Rebuilding Germany’s centuries-old vocational program (more)

Megan McArdle: Opinion | America needs more patriotism. (more)

In the rapidly expanding Mastodon Fediverse, there's an instance for everyone (more)

Farhad Manjoo (in Fast Company) describes the growing Platform War. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple Computer, FaceBook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for Mobile phones and Tablet-s, mobile AppStore-s, Social Networking, and more. (GAFA) (more)

Phil Simon's new book is The Age Of The Platform (Platform) ISBN:9780982930250 (more)

Learning via Self Directed Internet/Educational Technology use? (more)

Matt Baer: Bringing blogging (Weblog) to the Fediverse (more)

Joel Spolsky just wrote the best article on Venture Capital and the Software Industry that I've ever read. Founders would prefer reasonable success with high probability, while VCs are looking for fantastic hit-it-out-of-the-ballpark success with low probability... The difference in goals means that VCs are always going to want their companies to do risky things... The trouble here is that the VC is now doing a perverse kind of selection. They are looking for the founders with business ideas where the founders themselves think the idea probably won't work. The end result is that VC money ends up being used in bet-the-farm kind of ways... In a small company, you regulate each of these curves (revenues, employees, public recognition, and code quality) so they stay roughly in sync. Why? Because if any two of those curves get out of whack, you have a big problem on your hand - one that can kill your company... VCs try to speed things up by spending more money. They spend it on PR, and then you get problem 3 ("PR grows faster than code"). They spend it on employees, and then you get problem 4 ("too many cooks") and problem 2 ("high burn rate"). They hire HR people, marketing people, business development people. They spend money on advertising. And the problem is, they spend all this money before anyone has had a chance to learn what the best way to spend money is... The second (problem) is the fact that VCs hear too many business plans, and they need to reject 999 out of 1000... When you have to Say No 999 times for every time you say "yes," your method becomes whack-a-mole... Many excellent entrepreneurs feel that their time is better spent pitching products to customers rather than pitching stock to investors. It's bizarre that so many VCs are willing to ignore these companies simply because they aren't playing the traditional get-funded game... VCs are reacting to the crash by demanding ever stricter conditions for investments. VCs feel like this protects their interests. What they're forgetting is that it reduces the quality of startups that are willing to make deals... VCs who make exploding offers are pretty much automatically eliminating all the people with good business sense from their potential universe of companies... This is not the correlation you're looking for. In fact, just about everything the VCs do to make their deals "tougher," like demanding more control, more shares, more preferential shares, lower valuations, death spiral convertible stock, etc., is pretty much guaranteed to be at the expense of the founders in a very Zero-Sum kind of way. (more)

Albert Wenger had an interesting post on the idea of "ContentCapital" (kinda like Venture Capital) for Book Publishing. Probably based around a tiny corporation (Virtual Company) whose main assets are some amount of Intellectual Property by an author, and the author's time. A way of (possibly) providing a Living Wage advance to the writer, and Marketing for the property, then sharing revenue. Bringing together multiple revenue streams is important. But would an author most-often end up with a single relationship/SmallCo to cover his whole output/life, or a series of single-work-specific ventures? If the former case, and the 1st work doesn't do super-well, is there going to really be any money to continue to pay the creator to work on objet2? Conversely, if each work has its own fund, then do 2 funds end up competing for the same creator's time (for different purposes supporting different stages of the respective objects Life Cycle)? Seems like almost a form of Patronage with a possible payback (like a Broad Way play - so the creator really wants to sell 200%). (more)

Andrew Chen: Required reading for marketplace startups: The 20 best essays (more)

Amy Hoy: How the Blog Broke the Web (more)

Venkatesh Rao: Into the Fediverse (more)

Donald Trump's apprenticeship taskforce needs an apprenticeship (more)

Union Square Ventures is having a "Hacking Education" event today. My invite must have been lost in the mail :) (more)

The Scaled Agile Framework (abbreviated as SAFe), is a knowledge-base of organization and workflow patterns, made freely available while being a registered trademark of Scaled Agile, Inc.[1] It is intended to guide enterprises in scaling lean and agile practices.[2][3] Along with large-scale Scrum (LeSS), disciplined agile delivery (DAD), and Nexus, SAFe is one of a growing number of frameworks that seek to address the problems encountered when scaling beyond a single team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scaled_agile_framework (Agile Software Development)

I just noticed the development of Tiddly Space, which is different from Tiddly Spot: Tiddly Spot is a mature, popular service focused on publishing and sharing entire Tiddly Wiki documents. Tiddly Space is more experimental, and directed towards publishing and sharing individual tiddlers between documents. (more)

Perspective | The future of college education: Students for life, computer advisers and campuses everywhere (more)

a16z Podcast: Beyond Zero-Sum Thinking in the Game of Tech… and Life (more)

Lover of the new. Holder of Neophilia. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neophile

Escaping the SPA rabbit hole with modern Rails – Jorge Manrubia – Medium (more)