The Key Ingredients for a “Great City”

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Paul Graham ruminates on the essence of a technology hub:

I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They’re the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they’re the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.

Do you really need the rich people? Wouldn’t it work to have the government invest in the nerds? No, it would not. Startup investors are a distinct type of rich people. They tend to have a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. This (a) helps them pick the right startups, and (b) means they can supply advice and connections as well as money. And the fact that they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.

Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors. The idea of them making startup investments is comic. It would be like mathematicians running Vogue– or perhaps more accurately, Vogue editors running a math journal.

Grahams words are a must read for local politicians. Madison’s (Wisconsin) biggest challenge with respect to new business development is it’s parochialism. Living in San Francisco years ago, I was impressed by the general willingness to try new things and take risks. We have a world class University, lots of bright citizens but not so many people willing to take financial and career risks.

Email Addresses to Steer Snail Mail?

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Ben Charny:

The U.S. Postal Service was recently asked to start delivering packages and letters based on someone’s e-mail rather than street address.

he request is from Los Angeles-based Inventerprise LLC, which wants to conduct a trial run of its so-called Shelmail e-mail-to-snail addressing system sometime in 2008.

The Shelmail proposal is noteworthy because it suggests that e-mail addresses are a better means of delivering physical mail than what the postal service uses now.

Put another way, Shelmail questions just what constitutes someone’s “address” nowadays. For now and probably decades going forward, it’s a description of a physical location, in the form “101 Second Street, San Francisco, Calif., 94105.”

An answer in search of a question?

Vivisimo Criticizes Search Engine Personal Data Collection

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Tom Foremski:

Mr Valdes-Perez is also a critic of the behavioral technologies that the large search engine companies use to try and improve the search experience by collecting personal data. Clusty.com does not collect any user data which means that there can be no privacy breaches, accidental or subpoenaed.

“Users search based on their whims at the time, and not on past behavior. It is much better to provide a user with several options on what they are searching for and allow them to choose,” he says.

Best 2006 Car Deals

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Dan Lienert:

Chop isn’t the only one hacking prices down to size. Car buyers remember 2005 as a goldmine for car deals, because major American manufacturers, including General Motors (nyse: GM – news – people ) and Ford Motor (nyse: F – news – people ), made employee-pricing plans available to the public for a period of time. In comparison, 2006 has been something of a letdown so far, at least from the consumer standpoint. But the year is still young, discount deals are out there and the domestics might have these kinds of fire sales again.

Don’t Stop….Start

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Doug Sundheim:

If you want to change something in your life, it’s common to try to stop the behaviors you don’t like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple – it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be. And since nature hates a vacuum it will fill it with anything it can find – usually the very behaviors you’re trying to stop since they’re so familiar. Instead of stopping certain behaviors, try focusing on what you want to create – and the new behaviors you need to get there. Eventually, with practice, new behaviors will develop enough muscle to naturally replace the old ones.

Mammograms: Digital vs Film

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David Armstrong:

For the 23 million U.S. women who get mammograms each year, there is an increasingly urgent question: digital or film?

Interest is growing in the digital version of the breast-cancer screening test, driven in part by a study last fall in the New England Journal of Medicine that said digital was better for some women. The findings quickly became a marketing tool for makers of digital-mammography machines and hospitals that have them. Sales of the machines have been rising, with one major manufacturer citing digital equipment as the driving force behind record second-quarter revenue.

But some hospitals and doctors are concerned that the advantages of digital are being overestimated and may be causing women to delay getting a mammogram until digital machines arrive in their area. Still only about 11% of the 8,800 U.S. mammography facilities are estimated to have digital.

The advice from doctors: Don’t wait, especially if you are in one of the groups for whom digital has no demonstrated advantages. The study found that digital was better at detecting cancer only for premenopausal women, those under 50 years old, or those who have dense breasts. The majority of women who get mammograms are over 50, and looking at the 40,000 women in the study as a whole, the new technology was found to be no better than film overall.