Design, Entrepreneurship, Economics and Software
Hi! My newer writings are located on other sites: Medium Facebook Twitter You can still find my old blog posts here, including this popular one about my PeopleMaps project. Some current projects you may wish to check out: Mailstrom (Web-based email management app) Chuck (iOS email management app) Baltimore City Voters (Facebook Civics group for [ ]
For the last few years I ve been working on mapping out social relationships in cities with my project peoplemaps.org. I had the chance to speak about this work recently at the TED Global conference, and the talk was featured this week on the ted.com website. This has led to many, many inquiries about the project, [ ]
Much has been said about entrepreneurs and their oft-stated ambition to “change the world.” Making money is nice, they say, but they really want to “put a dent in the universe,” as Steve Jobs once said. Some see this as high-minded conceit: Change the world? Through tweets and hashtags? Photo oversharing? A world where everyone [ ]
While I m deeply involved in entrepreneurship, breathing it day in and day out, and actively follow many discussions around it, I tend to shy away from writing about it most of the time. Why? Because I m generally too busy doing the entrepreneurship to talk about it. In the end, it s the facts of our accomplishments that [ ]
For Baltimore City to grow and prosper once again, several problems must be solved: jobs, crime, and education are chief among them. But these are mere symptoms of the decades of systematic disinvestment which has characterized much of urban America since 1960. A return to prosperity is possible, and we ve seen it happen in other [ ]
I wrote recently about population density and its relationship to voting behaviors. In the 2012 election, high population density correlated with votes for Obama, while low density correlated with votes for Romney. Others observed that red states have more traffic fatalities than blue states. This is fairly easy to explain, as red states are lower [ ]
I ll be writing more about the correlation between population density and voting behaviors, but in the meantime check out these maps showing participation in the 2012 election. (Darker areas voted more than lighter areas.) So the country voted. Some parts more than others. What I think is interesting is that much of middle America, particularly [ ]
The 2012 election demonstrated what many people could have guessed: rural states voted for Romney while densely populated states voted for Obama. Many have offered explanations — everything from the presence of top universities in cities, to the prevalence of immigrant and African American populations. Perhaps the Republicans should consider running a Hispanic or African [ ]
There s been an explosion of interest in new startup accelerators, incubation, coworking, startup funding, and new-manufacturing efforts in Baltimore in the last few months; unfortunately this appears to say less about Baltimore than it does about the growth in interest in these efforts worldwide. Here s a list of some efforts in this space: Accelerate Baltimore [ ]
It can be difficult to see the forest for the trees when it comes to defining what it is we in the so-called tech community are trying to achieve. The confusion begins with names: some call it the startup community, the tech business community, or #BmoreTech. Whatever. I ve been splitting these hairs for several years [ ]