My telephone started ringing this morning and when I picked it up, I heard the crackly voice of Gordon Studebaker. Gordon was calling me from Dulles. As he has done so many times in the past 30 some years, Gordon was heading off to foreign soil to provide economic assistance. What […]

Certainly it was a successful, exciting, energetic and even inspiring gathering. One of the goals was the marketing of “low-hanging fruit” as it were- bringing a number of individuals who are committed to making social change in the world, working towards it in the online space, and looking for opportunities to collaborate on similar […]

It was great. Many people want to do it again. A small group of smart, committed folks are deeply involved in figuring out the structure of a group which might, collectively be building, in pieces here and there amidst our projects, a larger operating system for good. I’m just glad to be along […]

My friend and xigi collaborator John Geraci lost his phone in Oaxaca last week. He’s kind of enjoying not having one, but is also trying to drop hints to his marketing friends that he be given one because he’s a real power user and knowing what he gets from the device would be valuable. […]

According to SF Gate on Feb. 16, Kleiner Perkins has created a new Pandemic and Bio Defense Fund “after concluding that emerging diseases present a significant worldwide health threat and create an urgent need for new solutions.” The new fund will be $200M. “Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr said everyone should have access to […]

Two uses of the still emergent social and moral enforcement power of the net, one in email, one in a blog, came to my attention this week. The first was the infamous “Read from the Bottom” email where two lawyers brief sniping became a huge national blogosphere phenomenon erupting into a story in the […]

The Grameen Foundation, which added the the Village Phone project to microfinance, is expanding into providing electricity and water using the same village entrepreneurial model. Created by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, the village power and village water devices will be low-cost, low-maintenance, low-complexity methods of providing critical utilities to people in the developing world. […]

“Shareholder Value” ranks somewhere down there with indulgences when it comes to socially-sanctioned moral turpitude. By indulgences I mean the type of absolution the Catholic Church sold to wealthy patrons prior to the Reformation. Shareholder Value is the excuse corporate executives, shareholders and others involved in the investment business give when they do […]

A virtual world renowned expert on value flows, a man who finds higher level order in an emergent system faster than a speeding bullet, a guy who understands how to deflate utopian expectations now and in the future and get all the players to pay attention just by the way he explains it all, he’s […]

Andrew Leonard, whose Salon column on the impact of globalization called How the World Works I usually like, gets it wrong on the carbon credit market. Here he is on “A close look at Sterling-Waterford’s investment brochure reveals an odd mix of global warming science, analysis of the carbon credit market, and direct […]