I can´t help but share this with you. I am not a big fan of Christmas songs - actually I hate most of them. What I like thougha bout Christmas is the feeling you get and the melancholy you dive into during the couple of days that for my part are mostly "recharging batteries days".
I´ve been listening to the song "Phantom Limb" from The Shins´ upcoming record a lot lately and have already blogged about it, I know. It´s just that particulary this song puts me in the mood for the upcoming holidays. It´s warm, beautiful and swinging. It´s a perfect Christmas song without using Christmas topics. I´m sure you´ll like it too. And by the way, the video is pure beauty.
That´s pretty amazing:
Just read a great article on Spiegel Online (in German) about a collective of french students and young professionals in Paris that started an initiative to speak up against the high rental fees for single appartments. Young Parisians have faced a steady growth over 5% of rental fees in just a couple of years and more and more students and young adults can´t afford to live in the french capital anymore, unless they´re backed by wealthy parents or can prove a monthly salary that is three times higher than the rent.
The collective names itselfs "Jeudi-Noir" ("Black Thursday") in reference to the weekday on which appartments to rent are published as classifieds. Here is what they do:
It starts with a meeting during which the activists search the classifieds for flats with high rental fees (some are 850€ for 18 square meter or 720€ for 25 square meter!), call the owner to set up a visit and inform the group of where to meet. They show up with bottles and confetti close to the place and wait for a signal to join the two already in the house. As soon as the signal comes in, the whole mob enters the appartment to start a 10minute party with singing, dancing and drinking and leaves the owner with an open mouth. There seems to be two reactions by the owners: the ones who think this is quite funny and interesting and the others who ... call the police.
Check out the videos:
I think this is a great initiative and I´m sure this could spread throughout the cities that have been facing extreme rental fee growths.
If you´re undecided on what CD you´d like to give to someone you like for Christmas, head over to your local record shop and get this. It´s perfect for the holidays if you know that you´ll get a Christmas-song-overkill. And the one you´ll give it to will love you forever. Thanks Ben, that´s just great work.
Thanks to Fred Wilson I just recently came across Wallstrip.com which is a Rocketboom-style Videoblog that covers cool companies from a financial/market perspective. Things I particualry like about Wallstrip is that it is well produced, partly shot on the street, partly in a studio and that they put advertising at the end of their shows which I absolutely have no problem with. It´s fun, it´s short, it´s informative. And Lindsay´s just an adorable host.
Ok, most of you know and read them already, I´ll post them anyways. Might be one or two you don´t know and should check out. Here we go:
Techcrunch (English - This has to be the most read and up-to-date tech-blog around)
BildBlog (German - Always has an eye on Germany´s leading yellow press "news"paper)
Mashable (English - comes right second to Techcrunch)
Werbeblogger (German - mostly advertising and some tech news)
BasicThinking (German - the most active german blogger besides Spreeblick that I know and a Kawasaki fan)
Gründerszene (German/English - Spreadshirt CEO Lukasz meets interesting people worldwide)
MicroPersuasion (English - Steve Rubel tries hard to save the Walmart image ;-)
Guy Kawasaki (English - The entrepreneur´s guru)
AlarmClockEuro (English - Hot news from the Euro VC playground)
VentureBeat (English - Hot news from the US VC playground)
DonDodge (English - A Microsoft fellow on the next big thin)
Seth´s Blog (English - Seth Godin is for marketing what Guy Kawasaki is for entrepreneurship)
BeetTV (English - Short video interviews with media revolutionaries. Pretty cool)
BabblingVC (English - A slovak-american VC based in Germany and a partner at Neuhaus Capital)
Kenan Flaggler Business School (English - MBA Students at UNC Chapel Hill on PE/VC)
OnStartups (English - Great blog with practical advices for Start Ups)
Ehrensenf (German - Daily Vlog about fun stuff out on the webbernet)
Ibrahim Evsan (German - Ibo is the founder of german Video-Hoster Sevenload)
A VC (English - Fred Wilson is a cool VC with a great taste of music)
If I´m missing out on other great stuff - let me know in the comments.
Just found this great video called "Funding Your Dream" on Guy´s blog. He´s not in it this time but his partner at Garage who moderates this great panel discussion between VC`s and Angels about how entrepreneurs should get prepared to fundraising. It´s a little long but Veotag (the video hoster) let´s you jump from question to question which is a great new way of tagging videos. Check it out, it´s really interesting.
While I am at this, it would be a great idea if someone over here in Germany could do a similar panel with german VC´s and post it. I am thinking of Lukasz over at Gründerszene, who has in the past managed to meet a bunch of interesting people, either CEO´s of start-ups or VC´s.
Or Robert Basic, who seems to be a big Guy fan and was thinking about how to get him over to Germany in order to speak.
The question is, if the german way of VCising is similar to the US one.
