I received the news that my friend and collegue John Reuben lost his son....an anquish no parent should have to have to know. Please read Johns outreach - and make a donation to his non-profit that helps teens. I did - I believe in Johns good work and have seen the results. If you already made a contribution from the email I sent, thank you - you have helped a teen!
Sincerely,
Paul Lavallee
From: John Reuben [mailto:jreuben@savingteens.org] Sent: Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:16 PMTo: VentureFuel@msn.comSubject: Passing Away Of My Son Michael
Friends & Associates,Many of you may have already heard about the passing of my son, Michael, this past weekend as the result of substance abuse related issues. As much as I have tried these many years, I could not help Mike escape the grip of his drugs of choice. And now I am faced with a void in my life that will be impossible to replace.Substance abuse is a horrid disease, a plague on our society. In 2004 I realized that my son had this problem and looked for a constructive way to channel my energies from worrying about my son. I formed a non-profit called Saving Teens In Crisis Collaborative (STICC) to help disadvantaged families with their children. STICC provides long term, substantive care for the children and support for the rest of the family. To date we have helped several families, some of which you can read about on our website at www.savingteens.orgWe are currently funding a family from Columbus, Ohio. His single Mom works three jobs and has watched her 14 year old son cycle into drug abuse and all that brings socially, academically, and legally. STICC will provide Billy with an environment where he can deal with his addiction, regain his academic initiative, and confront the emotional issues he has that in many cases can be the root of the problem. Afterwards we will provide the family transitional assistance to help Billy back into the mainstream and for the entire family to heal together.I hope that you will think about my story, read about the families we have helped, and participate in this war on this disease, one kid at a time. Please do so by visiting our website at https://app.etapestry.com/hosted/SavingTeensinCrisisCollabo/OnlineDonation.html Let's not let this happen to one more parent than it needs to.Thank you,John________________________John D. ReubenChairman & FounderSaving Teens In Crisis Collaborative(978) 852-2144mailto:jreuben@savingteens.org
Friday, September 12, 2008
Friday, May 09, 2008
The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits
By Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant
We spent three years studying 12 of the most successful nonprofits in recent U.S. history. They have come up with innovative solutions to pressing social problems, and they have spread these ideas nationally or internationally. In the business world, these organizations would be akin to companies like Google or eBay.
What we learned about these nonprofits astonished us, and intrigued others with long experience in the field. We believe that the framework we've discovered offers a new lens for understanding the social sector and what it takes to create extraordinary levels of social change. Any organization seeking to increase its social impact can emulate the six practices that we describe in detail below.
The secret to success lies in how great organizations mobilize every sector of society -- government, business, nonprofits, and the public -- to be a force for good. In other words, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. Textbook strategies like relentless fundraising, well-connected boards, and effective management are necessary, of course, but they are hardly sufficient. The high-impact nonprofits we studied are satisfied with building a "good enough" organization and then spending their time and energy focused externally on catalyzing large-scale systemic change. Great organizations work with and through others to create more impact than they could ever achieve alone.
"Give me a lever long enough, and I alone can move the world," is the common paraphrase of Archimedes. These twelve groups use the power of leverage to create tremendous change. Like a man lifting a boulder three times his weight with a lever and fulcrum, they have far more impact than their mere size or structure would suggest.
The organizations in this book seed social movements and help build entire fields. They shape government policy, and change the way companies do business. They engage and mobilize millions of individuals and, in so doing, help change public attitudes and behaviors. They nurture larger networks of nonprofits and collaborate rather than compete with their peers. They spend as much time managing external relationships and influencing other groups as they do worrying about building their own organizations. These high-impact nonprofits are not focused only on themselves but also on the relentless pursuit of results.
After a long process of studying these organizations, we began to see patterns in the ways they work. In the end, six of these patterns crystallized into the form presented here -- the six practices that high-impact nonprofits use to achieve extraordinary impact.
The first four practices are more external; they represent how these groups dramatically expand their impact outside the borders of their own organizations. In observing this external focus, we also realized that working outside the organization entails special practices inside that help these nonprofits relate more effectively to their environment. This led us to discern two additional internal practices that enable high-impact nonprofits to operate successfully in the outside world and bridge boundaries.
More specifically, we learned that great social sector organizations do these six things:
1. Advocate and serve. High-impact organizations don't just focus on doing one thing well. They may start out providing great programs, but eventually they realize that they cannot achieve systemic change through service delivery alone. So they add policy advocacy to access government resources or to change legislation, thus expanding their impact. Other nonprofits start out doing advocacy and later add grassroots programs to supercharge their strategy. Ultimately, all of them bridge the divide between service and advocacy, and become good at doing both.
2. Make markets work. Tapping into the power of self-interest and the laws of economics is far more effective than appealing to pure altruism. No longer content to rely on traditional notions of charity or to see the private sector as the enemy, great nonprofits find ways to work with markets and help business "do well while doing good." They influence business practices, build corporate partnerships, and develop earned-income ventures -- all ways of leveraging market forces to achieve social change on a grander scale.
3. Inspire evangelists. Great nonprofits see volunteers as much more than a source of free labor or membership dues. They create meaningful ways to engage individuals in emotional experiences that help them connect to the group's mission and core values. They see volunteers, donors, and advisers not only for what they can contribute to the organization in terms of time, money, and guidance but also for what they can do as evangelists for their cause. They build and sustain strong communities to help them achieve their larger goals.
4. Nurture nonprofit networks. Although most groups pay lip service to collaboration, many of them really see other nonprofits as competition for scarce resources. But high-impact organizations help the competition succeed, building networks of nonprofit allies and devoting remarkable time and energy to advancing their larger field. They freely share wealth, expertise, talent, and power with their peers, not because they are saints, but because it's in their self-interest to do so.
5. Master the art of adaptation. All the organizations in this book are exceptionally adaptive, modifying their tactics as needed to increase their success. They have responded to changing circumstances with one innovation after another. Along the way, they've made mistakes, and have even produced some flops. But unlike many nonprofits, they have also mastered the ability to listen, learn, and modify their approach based on external cues -- allowing them to sustain their impact and stay relevant.
6. Share leadership. We witnessed much charisma among the leaders in this book, but that doesn't mean they have oversize egos. These CEOs are exceptionally strategic and gifted entrepreneurs, but they also know they must share power in order to be a stronger force for good. They distribute leadership throughout their organization and their nonprofit network -- empowering others to lead. And they cultivate a strong second-in-command, build enduring executive teams with long tenure, and develop highly engaged boards in order to have more impact.
Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits; Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant; Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
By Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant
We spent three years studying 12 of the most successful nonprofits in recent U.S. history. They have come up with innovative solutions to pressing social problems, and they have spread these ideas nationally or internationally. In the business world, these organizations would be akin to companies like Google or eBay.
What we learned about these nonprofits astonished us, and intrigued others with long experience in the field. We believe that the framework we've discovered offers a new lens for understanding the social sector and what it takes to create extraordinary levels of social change. Any organization seeking to increase its social impact can emulate the six practices that we describe in detail below.
The secret to success lies in how great organizations mobilize every sector of society -- government, business, nonprofits, and the public -- to be a force for good. In other words, greatness has more to do with how nonprofits work outside the boundaries of their organizations than how they manage their own internal operations. Textbook strategies like relentless fundraising, well-connected boards, and effective management are necessary, of course, but they are hardly sufficient. The high-impact nonprofits we studied are satisfied with building a "good enough" organization and then spending their time and energy focused externally on catalyzing large-scale systemic change. Great organizations work with and through others to create more impact than they could ever achieve alone.
"Give me a lever long enough, and I alone can move the world," is the common paraphrase of Archimedes. These twelve groups use the power of leverage to create tremendous change. Like a man lifting a boulder three times his weight with a lever and fulcrum, they have far more impact than their mere size or structure would suggest.
The organizations in this book seed social movements and help build entire fields. They shape government policy, and change the way companies do business. They engage and mobilize millions of individuals and, in so doing, help change public attitudes and behaviors. They nurture larger networks of nonprofits and collaborate rather than compete with their peers. They spend as much time managing external relationships and influencing other groups as they do worrying about building their own organizations. These high-impact nonprofits are not focused only on themselves but also on the relentless pursuit of results.
After a long process of studying these organizations, we began to see patterns in the ways they work. In the end, six of these patterns crystallized into the form presented here -- the six practices that high-impact nonprofits use to achieve extraordinary impact.
The first four practices are more external; they represent how these groups dramatically expand their impact outside the borders of their own organizations. In observing this external focus, we also realized that working outside the organization entails special practices inside that help these nonprofits relate more effectively to their environment. This led us to discern two additional internal practices that enable high-impact nonprofits to operate successfully in the outside world and bridge boundaries.
More specifically, we learned that great social sector organizations do these six things:
1. Advocate and serve. High-impact organizations don't just focus on doing one thing well. They may start out providing great programs, but eventually they realize that they cannot achieve systemic change through service delivery alone. So they add policy advocacy to access government resources or to change legislation, thus expanding their impact. Other nonprofits start out doing advocacy and later add grassroots programs to supercharge their strategy. Ultimately, all of them bridge the divide between service and advocacy, and become good at doing both.
2. Make markets work. Tapping into the power of self-interest and the laws of economics is far more effective than appealing to pure altruism. No longer content to rely on traditional notions of charity or to see the private sector as the enemy, great nonprofits find ways to work with markets and help business "do well while doing good." They influence business practices, build corporate partnerships, and develop earned-income ventures -- all ways of leveraging market forces to achieve social change on a grander scale.
3. Inspire evangelists. Great nonprofits see volunteers as much more than a source of free labor or membership dues. They create meaningful ways to engage individuals in emotional experiences that help them connect to the group's mission and core values. They see volunteers, donors, and advisers not only for what they can contribute to the organization in terms of time, money, and guidance but also for what they can do as evangelists for their cause. They build and sustain strong communities to help them achieve their larger goals.
4. Nurture nonprofit networks. Although most groups pay lip service to collaboration, many of them really see other nonprofits as competition for scarce resources. But high-impact organizations help the competition succeed, building networks of nonprofit allies and devoting remarkable time and energy to advancing their larger field. They freely share wealth, expertise, talent, and power with their peers, not because they are saints, but because it's in their self-interest to do so.
5. Master the art of adaptation. All the organizations in this book are exceptionally adaptive, modifying their tactics as needed to increase their success. They have responded to changing circumstances with one innovation after another. Along the way, they've made mistakes, and have even produced some flops. But unlike many nonprofits, they have also mastered the ability to listen, learn, and modify their approach based on external cues -- allowing them to sustain their impact and stay relevant.
6. Share leadership. We witnessed much charisma among the leaders in this book, but that doesn't mean they have oversize egos. These CEOs are exceptionally strategic and gifted entrepreneurs, but they also know they must share power in order to be a stronger force for good. They distribute leadership throughout their organization and their nonprofit network -- empowering others to lead. And they cultivate a strong second-in-command, build enduring executive teams with long tenure, and develop highly engaged boards in order to have more impact.
Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits; Leslie R. Crutchfield and Heather McLeod Grant; Copyright © 2008 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material is used by permission of John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Ozzie Memo: Software is Dead, Long Live the Web
The Ozzie Memo: Software is Dead, Long Live the Web
Posted: 23 Apr 2008 01:40 AM CDT (From TechChrunch)
After a few years of trying to fill Bill Gates’ shoes as Microsoft’s chief software architect, Ray Ozzie is starting to hit his stride. In a remarkable strategy memo to employees (embedded below), Ozzie essentially shifts Microsoft’s mission from one of creating software for the PC and stand-alone servers to creating an interconnecting mesh between devices and people. He is not abandoning Windows or Office, but he is saying that the value of Microsoft’s software will increasingly depend less on what it can do on its own than what it can do with others. It is not about software anymore so much as it is about Web-based services. Ray, welcome to the club.
Excerpt:
Central to this strategy is our embrace of both a world of the web and a world of devices. Over the past ten years, the PC era has given way to an era in which the web is at the center of our experiences – experiences delivered not just through the browser but also through many different devices including PCs, phones, media players, game consoles, set-top boxes and televisions, cars, and more.
Guiding Principles There are three overarching principles guiding our services strategy – principles informing the design and development of products being implemented across all parts of Microsoft, for both individuals and business.
1. The Web is the Hub of our social mesh and our device mesh.
The web is first and foremost a mesh of people. . . . All applications will grow to recognize and utilize the inherent group-forming aspects of their connection to the web, in ways that will become fundamental to our experiences. In scenarios ranging from productivity to media and entertainment, social mesh notions of linking, sharing, ranking and tagging will become as familiar as File, Edit and View. . . . To individuals, the concept of “My Computer” will give way to the concept of a personal mesh of devices – a means by which all of your devices are brought together, managed through the web, as a seamless whole.
2. The Power of “Choice” as business moves to embrace the cloud.
Most major enterprises are in the early stages of a significant infrastructural transition – from the use of dedicated and sometimes very expensive application servers, to the use of virtualization and commodity hardware to consolidate those enterprise applications on computing and storage grids constructed within their data center. . . . Driven in large part by the high-scale requirements of consumer services, the value of this utility computing model is most clearly evident in cloud-based internet services.
Software built explicitly to provide a significant level of server/service symmetry will afford choice and flexibility in developing, operating, migrating and managing such systems in highly varied enterprise deployment environments that are distributed and federated between the enterprise data center and the internet cloud.
3.Small Pieces Loosely Joined for developers, within the cloud and across a world of devices.
Application design patterns at both the front- and back-end are transitioning toward being compositions and in some cases loose federations of cooperating systems, where standards and interoperability are essential. . . . At a higher level, myriad options exist for delivering applications to the user: The web browser, unique in its ubiquity; the PC, unique in how it brings together interactivity/experience, mobility and storage; the phone, unique in its extreme mobility. Developers will need to build applications that can be delivered seamlessly across a loosely coupled device mesh by utilizing a common set of tools, languages, runtimes and frameworks – a common toolset that spans from the service in the cloud to enterprise server, and from the PC to the browser to the phone.
Read this doc on Scribd: Services Strategy Update
var scribd_doc = new scribd.Document(2603500, \'key-15o38nqxcf0mbhrre6x4\'); scribd_doc.write(\'embedded_flash_2603500_lekzd\');
(Photo by Dan Farber).
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Can smallest state be high-tech hub?
R.I. officials hope location, size will actually aid efforts
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff February 27, 2008
PROVIDENCE - Lee Hower lived the quintessential Internet start-up life as an early employee at PayPal and part of the founding team of LinkedIn, the social network for professionals. But three years ago, Hower left Silicon Valley's heady entrepreneurial scene for what might seem the outer reaches of the tech universe.
Last week, when Hower - now a venture capitalist - mingled with entrepreneurs hatching new websites, tech company founders looking to hire, and about 100 self-identified geeks, he wasn't in Palo Alto or even Boston - he was in an art gallery in downtown Providence.
"Five years ago, all of us thought we were doing this alone," said Soren Ryherd, president of Working Planet Marketing Group, a Providence tech company that had intended to set up shop in Boston or New York five years ago, but chose more affordable Rhode Island and now is profitable and growing, with a dozen employees.
Many areas compete to be tech hubs, trying to attract the high-wage jobs of a knowledge economy - whether it is Governor Deval Patrick's proposed $1 billion life sciences initiative, or New Hampshire's drive to develop a new tech park in Nashua and rebrand the state as a tech hotspot as well as a bucolic getaway.
Now, the smallest state is trying to position itself as an entrepreneurial hub, offering tax incentives and playing off its location between New York and Boston, its size, its universities, and Providence's urban renaissance.
"This is central to our economic development strategy - we're trying to create an innovation economy," said Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. "The whole state is 1,000 square miles with 1 million people in it and we all know each other - in an innovation economy, that's a huge ad vantage. Connecting the dots across sectors and silos is what innovation is all about, and we have the perfect real world test bed."
Last year, the first companies signed up for a new "innovation tax credit" of up to $100,000 for investors and entrepreneurs who invest and build high-tech companies in the state. In January, the state officially launched RINexus.com, a community site for techies to share news, job openings, and events - from computer science colloquia at universities to hacker fests. And Providence Geeks began as a small monthly gathering over a year and a half ago, but has blossomed into a full-scale geek gala.
That adds to other ongoing efforts. The state grants $3 million each year to the Slater Technology Fund, a nonprofit seed-stage venture capital fund. This is the fourth year of the Business Innovation Factory, an organization that brings together entrepreneurs and innovators for multi- disciplinary brainstorming sessions that could help Rhode Island play a key role in creating new products and innovations.
About 15,000 employees worked in the information technology and digital media sector in 2006, or 3.6 percent of the state's private employment workforce. Kaplan hopes to double the number of jobs within five years, and points to good news like Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, a local biotech company that announced in January it would build a manufacturing facility in Cumberland.
Other areas outside well-known tech hotspots have tried to cultivate a reputation for innovation, with varying levels of success. Portsmouth, N.H., branded itself the "eCoast." Wannabe tech corridors all over have aspired to the Silicon prefix at one time or another, whether it is Silicon Mountain in Colorado, Silicon Sandbar in Cape Cod, or Silicon Hills in Texas.
"It's different for Providence, than say 10 years ago - a lot has been done internally to Providence to position the city better to attract entrepreneurs," said Ross Gittell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics. "The development of culture and downtown life. There's buzz around Providence." And unlike a Silicon Prairie or Silicon Snowbank, Providence does have the unique benefit of proximity to New York City and Boston.
"Since I've been here, the tech start-up scene has started to flourish," Hower said. "It's exciting; still relatively early, still a fairly tight-knit community . . . but it's quietly bubbling up here, a grass-roots industry of people working on Web 2.0 stuff, and state and government agencies fostering an environment for innovation."
In 2000, when Charlie Kroll began working on a Web development firm out of his dorm room at Brown University, the tech scene in Providence was nearly invisible. The office space he rented initially for Andera was near a needle exchange; today the company is surrounded by designer boutiques, has grown to 40 employees, and will bring in $6.5 million in revenue this year, and Kroll attends geek events looking to recruit new employees.
Close proximity to Boston also means tech companies have access to vast networks of venture capital, but the close-knit community also fosters small businesses.
"You're nobody in a big pond for a very long time" in Boston or Silicon Valley, said John Zib, an entrepreneur who is building a digital signage company, Memo. "Here, they see you."
Recruiting is also more challenging when the local talent pool is smaller. But Pamela O'Hara, president of BatchBlue Software, an eight-person software company made up mainly of ex-Amazon people, said that there were advantages.
"For us it's nice to be outside of the Silicon Valley world where everyone is taking their computer apart on the weekend and putting it back together," O'Hara said. "We're a little more in touch with the real world."
Still, brain drain isn't uncommon. In the last few years, Spherics Inc., a biotech firm, moved from Lincoln, R.I., to Mansfield, Mass. A mobile firm, Teleractive, now known as Zoove, left Newport, R.I., for Silicon Valley when it landed venture capital money.
But Andrew Schiller went the opposite route, moving his company, Location Inc., from Worcester to Woonsocket. At the geek night, he showed off NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that uses data to help people find the Beacon Hill of Dallas or the Beverly Hills of Providence.
To demonstrate his service, he asked the audience to describe their ideal location.
What about the neighbors, Schiller asked. "Occupations?"
"Geeks!" someone shouted.
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
By Carolyn Y. Johnson, Globe Staff February 27, 2008
PROVIDENCE - Lee Hower lived the quintessential Internet start-up life as an early employee at PayPal and part of the founding team of LinkedIn, the social network for professionals. But three years ago, Hower left Silicon Valley's heady entrepreneurial scene for what might seem the outer reaches of the tech universe.
Last week, when Hower - now a venture capitalist - mingled with entrepreneurs hatching new websites, tech company founders looking to hire, and about 100 self-identified geeks, he wasn't in Palo Alto or even Boston - he was in an art gallery in downtown Providence.
"Five years ago, all of us thought we were doing this alone," said Soren Ryherd, president of Working Planet Marketing Group, a Providence tech company that had intended to set up shop in Boston or New York five years ago, but chose more affordable Rhode Island and now is profitable and growing, with a dozen employees.
Many areas compete to be tech hubs, trying to attract the high-wage jobs of a knowledge economy - whether it is Governor Deval Patrick's proposed $1 billion life sciences initiative, or New Hampshire's drive to develop a new tech park in Nashua and rebrand the state as a tech hotspot as well as a bucolic getaway.
Now, the smallest state is trying to position itself as an entrepreneurial hub, offering tax incentives and playing off its location between New York and Boston, its size, its universities, and Providence's urban renaissance.
"This is central to our economic development strategy - we're trying to create an innovation economy," said Saul Kaplan, executive director of the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. "The whole state is 1,000 square miles with 1 million people in it and we all know each other - in an innovation economy, that's a huge ad vantage. Connecting the dots across sectors and silos is what innovation is all about, and we have the perfect real world test bed."
Last year, the first companies signed up for a new "innovation tax credit" of up to $100,000 for investors and entrepreneurs who invest and build high-tech companies in the state. In January, the state officially launched RINexus.com, a community site for techies to share news, job openings, and events - from computer science colloquia at universities to hacker fests. And Providence Geeks began as a small monthly gathering over a year and a half ago, but has blossomed into a full-scale geek gala.
That adds to other ongoing efforts. The state grants $3 million each year to the Slater Technology Fund, a nonprofit seed-stage venture capital fund. This is the fourth year of the Business Innovation Factory, an organization that brings together entrepreneurs and innovators for multi- disciplinary brainstorming sessions that could help Rhode Island play a key role in creating new products and innovations.
About 15,000 employees worked in the information technology and digital media sector in 2006, or 3.6 percent of the state's private employment workforce. Kaplan hopes to double the number of jobs within five years, and points to good news like Neurotech Pharmaceuticals, a local biotech company that announced in January it would build a manufacturing facility in Cumberland.
Other areas outside well-known tech hotspots have tried to cultivate a reputation for innovation, with varying levels of success. Portsmouth, N.H., branded itself the "eCoast." Wannabe tech corridors all over have aspired to the Silicon prefix at one time or another, whether it is Silicon Mountain in Colorado, Silicon Sandbar in Cape Cod, or Silicon Hills in Texas.
"It's different for Providence, than say 10 years ago - a lot has been done internally to Providence to position the city better to attract entrepreneurs," said Ross Gittell, a professor at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore School of Business and Economics. "The development of culture and downtown life. There's buzz around Providence." And unlike a Silicon Prairie or Silicon Snowbank, Providence does have the unique benefit of proximity to New York City and Boston.
"Since I've been here, the tech start-up scene has started to flourish," Hower said. "It's exciting; still relatively early, still a fairly tight-knit community . . . but it's quietly bubbling up here, a grass-roots industry of people working on Web 2.0 stuff, and state and government agencies fostering an environment for innovation."
In 2000, when Charlie Kroll began working on a Web development firm out of his dorm room at Brown University, the tech scene in Providence was nearly invisible. The office space he rented initially for Andera was near a needle exchange; today the company is surrounded by designer boutiques, has grown to 40 employees, and will bring in $6.5 million in revenue this year, and Kroll attends geek events looking to recruit new employees.
Close proximity to Boston also means tech companies have access to vast networks of venture capital, but the close-knit community also fosters small businesses.
"You're nobody in a big pond for a very long time" in Boston or Silicon Valley, said John Zib, an entrepreneur who is building a digital signage company, Memo. "Here, they see you."
Recruiting is also more challenging when the local talent pool is smaller. But Pamela O'Hara, president of BatchBlue Software, an eight-person software company made up mainly of ex-Amazon people, said that there were advantages.
"For us it's nice to be outside of the Silicon Valley world where everyone is taking their computer apart on the weekend and putting it back together," O'Hara said. "We're a little more in touch with the real world."
Still, brain drain isn't uncommon. In the last few years, Spherics Inc., a biotech firm, moved from Lincoln, R.I., to Mansfield, Mass. A mobile firm, Teleractive, now known as Zoove, left Newport, R.I., for Silicon Valley when it landed venture capital money.
But Andrew Schiller went the opposite route, moving his company, Location Inc., from Worcester to Woonsocket. At the geek night, he showed off NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that uses data to help people find the Beacon Hill of Dallas or the Beverly Hills of Providence.
To demonstrate his service, he asked the audience to describe their ideal location.
What about the neighbors, Schiller asked. "Occupations?"
"Geeks!" someone shouted.
Carolyn Y. Johnson can be reached at cjohnson@globe.com.
Friday, February 01, 2008
The Geopolitics of Dope
January 29, 2008By George Friedman
Over recent months, the level of violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has begun to rise substantially, with some of it spilling into the United States. Last week, the Mexican government began military operations on its side of the border against Mexican gangs engaged in smuggling drugs into the United States. The action apparently pushed some of the gang members north into the United States in a bid for sanctuary. Low-level violence is endemic to the border region. But while not without precedent, movement of organized, armed cadres into the United States on this scale goes beyond what has become accepted practice. The dynamics in the borderland are shifting and must be understood in a broader, geopolitical context.
Related Links
Borderlands and Immigrants
The Geopolitics of Immigration
Related Special Topic Page
Tracking Mexico's Drug Cartels
The U.S. border with Mexico has been intermittently turbulent since the U.S. occupation of northern Mexico. The annexation of Texas following its anti-Mexican revolution and the Mexican-American War created a borderland, an area in which the political border is clearly delineated but the cultural and economic borders are less clear and more dynamic. This is the case with many borders, including the U.S.-Canadian one, but the Mexican border has gone through periods of turbulence in the past and is going through one right now.
There always have been uncontrolled economic transactions and movements along the border. Both sides understood that the cost of controlling and monitoring these transactions outstripped the benefit. Long before NAFTA came into existence, social and economic movement in both directions - but particularly from Mexico to the United States - were fairly uncontrolled. Borderland transactions in particular, local transactions in proximity to the border region (retail shopping, agricultural transfers and so on), were uncontrolled. So was smuggling. Trade in stolen U.S. cars and parts shipped into Mexico, labor from Mexico shipped into the United States, etc., were seen as tolerable costs for an open border.
A low-friction border, one that easily could be traversed at low cost - without extended waits - was important to both sides. In 2006, the United States imported $198 billion in goods from Mexico and exported $134 billion to Mexico. This makes Mexico the third-largest trading partner of the United States and also makes it one of the more balanced major trade relationships the United States has. Loss of Mexican markets would hurt the U.S. economy substantially. The U.S. advantage in selling to Mexico is low-cost transport. Lose that through time delays at the border and the Mexican market becomes competitive for other countries. About 13 percent of all U.S. exports are bought by Mexico.
Not disrupting this trade and not raising its cost has been a fundamental principle of U.S.-Mexican relations, one long predating NAFTA. Leaving aside the contentious issue of whether illegal immigration hurts or helps the United States, the steps required to control that immigration would impede bilateral trade. The United States therefore has been loath to impose effective measures, since any measures that would be effective against population movement also would impose friction on trade.
The United States has been willing to tolerate levels of criminality along the border. The only time when the United States shifted its position was when organized groups in Mexico both established themselves north of the political border and engaged in significant violence. Thus, in 1916, when the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa began operations north of the border, the U.S. Army moved into Mexico to try to destroy his base of operations. This has been the line that, when crossed, motivated the United States to take action, regardless of the economic cost. The current upsurge in violence is now pushing that line.
The United States has built-in demand for a range of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana. Regardless of decades of efforts, the United States has not been able to eradicate or even qualitatively reduce this demand. As an advanced industrial country, the United States has a great deal of money available to satisfy the demand for illegal drugs. This makes the supply of narcotics to a large market attractive. In fact, it almost doesn't matter how large demand is. Regardless of how it varies, the economics are such that even a fraction of the current market will attract sellers.
Even after processing, the cost of the product is quite low. What makes it an attractive product is the differential between the cost of production and the price it commands. In less-developed countries, supplying the American narcotics market creates huge income differentials. From the standpoint of a poor peasant, the differential between growing a product illegal in the United States compared with a legal product is enormous. From the standpoint of the processor, shippers and distributors, every step in the value chain creates tremendous incentives to engage in this activity over others.
There are several factors governing price. The addictive nature of the product creates an inelastic demand curve in a market with high discretionary income. People will buy at whatever the price and somehow will find the money for the purchase. Illegality suppresses competition and drives cartelization. Processing, smuggling and distributing the drugs requires a complex supply chain. Businesses not prepared to engage in high-risk illegal activities are frozen out of the market. The cost of market entry is high, since the end-to-end system (from the fields to the users) both is a relationship business (strangers are not welcome) and requires substantial expertise, particularly in covert logistics. Finally, there is a built-in cost for protecting the supply chain once created.
Because they are involved in an illegal business, drug dealers cannot take recourse to the courts or police to protect their assets. Protecting the supply chain and excluding competition are opposite sides of the same coin. Protecting assets is major cost of running a drug ring. It suppresses competition, both by killing it and by raising the cost of entry into the market. The illegality of the business requires that it be large enough to manage the supply chain and absorb the cost of protecting it. It gives high incentives to eliminate potential competitors and new entrants into the market. In the end, it creates a monopoly or small oligopoly in the business, where the comparative advantage ultimately devolves into the effectiveness of the supply chain and the efficiency of the private police force protecting it.
That means that drug organizations evolve in several predictable ways. They have huge amounts of money flowing in from the U.S. market by selling relatively low-cost products at monopolistic prices into markets with inelastic demand curves. Second, they have unique expertise in covert logistics, expertise that can be transferred to the movement of other goods. Third, they develop substantial security capabilities, which can grow over time into full-blown paramilitary forces to protect the supply chain. Fourth, they are huge capital pools, investing in the domestic economy and manipulating the political system.
Cartels can challenge - and supplant - governments. Between huge amounts of money available to bribe officials, and covert armies better equipped, trained and motivated than national police and military forces, the cartels can become the government - if in fact they didn't originate in the government. Getting the government to deploy armed forces against the cartel can become a contradiction in terms. In their most extreme form, cartels are the government.
Drug cartels have two weaknesses. First, they can be shattered in conflicts with challengers within the oligopoly or by splits within the cartels. Second, their supply chains can be broken from the outside. U.S. policy has historically been to attack the supply chains from the fields to the street distributors. Drug cartels have proven extremely robust and resilient in modifying the supply chains under pressure. When conflict occurs within and among cartels and systematic attacks against the supply chain take place, however, specific cartels can be broken - although the long-term result is the emergence of a new cartel system.
In the 1980s, the United States manipulated various Colombian cartels into internal conflict. More important, the United States attacked the Colombian supply chain in the Caribbean as it moved from Colombia through Panama along various air and sea routes to the United States. The weakness of the Colombian cartel was its exposed supply chain from South America to the United States. U.S. military operations raised the cost so high that the route became uneconomic.
The main route to American markets shifted from the Caribbean to the U.S.-Mexican border. It began as an alliance between sophisticated Colombian cartels and still-primitive Mexican gangs, but the balance of power inevitably shifted over time. Owning the supply link into the United States, the Mexicans increased their wealth and power until they absorbed more and more of the entire supply chain. Eventually, the Colombians were minimized and the Mexicans became the decisive power.
The Americans fought the battle against the Colombians primarily in the Caribbean and southern Florida. The battle against the Mexican drug lords must be fought in the U.S.-Mexican borderland. And while the fight against the Colombians did not involve major disruptions to other economic patterns, the fight against the Mexican cartels involves potentially huge disruptions. In addition, the battle is going to be fought in a region that is already tense because of the immigration issue, and at least partly on U.S. soil.
The cartel's supply chain is embedded in the huge legal bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. Remember that Mexico exports $198 billion to the United States and - according to the Mexican Economy Ministry - $1.6 billion to Japan and $1.7 billion to China, its next biggest markets. Mexico is just behind Canada as a U.S. trading partner and is a huge market running both ways. Disrupting the drug trade cannot be done without disrupting this other trade. With that much trade going on, you are not going to find the drugs. It isn't going to happen.
Police action, or action within each country's legal procedures and protections, will not succeed. The cartels' ability to evade, corrupt and absorb the losses is simply too great. Another solution is to allow easy access to the drug market for other producers, flooding the market, reducing the cost and eliminating the economic incentive and technical advantage of the cartel. That would mean legalizing drugs. That is simply not going to happen in the United States. It is a political impossibility.
This leaves the option of treating the issue as a military rather than police action. That would mean attacking the cartels as if they were a military force rather than a criminal group. It would mean that procedural rules would not be in place, and that the cartels would be treated as an enemy army. Leaving aside the complexities of U.S.-Mexican relations, cartels flourish by being hard to distinguish from the general population. This strategy not only would turn the cartels into a guerrilla force, it would treat northern Mexico as hostile occupied territory. Don't even think of that possibility, absent a draft under which college-age Americans from upper-middle-class families would be sent to patrol Mexico - and be killed and wounded. The United States does not need a Gaza Strip on its southern border, so this won't happen.
The current efforts by the Mexican government might impede the various gangs, but they won't break the cartel system. The supply chain along the border is simply too diffuse and too plastic. It shifts too easily under pressure. The border can't be sealed, and the level of economic activity shields smuggling too well. Farmers in Mexico can't be persuaded to stop growing illegal drugs for the same reason that Bolivians and Afghans can't. Market demand is too high and alternatives too bleak. The Mexican supply chain is too robust - and too profitable - to break easily.
The likely course is a multigenerational pattern of instability along the border. More important, there will be a substantial transfer of wealth from the United States to Mexico in return for an intrinsically low-cost consumable product - drugs. This will be one of the sources of capital that will build the Mexican economy, which today is 14th largest in the world. The accumulation of drug money is and will continue finding its way into the Mexican economy, creating a pool of investment capital. The children and grandchildren of the Zetas will be running banks, running for president, building art museums and telling amusing anecdotes about how grandpa made his money running blow into Nuevo Laredo.
It will also destabilize the U.S. Southwest while grandpa makes his pile. As is frequently the case, it is a problem for which there are no good solutions, or for which the solution is one without real support.
Over recent months, the level of violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has begun to rise substantially, with some of it spilling into the United States. Last week, the Mexican government began military operations on its side of the border against Mexican gangs engaged in smuggling drugs into the United States. The action apparently pushed some of the gang members north into the United States in a bid for sanctuary. Low-level violence is endemic to the border region. But while not without precedent, movement of organized, armed cadres into the United States on this scale goes beyond what has become accepted practice. The dynamics in the borderland are shifting and must be understood in a broader, geopolitical context.
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The U.S. border with Mexico has been intermittently turbulent since the U.S. occupation of northern Mexico. The annexation of Texas following its anti-Mexican revolution and the Mexican-American War created a borderland, an area in which the political border is clearly delineated but the cultural and economic borders are less clear and more dynamic. This is the case with many borders, including the U.S.-Canadian one, but the Mexican border has gone through periods of turbulence in the past and is going through one right now.
There always have been uncontrolled economic transactions and movements along the border. Both sides understood that the cost of controlling and monitoring these transactions outstripped the benefit. Long before NAFTA came into existence, social and economic movement in both directions - but particularly from Mexico to the United States - were fairly uncontrolled. Borderland transactions in particular, local transactions in proximity to the border region (retail shopping, agricultural transfers and so on), were uncontrolled. So was smuggling. Trade in stolen U.S. cars and parts shipped into Mexico, labor from Mexico shipped into the United States, etc., were seen as tolerable costs for an open border.
A low-friction border, one that easily could be traversed at low cost - without extended waits - was important to both sides. In 2006, the United States imported $198 billion in goods from Mexico and exported $134 billion to Mexico. This makes Mexico the third-largest trading partner of the United States and also makes it one of the more balanced major trade relationships the United States has. Loss of Mexican markets would hurt the U.S. economy substantially. The U.S. advantage in selling to Mexico is low-cost transport. Lose that through time delays at the border and the Mexican market becomes competitive for other countries. About 13 percent of all U.S. exports are bought by Mexico.
Not disrupting this trade and not raising its cost has been a fundamental principle of U.S.-Mexican relations, one long predating NAFTA. Leaving aside the contentious issue of whether illegal immigration hurts or helps the United States, the steps required to control that immigration would impede bilateral trade. The United States therefore has been loath to impose effective measures, since any measures that would be effective against population movement also would impose friction on trade.
The United States has been willing to tolerate levels of criminality along the border. The only time when the United States shifted its position was when organized groups in Mexico both established themselves north of the political border and engaged in significant violence. Thus, in 1916, when the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa began operations north of the border, the U.S. Army moved into Mexico to try to destroy his base of operations. This has been the line that, when crossed, motivated the United States to take action, regardless of the economic cost. The current upsurge in violence is now pushing that line.
The United States has built-in demand for a range of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine, methamphetamines and marijuana. Regardless of decades of efforts, the United States has not been able to eradicate or even qualitatively reduce this demand. As an advanced industrial country, the United States has a great deal of money available to satisfy the demand for illegal drugs. This makes the supply of narcotics to a large market attractive. In fact, it almost doesn't matter how large demand is. Regardless of how it varies, the economics are such that even a fraction of the current market will attract sellers.
Even after processing, the cost of the product is quite low. What makes it an attractive product is the differential between the cost of production and the price it commands. In less-developed countries, supplying the American narcotics market creates huge income differentials. From the standpoint of a poor peasant, the differential between growing a product illegal in the United States compared with a legal product is enormous. From the standpoint of the processor, shippers and distributors, every step in the value chain creates tremendous incentives to engage in this activity over others.
There are several factors governing price. The addictive nature of the product creates an inelastic demand curve in a market with high discretionary income. People will buy at whatever the price and somehow will find the money for the purchase. Illegality suppresses competition and drives cartelization. Processing, smuggling and distributing the drugs requires a complex supply chain. Businesses not prepared to engage in high-risk illegal activities are frozen out of the market. The cost of market entry is high, since the end-to-end system (from the fields to the users) both is a relationship business (strangers are not welcome) and requires substantial expertise, particularly in covert logistics. Finally, there is a built-in cost for protecting the supply chain once created.
Because they are involved in an illegal business, drug dealers cannot take recourse to the courts or police to protect their assets. Protecting the supply chain and excluding competition are opposite sides of the same coin. Protecting assets is major cost of running a drug ring. It suppresses competition, both by killing it and by raising the cost of entry into the market. The illegality of the business requires that it be large enough to manage the supply chain and absorb the cost of protecting it. It gives high incentives to eliminate potential competitors and new entrants into the market. In the end, it creates a monopoly or small oligopoly in the business, where the comparative advantage ultimately devolves into the effectiveness of the supply chain and the efficiency of the private police force protecting it.
That means that drug organizations evolve in several predictable ways. They have huge amounts of money flowing in from the U.S. market by selling relatively low-cost products at monopolistic prices into markets with inelastic demand curves. Second, they have unique expertise in covert logistics, expertise that can be transferred to the movement of other goods. Third, they develop substantial security capabilities, which can grow over time into full-blown paramilitary forces to protect the supply chain. Fourth, they are huge capital pools, investing in the domestic economy and manipulating the political system.
Cartels can challenge - and supplant - governments. Between huge amounts of money available to bribe officials, and covert armies better equipped, trained and motivated than national police and military forces, the cartels can become the government - if in fact they didn't originate in the government. Getting the government to deploy armed forces against the cartel can become a contradiction in terms. In their most extreme form, cartels are the government.
Drug cartels have two weaknesses. First, they can be shattered in conflicts with challengers within the oligopoly or by splits within the cartels. Second, their supply chains can be broken from the outside. U.S. policy has historically been to attack the supply chains from the fields to the street distributors. Drug cartels have proven extremely robust and resilient in modifying the supply chains under pressure. When conflict occurs within and among cartels and systematic attacks against the supply chain take place, however, specific cartels can be broken - although the long-term result is the emergence of a new cartel system.
In the 1980s, the United States manipulated various Colombian cartels into internal conflict. More important, the United States attacked the Colombian supply chain in the Caribbean as it moved from Colombia through Panama along various air and sea routes to the United States. The weakness of the Colombian cartel was its exposed supply chain from South America to the United States. U.S. military operations raised the cost so high that the route became uneconomic.
The main route to American markets shifted from the Caribbean to the U.S.-Mexican border. It began as an alliance between sophisticated Colombian cartels and still-primitive Mexican gangs, but the balance of power inevitably shifted over time. Owning the supply link into the United States, the Mexicans increased their wealth and power until they absorbed more and more of the entire supply chain. Eventually, the Colombians were minimized and the Mexicans became the decisive power.
The Americans fought the battle against the Colombians primarily in the Caribbean and southern Florida. The battle against the Mexican drug lords must be fought in the U.S.-Mexican borderland. And while the fight against the Colombians did not involve major disruptions to other economic patterns, the fight against the Mexican cartels involves potentially huge disruptions. In addition, the battle is going to be fought in a region that is already tense because of the immigration issue, and at least partly on U.S. soil.
The cartel's supply chain is embedded in the huge legal bilateral trade between the United States and Mexico. Remember that Mexico exports $198 billion to the United States and - according to the Mexican Economy Ministry - $1.6 billion to Japan and $1.7 billion to China, its next biggest markets. Mexico is just behind Canada as a U.S. trading partner and is a huge market running both ways. Disrupting the drug trade cannot be done without disrupting this other trade. With that much trade going on, you are not going to find the drugs. It isn't going to happen.
Police action, or action within each country's legal procedures and protections, will not succeed. The cartels' ability to evade, corrupt and absorb the losses is simply too great. Another solution is to allow easy access to the drug market for other producers, flooding the market, reducing the cost and eliminating the economic incentive and technical advantage of the cartel. That would mean legalizing drugs. That is simply not going to happen in the United States. It is a political impossibility.
This leaves the option of treating the issue as a military rather than police action. That would mean attacking the cartels as if they were a military force rather than a criminal group. It would mean that procedural rules would not be in place, and that the cartels would be treated as an enemy army. Leaving aside the complexities of U.S.-Mexican relations, cartels flourish by being hard to distinguish from the general population. This strategy not only would turn the cartels into a guerrilla force, it would treat northern Mexico as hostile occupied territory. Don't even think of that possibility, absent a draft under which college-age Americans from upper-middle-class families would be sent to patrol Mexico - and be killed and wounded. The United States does not need a Gaza Strip on its southern border, so this won't happen.
The current efforts by the Mexican government might impede the various gangs, but they won't break the cartel system. The supply chain along the border is simply too diffuse and too plastic. It shifts too easily under pressure. The border can't be sealed, and the level of economic activity shields smuggling too well. Farmers in Mexico can't be persuaded to stop growing illegal drugs for the same reason that Bolivians and Afghans can't. Market demand is too high and alternatives too bleak. The Mexican supply chain is too robust - and too profitable - to break easily.
The likely course is a multigenerational pattern of instability along the border. More important, there will be a substantial transfer of wealth from the United States to Mexico in return for an intrinsically low-cost consumable product - drugs. This will be one of the sources of capital that will build the Mexican economy, which today is 14th largest in the world. The accumulation of drug money is and will continue finding its way into the Mexican economy, creating a pool of investment capital. The children and grandchildren of the Zetas will be running banks, running for president, building art museums and telling amusing anecdotes about how grandpa made his money running blow into Nuevo Laredo.
It will also destabilize the U.S. Southwest while grandpa makes his pile. As is frequently the case, it is a problem for which there are no good solutions, or for which the solution is one without real support.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Salesforce Unveils New Pricing Model, App Dev Tools
By Kevin McLaughlin, CMP Channel 6:53 PM EST Thu. Jan. 17, 2008 -->
--> -->--> --> -->In a bid to make cloud computing more accessible to enterprises and accelerate adoption of its platform-as-a-service, Salesforce.com on Thursday unveiled new application development tools and a pricing model that lets companies pay on a per-login basis.
Many companies are aware of the massive on demand infrastructure that cloud computing provides, but have concerns over the cost and complexity associated with this emerging market segment. Still, Salesforce customers have built more than 50,000 custom applications using the Force.com platform, said Ariel Kelman, Salesforce.com's senior director of platform program marketing.
To account for Salesforce.com applications that customers only access a couple of times per month, such as vacation request forms, Salesforce is now offering access to customers on a per-login basis, said Kelman.
Under the new model, Salesforce customers will pay $5 per login for up to 5 logins per month, but as part of a special promotion, that rate has been reduced to 99 cents per login through the end of the year. Salesforce is also offering a flat rate of $50 per user per month for an unlimited number of logins.
Salesforce has been pushing the notion of a platform for some time, but the vendor has encountered resistance from segments of the market over price points for certain types of applications, says Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, a New York City-based solution provider.
"Salesforce can get away with charging a certain price for CRM, but the pricing for other apps isn't as easy to sell to the CIO," said Berridge. "They're trying to make pricing more palatable to organizations to let them take advantage and migrate expensive applications onto an on-demand platform."
Salesforce also launched a set of tools and services for application development that it will offer as a service, which it expects will boost developer productivity and accurately illustrate the potential of cloud computing.
The toolset, called Development-As-A-Service, includes a metadata API that integrates the Salesforce application development process to other development tools and gives developers access to complete code and schema, said Kelman.
"Customers want to understand how platform as a service fits into application lifecycle processes, and we want to increase developer productivity. This is a new layer in the Salesforce platform stack that will enable collaboration," Kelman said.
--> -->--> --> -->In a bid to make cloud computing more accessible to enterprises and accelerate adoption of its platform-as-a-service, Salesforce.com on Thursday unveiled new application development tools and a pricing model that lets companies pay on a per-login basis.
Many companies are aware of the massive on demand infrastructure that cloud computing provides, but have concerns over the cost and complexity associated with this emerging market segment. Still, Salesforce customers have built more than 50,000 custom applications using the Force.com platform, said Ariel Kelman, Salesforce.com's senior director of platform program marketing.
To account for Salesforce.com applications that customers only access a couple of times per month, such as vacation request forms, Salesforce is now offering access to customers on a per-login basis, said Kelman.
Under the new model, Salesforce customers will pay $5 per login for up to 5 logins per month, but as part of a special promotion, that rate has been reduced to 99 cents per login through the end of the year. Salesforce is also offering a flat rate of $50 per user per month for an unlimited number of logins.
Salesforce has been pushing the notion of a platform for some time, but the vendor has encountered resistance from segments of the market over price points for certain types of applications, says Eric Berridge, CEO of Bluewolf, a New York City-based solution provider.
"Salesforce can get away with charging a certain price for CRM, but the pricing for other apps isn't as easy to sell to the CIO," said Berridge. "They're trying to make pricing more palatable to organizations to let them take advantage and migrate expensive applications onto an on-demand platform."
Salesforce also launched a set of tools and services for application development that it will offer as a service, which it expects will boost developer productivity and accurately illustrate the potential of cloud computing.
The toolset, called Development-As-A-Service, includes a metadata API that integrates the Salesforce application development process to other development tools and gives developers access to complete code and schema, said Kelman.
"Customers want to understand how platform as a service fits into application lifecycle processes, and we want to increase developer productivity. This is a new layer in the Salesforce platform stack that will enable collaboration," Kelman said.
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