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Showing posts from December, 2008

Register for CoolPeople Beta

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We have now opened registration for our cool new CoolPeople application . CoolPeople finds influencers, trendsetters, and creators, and even measures their success. This can be done for example for "nanotechnology entrepreneurs in India", but also for "John Smith". It even finds the attributes of the people related to "John Smith". The picture below shows the CoolPeople network about the topic "Swarm Creativity" as a cybermap social network picture. The next picture shows the CoolPeople list view of the CoolPeople query "US President" If you want to see even more before pre-registering, try a dynamic preview: click on the "Condor" picture here which will bring up a dynamic cybermap about "swarm creativity".

Bankers are all Mad(off) – it’s communities we trust!

There are two articles in today’s NYT which resume where we stand regarding trust in ourselves, society, and our future. The first one is by NYT columnist Paul Krugmann, who talks about the Madoff economy. While everybody deplores the criminal tactics of Bernie Madoff, who, in the biggest Ponzi scheme of all times, squandered 50 billion dollars of investor money coming from anywhere on earth, Krugman makes the point that the rest of the Wallstreet bankers is not much better than Madoff. All of them got outrageously rich through outsized bonuses collected on trades in high-yielding, but highly risky assets. As the smoke at Wallstreet is slowly clearing, the bankers are keeping their bonuses, while the investors' money is gone. While Mr. Madoff skipped a few steps, simply stealing his customers’ money while passing on some of it to his earlier investors, the other bankers collected huge fees while exposing investors to risks they did not understand. The incomes of these employees i