3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38 thousand miles, an exploding volcano, 2 cameras and almost a terabyte of footage… all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning and food ….into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films…..
= a trip of a lifetime.

move, eat, learn

Rick Mereki : Director, producer, additional camera and editing
Tim White : DOP, producer, primary editing, sound
Andrew Lees : Actor, mover, groover

The Securities and Exchange Commission may adopt rules to let internet-age technologies be used in fund-raising.

The agency is considering whether to let fast-growing companies use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise funding by tapping thousands of investors for small amounts of money, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The move is part of a larger review by the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether to ease decades-old constraints on how companies can issue new shares to the public. The new funding techniques, known as “ crowd funding,” could usher in a new era of capital abundance for Silicon Valley’s startups.

The technique has spread from artists looking to fund their creative works to entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap companies without giving up control to venture capitalists. Typically, a company might raise $100,000 from an internet site where users could sign up to buy $100 worth of shares.

Crowd funding could be a cheap source of cash, competing with angel investors who specialize in giving seed rounds to start-ups. Since the amounts of money are small, the downside risk isn’t too bad for investors. But the trick will be in protecting the public from scammers who have no intention of following through on promises.

Crowd funding could also be appealing to larger companies that are popular with consumers. Those companies wouldn’t have to go through all of the onerous legal disclosures required under securities laws. Mary Schapiro, chairman of the SEC, said in a letter to a law maker on Wednesday that the agency has been discussing crowd funding with small businesses and state regulators. A petition allowing crowd funding up to $100,000 has been backed by 150 organizations and individuals.

In 1992, the SEC allowed small companies to issue shares valued as much as $1 million to ordinary investors without full disclosure of financial information and other legal limits. That effort was abandoned in 1999 because of fraud concerns.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman presented his vision today for “Web 3.0” at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin.

Hoffman, who is now a partner at Greylock Partners, sounded dismissive of most of the buzzwords that have been tied to Web 3.0 — bandwidth, “appification”, video, location, real-time, and mobile. (He said mobile is probably the most significant trend of the bunch, but it’s “kind of boring”.) Instead, he said that the next big trend in the evolution of the Web, and the next big opportunity for entrepreneurs, is data.

Specifically, he said that if Web 1.0 involved “go search, get data” and some limited interactivity; and if Web 2.0 involves “real identities” and “real relationships”, then Web 3.0 will be “real identities generating massive amounts of data.”

Of course, there are risks associated with you sharing data tied to your personal identity. (Two of the conference’s keynote speakers, 4chan founder Christopher Poole and Web video star Felicia Day, both made arguments for the benefits of anonymity.) But Hoffman said startups should just follow two important rules about data. First, “never ambush your users.” Second, “not all data is created equal.” A lot of the data that people provide online isn’t harmful, he said — what companies and users need to be really careful about is “data that is essentially equivalent to a password,” which includes things like credit card numbers.

Hoffman offered several examples of companies that are already doing interesting and useful things with social data: LinkedIn offers a new feature called Skills, where users can find people, companies, and jobs related to each skill. There’s Waze, a mobile application that uses data about your location and speed during your commute to deliver traffic advice. And there’s Redfin, an online real estate broker (which Greylock invested in) that gives homebuyers more information about their prospective homes and the housing market.

In what Hoffman acknowledged was a rather self-referential move, he proposed collecting social data about the interesting apps that can be built with social data — audience members are supposed to post their ideas on Twitter with the hashtag #web3, and his team will try to create an infographic showing off the ideas.

This was a 25% increase in the number of dollars invested over the same period last year. The money was spread of 738 deal, which is approximately the same as last year.

This represents a return to the pre-recession levels. The CB Insights “left it to others to decide whether that represents a return to normalcy or an untenable VC investment bubble.”

Join us to hear how experienced deal-makers are succeeding, at our upcoming webinar:

Conference Preview: Successful Deal-making with Small Companies April 21, 2011, 11:00am EST.

We’ll be discussing relationship building, cross-cultural appreciation, ongoing consulting, and step-wise deal structures, among other topics. We’ve gathered representatives from both the small and big company perspectives to share their thoughts — tune in to learn how you can hasten and improve your own deal process.

Webinar speakers:

April’s webinar is an exclusive preview of a live panel discussion to be held at yet2.com’s upcoming Open Innovation conference in May, in Boston.

Register today for the Successful Deal-making with Small Companies Preview Webinar here:

https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/311188682

SLSD engaged the services of open innovation service provider yet2.com as part of a series of pilot programs during the last two years. In an effort to expand open communication and to create additional opportunities for public involvement with NASA, open innovation service provider (OISP) platforms are under evaluation.

“Open innovation has been a critical component of SLSD’s broader innovation strategy,” said Jeffrey R. Davis, director of SLSD. “This strategy has strengthened our ability to make connections with organizations to address our research and technology needs that we would not have known about using more traditional approaches. Given the favorable results achieved through this pilot study, we will continue to pursue the use of OISP as one tool in our innovation toolkit.”

Based on NASA’s specific technological needs, yet2.com acted as a technology scout, providing a broad external network of experts as potential collaborators with NASA. A relationship can be established with these contacts to develop new technologies. Yet2.com’s system also can be used to maintain established networks for future collaborations. The results from the pilot study show potential for long-term efficacy of OISP platforms.

All contacts identified from the public posting of the six technical needs with yet2.com have yielded a number of contacts not previously identified by NASA as potential collaborators for solving the agency’s technology needs. The bone density measurement technical need received 51 contacts from 12 countries, and one company was chosen for immediate collaboration. The real-time microbiological monitoring of water biocides technical need received 61 contacts from 18 countries, and five candidates are under consideration for collaboration. The radioprotectants need received 28 leads representing nine countries, and six contacts are under consideration for future collaboration. The extraterrestrial life differentiation need received 31 leads representing 10 countries, and one contact is under consideration for future collaboration. The portable bone imaging device need received 34 leads representing five countries, and five contacts are under consideration for future collaboration. The improved food packaging technical need received 29 leads representing 11 countries, and five contacts are under consideration for future collaboration.

“It was a privilege to work with NASA during the several months of the pilot program,” said Eugene Buff, vice president of consulting at yet2.com. “As effective as we were at identifying opportunities for NASA’s technology needs, we would not have been successful without the regular feedback and full engagement of the NASA centers. We look forward to the successful implementation of the technologies from partners identified through this team approach.”

Yet2.com uses several methods to identify contacts of interest. Each technical need is posted anonymously on its marketplace website. Yet2.com actively searches through multiple databases of contacts from universities, small firms, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. All technical needs are posted on the yet2.com website for approximately 3-4 months.

For more information about yet2.com, visit:

http://www.yet2.com

For information about NASA and agency programs on the Web, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov

Written by PR Newswire – Taken from SYS-CON Media, Inc.

Don’t underestimated Japan’s capability and resolve. The below picture is a good example. The left is the state of a highway right after the earthquake. The right is the same highway four days later.  Message?  The Japanese economy and people will rebound from this crisis, and be stronger and better then ever.

I love playing sports (although as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more of a watcher than a doer).  In particular, I love the mental side of sports.  I’m convinced that sports are a great training ground for many different disciplines.  I remember when I was interviewing for Spark, excellence at some sport was an important factor in the hiring process.  Of course, it’s a good measure of competitiveness, but I think it’s even deeper than that.

(Editor’s note: Doug Collom is vice dean and an adjunct lecturer on venture capital and entrepreneurship for Wharton|San Francisco. He submitted this story to VentureBeat. I reprinted it here)

Starting companies is hard.  And it’s critical to make sure that your venture is pointing in the right direction from the moment it leaves the launch pad. Any misdirection or miscue on the basic organizational steps can be fatal.

It’s a lot like launching a rocket aimed at the moon—if the launch is only 2 degrees off target at blast-off, it will miss by hundreds of thousands of miles.

There’s no end to the advice and opinions entrepreneurs will hear in a company’s early days, but three basic rules that every company founder should take into consideration:

Keep it simple – In setting up the capital structure and the first equity of the company, many founders either try to innovate or try to accommodate the wishes and desires of every co-founder and early stage employee. The result is too much complexity.

In most cases where there is more than one founder (probably on the order of over 80 percent of startups), the stock should be split equally. If it isn’t an even split, then you should re-evaluate whether your co-participants really deserve to be in the “founder” category. Establish uniform stock vesting provisions that apply equally to both founders (although maybe with some “credit” for pre-formation activities) and early stage employees.

Stay away from unconventional employment terms that differ from founder-to-founder or employee-to-employee. And make sure and outside board members (including, if you have one, your advisory board), are compensated equally.

If you fail to keep the capital structure and the equity incentive arrangements absolutely consistent with convention, then every investor you approach and every manager you hire will require an explanation. Stay focused on the business plan, not the infrastructure of the company.

Select your business entity wisely – If you are planning on raising professional capital, whether from an angel group or from a venture capital firm, use a Subchapter C corporation incorporated in the state of Delaware.

LLCs simply do not work. Investors categorically will not put money into an entity that will require them to file annual federal and state tax returns to reflect the pass-through of operating gains and losses (as LLC’s do).

Subchapter S corporations are also a poor choice if the fundraising process is likely to begin in the first year. Sub S companies are viable only with investors who are “natural persons” (which automatically is a problem with VC firms and most angel groups) and only where there is a single class of stock (i.e., not preferred stock, which is typically the class of stock given out to angels and VCs).

A Delaware corporation is the preferred choice among states to choose from—most law firms will recommend this for a number of reasons, not the least of which it will save you the expense of reincorporating to Delaware in the event you are successful enough to consider an IPO in some distant future. (Fun fact: some 70 percent of the US publicly held companies today are incorporated in Delaware.)

Wait until the time is right before forming your company – Many founders are in a rush to go out and incorporate and set up the founders’ stock arrangements and stock plan. WAIT.

It doesn’t take much time to form and organize a company—with three general exceptions:

• You have promised your co-founders and/or anticipated early stage employees specific allocations of stock, and they are tired of waiting to get their hands on the stock certificates.
• You are about to enter into a contract with a strategic partner or a significant vendor or a major customer, and either they want to see a corporate entity on the signature line, or you are worried about potential personal liability if you sign as an individual.
• You are highly confident you are going to get funded.

Absent these circumstances, focus on the business.

Of course, there are many other matters that need to be addressed almost daily by any founder, but these three rules are likely to save you a lot of aggravation later on. More importantly, they will enable you to keep your focus where it belongs—on your business plan and persuading the investment community to see the potential in your company that you see.

If you’re a visiting dignitary whose country has a Gross National Product equal to or greater than the State of California, your visit to Silicon Valley consists of a lunch/dinner with some combination of the founders of Google, Facebook, Apple and Twitter and several brand name venture capitalists. If you have time, the President of Stanford will throw in a tour, and then you can drive by Intel or some Clean Tech firm for a photo op standing in front of an impressive looking piece of equipment.

The “official dignitary” tour of Silicon Valley is like taking the jungle cruise at Disneyland and saying you’ve been to Africa. Because you and your entourage don’t know the difference between large innovative companies who once were startups (Google, Facebook, et al) and a real startup, you never really get to see what makes the valley tick.

If you didn’t come in your own 747, here’s a guide to what to see in the valley (which for the sake of this post, extends from Santa Clara to San Francisco.) This post offers things to see/do for two types of visitors: I’m just visiting and want a “tourist experience” (i.e. a drive by the Facebook / Google / Zynga / Apple building) or “I want to work in the valley” visitor who wants to understand what’s going on inside those buildings.

I’m leaving out all the traditional stops that you can get from the guidebooks.

Hackers’ Guide to Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is more of a state of mind than a physical location. It has no large monuments, magnificent buildings or ancient heritage. There are no tours of companies or venture capital firms. From Santa Clara to South San Francisco it’s 45 miles of one bedroom community after another. Yet what’s been occurring for the last 50 years within this tight cluster of suburban towns is nothing short of an “entrepreneurial explosion” on par with classic Athens, renaissance Florence or 1920’s Paris.

California Dreaming
On your flight out, read Paul Graham’s essays and Jessica Livingston’s Founders at Work. Then watch the Secret History of Silicon Valley and learn what the natives don’t know.

Palo Alto – The Beating Heart 1
Start your tour in Palo Alto. Stand on the corner of Emerson and Channing Street in front of the plaque where the triode vacuum tube was developed. Walk to 367 Addison Avenue, and take a look at the HP Garage. Extra credit if you can explain the significance of both of these spots and why the HP PR machine won the rewrite of Valley history.

Walk to downtown Palo Alto at lunchtime, and see the excited engineers ranting to one another on their way to lunch. Cram into Coupa Café full of startup founders going through team formation and fundraising discussions. (Noise and cramped quarters basically force you to listen in on conversations) or University Café or the Peninsula Creamery to see engineers working on a startup or have breakfast in Il Fornaio to see the VC’s/Recruiters at work.

Stanford – The Brains
Drive down University Avenue into Stanford University as it turns into Palm Drive. Park on the circle and take a walking tour of the campus and then head to the science and engineering quad. Notice the names of the buildings; Gates, Allen, Moore, Varian, Hewlett, Packard, Clark, Plattner, Yang, Huang, etc. Extra points if you know who they all are and how they started their companies. You too can name a building after your IPO (and $30 million.) Walk by the Terman Engineering building to stand next to ground zero of technology entrepreneurship. See if you can find a class being taught by Tom Byers, Kathy Eisenhardt, Tina Seelig or one of the other entrepreneurship faculty in engineering.

Attend one of the free Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Lectures in the Engineering School. Check the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network calendar or the BASES calendar for free events. Stop by the Stanford Student Startup Lab and check out the events at the Computer Forum.  If you have time, head to the back of campus and hike up to the Stanford Dish and thank the CIA for its funding.

Mountain View – The Beating Heart 2
Head to Mountain View and drive down Amphitheater Parkway behind Google, admiring all the buildings and realize that they were built by an extinct company, Silicon Graphics, once one of the hottest companies in the valley (Shelley’s poem Ozymandias should be the ode to the cycle of creative destruction in the valley.) Next stop down the block is the Computer History Museum. Small but important, this museum is the real deal with almost every artifact of the computing and pre-computing age (make sure you check out their events calendar.) On leaving you’re close enough to Moffett Field to take a Zeppelin ride over the valley. If it’s a clear day and you have the money after a liquidity event, it’s a mind-blowing trip.

Next to Moffett Field is Lockheed Missiles and Space, the center of the dark side of the Valley. Lockheed came to the valley in 1956 and grew from 0 to 20,000 engineers in four years. They built three generations of submarine launched ballistic missiles and spy satellites for the CIA, NSA and NRO on assembly lines in Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. They don’t give tours.

While in Mountain View drive by the site of Shockley Semiconductor and realize that from this one failed company, founded the same year Lockheed set up shop, came every other chip company in Silicon Valley.

Lunch time on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View is another slice of startup Silicon Valley. Hang out at the Red Rock Café at night to watch the coders at work trying to stay caffeinated. If you’re still into museums and semiconductors, drive down to Santa Clara and visit the Intel Museum.

Sand Hill Road – Adventure Capital
While we celebrate Silicon Valley as a center of technology innovation, that’s only half of the story. Startups and innovation have exploded here because of the rise of venture capital. Think of VC’s as the other equally crazy half of the startup ecosystem.

You can see VC’s at work over breakfast at Bucks in Woodside, listen to them complain about deals over lunch at Village Pub or see them rattle their silverware at Madera. Or you can eat in the heart of old “VC central” in the Sundeck at 3000 Sand Hill Road. While you’re there, walk around 3000 Sand Hill looking at all the names of the VC’s on the building directories and be disappointed how incredibly boring the outside of these buildings look. (Some VC’s have left the Sand Hill Road womb and have opened offices in downtown Palo Alto and San Francisco to be closer to the action.) For extra credit, stand outside one of the 3000 Sand Hill Road buildings wearing a sandwich-board saying “Will work for equity” and hand out copies of your executive summary and PowerPoint presentations.

Drive by the Palo Alto house where Facebook started (yes, just like the movie) and the house in Menlo Park that was Google’s first home. Drive down to Cupertino and circle Apple’s campus. No tours but they do have an Apple company store which doesn’t sell computers but is the only Apple store that sells logo’d T-shirts and hats.

San Francisco – Startups with a Lifestyle
Drive an hour up to San Francisco and park next to South Park in the South of Market area. South of Market (SoMa) is the home address and the epicenter of Web 2.0 startups. If you’re single, living in San Francisco and walking/biking to work to your startup definitely has some advantages/tradeoffs over the rest of the valley. Café Centro is South Park’s version of Coupa Café. Or eat at the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen. (You’re just a few blocks from the S.F. Giants ballpark. If it’s baseball season take in a game in a beautiful stadium on the bay.) And four blocks north is Moscone Center, the main San Francisco convention center. Go to a trade show even if it’s not in your industry.

The Valley is about the Interactions Not the Buildings
Like the great centers of innovation, Silicon Valley is about the people and their interactions. It’s something you really can’t get a feel of from inside your car or even walking down the street. You need to get inside of those building and deeper inside those conversations. Here’s a few suggestions of how to do so.

• If you want the ultimate startup experience, see if you can talk yourself into carrying someone’s bags as they give a pitch to a VC.  Be a fly on the wall and soak it in.

• If you’re trying to get a real feel of the culture, apply and interview for jobs in three Silicon Valley companies even if you don’t want any of them. The interview will teach your more about Silicon Valley company culture and the valley than any tour.

• Go to at least three tech-oriented Meetups or Plancast events in the Valley or San Francisco (Meetup is a deep list. Search for “startup” meetup’s in San Francisco, Palo Alto and Santa Clara.)

Check out the meetups from iOS Developers, Hackers and Founders, 106Miles and Ideakick. Catch a monthly hackathon. Subscribe to StartupDigest Silicon Valley edition before you visit.

• Find a real 3-10 person startup, working from a small crammed co-working space and sit with them for an afternoon. Offer to code for free. San Francisco has many co-working spaces (shared offices for startups). They’re great to get a feel of what it’s like to start when there’s just a few founders and you don’t have your own garage.Visit Founders Den, Sandbox Suites, Citizenspace, pariSoma Innovation, the Hub, NextSpace, RocketSpace, and DogPatch Labs. Driving down the valley see Studio G in Redwood City, Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, the Plug & Play Tech Center in Sunnyvale, Semantic Seed in San Jose.

• Get invited to an event at Blackbox.vc and the Sandbox Network. See if there’s a Startup Weekend or SVASE event going on in the Bay Area.

• If you’re visiting to raise money or to get to know “angels” use AngelList to get connected to seed investors before you arrive.

• Use your entrepreneurial skill and get yourself into a Y-Combinator dinner or demo day, a 500 Startups or Harrsion Metal event. Go to a Techcrunch event. And of course go to a Lean Startup Meetup.

• Talk yourself into a job.

• Never leave.