Nicolò Borghi: My Blog

MacHEADS Trailer

Coming soon...

Book: Silicon Valley by Gabriele Basilico

When today I saw it in the bookstore I didn't wait more than three seconds to decide wheter to buy or not. Gabriele Basilico is one of the best Italian photographers and for me the Silicon Valley is somehow a magic place. I can't think of a better book, product or whatever to match my main interests. You can buy it from Amazon but I had to have it immediatly!

Why Every Journalist Should Blog + Use the Web

Two links from Publishing 2.0, I totally agree with:

Every Newspaper Journalist Should Start a Blog

The Only Way for Journalist to Understand the Web is to Use It

On curiosity

Yesterday I had an interview for a company I applied for a couple of weeks ago. At one point the interviewer told me "You are a curious person, aren't you. Yes, I know you are, right?" . And that is true, I am a curious person and always think there are very few things I don't find interesting. Now it's curious to see this post by Seth Godin with a video on curiosity. (I don't like that much the music which seems to be stolen from a 7th Heaven episode,but the video is interesting)

Producer JJ Abrams

I will speak A LOT about stuff from  TED. If you have 18 minutes a day, watching TED videos is a very healthy practice. In this video producer JJ Abrams speaks about his passion for mystery and how "holding information" makes a movie muche more interesting and engaging. Abrams also asks "what' s next?" mentioning how technology is evolving allowing everyone, everywhere, to create his own media.

Blogging Agenda 2008: Stealing Marc Andreessen's Blogging Agenda 2008

I was not really sure how to explain what I wanted to talk about on this blog until some days ago I read Marc Andreessen' s blogging agenda for 2008 and realized I am interested exactly in the same three categories. Of course, I can't compare pmarca's level of competence with mine, but the main areas of interest are the same:
So here's my blogging agenda, fully and totally cut and pasted from pmarca:

• Continued blogging about startups, entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley, and related topics.  Including many ongoing installments of the Pmarca Guide to Startups.
• Profiles and in-depth analysis of creative professionals across several domains. What do programmers, serial entrepreneurs, writers, artists, cartoonists, film directors, and stand-up comedians have in common? They're all creative professionals, who totally master their fields and then create on a sustained basis throughout a career that can last 50 years or more. I've become fascinated by how creative professionals operate and what we can learn from one another both within and across domains, and so will spend quite a bit of time on this topic in 2008.
• The history of the creation of various forms of media -- in particular: movies, television, radio, and newspapers -- and in parallel, the accelerating emergence of the Internet as the central medium of the next 20 years. I believe we have a lot we can learn from the history of other forms of media -- even the ones that are now in full-scale collapse -- that can help us both understand why things have happened the way they have so far with the Internet as a medium, and how things are likely to unfold from here

Plus I will talk and/or report about stories from Italy, entrepreneurship in Italy, and so on...

Jeff Skoll

In my previous post I spoke about the Skoll Foundation, without explaining what it is.

The Skoll Foundation has been founded  in 1999 by Jeff Skoll, the first employee and first President of eBay, in order to (from the website) "advance systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs".

In the same effort to promote and  drive social change, Jeff Skoll founded also Participant Productions, producing movies and documentaries that address social and political issues.

Here, you can see the Jeff Skoll talk at TED.

Skoll Foundation Awards 2007

I have just read the stories of the 10 recipients of Skoll Awards 2007 for Social Entrepreneurship. The stories  behind this companies are interesting, inspiring and definetly worth reading.

Here are the recipients:

Escuela Nueva Foundation

Free The Children

Friends International

Global Footprint Network

Gram Vikas

Kashf Foundation

Manchester Bidwell Corporation

Marine Stewardship Council

Veritè

YouthBuild USA

Bill & Melinda Gates Fundation's Initiative: Top Writers to Promote Dialogue on AIDS

The Hindustan Times reports an initiative by the Bill & Melinda Gates Fundations:

"The authors will visit communities or families affected by HIV/AIDS in the country to explore different aspects of the epidemic. Their writings will be like news magazine reports compiled together, said Parmeshwar Godrej, who has been closely involved with the project.[...]

The anthology, with a foreword by Amartya Sen, will be published in August. The Gates Foundation hopes it will humanise the epidemic. Around 2.5 million Indians are living with HIV, with some of India’s most marginalised communities hardest hit by it."

Walt Mossberg on the MacBook Air

Walt Mossberg the tech guy at the Wall Street Journal shares his first impressions on the new Apple  MacBookAir...

It' s great computer and it's some months I have to change mine. I was really waiting to see the new Apple product but I am not sure I am gonna get the MacBook Air. Indeed, being wireless the only way you can access Internet, this leave me with some doubts...

It think I' ll go for the pro 15".