Allen is at Big Brother Mouse

I just received this picture of Allen (co-founder of LibraryforLaos.org) at Big Brother Mouse HQ in northern Laos.

Allen had the opportunity to go to a BBM book party and watch and even help out with handing out the books THAT YOU”RE GOING TO DONATE FOR to the kids.

After chatting with him it was clear the affect that the experience had on him was profound and that our efforts towards this cause and helping the children of Laos were worthwhile!

Our Progress

So far we’ve raise about $813 bucks. We’re realizing that it may be difficult to hit our goal by the end of the week without a significant surge! We want to sincerely ask beg you to get out there and help us spread the word. I only have so many emails I can email but we’re relying upon the power of the social web to help spread this effort around the world and reach hearts to make a huge difference. I’ll be posting again the morning of the last day (Friday) with a last update of our progress. Go out there and fund raise!

Our Thanks

I do want to be very clear how grateful we are for the people who’ve donated already. In a tough economic climate donating is not easy and makes a much more significant impact peoples person lives and personal finances. We want to take our hats off to you to for maybe stepping out of your comfort zone and helping out.

Follow the progress on Twitter!

Repost from Rolf Potts’ Vagabonding blog

author Scott Gilbertson

Most of us have seen things in our travels that make us want to help the people and places we visit. Whether it be extreme poverty, oppressive governments or even slavery, the world is not always a pretty place.

Traveler Allen Burt went a step further than most of us and set up a small nonprofit to address different social causes while he was traveling around the world.

Burt’s current project is Library for Laos which is kicking off a fundraising drive this week to raise $5000 in 5 days. All of the money will go to Big Brother Mouse, a literacy organization that’s trying to get books in the hands school children around Laos.

Rural Laos is full of remote villages, many accessible only by long and grueling bus rides over some truly horrific road (I loved Laos, I spent two months there, but I have nothing positive to say about the roads). Other villages can only be reach by riverboat and only then when the water is high enough and still others are reachable only on foot.

Because many people in Laos live so far from what we would call civilization, books are a rarity, which what Big Brother Mouse and the Library for Laos fundraiser are trying to change.

The fundraiser kicks off today and runs through May, 1st. If you’d like to donate, head over to the Library for Laos site and click the donate button. You may donate any amount you’re comfortable with and keep in mind that a mere $50 can supply over 25 books to a school that currently has none.

All money raised will be donated to the local Laos based charity, Big Brother Mouse to fund children’s book purchases and reading programs. Big Brother Mouse writes, publishes, and distributes children’s books written in the native Laos language (a rarity, especially in rural areas of Laos). For more info, check out the Big Brother Mouse website (also see Matador’s excellent write up for some background on Big Brother Mouse).

It only takes about five minutes, and even donating just a few dollars can change the life of a child forever. For those of you on the road, Big Brother Mouse has offices in Vientienne and Luang Prabang where you can buy some books and pass them out as you travel around the country.

[image courtesy of Big Brother Mouse] [originally posted here]

In an effort to be a resource for many of my friends who have recently joined Twitter I’ve decided to post a quick list of Twitter safety tips. Many of these tips carry over to other social networks but they are written here as specific to Twitter.

5 Twitter Safety Tips

• Never give out personal information via Tweets. When writing your profile information add your URL but be general with your location. I don’t like the iPhone generated latitude/longitude locations. Just use your city to stay safe. Email is usually safe enough but understand that if it’s on your Twitter profile, it’s in the public.
• Never give out your Twitter password. There are SO many applications that “need” your password, don’t give it to them. Twitter has even created a method for a 3rd party application to use your login credentials without getting to that data. Especially since this has come out no app should need your password. Any good application will now use this system below to verify the use of your Twitter login credentials.
  
• Just like anything else on the web, once you’ve posted it, it’s there for good. Make sure to be smart about sharing content. Especially pictures and other multi-media.
• Keep your profile information brief enough that your comfortable with any stranger knowing it. Unlike Facebook, anyone can follow you on Twitter, you have limited discretion on who follows you.
• If you ever plan to meet someone from Twitter offline (which I have done often and have found to be extremely valuable for networking) make sure you know about that person first. It helps to first have a phone conversation with that person and ask questions that only that person would know to make sure there’s no scamming being done.

5 Tips For Twittering Kids

• First, why are you tweeting, go sign-up for sports!
• Always tell your parents about any threats or negative Tweets and never ever arrange to meet someone offline.
• Only follow people that you know in real life.
• It may help to keep your Twitter feed private and “protect your updates”. This allows you grant permission to followers and gives you complete control over who views your Twitter feed.

• Pretend your parents are behind you on every Tweet!

via senoranderson

Going through the earliest stages of startup have to be at the top of list for hardest things to do in business. Many will argue that the early stages are easy that’s why so many fail after a year, but the data on companies that never started just isn’t there. How many people talked about an idea and never were able to act on those ideas to launch a company? A ton.

Of those early challenges, the financial commitment and investment has got to be near the top of most daunting. I started thinking about how the finances of a very early stage startup usually work. How can I justify certain costs, and more importantly how can I keep costs super low? What should I expect in this adventure and how much should I put in to see this dream through to reality?

Adam Smith is the co-founder of venture backed Xobni, the Outlook plug in that makes Outlook bearable. His is a perfect story of how to keep costs low and when to justify certain costs. Adam and his co-founder Matt Brezina launched Xobni through the Y-Combinator program in 2006 and have really gotten a lot of traction on their software. Since the early stages they’ve taken investment from venture capital firms Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Atomico Investments, Baseline Ventures as well as several angel investors.

Adam shares with us a great case study of how they handled the early stages finances of Xobni and even how they protected their personal finances through the process. I’ve interjected some of my thoughts in italics.

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Give A Poor Child the Gift of Reading – In Just 5 Minutes!

LibraryForLaos.org is an ONLINE campaign to raise $5k in 5 days for children’s books in rural Laos? It only takes 5 minutes!

Dates: Monday, April 27 – Friday, May 1!!!

Donate here.

Friends,

Through LibraryForLaos.org & The $5K in 5 Days campaign, books will be purchased through the non-profit Big Brother Mouse, at an average cost of only $1.80 per book. With your help, we can provide thousands of books and fund reading programs for schools in rural Laos. Simply, contribute your lunch money or inspire 10 of your friends to contribute and share with 10 of their friends. This will take you only 3 minutes and YOU can help change the landscape of literacy in Laos!

When

During the final week in April we are going to launch a web wide effort to raise $5,000 US towards the children of Laos. Mark your calendars for Monday, April 27 – Friday, May 1. We’ll be accepting donation starting that Monday at 12:00am and going until Friday at midnight.

How can you help?

Easy…just go to LibraryforLaos.org and either go to the donate page to contribute monetarily. Or, use these links to share LibraryforLaos.org with all your friends, listservs, Twitter followers, or even stalkers on the web! Again, this sharing will only take you a minute so please help us spread the awareness of this cause!

– Email Library for Laos to friends!

– Share Libary for Laos with Twitter followers!

- Update your status on Facebook to recruit friends to help!

I know there are so many blog posts on Twitter now days but I was doing research on different Twitter clients and I’ve created a decent lists with my 1 sentence write-up. Still the best list I’ve found is at the Twitter PBwiki.

Also, I’ve been thinking a lot about the affect of the celebrity attention on twitter. In San Francisco this weekend the topic of Twitter came up (surprise surprise) and a someone who wasn’t on Twitter yet said, “Is Twitter that celebrity thing?” My immediate reaction was, damn celebs, screwing up Twitter for the rest of us, but maybe it is a good thing. Let me know what you think and I hope the resources below help.

Twitter apps

Tonight I was doing a bunch of research on different Twitter apps and how they use Twitter data to track usage, contacts, and (lame) popularity. This isn’t a pretty post but here are the links to the many sites and a not on them.

BEST COMPILATION OF TWITTER APPS – http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps

http://tweetstats.com/ -   best collection of graphs from twitter usage. required username not password.

http://bradkellett.com/experiments/tweetdumpr/ -  allows you to dump/download your latest 3200 tweets. we could use this to get data from before sign-up

http://twitterholic.com/ryangraves/ -  popularity rankings in twitter along with friends follow etc by date

http://xefer.com/twitter/ryangraves -  very creative way of displaying time and date of tweets, also had a cool way of showing count of @replys and the convos that go along with them

http://twistory.net/ – syncs your tweets with your calendar so you can recall when you said something or when you found something [Twitter + History]

http://tweetbuzzer.com/ – real time stream tracking brands.

http://flotzam.com/ – an interesting streaming app (with open code) for youtube, twitter, facebook, rss content

http://twitteranalyzer.com/CelebrityRace.aspx – up to the minute info on followers added

http://www.twaitter.com/ & http://tweetlater.com – the 2 best twitter scheduling platforms

http://adcause.com/ – ad campaigns from $1 on Twitter

http://twtqpon.com/ – offer exclusive deals on Twitter with “Qpons”

http://monitter.com/ – livestream topic monitoring

http://www.twitbin.com/ – twitter from browser sidebar

Potential Competition

http://objectivemarketer.com/ – they talk a lot about using data in new/interesting ways

http://bx.businessweek.com/ – from Business Week, getting good traction

http://klout.net/ – tracks a users influence across the web (twitter)

http://www.twibs.com/ – business monitoring on Twitter

http://www.addresstwo.com/ – Twitter contact mgmt system

http://twitturly.com/ – what is being shared and RT’d a lot on Twitter

No 10 mile run today. However, the weather was probably the best it’s been in the last 2 years of my life. I started the morning hopping on Yelp and finding an awesome little cafe called Caffe Capriccio in North Beach. Cafe Capriccio was the quintessential SF cafe with hipsters galore and breakfast egg wraps to die for. I did a little reading and scheduling the rest of the day.

Just after noon I headed south on the 101 towards San Jose to meet up with Ryan Kuder in Palo Alto. I had this perception of Palo Alto and all of Silicon Valley that every establishment has wifi, every coffee shop is filled with keyboard blazing software developers, and every restaurant is packed with VC’s either raising money or funding the next Facebook. I was excited to see how close my perception was to reality.

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This weekend I got a free flight out to San Francisco from Chicago so I cam out to visit friends, meet some folks in the startup world, and soak up some California sun. I got up Saturday morning after a pretty calm evening and decided the best way to see some of the city was to go for a quick jog. Shortly after setting lofty goals of reaching the Golden Gate Bridge, that “jog” turned into a 9.25 mile run (route pictured above).

My first reaction after the run was, wow, I love people. It was one of the most entertaining runs I’ve had in a very long time. The terrain was a bit tough with some good hills between The Wharf and Fort Mason but the people watching was phenomenal! I saw 70+ year old men running at twice my pace (embarrassing), I saw tons of 20 somethings desperately trying to run off the 6 pack they drank last night, and  almost everything in between. I really wish I had a camera out there that I could snap quick, clear, photographs of people while running, the snapshots in my head will only last for so long.

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image via aknacer

“We will be looking for someone with public company experience who can help take (Facebook) to the next stage in our growth.” – Mark Zuckerberg, an internal FB email

I just finished reading Kara Swishers post on AllThingsD (from 2 weeks ago) about Zuckerbergs announcement that Gideon Yu’s departure, their now ex-CFO. I don’t think it takes any stroke of genius to realize that FB is planning to go public. I’m not sure of the terms or the relationship between Yu and Zu(ckerberg) but as FB continues to turn down HUGE acquisition offers it’s obvious that Yu’s departure had to do with his experience, and going public is in FB’s near future.

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via vadirajcs

I’m pumped that now my Tweets feed directly to Facebook. All the friends that made fun of me for using Twitter are now commenting and joining in conversations around my Tweets and my blog posts that I share on Facebook via Twitter. This is a huge “crossing of the chasm” for Twitter because the “normal people” are now joining in on web based conversations at a rapidly increasing rate.

Sorry this post is so late, I’ve been thinking/working on it for a while. First, I’ll share why you should use Twitter for status updates, then show you how.

9 Reasons Why You Should Use Twitter for Status Updates

I have found multiple reason for using Twitter. I’ve use the service for almost a year and have been able to meet a ton of cool people using the service. I’ve used Twitter for personal and business cases. It’s a phenomenal communication platform that allows for extreme flexibility in communication. Here are my top 9 reasons why you should use Twitter to update your Facebook status.

1. Twitter allows for mobile status updates – Go to the ‘Devices’ tab under your Twitter account settings and give Twitter your mobile phone number. Then SMS or txt message ‘40404′ your message. This will update Twitter and now also your Facebook status. Easy peasy!

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A Fistful Of Dollars: The Story of a Kiva.org Loan

A few months ago I wrote about the micro-financing organization Kiva.org and my donation/investment to Kiva. I think it’s a phenomenal organization. I wrote about my investments in some third world entrepreneurs through Kiva.org a few months ago here. I also found out today that a few friends of mine are planning an 8 month investment of their lives to help out in Peru with a Kiva.org site. This experience is very high on my list and may very well be something that I do in my life. This video above shoes the end-to-end affect that a Kiva investment can have on someones life.

Below is a touching testimonial of Kiva.org donor Justin Watt. This testimonial was found at Justinsomnia.org
and is one of the best I’ve read. This is being shared with Justin’s permission using Creative Commons attribution. Thanks Justin!

#####

I am a bank

Back in May I created a Kiva account, and funded it with $100. At the time I was feeling especially fortunate, and wanted to give something back.

Kiva is this really amazing non-profit organization that makes it possible for anyone to make microloans to people in developing countries. The best part is that I get to choose who my $100 goes to, in as small as $25 increments. So I chose four different applicants, two in Cambodia, one in Tanzania, and one in Vietnam. I didn’t realize it at the time, but all four were women. (In retrospect I consider this just retribution for all the unspeakable violence that has been, and continues to be, perpetrated against women around the world.)

One woman needed a loan to purchase a cow to reduce farming costs. Another needed a loan to buy a motorbike to commute to work more easily. And two others needed loans to further expand their poultry businesses. I didn’t fund their requests in full, but I didn’t need to. Many other Kiva members contributed a portion of the loans. You can check out all the details on my lender page: who I’ve lent to, who else has lent to them, the status of repayment, etc. It’s really quite engrossing.

With the money that’s been paid back so far, including one loan in full, I was able to lend $25 each to two women in Peru to purchase animals. Which means I’ve been able to make $150 worth of loans, even though I’d only “invested” $100. Put another way: my $100 has done $150 worth of good in the world. This makes me really happy.

One of the things I’ve heard people say about Kiva is that it’s addictive. It’s true, I didn’t want to stop at the two Peruvian women. So I decided to add another $75 to my account so I could lend to three more people, an aspiring restaurateur in Peru who buys and sells scrap iron, another Peruvian woman’s poultry business, and a couple in Cambodia who want to buy a cow for breeding.

Here’s what my loan portfolio looks like:

I am so proud.

Source: Justinsomnia.org

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If you have an experience with Kiva, I would really appreciate you sharing it hear and please get in touch. Cheers.

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• Kiva Gives Entrepreneurs Some Wonderful Perspective
• Calling All Socially-Minded Techies; Kiva Launches API Platform (techcrunch.com)
• Kiva – an amazing success (the-accelerator.blogspot.com)

Today, I have the opportunity of meeting author AJ Jacobs who wrote ‘The Know-It-All’ and ‘The Year of Living Biblically’. AJ writes with a very unique style. He lives out life experiments, like reading the entire encyclopedia, or living the bible as literally as possible, or outsourcing his entire life for a month, in order to share the personal reactions and affects of the experiment. I’ve started calling this style experiential writing and I’ve been inspired by it.

As you may or may not know I’ve decided to write a book over the next year (2009) in the same tone. I’ll write an experiential account of the entrepreneurial process. As I work to build SocialDreamium I’m going to record the feeling of dumping $2,000 bucks into the business just months before the wedding, or why I hate my lawyer and how to avoid that (I don’t hate my lawyer by the way, he’s a great guy). Everything I share will be raw and uncut and both helpful for the first or serial entrepreneur and also entertaining for the “nontrepreneur” and the non business folks.

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ActionsTalk on Boxee! from ActionsTalk on Vimeo.

More and more of our lives are moving onto the web, but sometimes you just want to sit back and relax on your couch. Well, now you can do that with ActionsTalk, the weekly startup spotlights!

If you have interest in being on ActionsTalk or have interest in helping interview startups, please get in touch with us at info@actionstalk.com.

Good work Boxee, hopefully we can get you guys on AT soon!