Entries Tagged 'economics' ↓

Yesterday I met up with Jeff Pulver to discuss some business ideas, and one of the topics we touched on was, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

The new iPhone 3G and the imminent release of the App Store have created an amazing amount of buzz and speculation about what the next generation of mobile apps might be.

While I am unable to comment on any of my iPhone development efforts or the details of the iPhone SDK, I thought it might be interesting to ask here as well, “If you could build any iPhone app, what would it be?”

So, simple as that. What is your ideal “killer app” for iPhone? Write your idea here, and maybe we’ll build it!

I just want to say thank you to everyone that showed up to make SocialDevCamp yesterday such a huge success. I say it was a success not as an organizer, but as a participant. I learned a ton of practical information yesterday and made contact with dozens of talented people, most of whom are either nearby or a short train ride away.

I can rant and rave about how great yesterday was, but here’s what others are saying:

• “Dude – we were surrounded by talented folks – I think I talked myself out – so many interesting things happening.” — Bear
• “I think its official #socialdevcamp is the best event Baltimore has seen in a LONG time.” — Greg Cangialosi
• “Thanks for setting up #socialdevcamp yesterday. I thought the discussion was quite insightful & well-organized.” — kyeung808
• “@chrisbrogan Morning chris, you missed an awesome SocialDevCamp yesterday” — Jimmy Gardner
• “Good day at socialdevcamp (always a good day when you make friends with an MIT post doc)… also, I’m Bill Pardy.” — James Lombardi
• “Socialdevcamp was perfect. Met so many great people. Totally worth the sore vocal chords.” — Amy Hoy
• “What a day! socialdevcamp was seriously a lot of fun, the after party even a little more so.” — vees
• “After working with the highly esteemed @cyberhorse for 5 years, I met him for the first time today at #socialdevcamp” — Keith Casey

Honestly it all makes me a little emotional.  This is our community.  These people are the future of innovation, and we’re committed to making a go of it here along the silicon rails of the Amtrak east-coast corridor. I am so incredibly proud to be associated with this community, and the notion that we all have a stake in making the east coast a better place to start and run businesses.  More on that later.

I also want to especially thank all of the people who helped make the event possible on the unimaginably short time schedule of 25 days notice: our sponsors (listed here) as well as Melanie Kelleher of Kelleher Consulting for her invaluable assistance with the venue, the catering and at the registration table, Jen Gunner with the Greater Baltimore Technology Council for their support and encouragement, my wife Jennifer Troy for her help with a thousand details and the afterparty, and of course the event co-chairs Ann Bernard and Keith Casey who enlisted the support of their networks and helped shape and promote the event.  People wondered how we could do this so quickly, and it was because everybody involved is a superstar in one way or another; you couldn’t ask for a better event team!

We also need to make special mention of one person who was indispensable in making the event the success that it was: Jim Kucher at the University of Baltimore deserves huge kudos for securing the terrific space at the Thumel Business Center at a deeply discounted price.  Without the University’s support yesterday, as we all experienced it, would not have been possible.  Lots of folks mentioned that the space was really exemplary as a Barcamp-compatible space:  a large common area for mixing and meals, a great auditorium with theater style seating, and four, easy-to-find and easy-to-use breakout rooms.  We really could not have asked for a better space.

Also thanks to Brewer’s Art for putting up with the flash mob that colonized their Saturday happy hour.  We warned them that we were coming, but they might not have expected the sheer numbers and zeal that the SocialDevCamp crowd exhibited yesterday!

• Take a look at the Flickr photos that were generated.
• Jimmy Gardner (@jjgardner3) made a an awesome Animoto photo collage video. Check it out!
• Shashi Bellamkonda created a thorough recap of the day and of the coverage
• Greg Cangialosi has an awesome post that echoes my sentiments perfectly!
• Ann Bernard has a great summary of the content of the day’s events
• Kenneth Yeung made videos of many of the sessions
• We recorded several videos yesterday using Qik: shashi, davetroy
• If you have media to share, please post a comment here!

One thing is certain:  yesterday was a big success and it affirmed our belief that there is a need for exactly this kind of event and community in our region.  We will be planning a second event, SocialDevCamp East Fall 2008, for September.  Date TBD soon!

I will be writing more about my reflections on yesterday in the coming days.  Right now, I need to finish a presentation for the O’Reilly Where 2.0 conference on the openlocation.org initiative I am working on, and get on a plane to San Francisco at 6:00.

This morning, I attended another of Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Breakfasts.

Every time I go, I end up risking a parking ticket. The metered spots are invariably for 2 hours, and 10AM comes almost instantaneously. I can’t tear myself away to go mind the meter; been lucky, so far.

At these events, I’m continuously engaged with friends new and old; like-minded people who love ideas like I do, and who can bat them around like tennis pros.

If you’re like me, you find this kind of intense interaction to be exhilarating and stimulating.

This is what we want to facilitate at SocialDevCamp East — a thoughtful conversation about new ideas and how to realize them. We want to discuss the future in an informed way, synthesizing the lessons of the past with today’s emerging trends. We want to include economics, psychology, and design in this discussion. And iPhone and Rails and Twitter.

Anyway, if this sounds like a conversation you want to have, we guarantee that SocialDevCamp is going to be a blast, and that the day (and the party afterwards) will be a blur. A good blur; a blur you can leverage in the form of new ideas, relationships, and opportunities.

We want to thank our two newest sponsors: AwayFind.com and WebConnection.com. Also thanks to David Kirkpatrick, Senior Technology Editor at Fortune magazine, for attending.

Looking forward to seeing you and your ideas in Baltimore on May 10th!

Sincerely,
Dave, Ann, Keith, and Jennifer

I would not have anticipated ever writing anything with this thesis: Fidel Castro was right.

A couple of years ago, he made it known that the global subsidy of biofuels would lead to an increase in the price of food because of the diversion of grain stocks (such as corn) into fuel production.

It seemed basic economics at the time and he’s been proven correct. We saw it in the developed world first in the form of an increase in the price of milk (made from corn, essentially) and subsequently all dairy products.

Now we see it in the form of other grains, like rice and wheat, and there is no obvious end in sight. The craze to invest in biofuel technologies was nothing other than a stall tactic, to prevent investment in real alternative energy sources. While it’s nice to re-use things like old fry oil to run your Mercedes or semi, there just isn’t enough used restaurant oil to make a dent in our demand for energy.

Instead we’ve taken the final step in linking our food supply to the energy market: we’ve decided to invest heavily (and irrationally) in converting our food directly into energy with ethanol and soy biofuel subsidies.

It’s not as though there had not previously been a link; oil companies have been powering agribusiness for the last 75 years at least. Petroleum waste products have been productively combined with chlorine and other chemicals to produce a huge number of chemicals that have proved useful as pesticides (and as PCBs, PVCs, and other plastics) and have led to the current abundance of food.

Ostensibly, this is a good thing; however as this has occurred, farming has become big business, and the same corporations that control the chemistry of the food supply (like Monsanto and Exxon/Mobil) now control the food supply itself. There’s no monopoly like two monopolies.

If this theses are correct, one of the best things we can do to lower food prices and to promote investment in sustainable alternative energies is to loudly protest the investment in biofuels.

By removing subsidies for biofuels, we 1) direct food back to the food supply, thereby easing prices, 2) promote investment in sustainable alternative energy solutions, 3) agitate the monopoly link between corporate farms and the petroleum products they use, 4) put additional pressure on automakers to seriously consider the development of non-petroleum powered and, certainly, of non-biofuel powered vehicles.

So, I exhort you: help stop the subsidy of biofuel production. If there is a natural market for it, it will stand on its own.

Otherwise all we’re doing is making food less affordable, creating agony for countries that can’t afford these price increases, and extending the life of the petroleum monopolies.

Certainly new technologies like slow discharge capacitors hold real promise. Let’s develop these ideas and show the oil companies that their stranded costs are their responsibility, not ours.