The speaker list at the Technology Entertainment Design conference, TED, has included well-known names such as Bill Gates, Al Gore and Jane Goodall.
But with an audition tour the organization announced Tuesday, the roster could soon include a new name: yours.
TED will host auditions in 14 countries on six continents this spring. Anybody can submit an application on the TED website, and include a short video if they’d like, but auditions are invite-only. Favorites from live auditions will record short videos to post on TED.com for public voting, and the top 50 most popular contenders will be considered for TED 2013 programming.
The organization began to open its prestigious and arguably elitist speaker selection list to contributions from the general public last year, when it launched a video audition application process. That process, which culminated in a live audition in New York, resulted in about five speakers for next month’s TED2012 conference.
TED expects to choose many more speakers, about half of its list, from its new live audition process.
That’s an ambitious goal. The invite-only conference is known for bringing the world’s top thought leaders together. Surely there are top thinkers with fresh perspectives who also have low profiles, but it could be hard to find them.
The description of the auditions on TED’s website says the organization is looking for “undiscovered talent,” perhaps “the inventor,” “the teacher,” “the prodigy” or “the artist.” It is not, it says, looking for “product-hawkers, jargon-junkies, dullards, wafflers, motivator wannabes, self-promoters, spouters of new-age fluff.”
But if the American Idol audition process is any indication, TED will likely sort through much of the latter category in its selection for the former.
This is a 'house' that fits in your pocket, created by Barcelona designer Martin Azura, whose work focuses on minimalistic and environmentally friendly constructions. It's basically an incredibly lightweight balloon that can be carried in your pocket and used for shelter. *patting backpack* Thanks, but I think I'm good on portable shelter. "Sssshhhhhhh -- he thinks he's one of us." YOU SHUT THE F*** UP, DONATELLO.
The Basic House is a temporary housing solution so portable it can be folded up to fit in your pocket. Created from a metalized polyester material, when unfolded it self inflates with body heat or from the heat of the sun to provide an instant shelter.
Once inside the shelter, the material reflects your body heat to keep the user warm. If reversed the material will reflect the sun to keep a cool interior.
Great idea, just stop calling it a house. A house isn't just an enclosed space, there's usually more to it. I dunno, a bookshelf or something. I LIVE ON THE STREETS.
Meet the house that fits in your pocket [dvice]
Thanks to Ashraf, who agrees if this is a house then the guy living on my corner with two refrigerator boxes taped together in an L shape must have a f***ing mansion.
from Geekologie - Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome http://www.geekologie.com/2012/01/im-a-turtle-pocket-sized-portable-house.php
We might one day be able to monitor our bodies’ internal functions — and prevent things like epileptic seizures before they happen — using a flexible circuit attached to the surface of skin. The National Science Foundation announced Monday that researchers are working on a prototype tattoo-like device that can detect heart, muscle and brain activity.
Tiny curly wires in a flexible membrane make up these devices and work better than conventional hard, brittle circuits, because body tissue itself is soft and pliable.
“We’re trying to bridge that gap, from silicon, wafer-based electronics to biological, ’tissue-like’ electronics, to really blur the distinction between electronics and the body,” said materials scientist John Rogers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “As the skin moves and deforms, the circuit can follow those deformations in a completely noninvasive way.”
These devices could detect brainwave activity before a seizure and respond to the electrical abnormalities. The scientists also say the could be particularly useful for premature babies.
“They are such tiny humans that this epidermal form of electronics could really be valuable in the monitoring of these babies in a manner that is completely noninvasive and mechanically ‘invisible’,” Rogers said.
“I really think 2012 is going to be the Twitter Election,” Dick Costolo said on stage at AllThingsD‘s media conference in Laguna Nigel, Calif., Monday evening. It was an unusually confident declaration from a CEO who has hitherto appeared remarkably modest in his communications.
By saying that 2012 would be a “Twitter Election,” Costolo was not suggesting that sentiment analysis of tweets would indicate the winning candidate. Instead, he meant that Twitter has become an essential platform for reaching voters, and for gathering and responding to feedback in real time.
“We already saw this during the State of the Union when [President] Obama made the spilled milk joke and a collective groan went up across the country on Twitter,” Costolo posited. “In the past, you’d have to wait for the networks to cut to the pundits after the address was done to discuss it. You don’t have to do that anymore.”
“Washington is really starting to get that too … [It's] actively engaging in the real-time feedback loop now,” he added. “Instead of waiting for the rebuttal at the end, there were two senators live-tweeting their rebuttals [during the speech].”
This kind of real-time engagement is essential, he said. “Candidates who don’t participate in the conversation on Twitter will be left behind [in the elections], The next morning is too late to respond.”
He also emphasized Twitter’s role in humanizing public figures. “One of the reasons we’ve gotten so many celebrities from all walks of life [on Twitter] is because it gives them a vehicle to communicate directly with the people.” That capability could be crucial during election season, he suggested.
Having more work on your plate than hours in the day is nothing new for most of us, but the key to managing our workload is, sometimes, to learn what can fall off and what needs immediate attention, and let the unimportant work slide, whether we have explicit approval or not. Former CEO (and current Chairman of Thomas Nelson Publishers) Michael Hyatt describes this as "intentional neglect," an essential part of triaging your workload. More »
Just how important is original and exclusive content to Hulu? That was the question AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka posed to Hulu CEO Jason Kilar on stage at AllThingsD‘s media conference in Laguna Nigel, Calif., Tuesday morning.
The company, a joint venture between NBCUniversal, Fox Entertainment and Disney, scaled investments in exclusive content and original series in 2011. With competition heating up with other providers of premium online video content — think Amazon Lovefilm, Netflix and, more recently, YouTube — one wonders how Hulu will differentiate itself going forward.
Kilar acknowledged that while it is important for Hulu to build up a healthy offering of original and exclusive programming, that isn’t the company’s primary focus.
“It’s important for us to differentiate the service and create content not out there right now, [to tell] stories that aren’t being told right now,” he said. “Consumers are asking for it … [and] it does build up heavy differentiation. But it’s not ‘the thing’ on our agenda; it’s part of it.”
As such, Hulu will continue to invest in partnerships that will allow it to serve programming consumers can’t get anywhere else. However, the company has no plans to become the next Lifetime or HBO, providing primarily original programming,.
“What we want to do is create a service that distributes content to customers,” Kilar said. “That’s the primary goal.”
For now, that’s about developing a solution that serves both content consumers and creators, one that makes premium video content available to consumers on as many connected devices and platforms as possible, and compensates content providers generously.
Hulu generated $420 million in advertising and subscription revenues in 2011, up 60% from 2010. The company plans to spend $500 million investing in content in 2012, including fees from existing licensing deals, Kilar said. He added that Hulu does not need to raise additional funding to pay for the content.
There’s no reason to determine your virtual worth based solely on the number of people who follow you on Twitter — not when you can find the number of people who follow your followers, at least.
That’s what an app launched Monday promises to tell you, and along the way, it will also name your single Most Valuable Follower.
MVF was created by Aviary’s lead of business development and partnerships, Alex Taub, and Nerve Dating developer Michael Schonfeld. The pair developed the app for fun.
“We aren’t trying to turn this into a business,” Taub says. “We just wanted to build something people would want to try.”
The app plays perfectly into the inherently narcissistic practice of posting to social media. In my case, for instance, I have about 5,000 followers — which may sound like a lot, but it means I reach just .0005% of Twitter’s active monthly user base. Imagine my inflated sense of self-importance when I realized, however, that my followers have a combined reach of more than 12 million users. That means I can claim to reach more than one percent of the Twitterverse.
The app names your most valuable follower, or MVF, based on who in your following has the most followers. Mine is the main Mashable account, which has more than two million followers — meaning I took something of a shortcut to the 12 million followers-of-followers number.
You can make your MVF feel good with the app’s option to tweet a congratulatory message.
If you agree to do so, the app will also show you your 2nd through 5th MVF, giving you a chance to inflate their senses of self-importance as well.
Update: A large amount of traffic crashed MVF. The creators say they are working to put it back online soon.
Even though President Obama didn’t much address tech or social media during the State of the Union, the event sure stoked the social media channels. Twitter alone saw 760,000 tweets related to the State of the Union. Additional social chatter propelled that number to 2.1 million mentions, according to Trendrr.
Furthermore, CNN’s Florida Republican Presidential Debate socially outpaced all other ranked television shows by a long haul. But a couple of shows made the social TV cut for the first time, namely, American Dad and CSI: Miami. Care to explain, fans?
The data below is compliments of our friends at Trendrr, who measure specific TV show activity (mentions, likes, checkins) across Twitter, Facebook, GetGlue and Miso. To see daily rankings, check out Trendrr.TV.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the stage at AllThingsD‘s media conference in Laguna Nigel, CA, Monday evening to defend the company’s new censorship policies.
Twitter announced last week that it would begin censoring tweets in certain countries to comply with local laws. The move sparked outrage among many users, who gathered under the hashtag #TwitterBlackout and pledged to boycott the service on January 28.
But as Costolo argued on stage — and my colleague Josh Catone pointed out last week — Twitter’s new policies allow for greater freedom of speech on the platform. Previously, when a government demanded that Twitter remove a tweet or block a user, access to that content would be blocked from the entire world. Now, Twitter can hide the tweet or user from that individual country, but allow the rest of the world to see it.
“There’s been no change in our stance or attitude or policy with respect to content on Twitter,” Costolo said. “What we announced is a greater capability we now have. Now, when we are issued a valid legal order in a country in which we operate, such as a DMCA takedown notice, we are able to leave the content up for as many people around the world as possible, while still operating within the local law. You can’t operate in these countries and choose the laws you want to abide by.”
“Is there a way you could work outside the law? Say ‘Iran, we’re not going to censor?’” Kafka suggested.
“We don’t proactively go do anything,” said Costolo. “This is purely a reactive capability to what we determine to be a valid and applicable legal order in a country in which we operate. We’re fully blocked in Iran and China. And I don’t see the current environment in either country being one in which we could go and operate anytime soon.”
“We want to run Twitter as transparently as possible,” Costolo added. This is the actual thoughtful and honest approach to doing this.”
Let me start by saying that building a total compensation package is HARD! This is an extremely important component of business planning, but many executives end up “winging” it. Instead of taking time to do the math and some modeling, we just slap something together and pray our compensation structure won’t crumble.
For me personally, building an appropriate compensation package is a very hot subject, because I believe operations executives have tremendous impact potential by harnessing the power of well motivated and managed teams. Companies that take care of their employees rarely have challenges finding talent for their “constellations of stars” (see my article “Stars vs. Constellations – 3 Steps to Building Solid High-performing Teams”).
There are many “carrots” we use to incentivize our employees, but equity is one of the ultimate aces in our pockets. Run a quick search through sites like answers.onstartups.com, Quora, or others, and you’ll notice the equity question is a popular one. Nothing creates a heated conversation like bringing up equity! I have seen many companies fall flat on their faces when they attempt to put together proper equity compensation, even when they have the best intentions. I know I have made some mistakes too.
So where do we fall flat during equity compensation planning and how we can iterate for version 2.0? First, we should stop hiding behind the “industry standards” copout excuse. Anyone who has put together options/grants plans knows that it’s easier to locate the Holy Grail than to find these “standards” by region, industry, functional area, and role. Why?
Sub-100 employee companies, which encompass most of our startups and emerging companies, represent 5.7MM US businesses and employ 40MM people. Imagine the reporting burden and centralized effort that would be needed to collect all the information from these companies.
Even if you scaled the data collection down and arrived at a somewhat acceptable sample size for the data to be credible, I highly doubt most reports would bother with the full compensation structure details. How many of you have put all the requested data into Harvard and other surveys just to get access to the data? Many of us may put in the bare minimum just so we can get access. Garbage in = garbage out.
Maybe you can get some semi-decent equity compensation data if you are backed by VCs with an extensive portfolio of companies in your industry, but I doubt they would share that with the rest of the world.
Then there are those of us in pre-B round companies on our proverbial high horses and self-erected pedestals (yes, founders, I am looking at you). Don’t forget that founders would be alone in coffee shops for years and years without a team of talent that chooses to invest in their vision. Our first 15-20 employees are not just employees; they are “junior co-founders”. Companies that have not changed the business model and/or have not hit some really bad times are as rare as jackpots. Yet we plan out equity compensation as if our businesses will only go in one possible trajectory – the “hockey stick”. Early employees are jumping on the grenades for us – stop being cheap bastards and take care of them! Their “risk premium” is always higher than most of us are willing to admit.
So now that we got the elephants out of the room, let’s get down to business!
Equity compensation framework 2.0
I highly stress the iterative nature of this framework. As a founder you may start with something really simple to just get you started. That is fine, but you need to build out the plan and related details stage by stage, step by step. We shall crawl, then walk, then run.
Let’s start with where there is no need to re-invent the wheel:
Everyone vests and everyone has a year cliff! Yes, that includes founders. Four year vesting with a one year cliff and then monthly vesting – simple, clean, fair. It usually takes four years for a company to build a repeatable and scalable model. Any employee who does not stick around for at least a year does not really deserve to share in the bounty.
Equity should only be available until the company becomes profitable. The only caveat is that the company should be profitable for a full year. After the company is self-sustainable and profitable, we should switch to profit sharing.
Step 1.
Decide how much of the company should be owned by employees. Here is the 2.0 part: the total of the company owned by the employees should not be diluted. If you think this will be too extreme for your investors, and you don’t have enough brass balls/ovaries to show your investors the value of your team, then at least create predefined percentage points for each round of funding. And yes, investors put money to work for you (you know, insert the usual spiel here to appease them), but your employees are putting in their time, often take a ridiculously low “startup salary” for the impact they bring to the company, and are likely are sacrificing in many areas of their lives for you company. Grow a pair and stand up for your team! With every new funding round they are investing too, hence they should get additional options/grants.
Step 2.
Create two options/grants pools: Employee Impact and Company Milestones. Why am I separating the two? Because one is purely tied to the stage of the business (which can regress) and the risk premium of someone joining at that stage. The other is more of a bonus/celebratory reward.
Step 2(a).
For the Employee Impact pool, create employee bands based on when they joined and at what level they contribute.
Base bands:
Junior co-founders – proof of concept to first paying customer stage
Early team – first paying customer to repeatable business model (or product/market fit) found stage
Execution team – repeatable business model to first year of profitability
Sub-bands:
Non-founder C-level executives
VPs and directors
Managers and senior individual contributors
Junior individual contributors
Step 2(b)
For the Company Milestones pool, you will need to define your most important goals. Some that I find extremely crucial are:
Reached X paying customers (you should do several levels of this)
Major profit margin increase (e.g. 10% margin is not 40% margin)
Major sales number increase (e.g. $1MM in sales)
Round of funding “top-ups”
Here is a quick illustration of what the plan might look like in a chart.
(Planned) Step 2(c)
For the 2.1 iteration I am working on adding a third pool called “Market Discount/Salary Concessions”. I believe we need an easier way to grant options to those willing to help the company conserve cash by taking bigger salary concessions. This should really be a formula that is built into our compensation plan spreadsheets.
Hopefully this post will set you on a more structured path when setting up the total compensation plans. My next post will address the cash compensation portion.
If you have time, I highly recommend viewing this full video on Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs I often mention in this blog when analyzing the motivations of our employees.