Toluu

Robert Scoble's shared items

Free Alternatives to 10 Popular Commercial Mac Applications (Part2)Today

Shared by Robert Scoble
Good trend for bloggers to follow: find cool free stuff for their readers.

Due to the popularity of my first article regarding free alternatives to commercial Mac applications, I’ve decided to roll out a second part, shining the spotlight on more free applications for MakeUseOf’s Mac adopters. I hope you’ll like these applications just as well as their commercial counterparts, maybe even more since they’re free!

Jing, as an alternative to iShowU ($20)

Jing is a screen-casting program which has come a long way since it first started. Their current version is pretty impressive because it integrates sharing to Screencast.com, Flickr and uploads to any FTP; you’ll automatically get a download link which you can share with your friends (something like Skitch). It does everything iShowU does and it even records from the microphone. The one thing it doesn’t allow me to do is adjust the video output quality. But hey, it’s pretty dece

I've Got Your Ownership Society Right HereToday

While travelling in NYC & to RIT to speak at their entrepreneurs conference last week, I collected some thoughts about our turbulent times.

We started Socialtext in 2002, during the last crash, a time when many said it was the worst time in history to start a company.  But history shows us that the best companies started in the worst times, such as Apple or Microsoft.  And all great companies lead their way out of recessions.

Equity is the Ownership Society

Silicon Valley runs on equity, not credit.  The source of funding isn't drying up.

How equity is allocated, or rather the terms and valuation, will be effected.  Too early to say how macro will effect it because all macro is currently just volatile uncertainty.  While the classical shift in recession for venture capital is either towards more stable late stage (safe bets) or advanced R&D early stage (long bets), the underlying costs of startups have changed and some contrarians will even out the stage distribution. 

How equity is reallocated will favor new money, but this is kept in check. Those who invested must be, those who vested must be incented and those that will work in the future must be offered upside. There will be greater requirements for startups to be more capital efficient, but at the same time investors will seek to further capitalize their companies

The Next Step: Prediction Market Business IdeasToday

Silicon Alley Insider, which has recently become as obsessed with prediction markets as we are (Politickr likes to take at least some credit for this, dating back to its early days at SAI last year), is out with a few suggestions about how to turn prediction markets into an even bigger business:

• Provide political stock options to campaign employees -an admittedly far better motivator than pizza for overworked staffers on all those long nights (A good idea considering Politickr has learned from several very high-level campaign strategists that trading in markets like Intrade has become a popular hobby among staffers during this election cycle)
• Policy Hedges - SAI's post doesn't mention it, but there are already several startups in the works planning to do just this. By repackaging trading stats and selling them to lobbyists and hedge funds, companies are hoping to make money off those eager to hedge on policy.
• Campaign Fina

Focusing your blog content in a stormToday

Shared by Robert Scoble
Oh, Duncan is now saying "there's worse to come." Fear monger! I get it, he's playing both sides. He gets his new author to attack me for being too negative, then he goes negative himself. That way he gets both audiences: the folks who want just positive news reported, and the folks who want the hard truth. Heheh, brilliant strategy. Me? I'm going to Zig to this Zag.

No one can escape the economic bad news sweeping the world at the moment….or can they?

Blogs will likely fare well no matter what the economic downturn delivers to the broader market: advertising may actually increase, and most blogs and bloggers are small scale enterprises with little or no debt, who can survive on lower incomes than heritage media companies. But there is one thing you need to be considering now, and that’s a question of focus. Lots of blogs are writing about the economic crisis (us included) and it’s difficult to ignore what is going on and not write about it. But that news may be polluting your focus. You need to make a judgment call as soon as possible on what is the best focus for your blog in bad times. We’ve discussed various verticals in previous posts, and I hate to generalize, but this is the split to need to consider.

Are you a topical news blog, or are you an escapist blog?

Do your

An Observation: WSJToday

Shared by Robert Scoble
"Groupthink can be a dangerous thing and difficult to avoid." Good point. What's funny is most of the posts I've seen in the blogs are too positive and too dismissive of people who are more negative. So, there's some groupthink going on there too.

It is shortly after 11:30pm local time and I just finished reading today’s Wall Street Journal.  The WSJ is my paper of record having been a daily reader for well over a decade.  Why am I reading a newspaper at 11pm?  Isn’t the news old?  Why am I reading a paper at all?  Good questions for this internet age, I suppose.

First, I read the paper late in the day because the news is already old by the time it hits my doorstep, so why rush?  I read it for context and detail, not timeliness.  Good investors can pick up ideas and nuances in the articles that illuminate current events and provide insights.  Such details can be far more valuable than simply hearing the raw news as it breaks.  I often get wonderful ideas from articles which are weeks old.  And if a WSJ article is truly breaking news, other sources point this out and I can open the paper immediately.

Second, there is something about simply reading a hard to handle, crinkly, inky, paper.  I’m not that old, but I do appreciate getting away from my screens and away from the desk to sit in a comfortable chair, under soft light and enjoy the paper with a nice