Alex Lindahl

Feb 18

Startup Lessons From Syracuse University: Vol. 1

Dec 22

Crowdsourcing Medal Design For The Olympics

The first ever Youth Olympics will be held in Singapore. Interestingly, they’re crowdsourcing the design of the 1st time Youth Olympic Medals. Winners will receive a week-long VIP trip for two to the games, a replica of the Youth Olympic Games gold medal, and PR package that will give visibility to the designer.

This is incredibly cool. I’m a huge fan of crowdsourcing and have had tremendous success crowdsourcing the Open Economist and Clean Economies logos.

I received nearly 300 submissions over the course of 3 days for the Clean Economies one. I wonder how many they’ll get for the Olympics. Check out their gallery so far. I’m not that impressed with them yet. However, the better ones usually come later when designers start building off of ideas and each other’s designs.

I’m planning on writing a post explaining some of the best practices I learned throughout the process.

Posted via email from Open Economist | Comment »

Open Government Directive & Citizen Participation

Obama’s new open government directive marks a turning point geared towards bringing government and citizens closer together. The new Obama administration mandate pushes U.S. government agencies to be more transparent by providing information in “open formats” online. Data has always been available to the public by request under the Freedom of Information Act. However, few people know and request the data because its usually an arduous processes, difficult to request and retrieve, and not particularly user friendly for building web applications.

Continue reading on Clean Economies: Open Government Directive Mandates Data Accessibility

Posted via email from Open Economist | Comment »

Using Open Source To Visualize Afghanistan Election Data

Problems are usually easier to solve when you can see them visually. Understanding of the data is even more important if you’re figuring out how trends correlate to triggers and underlying variables. Perhaps this is why it’s so difficult for us to enact solutions, on a personal and group level, to thwart plaguing issues such as world hunger, deforestation, poverty, and pollution amongst others.

After stumbling across the topic of data visualization, I’m convinced that open data initiatives and open source web technologies will play a critical role to track and solve local and international issues.

Open Data Visualization of Afghanistan Election Data on Clean Economies.

Posted via email from Open Economist | Comment »

Sep 01

DailyTailgate: Simple and witty sports info delivered to you -

Calling all sports enthusiasts (and people who should know a bit more about sports): there is a new tool on the market worth checking out. DailyTailgate is a refreshingly simple and witty…

Aug 22

8 Free Online Entrepreneurial Finance Classes from MIT -

Running a business is never easy, especially if it’s your first time going it on your own. There are a million things to remember, clients to find, employees to be managed and of course, money to be…

Aug 19

(via haylieerin)

Sequoia Capital’s new homepage. They funded Google. Proof enough they know how to invest.

Aug 17

Can Microfinance Cure Poverty?

“My own view is that we have to approach extreme poverty a little like the way in which a doctor might approach a patient. By that I mean do a diagnosis and understand what is it that is really ailing the particular country, the particular region. Sometimes its terrible governance and the question is how to improve the governance and the hope for the kind of change that is needed. In other places it’s the terrible burden of disease that may be addressable by good public health measures. In other places it is to show how to grow more food. In other places its how to get business going and microfinance has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool.

Once the basics are in place, the people are eating and can survive, then microfinance can play a huge role in helping a poor community find ways through the market to get new opportunities, to earn new income, to start saving, making investments and start the process of climbing the ladder of economic development in your children, in your business or your farm and continuing up the process of improving skills, specialisation, new business ventures and so on. We’ve learnt that microfinance can be a wonderful tool for that.”

Jeffrey Sachs - Director, The Earth Institute, Columbia University

davidkaneda:

10 Levels of Intimacy in Today’s Communication (via geofox)