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The Best Childrens’ Books Ever

We are now half way through the summer  and if you have kids you are probably beginning to hear how bored they are. Coinciding with children, summer and boredom is the New York Times columnist  Nicholas  Kristof’s list of the  The Best Kids’ Books Ever”. In his article introducing the books, he writes that “American children drop in I.Q. each summer vacation — because they aren’t in school or exercising their brains.”


Creative Commons License photo credit: Lori Greig

Without further adieu, here is his list:

1. “Charlotte’s Web.” The story of the spider who saves her friend, the pig, is the kindest representation of an arthropod in literary history.

2. The Hardy Boys series. Yes, I hear the snickers. But I devoured them myself and have known so many kids for whom these were the books that got them excited about reading. The first in the series is weak, but “House on the Cliff” is a good opener. (As for Nancy Drew, I yawned over her, but she seems to turn girls into Supreme Court justices. Among her fans as kids were Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.)

3. “Wind in the Willows.” My mother read this 101-year-old English classic to me, and I’m still in love with the characters. Most memorable of all is Toad — rich, vain, childish and prone to wrecking cars.

4. The Freddy the Pig series. Published between 1927 and 1958, these 26 books are funny, beautifully written gems. They concern a talking pig, Freddy, who is lazy, messy and sometimes fearful, yet a loyal friend, a first-rate detective and an impressive poet. These were my very favorite books when I was in elementary school. A good one to start with is “Freddy the Detective” or “Freddy Plays Football.” (Avoid the first and weakest, “Freddy Goes to Florida.”)

5. The Alex Rider series. These are modern British spy thrillers in which things keep exploding in a very satisfying way. Alex amounts to a teenage James Bond for the 21st century.

6. The Harry Potter series. Look, the chance to read these books aloud is by itself a great reason to have kids.

7. “Gentle Ben.” The coming-of-age story of a sickly, introspective Alaskan boy who makes friends with an Alaskan brown bear, to the horror of his tough, domineering father.

8. “Anne of Green Gables.” At a time when young ladies were supposed to be demure and decorative, Anne emerged to become one of the strongest and most memorable girls in literature.

9. “The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be.” This is a hilarious, poignant and exceptionally well-written memoir of childhood on the Canadian prairies. (Note, if you prefer sweet to funny, try “Rascal” instead.)

10. “Little Lord Fauntleroy.” This classic spawned the Fauntleroy suit and named a duck (Donald Duck’s middle name is Fauntleroy). An American boy from a struggling family turns out to be heir to an irritable and fabulously wealthy old English lord, whom the boy proceeds to tame and civilize.

11. “On to Oregon.” This outdoor saga, written almost 90 years ago, is loosely based on the true story of the Sager family journeying by covered wagon in 1848, in the early days of the Oregon Trail. The parents die on route, and the seven children — the youngest just an infant — continue on their own. They are led by 13-year-old John: spoiled, surly, often mean, yet determined and even heroic in keeping his siblings alive.

12. “The Prince and the Pauper.” Most kids encounter Mark Twain through “Tom Sawyer,” but this work is at least as funny and offers unforgettable images of English history.

13. “Lad, a Dog” is simply the best book ever about a pet, a collie. This is to “Lassie” what Shakespeare is to CliffsNotes. The book was published 90 years ago, and readers are still visiting Lad’s real grave in New Jersey — plus, this is a book so full of SAT words it could put Stanley Kaplan out of business.

Did Kristof mention all your favorites?  What kids’ books would you recommend?

How to Score Funding, Andreessen’s New VC Firm has $300 Million

Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, co-founder of Ning and co-author of Mosaic, recently announced, “the formation of our new venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, and our first fund — $300 million in size — aimed purely at investing in the best new entrepreneurs, products, and companies in the technology industry.”

According to Andreessen, “We have the ability to invest between $50 thousand and $50 million in a company, depending on the stage and the opportunity. We plan to aggressively participate in funding brand new startups with seed-stage investments that will often be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But we will also invest in venture stage and late stage rounds of high-growth companies.”

bay bridge across troubled waters
Creative Commons License photo credit: Darwin Bell

In Andreessen’s post “Introducing our new venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz”,  he outlines seven characteristics he and his partner are looking for:

  • Above all else, we are looking for the brilliant and motivated entrepreneur or entrepreneurial team with a clear vision of what they want to build and how they will create or attack a big market. We cannot substitute for entrepreneurial vision and drive, but we can help such entrepreneurs build great companies around their ideas.
  • We are hugely in favor of the technical founder. We will generally focus on companies started by strong technologists who know exactly what they want to build and how they are going to build it.
  • We are hugely in favor of the founder who intends to be CEO. Not all founders can become great CEOs, but most of the great companies in our industry were run by a founder for a long period of time, often decades, and we believe that pattern will continue. We cannot guarantee that a founder can be a great CEO, but we can help that founder develop the skills necessary to reach his or her full CEO potential.
  • We believe that the product is the heart of any technology company. The company gets built around the product. Therefore, we believe it is critical that we as investors understand the product. We are ourselves computer scientists and information technologists by experience and training; therefore, we plan to focus on products in the domain of computer science and information technology.
  • Here are some of the areas we consider within our investment domain today: consumer Internet, business Internet (cloud computing, “software as a service”), mobile software and services, software-powered consumer electronics, infrastructure and applications software, networking, storage, databases, and other back-end systems. Across all of these categories, we are completely unafraid of all of the new business models — we believe that many vibrant new forms of information technology are expressing themselves into markets in entirely new ways.
  • We are almost certainly not an appropriate investor for any of the following domains: “clean”, “green”, energy, transportation, life sciences (biotech, drug design, medical devices), nanotech, movie production companies, consumer retail, electric cars, rocket ships, space elevators. We do not have the first clue about any of these fields.
  • We are primarily but not entirely focused on investing in Silicon Valley firms. We do not think it is an accident that Google is in Mountain View, Facebook is in Palo Alto, and Twitter is in San Francisco. We also think that venture capital is a high touch activity that lends itself to geographic proximity, and our only office will be in Silicon Valley. That said, we will happily invest in exceptional companies wherever they are.

So, do you fit the bill?

Best Blogs of 2009–Courtesy of TIME

TIME has published  its second annual list of the best blogs in the world. The list spans politics, housekeeping, astronomy and everything in between.

Rosie the Blogger
Creative Commons License photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

Here it is:

Talking Points Memo

The Huffington Post

Lifehacker

Metafilter

The Daily Dish

Freakonomics

BoingBoing

Got2BeGreen

Zen Habits

Paul Krugman

Crooks and Liars

Generacion Y

Mashable

Slashfood

Official Google Blog

synthesis

bleat

/Film

Seth Godin’s Blog

Deadspin: Sports News without Access, Favor, or Discretion

Dooce

Confessions of a Pioneer Woman

Said the Gramophone

Detention Slip

Bad Astronomy

Forrester Predicts Social Media Marketing to Hit $3.1 Billion by 2014

Forrester Research has just released “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2009 To 2014” and is forecasting that “Interactive marketing will near $55 billion and represent 21% of all marketing spend in 2014 as marketers shift dollars away from traditional media and toward search marketing, display advertising, email marketing, social media, and mobile marketing. This cannibalization of traditional media will bring about a decline in overall advertising budgets, death to obsolete agencies, a publisher awakening, and a new identity for Yahoo!.”

According to Mashable’s  Adam Ostrow, in the report Forrester estimates that:

Social media marketing to grow at an annual rate of 34 percent – faster than any other form of online marketing and double the average growth rate of 17 percent for all online mediums. Of course, social media is starting from a smaller base. Forrester estimates that $716 million will be spent on the medium this year, growing to $3.1 billion in 2014. At that point, social media will be a bigger marketing channel than both email and mobile, but still just a fraction of the size of search or display advertising ($31.6B and $16.9B, respectively).

What are your company’s  short and long term plans for integrating social media marketing?

mashableiPhone.JPG
Creative Commons License photo credit: juliegomoll

Don’t let this happen to you; United Breaks Guitars

The power of social media. Hopefully United is listening.

How to Politely Delete Facebook Friends

Have too many Facebook friends? Do you know how to filter out “friends” that you don’t want to follow so closely without offending them? Nicholas Carlson in his recent post for Silicon Alley Insider provides an eight step approach to do just that. You can read his entire article “How to Filter out Facebook “Friends” “ here.

facebook
Creative Commons License photo credit: benstein

Is NPR the Future of News Media

In Josh Catone’s recent article in Mashable “Why NPR is the Future of Mainstrem Media“,  he describes how National Public Radio (NPR)  “is starting to look like they have the future of news all figured out. Or at least, they appear to doing a lot better at it than the rest of the traditional media.”

Catone reports that NPR now has 23.6 million people ” tuning into its broadcasts each week. In fact, NPR’s ratings have increased steadily since 2000, and they’ve managed to hold on to much of their 2008 election coverage listenership bump (with over 26 million people tuning in each week so far in 2009), unlike many of their mainstream media counterparts.”

Why has NPR been so effective at building its audience while the majority of media outlets are losing their audience? According to Catone the reason for its success lies in its three prong approach: a focus on local; a focus on social media; and a focus on obiquitous access.

NPR headquarters
Creative Commons License photo credit: NCinDC

By focusing on what is happening locally,  NPR fulfills a need that has been abandoned by most media.  Catone reports, “Focusing on local information is a very smart approach for two reasons. One, because as Schiller says, it fills a gap in coverage, and two, because many people feel that delivering and aggregating hyperlocal content will be an important part of the future of media. In 2007, Alex Iskold, the CEO of semantic web application company AdaptiveBlue, predicted the rise of hyperlocal information, indicating that extremely targeted local advertising could be the path forward for the ad industry.”

NPR has also built its audience by building a strong social media presence. NPR’s Twitter account has more than 780,00 followers and NPR has more than 400,000 FaceBook fans. In addition, NPR has more than 650 podcasts, nearly 20 blogs, as well as their own social community.

According to Catone:

Perhaps the most important aspect of NPR’s approach to new media, is that they have an organizational level commitment to allowing listeners and readers to access their content on their own terms. Schiller, who prior to joining NPR at the start of this year was the SVP-GM of The New York Times web site, told mediabisto.com that NPR aims to bring people access to content “online, mobile, whatever people want, podcasts — you name it — so that you have that same sense of the NPR experience wherever you are. As far as NPR.org — sure, I want the traffic to increase, but to me the ultimate goal is not just bringing people to this walled garden that is NPR.org.”

NPR’s ability to build its audience is certainly impressive especially at a time when so many media outlets are going under. What lessons can your organization learn from NPR’s success?

How to Pitch to Angel Investors

In Brent Bowers recent New York Times article “In Pitching to Angel Investors, Preparation Tops Zeal”, Bowers’ writes, “For entrepreneurs hoping to land start-up capital from angel investors, here’s what two recent studies found: Don’t get carried away when you pitch your product because the investors may lose interest faster than you can say “almost unlimited market.”

In Bowers’ article he cites Jeffrey Sohl, the director of the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire, estimate that there are 260, 500 active angel investors in the United States and they constitute the “largest source of seed and start-up capital for entrepreneurs.”

This vale of tears
Creative Commons License photo credit: e³°°°Bowers points out that:

Even last year, as the recession gathered force, these angels spent $19.2 billion on more than 55,000 ventures, he said, though that was down from $26 billion in 2007. The average investment for each deal last year was $346,500.

By contrast, venture capitalists made only 440 investments in start-ups last year, putting the bulk of their money in later stages of a company’s growth in deals that averaged $7.5 million, Mr. Sohl said. “Angels provide the seed and start-up funding that turns acorns into trees like Starbucks, FedEx, Amazon and Google,” Mr. Sohl said.

Two reports studying angel investors and cited in the Bowers’ article both agree that what angel investors are looking for  “is evidence of a market opportunity with growth potential, a strong management team and an exit strategy, including a list of possible acquirers, since the eventual sale of the companies they invest in is how they make money.”

The article lists the following tips gleaned from the two angel investor reports:

¶Memorize an “elevator pitch” for your product and its potential in 90 seconds or less. It will bolster your confidence, and you can recycle it to win over customers, vendors and employees.

¶Consider hiring a speech coach, but only one familiar with angel investors’ thinking.

¶Attend “pitching contests” that many business schools and angel groups sponsor.

¶In presentations, be upbeat but realistic in your profit and revenue projections. Better yet, draw up optimistic, middle-ground and pessimistic projections to show how carefully you have thought them through.

What tips do you have in securing funding from angel investors?

Best Business Books via Business Week

How is your summer reading going? Have you started? Today Business Week Online published “Reading List” an article chronicling a list of business book recommendations from a “bevy of prominent professors and business professionals and asked them about their favorite books, business or otherwise. Browse around and discover what made those books inspirational, instructive, or influential in their thinking and their careers. What would they advise you to read if you had the chance to ask them?”

Business Week’s list of books was compiled from 38 professors and business professional across the country.

fred vargas
Creative Commons License photo credit: dottorpeni

Here’s a partial list of the recommended books:

Innovator’s Dilemma

Liar’s Poker

2020 Vision

Good to Great

Long Walk to Freedom

Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management

Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance

The Economics of Industrial Innovation

Information Rules

Who Moved My Cheese

The Road Ahead

Values of the Game

Destiny of Change

What books would you recommend and why?

Dartmouth Justifies Cost Via YouTube

Dartmouth takes just 2 minutes and 21 seconds to justify the cost of attending. Does it work? What can your brand learn from Dartmouth?