A patsy is a person that is easily taken advantage of, the guy that gets set up to take the fall so the big wigs in power can extricate themselves from a situation free from blame. As you may have heard, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has named a new CEO today, Thorsten Heins. He takes over for co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis who are both moving to non-operational seats on RIM's board of directors. Poor Heins. This is a big break for a guy that started his career as an engineer. Yet, Balsillie and Lazaridis are setting Heins up to fail. RIM has a new patsy.
What do you get when you mix a train wreck ravaged by a tornado then washed away with the torrents of a tsunami? That would be BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Now the company has a new chief executive, as co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are turning over their tightly held reins of the once-powerful smartphone manufacturer to chief operating officer, Thorsten Heins.
Who is Thorsten Heins? He is a product designer and engineer that rose to be the COO under Balsillie and Lazaridis. Most people outside of the smartphone industry may not know of him for precisely that reason. RIM's co-CEOs have never been known to share the spotlight. Heins has said that he is willing to license RIM's QNX-based smartphone operating system and perform with "rigour and flawless execution." Execution of what, exactly?
His face looks like the 3D movie version of some happy-go-lucky cartoon character, so for some, concocting a Charles Addams-like killer caption for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is irresistible. On Friday the 13th, of all days, the Bloomberg Businessweek cover (for those of you who still read magazines) will feature Ballmer's face along with its own idea of a "Caption This" contest entry, literally plastered in pink all over him.
Perhaps unintentionally, the presentation comes off like a political statement, maybe as phrased by a Microsoft shareholder.
One of LinkedIn's greatest advantages is that it has a wealth of data on the workforce. It can take that data and analyze market segments to find trends of who works in a specific industry, what kind of education they have, what their background is, who they know, where they are from and so on. This morning LinkedIn released an infographic studying entrepreneurs and how they came to their position if life.
LinkedIn says it is "Sequencing the Startup DNA." Unsurprisingly, the top three schools that startup founders come from are Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan. Yet, LinkedIn goes on to dispel a myth of startup founders that concoct their ideas to change the world from their dorm rooms.
Flipboard is getting an editorial director. Josh Quittner, a director of digital editorial development for Time Inc., is leaving the magazine empire to join the fledgling tablet magazine startup. He will make the transition after the July 4th weekend, according to the New York Post.
Time Inc. is the publisher of CNN Money, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, Money and, of course, Time Magazine. He is perhaps best known in tech circles for an article he wrote in the early 1990s for Wired titled "Billions Registered: Right now, there are no rules to keep you from owning a bitchin' corporate name as your own Internet address." In the article, Quittner had bought the domain name mcdonalds.com and tried to give it to the fast food giant, which was clueless about the Internet at the time.
Bryce Roberts is co-founder of O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV) and an investor worth paying attention to. Roberts is in the news this week because of his high-profile critique of Angellist, the hot new investment network Robert Scoble has called the new Silicon Valley hype machine.
Roberts celebrates 10 years in venture capital this month. He began as part of Salt Lake City's Wasatch Venture Fund (now Epic Ventures), an affiliate of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, in March of 2001. We thought readers might like to know more about this interesting player in the tech community.
This week, leading tech news aggregator Techmeme turned 5 years old. The service launched in September 2005, under the name tech.memeorandum, and ReadWriteWeb was one of the first media publications to review it.
In 2005, tech.memeorandum mostly tracked blogs. In 2010, Techmeme tracks all types of media web sites. Everything from news wires, newspapers, professional blogs, corporate blogs and personal blogs. That's been a natural evolution, as blogs have become more like newspapers and magazines - and vice versa. What's been more surprising is Techmeme's shift from full automation to a mix of algorithms and human curation. In this interview with Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera, we talk about these and other changes over the past 5 years.
How do we explain the Web and what it means? With so many innovations changing our lives, that's a complex explanation. Now what if you had to do it in only a few words?
Marshall Kirkpatrick recently asked some of our readers that very question. We then picked 10 responses most worth sharing. Congratulations to those who made the list. And if you'd like to add more ideas to this ongoing discussion, please do so in the comments section below.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is joining Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Khosla Ventures as a public policy advisor for the firm's green-tech investments, according to a press release from the firm today. Founded by Vinod Khosla in 2004, Khosla Ventures is one of the leaders in environmental tech investing - a field of entrepreneurship Blair says is paramount to turning around the energy and climate crisis facing the world today.
Digital activism is defined by the newly launched Meta-Activism Project as "the practice of using digital technology for political and social change." One of the leaders in the field of digital activism is Mary Joyce, the founder and executive director of the Meta-Activism Project. Joyce is among the most knowledgeable and experienced digital activists in the world.
As a lead-up to the upcoming event in New York City with Chinese digital activist Ai Weiwei, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and yours truly, I interviewed Mary Joyce about the strategies and success stories of digital activism.
