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EU to provide 45,000 micro-loans to unemployed and small entrepreneurs
Matjaz 4 days ago
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EU Employment and Social Affairs Ministers agreed on a new facility to provide loans to people who have lost their jobs and want to start or further develop their own small business. The European Microfinance Facility will have a starting budget of EUR 100 million which could leverage more than EUR 500 million in cooperation with international financial institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) Group.
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Tie Club for Men
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The Blogosphere
Michael 20 days ago
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Alt Text: Google Knows You’re Buzzing About Buzz via Wired.com
You can’t say Google is resting on its globe-encircling laurels. Recently the massive search company created Google Wave, an innovative collaboration tool that brings people together so they can work to figure out what Google Wave is good for. So far, the service’s main function seems to be getting people to send out invites to Google Wave, but Google is pretty sure that once every single person on the planet is participating in the exclusive invite-only preview, someone will figure out what to do with it.
Call it the Twitter effect: There are currently so many companies competing to provide services people want, like e-mail, photo-sharing, video-sharing and pasting the heads of famous people on random naked bodies, that the only chance to make a splash online is to create a service that nobody has ever asked for, and invite enough people so that the masses figure out what to do with it for you.
I can’t remember anyone in the history of textual communication saying, “Man, this message system has too many characters! I can practically fit a whole paragraph on this thing!” And yet, in spite of my early skepticism, I’ve discovered that Twitter is an indispensable way to dispose of jokes that aren’t good enough for this column.
But this isn’t about me. This is about Google, a company that has moved on from creating a tool nobody asked for to creating a tool people are actively angry about. The aptly named Google Buzz has gotten people talking excitedly in forum threads with titles like “How do I turn it off????” and “PRIVACY WARNING PLEASE READ.”
The original version of Google Buzz raised privacy concerns by — I’m not quite clear on all the details here, so I may be making this up — automatically setting up a social network for you based on your Gmail contacts, then sending out a message to all of them saying, “Google Buzz is so awesome! And nothing about it raises privacy concerns!”
Read More http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/02/alt-text-google-buzz/#ixzz0gA73dBAF -
The Man Who Looked Into Facebook's Soul
This Wednesday, Warden will make Friend, Fan page and name data from hundreds of millions of Facebook users available to the academic research community. It's a move that Facebook has to have seen coming, a move that many in the data-centric community have been calling on the company itself to do for years, and an event that's been complicated by Facebook's recent privacy policy changes, which have muddied the waters of right and wrong but rendered even more data available for outside analysis.
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Why if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web
Siri has developed a new programming language and GUI for the API web
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YouTube's Top Money Makers Are Record Labels
Music videos from Sony and Universal on YouTube have more advertising sold against them than any other group, according to analysis from TubeMogul. Below is an approximation of the daily share of YouTube's monetized views based on the number of videos that carry ads in YouTube's daily top 100 most-viewed. This is why Sony, Universal, and YouTube are teaming up to launch Vevo, the big web music video site, December 8th. According to TubeMogul, 3.94% of YouTube's daily views come from the two labels. This also shows how broad YouTube's base of publishers is, since only two represent more than 1% of the daily share of monetized views.
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Why Twitter Will Endure
“Anything that is useful to both dissidents in Iran and Martha Stewart has a lot going for it; Twitter has more raw capability for users than anything since e-mail,” said Clay Shirky, who wrote “Here Comes Everybody,” a book about social media. “It will be hard to wait out Twitter because it is lightweight, endlessly useful and gets better as more people use it. Brands are using it, institutions are using it, and it is becoming a place where a lot of important conversations are being held.”
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Predictions for Google's 2010
12. Google Wave won't become successful, but its features will be used in other Google products.
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Collect your points and advertise :
Collect your points and advertise
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Men are microwaves and Women are crockpots
#1: They go on too many unproductive dates. "If you know how to date, and you're meeting losers, get off the market and go into dating detox. Clean your energy up so those people don't ask you out anymore. The problem is we women are very impatient. We want it now. Instant gratification! Sometimes the best single men are worth waiting for. You might get one good date a year, versus 100 bad ones, but he's worth it.
"#2: They go out with their girlfriends in the hopes of meeting guys. "When you're with your girlfriends, you're not approachable. They're scared. Single men are very timid. I have this theory: Women who travel in packs do not attract. Men who are quality aren't going to go in there and ask you out while your girlfriends are standing right there -- he could get shot down. So it's a really good idea, at about 4 or 4:30 P.M., to go to the bar: Sit at the bar, have a drink, get an hors d'oeuvre, read a mutual-gender book like "The Da Vinci Code," know the score on TV, and pretend you're busy. You're reading a book, you're eating an hors d'oeuvre, you're meeting a friend -- and then you're more approachable because you're by yourself."
#3: They think a guy will always like them if he just gets to know them. "A guy knows right away if he's attracted to you or not. There's no warming up. Men are microwaves, women are Crockpots. Women heat up very slowly. They take in information; they decipher it and download it into their computer. Men know in one second, yes or no."
#4: They overshare on the date. "Single women are so trusting that they tell too much information about themselves. They pump and dump -- they baggage dump! They say, "I'm all relaxed, now he's my best friend and I can tell him whatever I want." They're nervous, and they tell their life story -- and sometimes their life story is not a good story to tell."
#5: They don't let the guy talk enough. "The way you talk on a date should be like a tennis match, but the guy should talk three times as often. It should be 3:1. He volleys, volleys, volleys, now you talk. You can answer the question every time he volleys, but then you lead him with your question, and it should be topical to the conversation he's having. You don't say, 'Hey, do you want to get married? Hey, what's your ex-girlfriend like?' You don't do that. You lead with what he's talking about."
#6: They forget their manners. "The key to a good date is to smile. Engage with eye contact. Let him lead and then you compliment little things along the way. If he orders the dessert and you guys share it, say, 'Oh, this is the best chocolate mousse, I'm so glad you picked this.' Manners are key. Most people do not have manners."
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Are Hot U.S. Startups The New Bling For Rich Russians?
A controversial comment
on Hacker News makes us wonder if hot U.S. startups are the new vanity purchase for rich Russians.We weren’t the only ones surprised earlier this year when Facebook raised a new round of financing at a $10 billion valuation. Facebook itself apparently held its nose as it closed the round, but Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies
was offering a far richer valuation than anyone else (and, importantly, they didn’t require a board of directors seat).
