Apple's chief takes pains to point out he feels well

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Correspondent  |  September 15, 2008

Maybe it's that apple a day thing.
With no major new products unveiled at an Apple press conference, blogger Kyle Austin wondered if the event was at least partly intended to scotch rumors about chief executive Steve Jobs being ill. (Jobs was diagnosed with a rare but treatable form of pancreatic cancer in 2003.) Austin blogs for the Waltham public relations firm Racepoint Group.

With questions lingering about his health, [Jobs] took no time to address what was on everyone's mind. In fact, he opened with a slide (a la Mark Twain) that simply said, "Reports of My Death are Greatly Exaggerated." Jobs was obviously having fun with the speculation that spun out of his gaunt public appearance earlier this year, [which] resurfaced in Joe Nocera's infamous [New York Times] article, and culminated with Bloomberg mistakenly publishing his obituary during a common internal update two weeks ago.

With what appears to be minor announcements surfacing during his current presentation, many believe his PR appearance at the event was choreographed to illustrate his wellness to investors and industry watchers.
www.racetalkblog.com

Help wanted: A CTO for the US?
Jeffrey Bussgang, an investor at Flybridge Capital Partners in Boston, underscored an idea floated recently by Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp.: America needs a chief technology officer. "You can't talk about homeland security or education or energy without it being in large part a conversation about technology," Kapor told Technology Review, a magazine published by MIT. Kapor has served as an advisor to Barack Obama.

I read Lotus founder Mitch Kapor's call for the next President to hire a CTO for America in MIT's Technology Review with great interest. Historically, America has never had a CTO. The President's Science Advisory Committee, which had great prominence when it was first established in 1957 during America's "Sputnik moment" under President Eisenhower, has had little influence and visibility since Nixon abolished the committee in 1973 and it returned under President Ford in a weakened form. Yet technology strategy and policy permeates so many of the critical issues the country faces today: from energy policy to defense, from education to homeland security, and obviously the big elephant in the room in any budget debate - health care.
www.seeingbothsides.com
www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/21247

Avoid those brick walls.
Venture capitalists have a reputation for being generous with their advice to entrepreneurs they have invested in - sometimes overly so. Sim Simeonov, a technology partner at Polaris Venture Partners in Waltham, tried to summarize some of his recent suggestions for entrepreneurs.

There is a set of interrelated concepts I'm fond of reminding entrepreneurs about , but I've never found a really good way to summarize them into a sentence that conveys the right meaning and tone. Here are various renditions:

Be different, not best

Do less, not more

Go around a wall, not through it

It is better to figure out how not to have to solve a problem as opposed to having to solve the problem.
simeons.wordpress.com

Hangout comes out of stealth mode.
Microsoft executive Don Dodge was in San Francisco last week for the annual TechCrunch 50 conference, where a crop of start-ups present their products to investors and media for the first time. Among the start-ups was Hangout Industries Inc., a Boston "virtual world" company founded Pano Anthos. Dodge summarized what Hangout is up to on his blog, The Next Big Thing, and included some feedback on the concept from one of the judges at the event, Google executive Marissa Mayer.

[Hangout is] an online space for 16-24 year olds to bring off-line, social hangout activities on-line. Think MySpace becomes MyPlace, where each user has their own virtual rooms that are highly personalized, stylized and private 3-D rooms where they can invite their friends to hang out and share their media experiences together (voice chat, magazines, photos, videos, gifts and music) in real time.

Hangout put a lot of effort into usability, security, and privacy. Hangout works with other social networks, inside them, so they don't need to build their own social network site.

Problem/Solution - Safe online hangout for teenagers

Business Model - Sponsorships, e-commerce, and advertising

Possible Competitors - MySpace, Second Life, Gaia, Habbo

Marissa Mayer liked Hangout, but asked how they would build their social network.
dondodge.typepad.com

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