Editor’s note: Contributor Mouna El Mokhtari is a French journalist and editor in chief of Webdorado.  Below is her translation of an exclusive interview she conducted with Tunisian hacktivist K3vin Mitchnik.  You can follow her @mooouna

Today, Tunisia is holding its first free elections. K3vin Mitchnik, whose pseudonym is a tribute to the great American hacker turned computer consultant, Kevin Mitnick, is a 25 year old Tunisian cyber activist who has played a crucial role in the recent Jasmine Revolution in his country, which helped overthrow the previous regime and sparked the Arab Spring across the Middle East.. He is a member of the Anonymous collective and the co-founder of Tunisian Blackhats. With his group, he has led the attacks against Ammar 404  (the nickname given to the state’s Internet censorship) and more generally against censorship in his country. After several email conversations, I persuaded him to give us an insight into the mind of an e-resistor from Tunis. Here is his story.

How did you become a hacker?
K3vin Mitchnik : I was only 12 when I first laid my hands on a keyboard. At the time, there was no internet and, for me, the computer was merely a machine on which I could play 2D video games.  When I turned 17, I got interested in the online hacking forums and I joined several of them. I didn’t understand much of their content as the administrators and the hackers of the time did not provide full information or tutorials or even explanations on how to use certain software. That’s when I wrote my first hacker article but the entire forum gave me flack and accused me of being a lamer. So I challenged the administrators and the members of this forum to crack a secured system. I won the challenge and convinced them of my abilities. And so I became a hacker.

What attracted you to hacking?
Initially, it was a hobby. I liked the challenge.

And so you went on to create Tunisian Black Hats?
Yes, I co- founded the group in 2007,  along with my friend ‘webterrorist’ and two other pals who were very interested in the issue of digital and online security. At the time, broadband connections were just starting to be available in Tunisia and as a consequence the country was opening up. That’s how we decided to model ourselves on existing groups in Europe, Russia and China.

Why did you choose to name yourselves the Tunisian Black Hats ? In computing lingo, “black hats” refer to destructive and often money-seeking hackers. Do you view yourselves as renegades?
The whole point was to impress people and thus to empower ourselves. But really, we are “good hackers”, white hats. Since Ben Ali’s fall, we have ceased to hack into the Tunisian State computer system and have actually pointed to over 200 critical vulnerabilities in systems or websites belonging to the National Agency for Computer Security.

How do you start a hackers’ group in a country where censorship is so severe?
We indeed have had to bear the brunt of police online surveillance and censorship. Since the start, I have been writing about the tips and tricks to defy this censorship, which was one of the toughest in the world. To give you an idea, YouTube and other video sharing platforms were blocked. Even Facebook was sometimes being shut, but the Tunisian government had to reinstate it because of pressures from the US government.

At that time, hackers were scared to attack governmental or presidential websites. We, the Tunisian Blackhats, dared pirate two pro-government newspapers, L'Expression and Le Temps, so as to get our discontent across to Ben Ali. Our purpose was to ask for freedom of expression and more generally freedom for the people. We also exposed the government’s methods used to capture the password private messages of citizens.

Censorship and control must have increased as soon as the situation started to sour for the authorities, in December 2010 after the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi.
Yes, the regime tried to hack into everybody’s Gmail, Facebook and Twitter accounts by getting their passwords. Its computer engineering team, which employs about 600 techies, tried to shut fan pages and Facebook group pages. They used all imaginable means to reinforce their control and prevent the revolution. They even paid European hackers to attack nawaart.org and websites belonging to TV channels and then laid the blame on Anonymous.

Resisting the regime must have required quite a bit of courage…
Yes, but I had always been against Ben Ali. I became even more opposed to his regime after the Wikileaks revelations. These cables were about the president’s family, its corruption, its amassed wealth. Besides, freedom of speech is fundamental in life, one cannot live without it, pretty much like water actually.

What concrete steps did you take in order to hasten Ben Ali’s overthrow?
When I co-founded Tunisian Black Hats, I also started to take an occasional part in the activities of Anonymous. In January 2011, I contacted them directly, via the IRC chat rooms [online chatrooms where hundreds of users can gather simultaneously] and via Twitter.

For security reasons, we agreed that no denials of service would be done from Tunisia itself. Hackers from Anonymous, based outside the country, launched the attacks.

Our role was to provide them with information, particularly concerning the network infrastructure. We also told fellow Tunisians how to hide their identity and evade censorship. We used IRC chatrooms, Facebook and Twitter to get our message accross. For example, I published on those platforms a script that disabled the scripts used by Ben Ali’s cyberpolice for accessing Gmail, Facebook and Twitter passwords. This disenabling script had been developed by the Anonymous team. I also published Anonymous’s latest news, their videos and the official publications that had come up during our IRC conversations.

How does Anonymous choose its targets and the sites it will attack?
They conduct polls and everybody can voice his opinion on this, or suggest something. Everyting happens in IRC chatroms or on the Piratenpad. The pads are used to craft attacks. Nobody can erase the texts published there but anyone can add a comment and save the contents even without registering online. This is the strength of Anonymous: anybody can join, you just need a pseudonym. If somebody is convinced by your idea, he will talk about it to other people, till enough of them are convinced about the merits of the proposed operation. Then you can launch it, with the help of the IRC chat administrators since they control the servers that are being used for attacks through  LOIC (volontary botnet). The administrators can take part in several attacks at the same time. It is a very democratic system.

Does Anonymous have leaders?
No, not really. But for instance, in the chatrooms that the group uses, my pseudonym is preceded by a star. This star lets participants know that I, unlike the ‘ordinary’ members, moderate the discussions, that the others can trust me, that I am aware of the ongoing attacks and that I am one of the people who have information and who spread it. Another hacker, who goes by the name of Sabu and belongs to the Lulzsec group, also has a star before his name. He is credited for hacking the CIA’s website and Sony’s databases.

How did you become a star ?
Well, as soon as I started collaborating with the group, I started giving reliable information, I corrected mistakes that had seeped in the online discussions… One day, Anonymous published a document about proxy servers that enabled users to retain their anonymity while attacking Tunisian servers. I checked it out and I discovered that the officials could still identify the users’ IP address. I told Anonymous about it and they withdrew the document. Since then, the administrators have been sending me the applications they plan to use for their attacks so that I can test them beforehand.

Were the Tunisian authorities always unable to identify you? What was the instructions to follow in case one of you got arrested?
'Webterrorist' was arrested once because the police suspected him of having launched denial of service attacks against a website showcasing Ben Ali’s presendential initiatives. They were unable to find proof to sustain their accusations and so they released him after two or three days.

If you get arrested, your first thoughts has to be for the information still present on your machine because the police will seize your computers and cellphones. You have to do your utmost to convince the cops that your hardware (wifi router, etc) is not secure and has been used by another person. Proving anything becomes next to impossible.

What have you been doing after Ben Ali’s overthrow?
Ben Ali’s fall has not meant the end of the system for internet control and surveillance in Tunisia.  A former director of Tunisie Telecom, the company in charge of granting access in the country, stated that a gateway node still existed between the National Internet Agency and Europe.  This node could enable whoever controls it to actually watch over the entire network here. A few questions nag me : where are Ben Ali’s engineers? Where is the data that was stolen all these years? We are still on the lookout for these systems of control and this data. We intend to answer these questions. This is the dream of every hacker and every blogger in Tunisia.

My day job is for a company that hired me as a computer systems administrator after it saw how I detected digital security breaches. I think about digital security all the time: at night, a project can very well keep me awake. I keep thinking about security even when I am with my girlfriend. I think about my own safety and that of my dear ones who use PCs, iPhones, etc.

Will you take part in the attack against Facebook scheduled for November, 5?
This planned attack is a hoax. All trustworthy administrators confirm it. Anonymous doesn’t want to carry out this operation for the simple reason that Facebook is one of the tools the group uses most to spread its information.  The media only rushed to create a buzz around this announcement.

Steve Anderson’s Baseline Ventures has invested in startups that include Instagram, Heroku, and Weebly. Earlier this month, Baseline took part in a $1-million seed round for Crashlytics. In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Anderson discusses investing in Instagram and what led him to become Baseline’s founder in 2006.

Anderson tells Dixon that after working for companies including Microsoft, eBay and Starbucks he was ready to strike off on his own. However, he lacked the roughly half-million to start his company and was not interested in trading a sizable chuck of his ownership (40-50%) to secure financing from a Sand Hill Road VC.

Anderson says “the reality also was on Sand Hill Road everyone talks about the billion-dollar exits, and if you look at the history of the last 15 years, there has not been that many billion dollar exits … it turns out that the average exit over the last 10 years on average has been $100-million, and so I was thinking to myself well if I owned 10% of a $100-million outcome that is real money for me, and my co-founders and anybody else and so why isn’t there anybody whose capital was aligned and incented for that outcome?”

Recognizing a fertile revenue stream, Anderson started investing in companies while allowing founders to maintain more ownership than they otherwise may have with traditional VC. Dixon tells Anderson, “you were, I think, ahead of the curve.”

One of the companies Anderson attached himself to early on was Instagram.

In the below video, Anderson tells Dixon that during Instagram’s infancy, “we didn’t know exactly how tight to be, but we knew directionally we were going to head towards photos and location and social network.”

The initial idea though wasn’t nearly as important as who was behind it. Anderson continues, “I was really involved with betting on Kevin (Systrom) early, helping him recruit Mike Krieger who is his co-founder and those two guys have just run with it.”

Anderson notes, “this is why I am in business, to find people like Kevin, to start at the earliest of stages.”

Make sure to check out the entire video for additional insights, and watch Kevin Systrom’s Founder Stories interview here.

Past episodes of Founder Stories, including interviews with Eric Ries, Kevin Ryan and Dustin Moskovitz are here.

Microsoft has signed yet another Android patent deal, this time with China’s Compal Electronics. The current list of Microsoft’s patent agreements include Samsung, HTC, Wistron, Quanta, Acer and General Dynamics Itronix. This is the tenth agreement relating to Microsoft’s Android patents, and the ninth agreement in the last four months.

According to the release, the patent agreements covers any tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer-focused devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. Similar to the Quanta deal, Compal Electronics will pay out royalties pay out royalties on phones, tablets or e-readers that run on Android or Chrome OS. As with many of these deals, the exact structure of the royalty fees is unknown.

In a blog post, Microsoft revealed that Compal, which produces smartphones and tablet computers for third parties, has revenues of roughly $28 billion per year.

From the release: “We are pleased to have reached this agreement with Compal, one of the leaders in the original design manufacturing, or ODM, industry. Together with the license agreements signed in the past few months with Wistron and Quanta Computer, today’s agreement with Compal means more than half of the world’s ODM industry for Android and Chrome devices is now under license to Microsoft’s patent portfolio,” said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel, Intellectual Property Group at Microsoft. “We are proud of the continued success of our licensing program in resolving IP issues surrounding Android and Chrome.”

Microsoft continues to profit off of Android, and this deal just adds more fuel to the fire when it comes to Google’s view on Microsoft’s practices. Google believes Microsoft’s endeavor to profit off of Android is extortion, and takes away from Google’s belief that Android is a free platform. Of course Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer clearly disagrees with this.

But Microsoft counters that its agreements reduce the number of patent lawsuits, as depicted in the chart below. From Brad Smith and  Gutierrez (Smith is  Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel) write today, As agreements ensure respect and reasonable compensation for Microsoft’s inventions and patent portfolio. Equally important, they enable licensees to make use of our patented innovations on a long-term and stable basis…While lawsuits may dominate many of the headlines, these are being overtaken by the number of license agreements being signed. At this point, the fast pace of licensing is reshaping the legal landscape for smartphone patents.

The company added that following the Samsung licensing agreement, Microsoft now has license agreements in place with OEMs that account for 53 percent of all Android smartphones in the United States. And there’s a jab at Google included as well in the announcement: For those who continue to protest that the smartphone patent thicket is too difficult to navigate, it’s past time to wake up.

Editor's note: Contributor Ashkan Karbasfrooshan is the founder and CEO of WatchMojo.

In soccer (or football outside the U.S.), the term talisman is given to the one player whose genius can turn a game around. With him, his team wins—without him, his team falters.

Over the past 25 years, Steve Jobs clashed with Bill Gates, Andy Grove and Michael Dell, but during the past decade, he led Apple's resurgence with the additions of the iPod, iPhone and iPad, driving Apple to become the world's most valuable company.

Jobs was the quintessential talisman of the tech word, excelling in tech, design, product, marketing, sales and overall business acumen. However, with Jobs death at the age of 56, it's a matter of time before the media looks for the next person to lead the technology world, to become the next so-called talisman of the tech industry.

The Insiders: Scott Forstall, Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive

BusinessWeek lost no time in declaring:

With the death of Jobs at age 56, Scott Forstall has now become an even more important and visible member of Apple's leadership team. As the person in charge of Apple's mobile software division, he oversees the iOS operating system, which runs the iPhone and iPad, devices that account for 70 percent of Apple's revenues. At 42 he's the youngest senior executive at Apple. He may also be the best remaining proxy for the voice of Steve Jobs, the person most likely to channel the departed co-founder's exacting vision for how technology should work. "He was as close to Steve as anybody at the company," says Andy Miller, who headed Apple's fledgling iAd group before leaving the company this summer. "When he says stuff, people listen."

Of course, aside from Scott Forstall, the other Apple insiders who seem like legitimate "heirs" include current CEO Tim Cook, the brilliant operator who has run Apple's nuts and bolts; and Jonathan Ive, the design hawk who is viewed as the soul of the company's soul.

While Forstall, Cook and Ive may very well lead Apple to even loftier heights, others have been blazing their own trail at other companies.

Enterprise Software Guys: Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle and Marc Benioff, Salesforce

As the enterprise software leaders, Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff have mastered business and technology. Jobs was an icon thanks to commercializing consumer products that touched millions of people whereas Ellison and Benioff focus on software for enterprises, making them less likely to be viewed as the person the media turns to to understand the future of tech and media.

Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft

As the world's richest person, Bill Gates has stepped out of the business limelight. Too wealthy to have the drive to get back to the day-to-day rigors of the business world, Microsoft's uncertain future and Steve Ballmer's approval rating might lure him back. Gates has the vision, technical and business acumen to come back stronger than ever.  While Apple emulated others but did things better, critics don't share the latter point of view about Microsoft's strategy when it enters a market.

Michael Dell, Chairman of Dell

Right after Steve Jobs took back over the CEO job at Apple, Michael Dell told a bunch of tech investors that if he were in charge of Apple he would, "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders." Today he says his comment was misconstrued. Regardless, Dell remains a wealthy and influential leader of one of the world's largest computer companies, but whereas Jobs could focus on an industry and re-create it, Dell on the other hand doesn't seem to "think about being the CEO of any other company, I'm not a CEO for hire, so if you asked me what I'd do for any other company, it's not really something I think about."  His most disruptive days seem to be behind him.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder

If there is anyone whose attention to detail and focus on simplicity is reminiscent of Jobs', it's Zuckerberg. Of course, denigrators will be quick to point out that Facebook is more Microsoft than Apple, and Zuckerberg the next Gates. Right or wrong, at 27 and with Facebook marching towards one billion users, Zuck has a lot of runway to become the face of tech in the 21st century.

Sean Parker, Napster, Plaxo, Facebook

Parker claims to have changed the world three times: with Napster, Plaxo and then Facebook. While critics may argue that he was at the right place at the right time, lightning doesn't usually strike thrice in the same spot. Parker is increasing his profile since his Facebook stake has increased his net worth, Forbes recently called him an Agent of Disruption when it featured him on their cover.

Evan Williams, founder of blogger and former CEO of Twitter

It remains to be seen how history will judge his tenure as CEO of Twitter, but the fact that Williams has founded Blogger and Twitter – two of the leading communications platform of the past 15 years – gives him a seat at the table. Whereas Williams has the vision to identify these new paradigms, he seems to lack the attention to product or technical prowess that set Jobs apart. His 2008 boardroom coup to get rid of Twitter's founder Jack Dorsey suggests that he can handle himself on the business front, however.

Sergey Brin/Larry Page, Google founders

Wealthy beyond imagination; Google co-founders Sergey Brin/Larry Page rode their Ph.D project to global domination. Today Google is the largest Internet company with tentacles in mobile, Apple's new battleground. Technically Brin/Page are unparalleled, but the lack of traction some of their product launches have had make analysts wonder if they have the eye for design and product details that made Jobs so successful. With Page off to a good start as CEO, his stock is on the rise.

Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon

Before Jobs' assault on the tech world a decade ago, Amazon's Jeff Bezos had the inside track to become the leading disruptor amongst the technorati, even though he clearly lacked the polish that made Jobs so masterful. With the launch of the Kindle and roll-out of cloud services, Bezos is evolving and could emerge as the talisman after all.

The Paypal trio: Elon Musk, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel

The merging of X.com with Confinity.com created Paypal. Once acquired by eBay, the Paypal mafia – spearheaded by Elon Musk, Max Levchin and Peter Thiel have spawned countless companies in tech. Time will tell which one of these three, if any, really stands out. Levchin's star took a hit with Slide and is now rumored to be working on his next big thing; Musk's attention has focused to electric cars and space travel, while Thiel has emerged as one of the premium investors of his age.

Janus Friis/Nicklas Zennstrom, founders of Kazaa, Skype

Friis and Zennstrom have made their mark with some of the most disruptive innovations of the past decade. Sure, while Joost makes the Titanic look like smooth sailing, but the product's design and aesthetics was beautiful. KaZaa kicked the record labels when they were down and Skype left no doubt about the duo's technical savvy and vision. How Joltid jilted eBay with the IP shows that these guys are ruthless businessmen, too. Discount these two men at your own peril.

Marc Andreessen, inventor of internet browser, currently an investor

Marc is the inventor of the browser, first Mosaic and then Netscape. Today he is a popular and powerful investor with stakes in Facebook, Foursquare, Groupon, Twitter, Zynga; proving his Midas touch on the quick flip of Skype to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. In between he also launched and sold Opsware and Ning.

He invented the browser, so his vision and technical savvy is unquestioned. By making the Internet user-friendly, he understands design and aesthetics. His successful track record as an investor demonstrates that he has the business savvy, too. Does he have the polish and salesmanship that Jobs mastered? Time will tell.

Jack Dorsey, inventory of Twitter and Square

Having invented Twitter at 29 and Square at 34, and now effectively highly active at both companies, Dorsey has the technorati's attention and mindshare. Adding to this Jobs-esque destiny is the fact that Dorsey was pushed out of Twitter only to return, the way Jobs hired Pepsi executive John Sculley, only to be pushed out by him.

Clearly none of these men match Jobs, today. But with the frantic pace of innovation and Jobs' influence affecting and enriching them all, it is possible that one of these candidates will one day leave a legacy as great as Jobs'.  Who do you think has the best shot?

Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book he's giving away free. He built and sold Reset, Inc in 1998 and Stockpickr.com in 2007, among others. You can follow him @jaltucher.

I know why I’m not a billionaire. Other than having the consistent self-sabotaging quality of destroying money in massive bonfires every time I sell a company, I also have a severe psychosocial disorder which makes me a horrible connector of people. Connecting people who can benefit each other is the most useful skill you can have on the entrepreneurial ladder of skills. When you help others make money by connecting them together, the world forces itself into the Möbius strip of success that brings the money right back to you times ten. Some billionaires are great at it. If I write Mark Cuban an email he responds in two seconds even though he doesn’t even know me. He’s a “Super Connector”. I know quite a few talented super connectors and they will be very successful as they grow into future Mark Cubans.[See, "How I Helped Mark Cuban Make a Billion Dollars and 5 Other Things I learned from him".]

I’m horrible at following up. I also burn bridges. I used to play a nice social game of Wordtwist on Facebook every day with Don Graham, the publisher/owner of the Washington Post. Then I wrote a blog post, “Don Graham is a Punk”. Guess what. He doesn’t play Wordtwist with me anymore. Another time I was trying to get a job working for the hedge fund manager Stevie Cohen. He wanted me to share a few trades with him as I was doing them. We IMed back and forth a bit during the trades. One trade didn’t work out and I was ashamed of it. So I stopped IMing him. After a few days of this billionaire IMing me with, “Where’d you go?” I blocked him on my IM list and that was that.

But that said, I love meeting new people and I’ve always done a good job with the initial skills involved with meeting new people. I feel like I can meet anyone in the world that I want to. Whether I make use of that meeting is another story. In fact, it’s a fairy tale. Because I seldom do the follow up correctly.

But here are the 9 Skills You Need to Become a Super-Connector.

1. Introduce two other connectors – this is an unbelievable technique. If you can introduce two people who are themselves great connectors then you become a meta-connector. They will meet and get along (connectors get along with each other for two reasons: they are naturally friendly people (hence their ability to connect so easily with people) and they have a lot of friends in common almost by definition.) If you are in the middle of that connection then they will always remember you and you’ll always be on their mind for future potential connections they can make that would be useful for you. And their rolodexes are immense. So if you need to meet Prince William of England, for instance, or Ellen Degeneres then just connect two connectors and the next thing you know you’ll be dancing right down the aisle with Ellen on her show or bowing to Kate Middleton, or whatever you want to do. Ellen? Kate? Uma?

2. Introduce two people with an idea in mind: Marsha, meet Cindy. Cindy, meet Marsha. Marsha, you are the best book editor in the world. Cindy, your book is the best book idea I have ever heard. You both can make money together. No need to “cc” me.

In other words, if you can help two other people make money then eventually, good things will happen to you. In cases where I’ve been able to do this (rare, but it’s happened) I always tell people who say “what can I do for you” that “if they ever find me in the gutter with blood leaking from my mouth and a needle sticking out of the veins in my elbow then at the very least pull the needle out.” That’s all I ask. The first time I ever did this I went home (1994) and told my girlfriend, “I just helped two people make money for the first time ever.” And she said, “yeah, but what did you get?” I got nothing. But I felt something. I felt like I had done good in the world and that if I kept doing it, eventually it would return to me. And it did. With those very two people that first time but years later.

3. Have a dinner of interesting people. I’ve only done this twice. When the last Star Wars prequel came out I invited people from every aspect of my life (friends, hedge funds, writers) to a dinner, I got everyone movie tickets, and it was a fun night. I solidified my relationships with some of my investors, plus some of the funds I was invested in, and I managed to connect people up who later did business together. On another occasion I threw a party for everyone who had been fired by thestreet.com. It got a little awkward when the guy who had done most of the firing (who had himself been fired right before then) was also there but it was all in good fun. Not sure how much goodwill it created for me. Too early to tell.

But, I much more enjoy going to the dinner that I’m invited to. [See, "Why a Grenade Needs to Get Thrown At Me"]. I’ve met a lot of interesting people. My main problem is that my normal bedtime is about 8pm. So sometimes I fall asleep at the table and everyone thinks I’m on drugs. And other times I just can’t go to the dinner because I know I won’t be functional the next morning when I like to write. But sometimes I go just because my wife Claudia gets sick of having me around all the time and pushes me out the door. So please keep inviting me.

4. Following up. This is the hardest part for me. I have a list five years old of people who introduced me to people I actually wanted to be introduced to and then I never followed up. For instance, a few months ago I wrote a post “Burton Silverman, are you dead yet??” Burton Silverman is one of my favorite artists. I wanted to know if he was dead to see if the value of one of his paintings had gone up. Guess what? He wrote me to tell me he wasn’t dead yet. And as I type this, his studio is only a few blocks away. I could visit him right now if I want. Except…for some reason I never returned his email. He’s on my list. But followup is my hardest part. Then I put it off until I start to feel guilty about not following up. So then I push back the follow-up even more. At my first company I hired someone to follow up for me. Claudia tells me she will follow up for me on emails. But I have a hard time letting other people do things for me that I should really be doing for myself.

But needless to say, if you make a connection, it’s so easy to keep it by just saying, “hey, it was great meeting you. Lets do that again in a month or so.” Why the hell can’t I ever do easy things? Instead of writing this post I could simply write an email to 400 people on my list, including Silverman. Something is mentally wrong with me.

5. Re-establishing Contact. The other day I was following my own advice. I’m on the 21 Day Gratitude Diet I discuss in the post “How Being Grateful Can Make You Rich“. I wrote an email to an ex-investor of mine from 2004 saying sincerely how grateful I was he invested with me and I always enjoyed his advice and friendship. He immediately wrote back (because, unlike me, he’s a good connector and businessman) and said, “what are you up to? Here’s what I’m doing. Maybe we can work together again.” This is 6 years after I last spoke to him. Guess what. He’s now on the list I mentioned in #4 above. He’s #401 on the list. But I’ll get back to him. Maybe later today. After I get my driver’s license. Because I promised Claudia 3 months ago that I would get it “today” although “today” means that day three months ago.

6. Show Up. I don’t know which “rule” on this list is the most valuable. But if a good connector invites you to a dinner or a meeting, then the best thing you can do is show up. I was invited to a party of 40 bloggers the other night. The guy doing the inviting was Michael Ellsberg who recently wrote the bestseller, “The Education of Millionaires“. More on him in a second. I probably should’ve gone. But 9pm! That’s like 8 hours past my bedtime. Still, I should’ve gone. Next time!

7. Interview People. Back to Michael Ellsberg. This was genius. He figured he wanted to meet a lot of successful people (sort of like how Napoleon Hill did this when he wrote the bestseller “Think and Grow Rich”). So he got himself a book deal about how millionaires are educated and then, book deal in hand, he interviewed as many billionaires as he could find. The guy is now a MEGA-Connector. When I met him a few weeks ago he had non-stop ideas about how one goes about meeting people. He should give conferences or do coaching on this one aspect alone. Meanwhile, there’s me—I blew off his party last night and didn’t respond to his last email. He’s on my list of emails to return.

I’ve done this technique to some extent. Writing for the Wall St Journal or Financial Times it was always fairly easy to get people on the phone or meet them at a breakfast. But I had a hard time following up. Anthony Scaramucci, for instance, is a well-known finance guy—running one of the biggest funds of funds and also running the annual SALT conference where guys like Bill Clinton and Vladmir Putin will speak on the same stage (Mike Tyson had to break up the fist fight). I met Scaramucci through my writing (he has also written a book) and we had breakfast together and he asked me to run a panel at his SALT conference. Guess what? I didn’t follow up. I didn’t even return the calls of people on his staff. Bad James!

When I was at HBO, I interviewed people for a living. The only problem is they were mostly transvestite prostitutes.  But, I did get to meet the producers and creators of one of my favorite shows, “Taxicab Confessions”. This was back in 1996. One of them called me recently and wanted to get together. And guess what?

8. Produce Something of Value. In order to connect two people, you must have people to connect. You have to meet them in the first place. The best way to do that is to produce something of value. In this post I described about how when I was broke and about to go homeless I tried a technique of just reaching out to people. I would write letters like, “Hey, would love to meet.” That never worked. People are busy. Nobody wanted to meet some random guy like me. So instead I tried a new technique. For each person I wanted to meet I would spend time researching their business and come up with 10 ideas that would help them that I would just completely give for free. With one guy (Jim Cramer), I came up with ten article ideas he should write. He ultimately wrote back, “YOU should write these” and that started my financial writing career. It also developed a culture of exchanging ideas with thestreet that ultimately led to me selling Stockpickr.com to them. With another guy, I gave him several trading system ideas and he ultimately allocated money for me to trade. This started my hedge fund trading career.

I then write my first book about trading. Which led to Fidelity inviting me to speak at conferences, a good way to meet people. My next two talks for them are in Scottsdale, AZ and Las Vegas in the next few weeks. I’ve been giving talks for them since 2004. I haven’t raised my prices since then because I’m always too shy to talk about money except in passive-aggressive ways like writing this blog post.

9. Time. I woke up for a few minutes at 3am this morning to write this list. Then I went back to sleep, figuring I’d write the post when I woke up. The last item on the list I wrote at 3am is “Time”. But for the life of me I have no idea why I wrote it. If anyone can help me solve this mystery I’d be grateful.

I’m going to get another coffee. Be right back….

Ok, I still don’t know what “Time” means. But I do know I’m late for my first breakfast for the day. I introduced the person I am meeting to this guy a few weeks ago and they had a good meeting. Maybe I’ll finally learn to follow up by sending an email after the breakfast.

—

Follow me on Twitter, please.

Or, Buy the book I’m most proud of.

How important is mobile to Facebook? Already, 350 million of its 800 million monthly active users are on mobile devices, and that number is just going to get bigger. “Fundamentally we view it as a really big shift for our company, as fundamental as the shift from desktop apps to the Internet,” Facebook CTO Bret Taylor tells me in the TCTV interview above (which was shot at the Web 2.0 Summit earlier this week). “Companies really need to redefine themselves in this world of devices rather than browsers on people’s laptops.”

Taylor goes even further with this stunning prediction: “A few years from now, most every single person at Facebook who works there is going to be working on mobile almost exclusively.” Mobile and social go hand in hand. Facebook wants to create a seamless experience across the desktop and mobile, as well as between mobile devices.

Here is where Project Spartan may come in. Project Spartan is the unofficial name given to Facebook’s mobile HTML5 efforts. “I am not sure what Project Spartan was,” demurs Taylor before proceeding to explain how the mobile web it fits into Facebook’s overall mobile strategy. Facebook wants to be available everywhere on any device. If that means native mobile apps, that’s fine. But if someone doesn’t have a Facebook mobile app on their device, there will always be a mobile web version as well.

“Where we can play a role in mobile is just helping app discovery and engagement,” says Taylor. That ambition is actually quite large. App discovery is like search for mobile. Whoever controls it, controls what people can do on their phones.

Here are links to Mary Meeker’s mobile slides I mention at the beginning, and the first video with Taylor from this interview.

In the video below, we talk about the interest graph and how there is an opening for startups to explore it. At the end, I also ask Taylor what he thinks about Google+.

Is Jeff Bezos really like a "giant-brained alien?" In categorizing the Amazon founder's unusual genius, Google (and former Amazon) engineer Steve Yegge compares Bezos and those like him to "hyper-intelligent aliens with a tangential interest in human affairs.” He is not trying to be disrespectful. He is just trying to explain how to go about pitching an idea to someone like Bezos. (The short answer: assume he already knows everything about the topic you are going to present, no slides, and “delete every third paragraph” of your pitch).

Yegge does this in a follow up post on Google+ to his earlier rant on Google+ and Amazon.

If you haven’t heard of Steve Yegge yet, he’s the guy who accidentally shared a 4,500-plus-word pointed critique on the shortcomings of Google+, his former employer, Amazon, among other things, publicly on the very social network he was criticizing. The post was meant to be shared among his colleagues, but it appears that Google+’s Circles of Sharing can even be confusing to those who work at Google. (The full rant was posted on Hacker News here.)

The initial post made the rounds, even working all the way up the chain to Google Co-founder Sergey Brin. At Web 2.0 this week, Brin was asked about the memo, to which he somewhat jokingly replied, “I stopped reading it after the first 1,000 pages or so”. To Google’s credit, in spite of this being an epic Reply-All-type FAIL and having “potential PR nightmare” written all over it, the company elected not to sack Yegge, and is instead taking his beef into consideration. Turning a frown upside down, or a minus into a plus, if you prefer. Personally, I applaud Google for the way it’s handled this situation. We all make mistakes, and clearly Yegge was, at the very least, trying to be constructive in his criticism. In varying degrees, we’ve all been there.

After dealing with a lot of media (and internal) attention, Yegge was back on Google+, and decided to use the platform to clarify some of his earlier statements, specifically about his former employer, Amazon, and its founder, Jeff Bezos. In his initial manifesto, Yegge referred to Bezos as the “Dread Pirate”.

On Friday morning, Yegge (currently an engineer at Google) explained:

I still have a lot of friends at Amazon. In fact the place is chock-full of people I admire and respect. And up until now I have prided myself on my professionalism whenever I have talked about Amazon. Bagging on the company, even in an internal memo, was uncharacteristically unprofessional of me. So I've been feeling pretty guilty for the past week.

So, in his post, the Google engineer attempts to paint a more balanced picture of the billionaire genius behind Amazon, fleshing out his thoughts through relating a specific experience he had pitching the CEO on one of his ideas.

The content is very similar to a post Joel Spolsky wrote for Inc. Magazine back in 2008, in which he recounted his experience working for Microsoft, and specifically, Bill Gates. Spolsky wrote the post shortly after Gates retired from Microsoft to focus on his charitable work. It gave many outsiders a glimpse into Gates’ management style and introduced many to the billionaire’s “F Counter” — the guy/system by which people were able to judge whether or not their idea/pitch had been successful. In short, the fewer “F words” Gates issued, the better.

Yegge’s post, in contrast, is actually very funny. In fact, I thought it was so funny, I read it out loud to a couple of people. And like Spolsky’s post did for Gates, Yegge’s Google+ entry paints a vivid image of Bezos, what he is like to work with, his management style, and how the CEO interacts with employees.

The alien analogies stem from Yegge’s effort to describe what it was like to construct a presentation (and then present it) to the Amazon Overlord. Besides being funny, the post will also likely be of use to current or future Amazon employees who have to confront the anxiety-producing prospect of pitching an idea to a guy who, according to Yegge’s rendering, is already an expert in the subject you want to raise, and is probably a lot smarter than you are.

Bezos is so goddamned smart that you have to turn it into a game for him or he'll be bored and annoyed with you … for years he's had armies of people taking care of everything for him. He doesn't have to do anything at all except dress himself in the morning and read presentations all day long. So he's really, REALLY good at reading presentations. He's like the Franz Liszt of sight-reading presentations.

Yep, he just compared Bezos to Franz Liszt. That just happened. He continues:

So you have to start tearing out whole paragraphs, or even pages, to make it interesting for him. He will fill in the gaps himself without missing a beat. And his brain will have less time to get annoyed with the slow pace of your brain.’

According to Yegge’s experience, even after weeks (maybe even months) of preparation, Bezos will still outsmart the presenter, and just knowing your subject from top-to-bottom isn’t enough; you apparently have to be ready for a potentially withering question or angle that you weren’t expecting.

He is going to have at least one deep insight about the subject, right there on the spot, and it's going to make you look like a complete buffoon … Trust me folks, I saw this happen time and again, for years. Jeff Bezos has all these incredibly intelligent, experienced domain experts surrounding him at huge meetings, and on a daily basis he thinks of shit that they never saw coming. It's a guaranteed facepalm fest.

While this kind of management style and intimidation factor is sure to inspire a culture of paranoia, it seems like that’s just want Bezos wants. He’s known for taking an unusual, quirky, alternative (however you want to say it) approach to building his company, preferring loose-fitting and sometimes poorly communicating teams over a well-oiled machine that creates groupthink — one not so befitting of innovation. And, hey, when you feel like you’re always one step away from losing your job (even if that fear is only in your head), you may just be willing to take more risks.

As if banning PowerPoint from the Amazon offices isn’t enough to stop and ponder Bezos’ intelligence, then maybe the new Kindle line has that potential. When Bezos presented the Kindle Fire at the end of September, he seemed to both literally and figuratively take a page out of Steve Jobs’ book. As Matt wrote at the time, Amazon has actually succeeded in building a tablet that both geeks and non-geeks alike want to buy. No small feat.

The release wasn’t about what’s inside — Amazon’s custom UI built on some Android frame or another — it was about how well the new browser works to iron out Android kinks, not about how it has EC2, but what that means to users, and what it means to have all the whizbang consumer functionality of Amazon products up front, with a not-too-shabby processor backing it all up. Kindle Fire at first brush looks like it actually “just works”, too.

Sure, it’s not the iPad and likely won’t be, but it is $300 cheaper. Android and Windows devices et al have been trying to launch cheaper, viable alternatives to the iPad for how long now, and have they? Not really. With its new-and-improved Kindle, Amazon is making a play at a covetable, marketshare-hungry tablet.

Apple is one of the few companies in the world that, in television spots, can simply just show their product and how it works, maybe play some canned music in the background, and you’ll actually feel impelled to buy it. Need to buy it. Even if you hate technology. Or maybe Apple can get away with the stripped-down TV spots simply because it has the confidence in their products that allow them to do that. Everyone else seems to have to rely on lightning bolts and CGI to spruce up their gadgets, or cars, as the case may be.

Bezos seemed to exude that kind of Jobs-ian confidence on stage, and though Bezos is somewhat of an enigmatic figure in the Seattle tech scene, based on Yegge’s portrait of him, it kind of seems like he’s been that way all along. Some scratched their heads as Amazon built up its streaming video, MP3 downloads and cloud computing capabilities. But with Fire and Touch, it’s become clear why. The Kindle is no longer just a reader.

While Bezos may remind some of Gates in the way he is able to display ferocious domain expertise (Gates was and is a programmer and understood the moving parts of Microsoft products better than most), he certainly seems to have Steve Jobs’ DNA, too.

As Chris Dixon said in talking about the difference between a good CEO and a superhuman CEO, the test of a great leader is not just building a successful company that has a good run for a few years, but building a company that leads innovation in their industry with a string of leading products, devices, etc. It’s way too early to say for Bezos and Amazon, but a $39 billion web platform, streaming services, EC2 and killer cloud services, the Kindle, and now the Kindle Fire, it doesn’t seem ridiculous to posit that (while no one will ever replace Jobs), he may be next in line.

Let us know what you think.

Like many of you I’ve been watching the steady stream of incremental Steve Jobs-related news stories for the past couple days, resulting from the imminent launch of Walter Issacson’s Jobs biography:

Jobs came up with the name Apple while on a fruitarian diet, he gave up Christianity at age 13, he loved King Lear, he was disappointed in President Obama, his first job was at Atari, he valued simplicity, utility and beauty, he hated Fox News, he was obsessed with Bob Dylan, he dated Joan Baez, he resisted early surgery for pancreatic cancer, he was inspired by a Cusinart food processer, he was inspired by a trip to a jelly bean factory, he advised Bill Clinton to tell the country about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, he thought John Mayer was “out of control,’ he even consulted a psychic.

“It’s like book striptease,” said Twitter user Nuno Maia, when I asked if readers and followers minded all the micro spoilers. “If I read in his biography that he killed a bison, I will quit the internet for a year,’ joked Shawn Farner, making reference to a ridiculous story about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that had previously made the tech blog rounds.  ”People are bored,” Tech pundit Dan Frommer said, explaining the onslaught of incremental Steve Jobs headlines and the pageviews they inevitably bring, “I am on Steve Jobs reading embargo until the book is in my hands.”

Issacson’s “Steve Jobs” officially comes out Monday, but many bookstores already have it in stock — which might explain why the Huffington Post and the AP claim to have purchased their copies. Following their lead I too tried to purchase an early copy, asking people coming in and out of SFO to check its bookstores, as I had heard that some people had procured theirs there.

The result? No dice, even after Geeklist founder Reuben Katz offered a bookstore counterperson $1000 for the book, arranging the money in hundred-dollar bills out on the counter. (Note: I did NOT ask him to offer cash.) Katz has since tried three times to get a copy at other bookstores, to no avail. Monday it is then.

In the meantime, most of those interested in the visionary’s life and times will voraciously lap up every Jobs-related tidbit and leak. It simply comes down to supply versus demand.

As Josh Ronin answers on Quora, “Bottom line: Steve was a very private guy. When Walter asked him why he was allowing him (a journalist) to write about his private life, he responded:  ’I wanted my kids to know me. I wasn’t always there for them, and I wanted them to know why and to understand what I did.’ Even his children didn’t know much about him. So why do we care? To get even a glimpse of his private life is just plain interesting. We don’t hear much about it at all.”

“It keeps him alive for those of us that hope he’ll live forever,” said Thomas Muraca, explaining that even something as mundane as perusing Jobs’ reading list becomes another point of fan connection with one of history’s most galvanizing and inspiring men. ”Many of the recorded interactions with Jesus were uneventful,” mused new media analyst Cody Brown “but when you sew them together you get ‘The Bible.’”

“Steve Jobs” Table of Contents /via 9To5Mac. Headline /via @JohnBiggs

So I don’t seem biased, because I really don’t care, here’s the Call of Duty: Modern War 3 trailer. You know, the other first person shooter launching this fall, which has been mostly overshadowed by another. The trailer calls MW3 the most anticipated game in history but that’s certainly up for debate. However, Battlefield 3 couldn’t have stolen all of Call of Duty’s fans. It is the best-selling franchise in Xbox 360 history, proving Xbox 360 gamers love highly scripted shooters. Jokes! (no, not really) Anyway, hopefully you were good this year because between Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, gamers could have an awesome Christmas.

This stuff writes itself. At the grand opening of a new Windows Store in Seattle folks were camping out for most of the night only to stream in, breathlessly ready to partake in the one exciting product Microsoft could offer – a free concert by the Black Keys.

I’m not here to bash Microsoft’s actual products but gosh darn it of their marketing guys aren’t incompetent. Remember the strange, proto-softcore porn launch videos for Windows 7? Remember the “PC Hunter” ads? Microsoft’s marketing department, barring events where the Black Keys play for free, just can’t get people excited.

We saw two or three great Microsoft Research products just last week, yet they have to sink to live music to draw a crowd? Sure, the company doesn’t need to impress anybody with gimmicky hardware and splashy ads, but can they at least try to plan out a store launch that would make folks line up for more than just the blues rock stylings of Dan Auerbach and Patrick Carney?

Steve Jobs was the ultimate showman. As such, it should be no surprise that he realized the power of following up a great performance with an encore. But unlike many musicians who treat encores as a given add-on for each show, Jobs seemed to recognize that encores are much more powerful if they’re used judiciously. The Steve Jobs encore was the “One more thing…” He didn’t use it all the time, and because of that, when he did, it would whip the audience into a frenzy.

Following his passing, the question now turns to what Jobs was working on in his final days. Surely, the master showman has something to present us with even though he’s no longer around to show it off, right? After he stepped down as CEO in August, I made the case that his final “One more thing…” was actually Apple itself. That his last great product was actually a self-sustaining company that could continue to pump out innovation even after he’s gone. Hopefully that will be the case. But it’s sure starting to look like he may have had a few tangible “One last thing…” products up his sleeve as well.

In the weeks following his death, reports have been popping up that he was working on a few new things, perhaps even up to the day before his passing on October 5. One of these projects is said to be the iPhone 5 (or whatever it will be called). This isn’t the iPhone 4S, but rather a completely redesigned version of the phone. If you believe the report by CNet’s Brooke Crothers, Jobs was not very involved in the 4S itself because he was focusing his time on the 5. Crothers goes so far as to say this was Jobs’ “last big project”.

Considering the iPhone is Apple’s key product now (at least in terms of revenue), certainly one final version revamped by Jobs himself would be a worthy final project. But Jobs clearly loved to transform different industries with his new innovations. The iPhone 5 probably doesn’t fit that bill — he already disrupted that industry. Further, other reports now suggest Jobs had his hands in other things in his final months.

Jobs’ upcoming biography is the source for a lot of this new information. Even though the book won’t be out until Monday, several tidbits have leaked out over the past few days. Consider that sentence a verbose SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!

Another potential “One more thing…” for Jobs is apparently digital textbooks for the iPad. “Mr. Jobs's biographer Walter Isaacson says in the book that Mr. Jobs viewed textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform,” Damon Darlin and Nick Wingfield reveal on The New York Times’ Bit blog. Jobs apparently went as far as having meetings with publishers about partnering with Apple to make this happen. And he was thinking about ways of circumventing state certification requirements (a tricky issue in the textbook market).

Revolutionizing textbooks may seem a bit ho-hum by Jobs’ standards, but it’s pretty clear that Jobs was passionate about the U.S. education system, and felt this country was falling behind. While digital textbooks may not have the sex appeal of the iPad itself, something of that nature could ultimately prove to be the most disruptive in the long run.

And then there’s the big one.

For years, there have been rumors of Apple working on a television. Not the current Apple TV, mind you — an actual television set. Once the Apple tablet became a reality with the iPad unveiling in 2010, the Apple television took over as the new mythical invention that everyone loves to contemplate. I’m guilty of this as well. A number of times, I’ve laid out why I think the television space is the next major market Apple will go after. Why? Simple. It’s extremely ripe for disruption.

But others have long disagreed. Most skeptics point to the fact that the television hardware market is rife with issues like very low margins, long product cycles, tough distribution, and an all-powerful industry (cable) that essentially makes the hardware their bitch. There are many good points being made. Of course, many of these things were previously said about the mobile phone industry, and even the PC industry before that. And most of these things are exactly what make the market so ready for disruption.

It would be a challenge, no doubt. But it’s the type of challenge that Apple under Jobs seemed to live for. And conquering such challenges is exactly why Apple has thrived.

So it’s not surprising for me to hear that Apple does indeed have plans in the television space. “The new biography on Steve Jobs has a major product reveal: Apple may drop a full-fledged television,” Hayley Tsukayama reports for The Washington Post. She calls this “Jobs’s final plan” — funny how many of these there seem to be, no?

Here’s the key part:

"He very much wanted to do for television sets what he had done for computers, music players, and phones: make them simple and elegant," Isaacson wrote.

Isaacson continued: "'I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,' he told me. 'It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.' No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. 'It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.'"

“I finally cracked it.” No four words have ever made me more excited.

Apparently, the biography doesn’t dive into any further details about the project. Quite frankly, while the fact that Apple is working in the space isn’t surprising, it is surprising that Jobs would say anything about it. Almost nothing has leaked out of the company with regard to the project. In fact, the only thing I’ve ever heard thrown around is a reference to a project codenamed “Sphere”. That’s it.

Considering how big the market is, and the amount of disruption that the television has brought not just to technology but various fields like entertainment and information, an Apple television would certainly seem to be a fitting last “One more thing…” for Jobs. Television is a core technology that touches billions, but it really hasn’t been fundamentally rethought in decades. Sure, the picture has gotten better and the content more expansive, but we’re now forced to interact with it through crappy cable boxes and remotes that I would call Fisher Price-esque — except that it would be a huge insult to Fisher Price.

So that’s what I’m hoping for from Jobs’ final “One more thing…” A new iPhone is and will be awesome. Re-imagined textbooks sound great and potentially very important. But I want Apple in my living room disrupting the stale status quo. There’s a reason that Apple refers to the current Apple TV as a “hobby” — it’s just a foot in the door to ensure that it doesn’t close as they work on something much bigger. The real product will see Jobs transform another massive industry — only this time he’ll do it posthumously.

One final rabbit out of one final hat from the master showman.

[image: flickr/ssoosay]

It transpires that the government of Nunavut, a remote territory of Canada between Hudson bay and Baffin bay, recently acquired some new digital cameras for the purpose of creating driver’s licenses. The files created by the cameras, presumably a handful of megabytes unless they’re using Hasselblads, were too big to be effectively emailed for processing due to the extreme limitations of internet connections in the area. Instead, they were loaded onto flash drives and flown hundreds of miles to Iqaluit, where they were processed and returned.

Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is jokes: haven’t they heard of “save for web”? Did they try the wi-fi at the coffee shop? And in the frozen tundra, shouldn’t they be issuing sledging licenses? But the truth is that this rather absurd little situation is just one of thousands in which huge swaths of the world are being left behind in our rush toward connectivity. While the haves are complaining about losing 4G service when they’re in their apartment, the have-nots are paying hundreds of dollars for speeds we would have laughed at ten years ago. Is it possible to bridge the gap, or are the Nunavuts of the world simply out of luck?

Begging the question

Practically speaking, it’s easy to dismiss the issue entirely by making some noises about how living in the sticks is a choice, and the physical isolation is a natural match for informational isolation. You see pictures of a llama farm in the Andes or an Inuktikut native in Nunavut, and you think “do these guys really need broadband?” There’s a grain of truth to this, but really it’s a form of entitled bigotry and a refusal to acknowledge the purpose of civilization, which (briefly stated) is to grow and improve human communities. Cities don’t “deserve” broadband any more than the some ice-encrusted region with more bears than people.

Besides, problems are interesting. And solutions have a tendency to breed other solutions. Finding a way to serve remote areas with real and affordable broadband could easily yield serious improvements to the efficiency and reach of our existing and future networks. This isn’t about just buying enough copper to lay down cables to every home in the arctic, it’s about acknowledging limitations in our current systems and thinking about whether those limitations are something we want to work and live under. But there are very few limitations that people will truly accept as permanent.

The cost of not doing business

It should probably be acknowledged up front that nobody is going to make any money providing remote areas with internet. Profit is a powerful motive, and it is completely absent here, at least on the face of it. Companies like Comcast and Hughes exist to make money; it just so happens that they make money providing connectivity. National and local governments, however, serve the people, and part of their mandate is the standard of living. The absence of a working internet connection, or at least the absence of one that belongs in this decade, is a serious problem in that category of government responsibility. The Artic Communications Infrastructure Assessment report (which inspired this article) makes this point very clear.

India is about to invest some 20 billion dollars into a huge roll-out of broadband services. A huge amount of this will be going to foreign contractors, who will be thrilled to be laying their own style of foundation in a market set to explode. The situation is, unfortunately, somewhat different in places like Nunavut. The population of the entire territory is around 35,000 people. If it were a country, it would be the 15th largest in the world by area. Subtracting the ~6000 people who live in the largest city, Iqaluit, you have on average one person for every 28 square miles. In Bombay, the number of people per square mile is over 50,000.

Resistance

In Canada, there has actually been a lot of discussion on this topic. The northern territories make up only a tiny fraction of the population, and a tension exists between the south and the north as to just how much the big cities should be subsidizing the rural areas. The Canadian telecoms regulatory agency, the CRTC, actually put together a requirement that the existing telecoms should establish a “deferral account” by skimming money from their subscriptions in urban areas (high-profit, low-cost), 95% of which was to be used for remote and rural connectivity (the remaining 5% would go to accessibility for the disabled).

But lacking a specific spending plan, the money just piled up. Maybe $670 million was set aside when someone questioned the jurisdiction of the CRTC over things like expanding broadband access. Some people wanted the money to go back to the customers. Some questioned the legitimacy of requiring urban users to subsidize rural areas.

It seems a little misguided to me that such a war chest should be squandered on a one-time refund to customers, or spent on areas where the telecoms are already voluntarily investing billions. But there you have it — it’s the kind of questionably justified resentment that some people feel when they see the amount of their paycheck that goes into Medicare or Social Security.

It’s not big big money, as far as government spending goes, but half a billion dollars sure isn’t small money, either. And as we have seen, it presents a kind of ethical quandary: can we justify spending that much money so a few people in the sticks can check Facebook?

It’s more than that, though: without modernization in this area, services that increasingly rely on connectivity as an adjunct to their functions (licensing, law enforcement, hospitals) will suffer and the standard of living will truly be lower. So I think the answer is that at some point, we’re going to have to. And by the time you have to, you always wish you’d done it earlier. So what are the options?

For Nunavut and places like it (rural Russia and China, developing regions in Africa and India), options are actually very few when you get down to it. The combination of extreme isolation and environmental conditions makes for a logistical nightmare.

Solutions

If the town is lucky enough to be in range of current data-serving satellites, which understandably mainly orbit in range of the more habitable zone of the planet, you can install a base station. The trouble is that these are expensive to install and upgrade. The stations serving Nunavut now are slow enough that sending photos was impractical, and even slight population growth would instantly render the bandwidth totally inadequate. What if a refinery were to be established, and a few hundred people move into the area? All of a sudden that seven-year-old base station, barely sufficient for a population of 50, becomes absurd. And all of a sudden, that location becomes a risk because critical services can’t be reached during, say, inclement weather, which may be when they are most required.

You could establish a series of relays bouncing signals from a central area connected to a backbone. This is common practice elsewhere, good for getting a signal from downtown to the suburbs, but in a places where the hub is separated from the other points by miles of rough territory, it becomes problematic. After all, the towers can only be so far apart, and require regular maintenance. In Nunavut you’d have to have someone going around knocking the ice off the dishes so they don’t collapse. Not a job I’d volunteer for, and not a sustainable or affordable model. Besides that, it would be extremely costly to radiate these tower relays to every far-flung community.

The only solution seems to be industrial-sized. In coastal communities like Nunavut, an undersea cable seems to be the tool for the job. But inland areas would need a buried cable. To future-proof it a bit, it should probably be fiber, not copper. I don’t even want to estimate the kinds of costs it would take to put three or four thousand miles of fiber under the ground, with repeaters, protection, maintenance roads, and so on. To be honest, that $670m figure saved by the telecoms starts to look like a down payment.

But what other option is there? Connectivity is a necessity these days for prosperity. Without reliable internet, one is limited to places one can reach physically, which in rural areas may not be more than a few hundred or thousand people in a handful of towns. With reliable internet, the possibilities expand almost infinitely. Education and social awareness increases, and people can become involved in industries that require nothing but data to be exchanged — which makes up quite a lot of the economy these days. Some growth might be achieved by putting a little money into fishing or mining, but it’s nothing compared with the opportunity to take part in the world’s “virtual” economy, larger and more real than any local economy.

Necessity

It’s a problem without a definite solution, currently, but so was getting messages across the Atlantic in good time, until someone took the trouble to sink a telegraph cable between Ireland and Newfoundland. This is one of those problems with continental scale.

Who will volunteer to undertake this enormous task? At this level of investment, it’s too great a risk for any one entity to take on alone. Google, for instance, isn’t going to just say “all right, we’ll build that billion-dollar fiber backbone for Africa.” And neither is the African Union, which likely has more important things to manage. And neither is the government of Canada, apparently, until absolutely necessary. Australia, on the other hand, is spending billions per year to establish high-speed internet in its most remote regions.

One option might be an international fund being contributed to by ISPs and telecoms; Canada alone raised half a billion in a few years on the subscriptions of perhaps 15 or 20 million people. A similar requirement in the US and other rich, connected countries, guaranteeing a certain level of outlay for the establishment of remote networks, would produce a very substantial sum of earmarked money. The telecoms would fight it, of course, but the deal could be sweetened with low-interest matching loans or what have you. I’m not a politician, if that wasn’t clear from the get-go, and I’m sure this idea of an international fund is astoundingly naive in many ways. But I can’t think of another way to advance the state of global connectivity, such is the size of the problem.

Right now there are thousands of communities like Nunavut, underserved and perhaps in danger of being extinguished through neglect. As Nunavut found, the internet is quickly changing from a convenience to a necessity. Not that even necessities are guaranteed by the government or global community — but it means something to class basic connectivity among such other basic public services as medical care, clean water, and police and fire departments.

It may be that research is underway that will make laying fiber or cable seem positively primitive, but I doubt there’s anything in Alcatel-Lucent or Cisco’s labs that’s going to obsolete basic broadband infrastructure. And skimming the income of an industry already in rapid expansion internationally seems a timely solution, however unpopular it may be among the carriers.

The internet is a promise. A promise that physical distances will be rendered irrelevant. At the moment that promise seems only half fulfilled, as the internet is limited by, of all things, physical distance. The world will be connected, though it be at great cost. Such has always been the trend. But those who would pay the greatest cost, as usual, stand to gain the most by it. They wouldn’t agree to it any other way, though a little coercion is sometimes necessary.

We here at TechCrunch love startups, and we love the programs, networks, accelerators, and funds that help these startups grow and take over the world. There are a lot of them out there, and for entrepreneurs, it’s all about finding the right fit. First Growth Venture Network, also known as “FGVN” or “First Growth”, may not be as well known as awesome accelerators and incubators like Y Combinator, TechStars, LaunchBox, or DreamIt but the New York City-based startup incubator has a lot to recommend it. Especially for very early-stage startups that haven’t raised any outside funding.

For starters, application to the venture network is free and, if the startup is accepted, there’s no enrollment fee. What’s more, the accelerator doesn’t take equity, your company doesn’t have to be located in NYC, nor is it required to have raised funding to be eligible. First Growth is looking for companies that have raised less than $1 million. All applicants need is a business plan, a PowerPoint deck explaining their mission to take over the universe, target market, why they’re disruptive etc.

Like other accelerators, First Growth offers its participating startups the opportunity to participate in classes, which focusing teaching founders the important business and product strategies they’ll need to take their ideas from seed to market. These classes and sessions are led by industry experts, VCs, angels, and other entrepreneurs, and are supplemented by networking events, meetings with advisors, and so on.

The list of advisors includes VCs and entrepreneurs like Joshua Abram, Partner, Coriolis Ventures, Co-Founder Media6Degrees & AdSafe, CFO of Yext Alok Bhushan, Kleiner Perkins Partner Eric Feng, Accel Partner Sameer Gandhi, North Bridge Ventures Principal Dayna Grayson, Spark Capital Principal Mo Koyfman, Michael Lazerow, Chairman and CEO, Buddy Media, and College Humor Media CEO Paul Greenberg.

Today, First Growth is announcing its Fall 2011 lineup and the fourth “vintage” of its startup accelerator program, which will include sixteen young companies looking to go pro. In its inaugural batch of fifteen companies back in 2009, ten of the startups were able to attract funding by the time of their “graduation”, along with one acquisition. In its second vintage, seven of the ten startups had received funding by graduation.

It’s encouraging to see this kind of success rate for an accelerator in the now burgeoning New York tech scene. Especially as First Growth is taking a somewhat unique approach in that it’s not trying to make money off of its startups. As First Growth Founder and Executive Committee Chair Ed Zimmerman told us, the accelerator is “exciting in its un-cola approach: We don’t take equity, it’s free for the companies, and there’s no demo day. Instead, it’s simply about building a community of companies and advisors that lead to long-term success”.

Furthermore, Zimmerman said that roughly 70 percent of the network’s startups have gone on to get funding, and the under-the-radar accelerator has already hatched startups like Birchbox and FanBridge that have attracted some high-profile investors and a few big numbers to boot. Not bad at all.

So, without further ado, here is an introduction to First Growth’s newest batch of startups:

105 Looks is video-centric website for makeup. Founders and Caroline Marcus Dahllof use video to show women how to increase their style points and what products to use to do so. The goal is the offer a superior alternative to traditional ways of learning about makeup products and how to use them. 105 Looks' weekly “Trend Guide” covers the latest trends and provides inspiration for trying new looks, along with videos that show how to make them come alive.

72Lux is a personalized destination site that allows users to shop multiple high-end retailers from a single location, with a single checkout. It also licenses this universal checkout to provide enterprise publishers with a turnkey ecommerce solution and new revenue stream.

Frustrated by an experience looking for a specific dress online and with the technical knowledge that a better, more luxurious experience was possible, founder Heather Fitzpatrick resigned from her job to found 72Lux Inc. in 2009. The 72Lux team also includes Jason Cain and Michelle Montgomery.

Adaptly is an easy way to advertise across the social web. The company allows businesses to create ads and deploy them across multiple social ad platforms instantly. Until now, every social network had its own distinct set of data, ad formats and advertising platforms, so advertisers and media buyers had to broker individual deals with each network.

Adaptly opens up these walled gardens, providing one simplified social media ad buy to reach the 1.5 billion people on social networks, monitors data in real time, and delivers actionable insight. In April 2011, the company, founded by Nikhil Sethi andGarrett Ullom, raised a total of $2.7 million in seed and Series A funding from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Kirschenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners, and Lerer Ventures. (You can read our coverage here.)

Artsicle is a web-based art rental service for consumers, small businesses and interior designers. The company curates the best pieces from emerging artists at the top MFA programs. It asks potential customers to fill out short quiz to start discovering the art they’ll love. Then, Artsicle's curators put together a personal gallery for browsing. Clients can try the art for as little as $25/month and earn credits towards purchase. Artsicle co-founder and CEO Alexis Tryon is the site’s connector guru, finding collectors and artists, while co-founder and CTO Scott Carleton is chief geek.

Binksty is a comprehensive online personal finance tool that helps uses organize and pay their student loans. Binksty launched in private beta in October 2011 and now manages nearly $1 million in student loans. In 2009, Binksty's founder Brendon McQueen graduated from Columbia University with 12 loans and over $100,000 in debt. He realized how frustrating organizing his student loans was and began to envision a real world tool for people who are fed up with wasting time, energy and money. (Read TC’s coverage of Binksty here.)

irrive is a social travel application that consolidates the past and future plans and destination recommendations of a members social graph into one clean, actionable UX. Irrive was founded by Steven Cohn.

Jagimo/Woern is a mobile social network that plays like a game. Users can share ideas and photos in a realtime, spontaneous, game-like environment with people from around the world. Toss a jagimo, and random people catch it and add their own ideas and photos. Once you catch a jagimo, you then have five minutes to retoss. The name Jagimo! is a play on the Japanese word for potato, “Jagaimo”, and thus an allusion to the early “Hot Potato” idea. The company is overseen by President and iOS developer, Erich Wood.

Keaton Row is an online platform that leverages technology to bring the traditional stylist-client relationship to the masses, while creating a far-reaching and quality distribution channel for brands. It is launching with a focus on the professional women's wear market, offering a personalized selection of work wear, pieces and outfits delivered virtually by a Keaton Row stylist. Co-founder and President Cheryl Han was formerly head of the online division for Clarins, where she was responsible for Sales, Marketing and Online Business Development.

OpenFin is a secure, cross-device app platform designed exclusively for the financial community. The platform makes it easy for financial providers to deliver apps to users on tablets, smartphones and desktop. The company was co-founded by CEO Mazy Dar and President & COO, Chuck Doerr.

StyleOwner is making it super easy and fun for anyone to create an online store and personalize it for their social network by curating from an amazing catalogue of more than 2,000 fashion brands. “STYLEpreneurs” provide friends with customized recommendations and make a 10 percent commission on every sale. The company seeks to make the web shopping experience more personal. Founder and CEO Joel Weingarten realized that by combining the best marketing tool (a recommendation from a family member or friend) with the power of social media, StyleOwner could empower people to become entrepreneurs.

Shopperseeks is a demand-based marketplace for clothing and accessories. By focusing the shopping experience on the customer, Shopperseeks makes online ordering more efficient for shoppers and retailers. Founder Andrea Gouw is an fashion an ecommerce veteran, having worked for companies including May Company and walmart.com. The site is currently in Beta.

Tidal Labs is a platform that identifies the best content from tens-of-thousands of the best online contributors and connects them to publishers or brands. The company powers fashion look-books for Teen Vogue, Zagat and Neutrogena. For Conde Nast, publisher of Teen Vogue, the platform produces ten times the editorial-quality content for 1/5th the cost of a staff editor. The platform was developed by founder Matthew Myers.

TreSensa is building an HTML5-based game development platform that enables developers to author, publish and monetize casual/social games across the Web, mobile devises and connected televisions. The platform will provide support for games across the entire life cycle ofgame development, driving significant efficiencies and increased monetary opportunities for large, mid-sized, small and independent game studios. TreSensa was founded by CEO Rob Grossberg, President Vincent Obermeier and CTO Rakesh Raju.

Tutorspree is a marketplace for local tutoring. The company has tutors across the United States focused on academic subjects ranging from Elementary School Math through Quantum Physics. The company launched in January 2011. Currently there are over 160 tutors signed up in four cities: San Francisco, Washington, New York and Los Angeles. Tutorspree was co-founded by CEO Aaron Harris, Ryan Bedner and Josh Abrams.

Venmo is a mobile payments platform designed to payments between friends simple and fun. Iqram Magdon-Ismail and Andrew Kortina, met as freshman year roommates at The University of Pennsylvania and built Venmo because it was difficult for them to exchange money with each other, and they wanted to improve this experience for everyone.

Yabblr is a platform to unite consumers around products they want to buy to pull deals from brands, the reverse of the prevailing model of marketer pushed deals. Co-founders Jeff Zaresky, John Garbarino and Bryan Migliorisi are levering combined years of experience helping brands develop social media marketing programs to disrupt the current deals model and is creating new efficiencies for both consumers and marketers.

When Facebook CTO Bret Taylor was in high school, he had a backpack covered in patches that helped him express who he was and what things he was interested in. He thinks that your Facebook page is becoming more and more like that backpack. It is a reflection of your identity: where you’ve been, what you are thinking, what music you listen to, and photos of yourself and your friends.

In the video interview above, which I conducted this week at the Web 2.0 conference where Taylor was a speaker, he explains the thinking behind some of Facebook’s recent features, including Timeline, Ticker,and Open Graph.

Taylor describes Timeline is meant to show your life on one page, with the most important stuff up top, not necessarily the most recent. The Ticker, however is this constant stream of everything your friends are doing, much of it reported automatically by apps such as Spotify or RunKeeper.

It all can become a bit noisy if you ask me. “A lot of this is trying to find the balance between self-expression and sharing,” says Taylor. Self-expression is a deliberate act. You choose to put a particular song or photo in your Timeline to tell people who you are.

Ticker is a different beast altogether with its automated stream. It is over-sharing in its most unadulterated form. But Taylor doesn’t look at it that way. “Ticker is like the next generation of presence. It is valuable because it is realtime—what are my friends up to right now.” They are listening to “Hot in Here” by Nelly, now get on with your life.

The author of several classic histories of pop music including Rip It Up And Start Again, Generation Ecstasy and Retromania, Simon Reynolds is as well placed as anyone to understand how the Internet has changed the music industry.

But while Reynolds might not go as far as critics like Jaron Lanier, he is nonetheless far from optimistic about the impact of the Internet on the music industry. As Reynolds told me when he came into our San Francisco TechCrunchTV studio, the Internet is bad for artists because it's much harder now to make a living recording music. And it's bad for fans too, Reynolds insists, because all the free music on the Internet has created a problem of what he calls "over abundance."

So is Simon Reynolds correct? Has the Internet really had such detrimental impact on artists and fans alike? And if so, then how can we return to a time when musicians like the Beatles, Stevie Wonder or Talking Heads, rather than Steve Jobs or the iPhone, captured the zeitgeist of our age?

Is this a contrarian view? I can’t even tell any more. On one hand, Google Plus now has 40 million users, it’s the fastest-growing social-networking site in history, and its users have uploaded 3.4 billion photos. On the other, Google is mum about how many of those users are actually active; some say that its traffic has declined significantly from its peak; Google’s own management didn’t much use it, until recently; and many agreed with Google engineer Steve Yegge’s lengthy and viral rant about how they have screwed up Plus.

Not me. I think Google+ is a hit in the making. I hardly use it myself any more — indeed, my last post there, more than a month ago, was “Sadly, it seems G+ has degenerated in my mind into little more than the place I go to complain that Twitter seems to be down” — but I’m no representative sample. Heck, I don’t really use Facebook either, except to mindlessly echo my Twitter stream.

(We pause here briefly so that bloggers everywhere can recover from their exposure to the mindblowing notion that perhaps one should not treat one’s own anecdotal experiences as universal truths.)

When Sean Parker pointed out that all your friends are already on Facebook, Vic Gundotra retorted, “Your mom and friends, guess what, they are already on Google.” As MG said some time ago, that little black bar on top of their home page and search results is their secret weapon. It gives Google an unparalleled ability to lead horses to their water. But can they make them drink?

I think they can.

Think long term. Google does. When Google initiatives flop, they’re usually pretty much dead within a month of arrival, a la Buzz or Wave. But when they get any traction, Google is excellent at pushing them uphill, bit by bit, year by year, with a relentless tide of data-driven iterations, all the way to the top of the mountain. When Chrome launched, a lot of people (including me) were bemused: why a new browser? Weren’t Firefox, Opera, and Safari more than good enough? Now it’s on track to overtake Firefox, and maybe one day even IE. When you consider the commitment Google has made to Plus, you have to figure that G+ today is a mere crude and clumsy approximation of what it will be a year from now.

And what it is today is pretty damn good. (Especially now that they’ve (more or less) stopped machine-gunning themselves in the foot, by publicly backing down from their stupid and ham-handed real-name policy.) There are already a bunch of things G+ does better than Facebook. Photo sharing. Group video chat. Allocating people to Circles. Sharing Circles with others.

…Wait, there’s sort of a theme, isn’t there? Groups. Circles. Handcrafted subsets of your friends, your acquaintances, and the people you follow. Videoconferencing with a group of your co-workers; literary discussions with the members of your book club; debates about the price of a new roof with the other members of your local community center; ongoing scheduling of your World of Warcraft guild; news from the leading lights of the political party of your choice; any of the hundreds of kinds of little or large groups of people that form and dissolve all the time. That’s what Google Plus is good at, and Facebook isn’t.

Mark Zuckerberg famously said, “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists” — but everyone lists and subdivides the people they know all the time: in their head, or on paper, or in the To:  and CC: fields of their emails, for innumerable social reasons. They’ll do so online, too, if it’s easier and a more core part of the experience than it is at Facebook. I believe people want to connect to both broad-brush swathes of people — everyone they know, everyone they work with, everyone they went to school with, friends of friends — and more carefully defined groups, with finer control over identity and membership.

Can Facebook seamlessly do both, and be all things to all people? Maybe, but that’s not the direction they’re going. Ironically, they’re doing things “the Google way,” betting on sweeping algorithmic solutions with their Smart Lists and Top Stories, while Google seems to be building G+ “the Facebook way,” around personal curation and social selection. The key difference is that, as moot aka Christopher Poole said the other day, our identities — and our relationships — are prisms rather than mirrors, multi-faceted rather than black & white. Google Plus acknowledges this in a way Facebook doesn’t, and that’s a big part of why I believe it will ultimately succeed.

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rebounded from a seven and a half minute gap to explore the mysteries of the Siri platform. As machines give up being trained by us and reciprocate by rewarding us for compliant behavior, our gestures are being finetuned to a social pitch.

While no one was looking, Apple has provided a fresh and easy way of decorating content with social energy, and in the process setting the stage for a renaissance in media influence and strategic thinking. As we produce ever more articulate renderings of our movements through time and space, we build synapses that can hold conversations between events without bothering to ping us for data.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

See Mr. Fauxcredible over there? He needs a name and Wyse wants to give an iPhone 4S to the reader who comes up with the best one for him.

Pocketcloud by Wyse is a remote desktop solution for IT folks and they’re trying to jazz up their marketing. To that end, they asked if I would “crowdsource” their mascot and ask you folks for some help. To enter, simply drop a name below in comments. Enter as many times as you wish and Wyse will pick one winner from all the thousands of comments that I expect we’ll get.

Here’s a bit about Pocketcloud to give you some background. I’m going for Floyd, but you may have better ideas.

The new version of PocketCloud allows unlimited file sharing, of any file type between your iPhone and iPad and your computer for just $1 a month. So you can link devices, and share music and other files between these devices. PocketCloud also includes support for OS X (Lion) user account authentication, and support for iPad 2 video mirroring.

The winning submission wil get an iPhone 4S for the carrier of their choice, international entrants included. We’ll pick a winner on Monday, October 24 at noon Eastern time.