This is the third installment in my Best 40 Movies of the Decade series of posts. The feedback so far has been pretty positive, but I wonder if that is because readers think I’m going to put their favorite films in the last 20! I decided last night that after the final post, I’ll include a list of other films that didn’t make the top 40 cut, but are five stars nonetheless. So let’s get going and start with #20, about a family of superheroes… Read the rest of this entry »
If Twitter is the new Walter Cronkite, Gov 2.0 is the new Camelot. As the optimism of JFK’s time brought the best and the brightest to Washington DC and Houston (for NASA), the Obama administration’s commitment to opening up government has attracted a large number of technologists to government for really the first time ever. 
This is not to say that the tech community hasn’t always been more than willing to sell to government – we always have and always will, but two recent conferences have confirmed to me what others have been predicting would hopefully happen, that not only is the government encouraging innovation from the private sector (or as Anil Dash joked this week “or what everyone else calls the world”), but a growing number of tech stars are putting aside riches or the hope of riches to serve (at least temporarily). At both SuperNova in San Francisco this week and the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon in Mountain View a few weeks ago – both a coast away from DC – I and other entrepreneurs got face-to-face time with a wide range of leaders in the federal government. We didn’t have to go through red tape, get on anyone’s calendar, or for that matter have to fly to DC – they came to us. At the Random Hacks of Kindness, we had the Administrator of FEMA speak to 50 or so crisis mappers for over an hour. At one point, he was wringing his hands saying “we don’t even know the questions to ask”. When the head of FEMA comes to a hacker’s garage in Silicon Valley to plead to the tech community for help, how can we not respond? Read the rest of this entry »
This is the second post in my countdown of my 40 best movies of the decade. You can read #31-40 here. Let’s start with #30, The Motorcycle Diaries: Read the rest of this entry »
