This morning’s NYTimes business section had an article by Janet Rae-Dupree about the people and companies trying to get tax credits for innovation, because innovation creates jobs.  I wholeheartedly agree and want to mention a couple of examples.  Yahoo!, Google, Intel, Apple and Pfizer are just a few of the many examples of companies that created hundreds of thousands of jobs by innovating.  Google’s success generated almost 20,000 jobs according to WikiHow and that is not including all the peripheral Google-related jobs.  The SEM business took a whole new twist when Google launched adwords and its auction model.  SEO is now a full-time job for many people and that is because search engines now drive businesses.  

Joseph Stiglitz was quoted in the article as saying all our bailouts are focusing on the past, not the future.  Will throwing money at corporations for innovation work?  or should the government be investing in small businesses?  I am not sure either will work effectively.  This is a little farfetched, but what about making all college graduates publish at least 1 academic paper before graduating?  This would show them the power of creating new ideas and the validity of peer review.  I am not sure it would create jobs, but it would certainly make our society one of thinkers and creators, two ingredients for innovation.

Bob Herbert wrote an interesting op-ed piece this morning in the NY Times titled “Stop Being Stupid“.  Bob credits Madoff for saying that he paid investors with “money that wasn’t there”.  The piece ends by saying that we need to go into serious debt to jump start our economy and that we need to start investing in world-class infrastructure.  

I completely agree that the U.S. and the American people need to start watching the dollars they spend and stop spending money that isn’t there. I agree that we all need to tighten our belts and stop “the limitless consumption of trashy consumer goods”, but where is the incentive for innovation?  Not only do we need to educate, feed and provide health care for the country, but we need something to aspire to.  Kennedy put us on the Moon without knowing the science.  What is the next frontier?  Artificially Intelligent robots in every home?  Mars?  Flying Cars?  What is America’s dream?  Once we figure that out, we will be on the road to recovery.

Over the last few days, the NY Times and the WSJ have been writing about Verizon Wireless’ talks with Google to have Google build a mobile search engine and operate all of Verizon’s mobile searches.  The talks started because Verizon couldn’t figure out how to create a single way to search from their phones.  In other words,  most Verizon phones make the customer use different search methods for each thing they are looking for.  So, if you want to search for a ring tone, you have one tool.  If you want to search for a game, there is another.  If you want an app, there is another.    Here comes Google to the rescue!   Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a very funny op-ed piece in the NY Times that I wanted to share.  The piece is titled “Lord of the Memes” and is a great satirical piece about our culture and the general need for people to be part of the “in” crowd or doing the “cool” thing.  His last paragraph really defines “cool” in today’s society.  Brooks says that the goal is to be an early adopter and an early discarder.  

I really loved the article because as a kid everyone wants to be in the hottest crowd, but then during college I assumed I grew out of it.  In truth, I haven’t.  In the beginning of April I bought a MacBook Air thinking it is time to become a mac user and also buy the lightest one they were selling.  According to Brooks, I am just trying to be cool and become an early adopter of one of the hottest new toys on the market.  Now the question is can I afford to be an early discarder?

This morning, while reading the NY Times, I came across two articles that are somewhat related and started me thinking.  The first is titled “If You Run a Red Light, Will Everyone Know?” by Brad Stone.  In this essay Stone informs his readers about a site that was just unveiled last month: CriminalSearches.com. The site is owned by PeopleFinders and allows anyone to search public criminal records about anyone else.  All you need to know about the person is their first and last name.  This means you can look me up by just entering Jordan Salvit in the search and can see that I have no criminal offenses to my name.  As Stone points out in his blog post, “Is ChoicePoint a Model of Restraint in Releasing Criminal Records?“, people can easily judge their peers with access to this potentially incomplete information.  In his essay, Stone notes that if you have the records corrected they will be fixed immediately on the site.  So if you had a traffic violation removed from your record in Virginia it will no longer appear on CriminalSearches.com.  The problem is that nothing ever gets deleted from the internet.  Once content is posted on a site and then crawled by Google and cached in their system or by Archive.org someone can always find it.  After finishing the essay the privacy advocate in me was screaming to shut this site down.   Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s New York Times had an op-ed piece by David Brooks titled “The Biggest Issue” which talked about education in the U.S. and how the biggest problem facing us is the education slowdown.  Brooks makes the point that the United States education rate has slowed drastically, causing a gap between the rich and poor and stagnating growth as a society.  I agree with Brooks completely:  education is the key to our success as a country, but how do we get back on track?  How do we get more people to get higher educations?  How do we interest people to train and do better?   Read the rest of this entry »