Disqus - Latest Comments for ghostrider273

Re: Chicken or the Egg?

ghostrider273 — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:16:26 -0000

Hey David, interesting analogy with the chicken and the egg. Without knowing too much about VC's and startup firms - I think its a social thing again. There is this talk by Jawed Karim on why he thought youtube did so well (http://www.youtube.com/watc... and he said something to the effect that the enablers were a concoction of certain phenomena - the fuzzy "right time right place" effect, the "social epidemic effect" (word of mouth) and ofcourse technological enablers such as the emergence of flash video then. But he did also mention the influence VCs had on them which if I remember right was significant. Saying that however, I would stress on the social presence, a product needs to have in the state college area for it to bloom. Somehow either I dont see this happening or Im not socially present myself :)

Re: (One Step Closer to) Uniting the Undergraduate and Graduate Communities in the College of IST

ghostrider273 — Sun, 18 May 2008 11:51:53 -0000

Daehee - Yesterday a grad peer and I were ranting about how on weekends we geek out on TED (I call it TED out) while munching in front of the computer. This is however, a very individual experience - if we could scale it up a bit but still keep it open-ended where the IST "junta" (for lack of a better word describing the IST populus) could gather around the big Cybertorium screen and just TED out or share interesting ideas while "munching" or basically lounging around. I would think it would be a good summer stint to think about how to frame it.

Re: Penn State, MIT, Stanford, CMU: Which one in this group doesn’t belong?

ghostrider273 — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:09:44 -0000

following up to this : Jeff Raskin, one of the original creators of the MAC and hence the one of the pioneers of the Personal Computer revolution....actually studied at Penn State

http://en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Re: Penn State, MIT, Stanford, CMU: Which one in this group doesn’t belong?

ghostrider273 — Sun, 18 May 2008 00:04:59 -0000

I have friends at Stanford and I must admit its a combination of various factors that have gone to its success. Firstly, and historically placed with respect to the personal computer revolution, Stanford and Berkeley are literally co-located along with the atrociously liberal SF Bay area. Referring to a book called "What the Dormouse said" that credits the development of the personal PC to a sentiment of counter-culturalism in the Stanford/Berkeley/Bay Area...its very easy to compare the State College and the Palo Alto area in terms of descriptive stats of jobs and VC availability...but there are many factors that are implicit and subtle and also in some circumstances depend on being "at the right time in the right place" that played in Stanford's favor. About a year ago, I met with a certain lady who was on the team that presented the original concept of the GUI to Steve Jobs. According to her in that time and age, and thinking about it now - it was all about "the right time right place" factor that led to all those developments. In saying this I have a point, State College and the Penn State area is "theoretically" a wonderful place for innovation and entrepreneurship but owing to its financial sustainability on things such as defense and political earmarks rather than Stanford's private privileges...Penn State caters to a more civic obligation than Stanford's corporate one. In the larger view of things, if a simplistic comparison were to be made between Stanford and Penn State's contribution to the local development, its safe to say that Penn State is on par but due to the liberal environment it was and IS placed in, Stanford has a global outreach that is unmatched by Penn State and this is something that PSU, at a entrepreneurial level as well as an academic must start realizing.