SlideShare Opens Parent Toolbox Channel for Active Parents

SlideShare Opens Parent Toolbox Channel for Active Parents
Parents on SlideShare have a new place to go to learn, and share household tools, tips and tricks. The Parent Toolbox Channel, sponsored by Microsoft Office brings you content and community related to home and family.

There are three groups within the Parent Toolbox Channel

• Fun & Games: exciting activities for the whole family to unwind
• Home Organization & Money: worksheets, presentations & forms for a more efficient household
• School & Writing: wayshow to help your kids learn and grow

You have an opportunity to share your own content on these topics. You might even win a copy of Microsoft Office. Just upload as usual and add it to the relevant groups. Go here to learn more. 

Blogger Asha Dornfest from Parent Hacks will be curating content. We've also invited other leading parenting bloggers contribute. Expect relevant presentations, documents and even blog posts. You can comment, favorite, subscribe to content or even upload your own.

We're really excited about the Parent Toolbox Channel and we hope you'll love it as much as we do. We can't wait to see all your uploads.

Classic Phishing

Received a classic Phishing Mail today after a long time

Why Controlled Markets are bad?

Excerpt from: Dr T J Rodger's (Cypress Co-Founder and President & CEO) testimony to the US Senate

Europe's JESSI showered billions on the European semiconductor industry. It also "rationalized" the industry by allocating certain market segments to various companies. Siemens became the DRAM company for Europe--and has since gone out of the business. Philips became the SRAM company for Europe--and has since gone out of that business.

After inadvertently weakening its chip industry, Europe then established 14% import duties on foreign chips--the next logical step of desperate government policy. The import duty had precisely the effect we might expect: It raised the price of components to the European computer industry and virtually wiped it out as well. Today, there is no European chip industry or computer industry to speak of--thanks to the role of government programs like JESSI. European taxpayers gave up part of their income to wipe out two critical industries! We can't afford to emulate such failed experiments.

Source:http://app.cypress.com/portal/server.pt?CommunityID=201&DirectoryID=204370&PageID=344&control=SetCommunity&space=CommunityPage

Amusing schedules maintenance page

From: www.HootSuite.com

How to replicate Silicon Valley model

Source:http://www.paulgraham.com/revolution.html

If you wanted to create a startup hub by reproducing the way existing ones happened, the way to do it would be to establish a first-rate research university in a place so nice that rich people wanted to live there. Then the town would be hospitable to both groups you need: both founders and investors. That's the combination that yielded Silicon Valley. But Silicon Valley didn't have Silicon Valley to compete with. If you tried now to create a startup hub by planting a great university in a nice place, it would have a harder time getting started, because many of the best startups it produced would be sucked away to existing startup hubs.

Read this too: How to be Silicon Valley 

Ideas for Startups!

Nice Article: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

Excerpt:

The initial idea is just a starting point-- not a blueprint, but a question. It might help if they were expressed that way. Instead of saying that your idea is to make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet, say: could one make a collaborative, web-based spreadsheet? A few grammatical tweaks, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question to explore.

There's a real difference, because an assertion provokes objections in a way a question doesn't. If you say: I'm going to build a web-based spreadsheet, then critics-- the most dangerous of which are in your own head-- will immediately reply that you'd be competing with Microsoft, that you couldn't give people the kind of UI they expect, that users wouldn't want to have their data on your servers, and so on.

A question doesn't seem so challenging. It becomes: let's try making a web-based spreadsheet and see how far we get. And everyone knows that if you tried this you'd be able to make something useful. Maybe what you'd end up with wouldn't even be a spreadsheet. Maybe it would be some kind of new spreasheet-like collaboration tool that doesn't even have a name yet. You wouldn't have thought of something like that except by implementing your way toward it.

Treating a startup idea as a question changes what you're looking for. If an idea is a blueprint, it has to be right. But if it's a question, it can be wrong, so long as it's wrong in a way that leads to more ideas.

One valuable way for an idea to be wrong is to be only a partial solution. When someone's working on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the problem, then gradually expand from there? That will generally work unless you get trapped on a local maximum, like 1980s-style AI, or C.

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Skype Sold for $2.75 Billion

http://gigaom.com/2009/09/01/skype-sold-for-2-75-billion/

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