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Silicon Valley Investors Wants to Fund a 'Good For Society' Facebook Replacement (calacanis.com)
Silicon Valley angel investor Jason Calacanis just announced the "Openbook Challenge," a competition to create a replacement for Facebook.
"Over the next three months, 20 finalists will compete for seven $100,000 incubator grants," explains long-time Slashdot reader reifman. "Their goal is to find startups with a sustainable business model e.g. subscriptions, reasonable advertising, cryptocurrency. etc. And they want it to be 'good for society.'"
Jason Calacanis writes: All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they're not shut down by the government -- they're slowly replaced by better products. So, let's start the process of replacing Facebook... We already have two dozen quality teams cranking on projects and we hope to get to 100...
This is not an idea or business plan competition. We're looking for teams that can actually build a better social network, and we'll be judging teams primarily based upon their ability to execute... Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more.
Calacanis has even created a discussion group for the competition...on Facebook. And his announcement includes a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Don't be too proud to copy."
"Over the next three months, 20 finalists will compete for seven $100,000 incubator grants," explains long-time Slashdot reader reifman. "Their goal is to find startups with a sustainable business model e.g. subscriptions, reasonable advertising, cryptocurrency. etc. And they want it to be 'good for society.'"
Jason Calacanis writes: All community and social products on the internet have had their era, from AOL to MySpace, and typically they're not shut down by the government -- they're slowly replaced by better products. So, let's start the process of replacing Facebook... We already have two dozen quality teams cranking on projects and we hope to get to 100...
This is not an idea or business plan competition. We're looking for teams that can actually build a better social network, and we'll be judging teams primarily based upon their ability to execute... Keep in mind, that while ideas really matter, Zuckerberg has shown us, execution matters more.
Calacanis has even created a discussion group for the competition...on Facebook. And his announcement includes a famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg.
"Don't be too proud to copy."
No need to thank me. Just use Diaspora*, open, distributed, optionally self hosted Facebook alternative
At best, this is an historical sidebar. At worst, a ploy to take us off topic. I'll respond once and then drop out.
I agree the 2nd Amendment was there originally to protect the others, or worst case it was "the reset button on the constitution". Reading the letters and essays by Federalists and Anti-Federalists makes clear this was the intent. Military technology at the time made it sensible.
However, successful rebellion means "We won", not "We killed a lot of people and then we were killed". For a rebellion, you are putting yourself on the line, not some proxy nation/tribe/oppressed people. "Our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor" et al. The Gatling gun (Civil War), the Maxim (WW I), the tank (WW II), the Apache attack helicopter (Vietnam), and the AI-controlled drone (Middle East) pretty much obliterated the value of rifles (automatic or not) for purposes of successful rebellion against the US Govt. Furthermore, for urban rebellion, guns make enough noise to be triangulated, and any human holding one will be caught on video and identified. Any serious rebel is thinking Cambridge Analytica-style Big Data, weaponized drone swarms, and infowar campaigns to convince a few million peiople to risk death for the cause. [Ohhh, so that is what the Koch brothers and Mercers are up to... :-)]
It becomes pretty clear that informed (not mal-informed) voting is vastly more efficient than guns for changing the nation's path. For that we need a sense of community, not wedge issues like gun control. Which brings us back to the need for a non-commercial free-as-in-speech social media mechanism.
So, while I reload carefully enough to shoot "ragged clover leafs" with my rifle, and can watch the rechamber with my pistol, all my energy these days goes into makerspaces, meetups, and playing music. "Make love not war".
No need to worry. Jason Calacanis is a publicity whore and little more than a con artist.
I've been to one of his hackathons before. They're huge. I'll give him that. He promises huge prizes from his own (supposed) fund, but then if you read the fine print, he reserves the rights not to offer any such prize to the winners if they don't meet his (unspecified) criteria. Plus in addition to that, should he select you, you have to give him a part of your future company in exchange for the prize money. No thank you, Jason. If you do go to his hackathons, make sure that the sponsors (other than him) are offering decent prizes. Do not believe in the BS he personally tries to sell you. If you represent a company interested in sponsoring a hackathon, my suggestion is that you sponsor other hackathons than his.
The event I was at ran out of food super quickly. Jason Calacanis begrudgingly ordered more pizza, but only after participants complained on Twitter that the event had no food. But you had to write something nice about him on Twitter and you had to show them your comment on your phone before you could get your slice of pizza. I kid you not. That's the kind of maturity you're dealing with when you're dealing with this guy.