TEC Weekend Reading 2011-10-01

Business

15 Startups With $100 Million+ Valuations That Hardly Existed Last Year
http://read.bi/qDioRF

What Steve Jobs Taught Me About Growth - Nilofer Merchant - Harvard Business Review
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/what_steve_jobs_taught_me_abou.html

The New Social Network: Who’s Nearby, Not Who You Know
http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/16/the-new-social-network-whos-nearby-not-who-you-know/

CHART OF THE DAY: 18-24 Year Olds Send 55 Texts Per Day On Average
http://www.businessinsider.com/18-24-texting-2011-9


Technology
Can Drumbi change the telephone?
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/09/12/drumbi-reinventing-phone-calls-by-giving-them-a-subject-line/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHZkJvwpp2E

Virtual monkeys write Shakespeare
The best ever demonstration of the Cloud Computing business opportunities: virtual monkey simulate Shakespeare for $20 a day....
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15060310

Investigation: Is Your SSD More Reliable Than A Hard Drive? - SSD Reliability: Is Your Data Really Safe?
http://m.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html


General

Israel’s top 45inventions
http://israel21c.org/technology/israels-top-45-greatest-inventions-of-all-time

What They Say About Us

"The wonderful thing about entrepreneurs is that their passion for starting new companies transcends languages and geographic boundaries."

Ron Conway, Founder and Managing Partner of the Angel Investors LP funds, early stage investor in Google and PayPal

"Networking is very important for start-ups. The challenge for them is often not money: it is mentoring and finding people who can give good advice from experience."

Esther Dyson, Founder, EDventure Holdings

"This conference is clearly a labor of love for a group of dedicated professionals who care deeply about the Eastern European entrepreneurs. From the value-packed educational panels, to the star-studded key note speakers' line up, to an amazing quantity of venture capitalists – this is a not to be missed event for any high tech entrepreneur,"

Richard Guha, President of the Marketing Executives Network and Managing Partner at MaxBrandEquity

"As Stanford MBA students, we were exposed to a lot of VC firms both from the Valley and abroad. It is at Stanford that we met Anna Dvornikova, an absolutely amazing business leader and (by our big luck) our friend, who was the center of the Russian Silicon Valley professional community, and was doing a huge work to connect Russia and the Valley. Anna helped us a lot with kick-starting Wikimart, put us to our first-ever conference, introduced us to most of Russian VCs. And all that happened in a very short time span! It was the beginning of a six-month journey that despite the particularly tough times resulted in an extraordinarily group of investors backing our start-up."

Maxim Faldin and Kamil Kurmakayev,
co-CEOs, Wikimart