Wanted: Manic Entrepreneurs

Brian

http://dealbook.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/just-manic-enough-seeking-perfect-entrepreneurs/?scp=10&sq=David%20Segal&st=cse

Imagine you are a venture capitalist, David Segal writes in The New York Times. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

You don’t know what “the game layer” is, let alone whether it should be built atop the world. But he has a passionate speech about a business plan, conceived when he was a college freshman, that he says will change the planet — making it more entertaining, more engaging, and giving humans a new way to interact with businesses and one another.

If you give him $750,000, he says, you can have a stake in what he believes will be a $1-billion-a-year company.

Interested? Before you answer, consider that the man displays many of the symptoms of a person having what psychologists call a hypomanic episode. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual — the occupation’s bible of mental disorders — these symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.

13-Year-Old Asher Brown Was Bullied to Death for Being Gay

Brian

http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2010/09/28/asher-brown/

Bullying is an omnipresent and seemingly ever-growing problem in schools these days, so much so that CNN has an upcoming special about it beginning Monday. Bullying at any level is uncalled for and unacceptable, but is horrifying when a child is literally “bullied to death,” as in the case of Phoebe Prince and now 13-year-old Asher Brown, who was ridiculed by his classmates for “for being small. For his religious beliefs. For the way he dressed. And for being gay.”

How One Small Business Increased Web Traffic by 300% With Real-Time Analytics

Brian

http://www.readwriteweb.com/biz/2010/09/how-small-business-increased-traffic-by-300-percent-real-time-analytics.php

For any small business trying to thrive online, there are few questions more critical or often, confounding: How can we increase traffic to our business’s Website on a budget? And then, once they’re there, how can we convert them to paying customers?

There are lots of companies, SEO gurus and social media pundits offering up their solutions, some of them more legitimate than others. One company we spoke to recently took an approach that led to a 300% increase in organic search traffic in just three months.

Corensic, a two-year-old company that specializes in building tools for multi-core software developers, is using real-time marketing platform Optify to analyze their traffic and optimized their site based on their findings.

“We just pointed Optify at our site and it gave us a checklist of things to do,” said Prashant Sridharan, Corensic’s senior director of marketing. Many of the suggested changes, such as putting important headings in the proper HTML heading tags and including keywords in URLs, were easily implemented.

Robert Zemeckis Plots Return To Live Action–And Time Travel

Brian

http://www.deadline.com/hollywood/

EXCLUSIVE: It has been a decade since Robert Zemeckis last directed a live action film, the classic Cast Away. It has been 25 years since he launched the time travel trilogy Back to the Future. I’m told that Zemeckis is plotting a return to both folds at Warner Bros, where he is at the center of a deal for the time travel pitch Timeless. It’s a big tent pole picture that will be written by Mike Thompson. Zemeckis and his ImageMovers will produce. Deal is mid six-figures.

ITV To Start Charging For Internet Extras

Brian

http://www.deadline.com/2010/09/itv-to-start-charging-for-internet-extras/

Adam Crozier, CEO of UK broadcaster ITV, has suggested making viewers pay for extra content, such as alternative endings. At one point he talked about charging Brit TV viewers to watch hugely popular soap Coronation Street first online, but rowed back from that. Crozier was speaking at the Royal Television Society international conference in London this afternoon. Everything on ITV.com is free at present. Crozier said his top priority is to invest in ITV.com, which he said had been woefully underfunded. The ITV boss reiterated that 50% of revenue must come from pay-TV, online and selling formats overseas, compared with 26% today. He’s not interested in making shows available on content aggregators such as Hulu though. TV commissions will be influenced by how they translate online, he said. “The first thing we need to turn is turn ITV.com into a really robust site,” said Crozier, who joined ITV as CEO in April. Increasing the amount of programming produced in-house by production arm ITV Studios is another priority. In-house only accounts for 47% of programme commissions, he said – and drops to 16% if you strip long-running soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale out. ITV is looking to acquire independent production companies to beef up ITV Studios. “We need to focus on more long-running renewable series,” he said. “Owning more rights is key to our future.” Crozier said that ITV’s historic problems haven’t stemmed from not knowing what to do but “a failure to execute”.

She’s the power behind food shows

Brian

http://www.jsonline.com/features/food/103893759.html

Peek behind the scenes of hundreds of cooking shows and you’ll likely find JoAnn Cianciulli.

From Food Network to Bravo’s “Top Chef Masters,” Cianciulli has helped create a new genre known as food television. Most recently, she was the supervising culinary producer of Fox’s “MasterChef,” starring Gordon Ramsay, Graham Elliot and Joe Bastianich. She also authored the companion “MasterChef Cookbook” ($24.99, Rodale).

After studying film and television at New York University, she headed for California and the movie business. Always a food lover, she learned the language of chefs at her father’s restaurant in Queens, New York. That passion for food, and the ability to communicate with chefs, helped her create a unique career in food television and cookbooks.

She’s collaborated on cookbooks with Tyler Florence, Aaron Sanchez and Michael Mina. Now she’s co-authoring “Michael’s Genuine Food & Drink” with James Beard Award-winner Michael Schwartz. Next up, she’s producing “Marcel’s Quantum Kitchen,” a look at molecular gastronomy expected to air in February on SyFy Channel.

Tell gay teens: It gets better

Brian

http://www.suntimes.com/news/commentary/2741188,CST-EDT-edit24b.article

It happened again two weeks ago in Greensburg, Ind. A 15-year-old boy, Billy Lucas, killed himself because he could no longer bear the bullying.

For years, other students, suspecting he was homosexual, had called him “fag,” mocked the way he walked and talked and told him he should kill himself. On Sept. 9, he hanged himself in his family’s barn.

When Dan Savage, author of “Savage Love,” the syndicated sex column in the Chicago Reader, read about Billy, he had one thought: “I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better.”

That is exactly right — it does gets better. To be gay in America, if in fact Billy was gay, need not be the hell it once was.

But how do we get that message out where it matters most? There is no openly gay community in the average small town.

Savage’s response, to which we’d like to call attention today, was to launch the “It Gets Better Project” via YouTube, to reach out to tormented young gay people. The project consists of testimonials from adult gay men and women that, yep, high school is not the end of the world and, count on it, life does get better. You are not alone.

Showing Gay Teenagers a Happy Future

Brian

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/showing-gay-teens-a-happy-future/

A new online video channel is reaching out to teenagers who are bullied at school for being gay. The message: life really does get better after high school.

The YouTube channel, called the “It Gets Better Project,” was created by the Seattle advice columnist and activist Dan Savage. Mr. Savage says he was moved by the suicide of Billy Lucas, a Greensburg, Ind., high school student who was the target of slurs and bullying. The channel promises to be a collection of videos from adults in the gay community who share their own stories of surviving school bullying and moving on to build successful careers and happy home lives. The first video shows Mr. Savage with his partner of 16 years, Terry. The men tell their own stories of being bullied, finding each other and becoming parents. This week I spoke with Mr. Savage about the new channel and why he decided to reach out to teenagers. Here’s our conversation.

‘It Gets Better’: Wisdom From Grown-Up Gays and Lesbians to Bullied Kids

Brian

‘It Gets Better’: Wisdom From Grown-Up Gays and Lesbians to Bullied Kids

“Bullycide” is a colloquialism referring to suicide that results from intense bullying — think Megan Meier and Phoebe Price and Jaheem Herera, 11, a Georgia boy who hanged himself in 2009 after being tormented by classmates for being “gay and a snitch.”
The link between bullying and suicide in teens has been on the forefront of media coverage for several years now, and it is children like Jaheem — who are gay or are perceived to be gay — that are most at risk. According to a study from Penn State University, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and “queer” youth (a catch-all term for gender and sexually non-normative people) are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight peers. Of all American teens who die by their own hand, 30% are LGBTQ.