct this Huffington Post writer on my blog. I was just reading Peter Schwartz new blogpost called Microblogging with Shitter – I mean Twitter. I felt that he totally didn’t get the true value of Twitter, so I decided to make a long comment on his post. When I was posting, it told me I could only comment for 250 words. That’s why I was forced to make it a blogpost instead.

This post is directly in response to Peter Schwartz (like @ Messaging in a non-microblogging way)

OK. Let me address your post as best as I can to someone who has only seen the exterior of Twitter and not the true usage and value of it. Your bashing is vulgar, unfair, and mostly illogical, and I would like to point out why.

1) Twitter Journalism is possible

I know you feel that Twitter Journalism is ridiculous, but I think it’s because you are simply talking about using one tweet to describe everything. There are people who Tweet about their new experiences from moment to moment. People write stories through an aggregate of Tweets (and others DO read it). There’s also been surgeons who Tweet about their surgery operations while doing it. Now I won’t argue about the moral implications of that, but it at least proves that Twitter has at least some Journalism applications.

2) Just because something else can do it too doesn’t mean it’s not useful

I think your logic is not correct when you said Texting and Cellphone Cameras can also report headline news on the spot. First of all, saying “something else can do this too” by no means discredits the quality of the service in mind. When cellphone cameras came out, would you also say, “Normal cameras can do this too, so it’s a piece of crap” if you were not randomly biased against cellphone cameras? Probably not. Also, I can tell you that Twitter reports these news much better and faster than the 2 alternatives you mentioned. If you see a shocking event, you might text it to your 10 friends. These 10 friends will respond “No way! Are you ok?” And then maybe tell their 2 friends that are sitting next to them. End of story.

Continue reading For Huffington Post readers who don’t know what’s the point of Twitter

Seth Godin should be our advisor

I was hanging out on Viralogy, and I stumbled on Seth Godin’s profile and his post about Clout. He introduces how useful it is to map out a person’s clout(or influence) on the internet, something that can tell you all your social power and the power of your influencees throughout all the different platforms. He says right now it’s a secret that the internet will not tell us yet. That’s actually the vision Viralogy has set out to do and we have successful made some giant steps towards that in the half a year we’ve been around.

We’re not anywhere close to perfect, and we still have tons of work to do before we’re successful, but we are determined to reveal this secret on the internet, Google-style. Since Seth Godin sees the same vision that we have been working on for a long time, I know he has more direction on how to do it correctly. If he becomes our advisor, I know we can realize this vision together and change the web.

The web is our oyster. We just have to figure out how to crack open the shells.