Amit is one of those special people who came forward to help us when we were getting ready to launch CurdBee few years back. We just dropped him a mail inviting him to check CurdBee and share his thoughts, possible improvements we can do, etc. But we never thought he would even have time left in his schedule to pay attention to us, we being total strangers. But he did and replied back within matter of hours.

Today we think its our turn to help this wonderful entrepreneur, who’s fighting against Leukemia and is looking for a bone marrow doner from South Asian descent. If you are one of them who’s living in US, you can surely help Amit. Not a South Asian descent living in US? Still you can spread the word and we salute all those efforts.

Tony Bacigalupo wrote a detailed post about Amit and here’s an excerpt,

” Amit is the founder of the endlessly wonderful DIY photography site Photojojo. He’s the cofounder of Jelly, a casual coworking community which started in New York in 2006 and spread to over 60 cities worldwide, acting as the starting point for countless coworking communities. The original Jelly in New York was my first coworking experience, and my firsthand inspiration to dedicate myself to what would become New Work City.

Amit has leukemia. He was diagnosed only two weeks ago, but already so much has happened. He’s undergoing chemotherapy now at Connecticut’s Smilow Cancer Center in Yale-New Haven Hospital, near his family.”

Read the post and see how to contribute: http://tonybgoode.tumblr.com/post/11098100728/lets-help-amit-defeat-leukemia

We’ve been keeping close watch on Magento Commerce from it’s release. It has really filled the void of an open source e-commerce system. However, it seems there are several concerns when it is to be used in production.

Magento Commerce has been criticized in the past for being too bloated. I agree it is. A single, uncached page load takes as much as 20MB of memory, which is a bit much for a web application. While Magento can be criticized for being too bloated, many other popular apps are bloated, and that bloat can generally be solved by server tuning and hardware. The issue of Magento extends further to a much more important issue: security vulnerabilities in the administration panel.

Magento Commerce Security Vulnerabilities

Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a super cool prototype of a computer system which can turn any surface into an interactive display screen. It can be coupled with Internet, to create a digital **6th sense**. Check this out.

Twitter – our favourite little micro blogging tool has opened  pathway
to a new way of communication and it’s becoming a mainstream
information channel. For both CurdBee and Hotelotravel Twitter has
become a handy tool to get more in touch with users and we can’t help
but fall in love with this handy gadget. How ever as much as popular
and useful it has become, it too has faced woes of economic collapse to
top off the lack of a proper business model to keep it sustained.

This quote pretty much sums it.

The bad news: The startup makes zero dollars — still. In this
economy — VC
funding is drying up, maybe you’ve heard — that means Twitter
could shutter as suddenly as it appeared.

To know the full story yourself follow this  – Announcing The Create A Twitter Revenue Model Contest

But on the plus side of the story, some good ideas have come up and you can
give your feed back to choose the best one out of them and try to salvage this handy way of communication. 11 Business Plans For Twitter

Today, US beekeepers are faced with a great challenge with Colony Collapse Disorder, which causes huge losses due to millions bees being killed in the winter season. Extinction of bees would be a serious problem (not only we loose a brand identity, but our food too). Aaron E. Hirsh suggests to restore natural habitat and right geographic arrangement for wild-bees near the crops, as a solution to this. Interesting to see how world is moving towards permaculture.

Nice visualization of people editing Barack Obama’s wikipedia page from October 2005 to November 2008 (by Jamie Dubs).

If you want to spread the word about something in the virtual world, the
easiest way is to use social web. For projects like
Hotelotravel and
CurdBee we have used it excessively to
take the word to the people that are in need of such products.

However this is another aspect of social web that worth your two cents -
The unforseen consequences of social web.

We all love Twitter. But how to use it for branding and get in touch with customers? Here are some most popular brands in Twitter and people behind it.

Lets wish speedy recovery and good health for the most innovative CEO of our time, Steve Jobs.
http://stevegetwell.com/