The Human Genome project was completed at the start of the last decade, and only in the last two years have we really begun to reap the fruits of the immense undertaking. I talk about some of commercial players and legal issues surrounding the wide spread adoption of personal genomic technology in medicine at the First AMA-IEEE Conference on Individualized Healthcare blog.

Incidentally, I’m also on the organizing committee for the conference mentioned above. Consider attending the conference if you are interested in Individualized Healthcare!

First AMA-IEEE EMBS Medical Technology Conference on Individualized Health Care
23-23 March 2010, Renaissance Mayflower Hotel, Washington, DC

The Harvard Business Review recently published their article on the Top 100 Best-Performing CEOs in the World. It’s probably not a surprise to many that Steve Jobs is #1 on the list (Apple, Pixar) or that there is only one woman (#8 – Meg Whitman of eBay) on the top 100. I am however, surprised by which woman they picked. Meg Whitman practically ran eBay into the ground. Indra Nooyi of Pepsico would have been a much better choice.

After glancing at a few of their selections, I decided to crunch some of the numbers given to see if there are any interesting trends. First, we can clearly see that HBR has a bias towards western CEOs (specifically, the US and UK).

The industries are pretty much what one expects, with energy and financial services leading the way.

Contrary to the prevalent white knight CEO myth, most good CEOs tend to be insiders, and do not hold MBA degrees. An MBA only seems to be important IF you want to be a white knight CEO.

Though if you do want to try and be a white knight CEO, USA and UK are about the only countries that really has that type of culture.

There’s a lot more analysis that you could run on the data if you want. I’m going to save you some effort in screen scraping and just give you the excel sheet that I used here.

So this concludes my first blog entry in the new decade! As some of you might have noticed, I’ve also completely revamped the website. If you have any comments, (constructive or hateful ones), please let me know! Happy New Year!

Wow, I’m really impressed with the disastrous state of economy. I don’t really have much to say about it except that I am expecting these companies to fail within the next year or so:

• Citigroup
• GM
• Ford
• Chrysler
• Goldman Sachs
• Yahoo
• Citadel

Let’s see what actually happens….

In the process of managing non-profits and startups, I’ve used many different online tools to better enable collaboration and communication in organizations. Through the years, I’ve tried many different tools, and now think I have a pretty good list. Please bear in mind that the three dimensions I’m optimizing across are ease of use, reliability, and cost. I am still looking for solutions in two major areas, and would love suggestions if anyone has them.

Website Registration: I’ve used GoDaddy and Namecheap in the past and they are both really good. If you have to be anonymous, try International Alliance Privacy Services.

Website Hosting: I’ve tried self hosting, as well as many different online hosts. If you have a good technical person on board, and REALLY have the need for something advanced (cron jobs, RoR, significant processing needs), try either dedicated hosting or colocation. For dedicated hosting, I really like Softlayer. For NYC based colocation, I really like Pilosoft. For most website hosting needs, all you need is a good shared hosting provider. I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech. They are extraordinarily cheap for low traffic websites, and I have yet to see them go down. I do NOT recommend GoDaddy, or NameCheap for web hosting.

DNS Hosting: Normally I just use my domain registrant, or my webhost, for DNS hosting. However, if I really need to be anonymous, I will use FreeDNS.

Email Needs: I used to use my own mail servers, but now, I completely rely on Google Apps. If you are a registered 501-c3 organization, you can also get GoogleApps Education and Google Checkout for free. Therefore you get the hyped up version of Google Apps, as well as free payment processing!

Actual Website:: I am now a total Wordpress convert. It started as a blogging software, but has grown to become a very very stable content management system. I’ve tried other CMS like Joomla and Drupal, but they are really really complicated to work with.

Internal Website: Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is great for internal websites. Any member can just click on edit and then add or remove information. I’ve tried other wiki installations, but none are easier to maintain than MediaWiki.

UPDATE 1: I’ve since tried out “Google Sites”, an app that’s part of the ever expanding Google Apps, and found it even superior to Mediawiki. Here you’ll also be able to easily manage spreadsheets and files!

Phone Service: For those who simply need a phone number, but don’t necessarily want to answer it all the time, I highly recommend the currently freeGrandCentral if you can secure an invitation. If you can’t secure an invitation, you can use RingCentral.

Fax Service: For a great fax to email service, definitely try RingCentral.

Conference Call Service: Unless you really need a toll-free number, I highly recommend FreeConferenceCall. There is a short message in the beginning of the call saying this is a service provided by freeconferencecall.com, but do you really mind?!

Forms, Spreadsheets and Documents: I really like GoogleDocs (part of Google Apps mentioned above) for simple spreadsheets that are shared between multiple people, i.e. financial projections between executive committee members. However, if you need to construct a nice looking form to accept information, Google Spreadsheet really sucks. I’ve found Zoho Creator to be absolutely amazing in that respect though. They even allow for scripted actions like automatically sending an email using data you just collected as acknowledgment. For example, at the New York Interscholastic Mathematics League, we use it to collect registration information.

Business Banking: I am starting to really like Chase Business banking. They have a pretty high monthly service charge, but one that can be waived if you open a business credit card and charge any amount on it each month. So simply have your credit card make 1 dollar monthly payment onto Paypal.

Newsletter: I’ve tried out Constant Contact and they are a great service provider. Unfortunately, they are also decently expensive (15 dollars a month) for organizations starting out. I’ve tried open source solutions like Dadamail and Phplist and they are both too difficult to use for any normal human being. If anyone knows of any good newsletter provider, hosted or not, I would LOVE to know.

Project Management This is an area I’ve tried many tools and just can’t quite get used to any of them. BaseCamp seems to be the best at the moment, but they are REALLY expensive. Also, I STILL don’t know the difference between milestones and tasks. Ever since Activecollab betrayed the open source community, it has started to really suck even as a tool. I have found Collabtive to be a really good imitation of BaseCamp, but not nearly as polished. So if someone knows of a good project management tool, I would love to know.

So there you go, my years of trying out different tools boiled down onto one blog post!

In the interest of anti-stealth, I’m going to publicly announce one of the for profit ventures that I am currently working on. Incidentally, what exactly happened to the NextNY anti-stealth movement? There was a lot of activity at the end of October, and then the whole movement seemingly collapsed.

Anyway, a friend and I have started exploring the idea of a new campus based venture. Many of you who are students are probably familiar with the few awkward minutes that you spend every few hours in an elevator traveling to and from class. While you are in the elevator, wouldn’t it be nice to have a nice LCD displaying current campus events that might be of interest to you, or perhaps an ad telling you about the discounted food at Chipotle down the block this week?

Our idea is exactly that, we would like to create a network of LCDs in campus elevators that would stream both campus events as well as advertisements. A well established player, Captivate Network, currently does this in the office building market. We would like to stay away from office buildings at the moment, and focus purely on college campuses (Facebook vs LinkedIn analogy?).

Since both of us are current Columbia students, in fact both BME PhD students, we have decided to use Columbia University as a pilot site. I haven’t had time to put together a powerpoint presentation yet, but I will definitely post it in the next few days. For now we are tackling several thorny issues:

• Is it even possible to do it in NY? We are currently checking the New York Fire Code. Safety code for elevators and escalators : an American national standard by the American Society for Mechanical Engineers will be our guide. Looks like I won’t need sleeping pills tonight.
• We have done some back of the envelope calculations to see whether the idea is sustainable and scalable. If we intend to get more funding, we will have to produce a full financial projection. The projection itself is of course of no great importance to either investors or us, since reality almost always deviate significantly from the projections. Though it’s important to have one anyway, if nothing else than to show that due diligence was performed.
• To start campus based businesses that depend so much on campus infrastructure, we are clearly going to need a faculty champion. We have started approaching various members of the engineering faculty, the business school faculty, as well as Columbia’s Science and Technology Ventures group to begin soliciting feedback and buy-ins. We’ve had a lot of success getting people excited about the concept, but haven’t found a champion of the project yet. If you know of a Columbia faculty who might be interested, please let me know!
• I will also begin to approach NYU and CCNY about the idea as well, in case Columbia falls through as a pilot site.
• We will clearly need a powerpoint presentation down the line. I’ll put up version 1.0 of the presentation in a few days.

Since we are still very early in our planning stages, we are open to all suggestions and ideas. Let me know if any of you have any feedback or have seen existing implementations on college campuses! If you happen to be a college student / faculty, and are interested in joining our team, shoot me an email: mail @ jackpo dot org.

All of us in the startup community have been debating whether the bubble is once again upon us. It is my strong opinion that indeed it has

Dmitry sent me this video when I told him I will be teaching Entrepreneurship next semester, check it out!

As many of you know by now, my team and I launched PeerDecision recently. The site intends to facilitate high school seniors’ college admissions process. We have included a lot of features that we think would have been useful when we applied to colleges ourselves.. but that was quite a while ago. For any HS students who chance upon this site, go check out PeerDecision and tell me what you think! I’d love to hear any feedback that you have (jack at peerdecision.com).

Now back to the main topic of this post. As I was researching for a blog post for PD, I came upon Princeton Review’s financial statements. Many would probably assume that they make money hands over fist from their books being pimped everywhere, and their classes costing a ridiculous amount of money. It turns out that in fact the opposite is happening! Princeton Review is in fact hemorrhaging money!

Above is a chart showing Princeton Review’s operating results per quarter since the beginning of 2002. The darker color bar is the result for the quarter, and the lighter color bar is the cumulative result since 1st quarter 2002. You’ll notice that in the first quarter of 2004, Princeton Review took a massive charge of 30 million dollars and can’t seem to get its act together ever since…. The reason for the 30 million dollar charge? This is from their official press release:

• An impairment charge of $8.2 million to write down the goodwill associated with the Company’s 2001 acquisition of Embark.com, Inc.; and
• A valuation allowance against the Company’s deferred tax asset in the full amount of the asset, which is $22.1 million.

So, essentially a REALLY bad acquisition at the height of the dot com, and delinquent taxes… Talk about a messed up organization! It’s my hope that peerdecision will never end up like that

If you use the internet regularly, I’m sure you’ve mistyped a URL at least once or twice, and come across a webpage with nothing but useless links. This is actually a phenomenon called “domain squatting”. Almost every single domain name that remotely sounds like a word, or even the combination of two words have now been squatted on. These scum of the earth assholes’ are actually making fortunes abusing the open internet model.

The man who owns the Internet

Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you’ve never heard of, reports Business 2.0 Magazine. Here’s how the master of Web domains built a $300 million empire.

(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Kevin Ham leans forward, sits up tall, closes his eyes, and begins to type — into the air. He’s seated along the rear wall of a packed ballroom in Las Vegas’s Venetian Hotel. Up front, an auctioneer is running through a list of Internet domain names, building excitement the same way he might if vintage cars were on the block.

As names come up that interest Ham, he occasionally air-types. It’s the ultimate gut check. Is the name one that people might enter directly into their Web browser, bypassing the search engine box entirely, as Ham wants? Is it better in plural or singular form? If it’s a typo, is it a mistake a lot of people would make? Or does the name, like a stunning beachfront property, just feel like a winner?

…

That’s right, the guy makes HUNDREDS of MILLIONS of dollars contributing absolutely NOTHING to society. In fact, he actually affects society negatively. As an internet entrepreneur, we often find our prospective domains squatted on. Not only is he filling the internet with junk, he’s preventing others from contributing to the internet. For a bloody spammer, he sure seems awfully concerned about his own privacy:

Registrant
KEVINHAM.COM
c/o Whois IDentity Shield
142-757 W. Hastings St., Suite #777
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6C 1A1

Someone should find his real address, and give him a serious beating.

A good friend Aswin is leaving the States for good and returning to India to lead his startup.

What’s particularly cool about his startup is that it’s actually based on the theory of social contract. A company that revolves around solving infrastructural problems in the developing world, how cool is that?!

Incidentally, I would also like to use this post as proof that I predicted Aswin’s rise to the ruler of India well in advance. Good Luck Aswin!

Everyone talks about globalization these days. The US economists are furious over our increasing trade deficit, while blue collar workers are screaming bloody murder over illegal immigration and outsourcing. Even hackers are going global on their brute force attacks!

…
vcsa (206.132.218.244): 2 Time(s)
webalizer (206.132.218.244): 2 Time(s)
xfs (206.132.218.244): 2 Time(s)
helen (206.132.218.244): 1 Time(s)
joe (206.132.218.244): 1 Time(s)
karen (206.132.218.244): 1 Time(s)
mark (206.132.218.244): 1 Time(s)
mysql (88.191.34.83): 1 Time(s)
rodica (206.132.218.244): 1 Time(s)
root (88.191.34.83): 1 Time(s)
…

Rodica??? Seriously, how many people name Rodica do you know?!