[vimeo 6827318]

* Understand risk. Buy low, sell high. Manage your risk.

* Spend your time (as in investor) on the companies that are doing well, don’t just “nickel and dime” the ones that are failing.

* The cost of failure is decreasing. If you start from open source, and have a designer, an engineer, a products guy, users, and you get growing 30% a month or so, you don’t even need to write a business plan. [just after 9:00 minutes into the video – THIS IS THE KEY point I want to make]. If you can get your project to the point where it is running, growing, perhaps bringing in some money, you bring in the VC investors at that point – no earlier!

* Open standards give you a big advantage. Big companies spend $ millions to even think about a new project, but you can get your project off the ground for far less by starting with open source, good ideas and good thinking.

* Development methodology needs to be flexible, iterative, and respond to what you can learn from your customers. ”If you’ve launched your product and you’re not embarrassed by it, you‘ve launched too late.”

* Distribution. Every failed startup has had a business model, team, and so forth, but no users. Almost every team that has users eventually comes up with a business model [if they’re smart and paying attention]. You must be viral – you must infect your customers.

The post Joi Ito on Innovation and Startups appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The AirJaldi 2006 Summit, held in Dharamsala, India, was a several-day sequence of presentations, panels and then a week of workshops, dealing with Wireless infrastructure and how these can be used to further the development of the world into a place where veryone can live a healthy, happy life. The meeting was attended by social activists of many sorts, all of whom had an interest in using communications technologies.

Here’s your action item for today: The Video page for Airjaldi I would recommend that you take a look at what’s available there.Here are two of my favorites:

Dr. Rodger Downer, keynote speaker, and President Emeritus of the University of Limerick (Ireland), A Global Perspective on Sustainability {28 minutes running time}

Dr. Richard Stallman, keynote speaker, On free software, human rights, development and GNU. {52 minutes running time IMPORTANT NOTE: the camera was not rolling until shortly after the talk was underway}

Everything else on that page is worth viewing! Just a reminder.

You can find all of my articles on AirJaldi here in my blog. I tried to blog the conference in real-time, since we had wi-fi available in the hall, but it was really a challenge. It’s hard to estimate how much bandwidth, and how many routers, to provide for so many tech-literate participants. So I ended up writing blog entries each evening, and then posting them during the day. This set off an inquiry into offline blogging tools (like MarsEdit and Ecto) which I use to this day. And an overview of blogging tools. And it continued my series I’m a Turtle about how I carry my “home” (computer) on my back(pack) everywhere I go (cyber-nomadics).

The post Looking back at video and ICT4D appeared first on Sky's Blog.