Friday, April 23, 2010 at 12:41AM Philip Cortes Found this and thought it was pretty interesting....Craigslist is just so simple, and continues to be so relevant.
There's something to be said about finding a societal need, and fulfilling it in the most simple (read: less overhead) manner.
Cheers Craigslist!
Sunday, April 18, 2010 at 9:59PM Philip Cortes Mr. Yunnus sure was onto something when he founded the Grameen Bank, the world’s first microfinance institution. The concept that micro loans could have a significant impact on the well being and growth of a community was truly transformative, and many business models have since sprung from his first initiative. Although Grameen founded microfinance it was Kiva that digitized the model, bringing peer to peer (P2P) lending to the 21st century.
Other business models then built on both Grameen and Kiva’s revolutionary adaptations of microfinance, one of which was peer to peer credit loans. On such adaptation is Vittana – a peer to peer lending platform focused on providing loans to students in developing countries. 
I recently had the chance to have dinner with Mora Mcleon from the Africa America Institute, and she made an astute observation....Microfinance is a fantastic model for providing capital to communities seeking to develop, but in order for those communities to truly rise out of poverty, it is important to increase the level and depth of education. The Africa America Insitute focuses on doing just that – providing capital to students in Africa seeking a higher education in business. What Vittana has done successfully, is adapted the micro lending model to a part of society that is usually forgotten as we view it as a public good – education.
I would argue that loans to both micro enterprises AND education is necessary for the alleviation of poverty, and that both models are making great strides to simplifying the way individuals in the developing world can help.
For those of us who believe that more should be done to tackle problems within our own country before we focus on the developing world, I have good news. LendingClub.com just scored 24.5m last week from Morganthaler, Norwest and Canaan. This platform seeks to simplify the process through which individuals can loan money to one another, for anything. We have Mr. Yunnus to thank for this revolution in lending, and I sure hope we carry this momentum forward.
Sunday, April 4, 2010 at 10:19PM Philip Cortes
All this iPad discussion around it being a product focused solely on "consumption" of media has got me thinking....The QWERTY keyboard, whether it's on an iPad or my laptop, is completely overrated. I have been typing since the days of Apple IIe (oh Logowriter, how I miss thee) - and I just can't stand keyboards. Sure, I can type 90 WPM, but that's with some serious focus, and reading pre-written text. Let's face it, the problem doesn't lie with Apple, but rather with the tools we use to input data - the QWERTY keyboard and mouse were once novel, but their expiration is long overdue.
Potential Breakthroughs :
So I did some searching on the web, and unfortunately the days of cybernetics aren't quite here. We have gotten monkeys to control robotic arms via chips implanted into their brains....which is pretty sweet, but not due for human testing for quite some time...(see more here)
Conversely, Wash U has completed some interesting research reading brain waves (read: less intrusive), and apparently humans can learn to control video games after a few hours of training. (see more here)
MIT, inspired from the Minority Report, has come up with a “glove mouse.” (Didn’t Nintendo come up with that back in the day? Anyways…) You can see the glove mouse in action here – I’m not super impressed but it’s getting closer. WE have to learn to interact with computers, media, and everything we “consume” and “produce” differently, and hopefully these are small steps in the right direction.
Far and away the most impressive technology I have found (if we can call it that), was invented by a company called Swype. You might have seen their technology on the new Samsung phone commercials – they’ve created a platform where you simply draw a line between letters in a word, and they recognize what word it is that you’re trying to “swype” automatically. 
You simply put your finger down on the first letter, and keep drawing a line around the keyboard, going from letter to letter, without lifting your finger until you’re done with the word. Swype automatically recognizes what word it is that you wanted to type and enters it – apparently it’s pretty easy to get a hang of.
All of these new technologies are going to have a hard time replacing the keyboard, it’s become part of how everyone learns to interact with the world, even at a young age. (I was typing on a IIe by the time I was 7….) The key to any of these new technologies is the adoption of young people – if they make it their defacto method of inputting data, then the world will change accordingly.
Not sure a three year old would be open to brain implants though….we might have to deal with Glove Mouse and Swype for now…
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 4:13PM Philip Cortes 
, a startup launched by Dolores Labs, just raised a fair amount of money (5mm) through Bessemer and Trinity Ventures. What I like about CrowdFlower is that they're taking an innovative approach to "Labor as a Service" (LaaS)....instead of trying to source their own group of workers & projects, they've aggregated labor from other LaaS sites (like Amazon Turk). What I like about this approach is that they've essentially cut out half of the marketing equation for themselves - they can now focus on ensuring that the data provided meets a certain quality, and targeting projects instead. I always though the effort was a bit large for other LaaS companies - trying to pool together both labor and project demand is expensive and difficult.
The second impressive component to CrowdFlower is their Quality Assurance and pricing mechanisms. I strongly believe of all the LaaS services out there, this one has a shot at differentiating itself because it targets one side of the equation, and does it well.
Check them out ! Crowdflower.com
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 12:21AM Philip Cortes It's no secret that location-based services are hot commodities, but one startup in particular has caught my attention, SimpleGeo. The service is coming out of Beta tomorrow, and its launch process has just been fascinating to follow.
What : SimpleGeo is a location information platform that other businesses can build on top of. Whether your business needs information on a specific area, or person, they can provide the platform through which to gain access to all of that information. In essence, they enable you to outsource and cut down on the costs associated with building and integrating location into your platform.
Strategy: They began by targeting the developer community - and they have bout 5,000 partners lined up already! The strategy seems to have really paid off - they're coming out of beta with a fantastic network of existing users, and probably an amazing amount of feedback as to what is needed by developers, and how to streamline their platform for integration.
Although the foursquares and gowallas of the world will continue to be interesting, as they're the client facing services (...even though services like Meetro were truly the first onto the scene...), SimpleGeo is unique in that it's a B2B service.
Their pricing also seems to hit the nail on the head - they're letting developers pick and choose what they'll be using, and pay for the services accordingly. Thus far it seems that it's free for up to a million calls (wow), and then 399 for 2 mm calls, 2499 for 10mm calls, and $9,999 for 30 mm calls. What's convincing here is that it will probably hook a large amount of startups looking to keep their development costs down, and then scale with them as they grow.
You can check them out here.