{"id":344,"date":"2008-10-09T21:17:03","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T21:17:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2008\/10\/09\/the_geeks_might_inherit_the_earth\/"},"modified":"2008-10-09T21:17:03","modified_gmt":"2008-10-09T21:17:03","slug":"the_geeks_might_inherit_the_earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/2008\/10\/09\/the_geeks_might_inherit_the_earth\/","title":{"rendered":"The geeks might inherit the earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur<\/em>.” Thus\u2014allegedly\u2014spoke soon-to-be ex-President George Bush. It may be an apocryphal tale but I do so want it to be true.<\/p>\n

\tAnd speaking of entrepreneurs, Michael Birch<\/a>, founder of the social networking site bebo.com<\/a>, gave a talk at Imperial a couple of weeks ago. Birch, a physics graduate back in 1991, was speaking at the College\u2019s Alumni Reunion.<\/p>\n

\tYou can stream<\/a> the video of the talk or download<\/a> it as a podcast1<\/a><\/sup>. Birch is an engaging and fluent<\/a> speaker and has an interesting tale to tell of his student days, his early employment developing databases for an insurance company and then his various attempts to develop a successful business on the web. The account of his initial efforts is really quite revealing \u2013 there were several non-starters before he finally got bebo.com off the ground. This kicked off as a very small business with his wife and brother but eventually grew into the success that is so well known today and that they sold to AOL this year for \u00a3850 million. Not too shabby.<\/p>\n

\tIt\u2019s a fascinating account\u2014especially for anyone interested in Web 2.0\u2014 told in a nicely self-deprecating manner. There are some touching recollections about his father \u2013 also a bit of an entrepreneur it would appear. And for those interested in making presentations<\/a>, there was a very nice innovation: he gave a few keywords to his kids (aged 7 and 9) and got them to draw the slides that were shown in the talk!<\/p>\n

1<\/sup>NB:<\/strong> the video is about an hour long, but it’s mostly footage of Birch talking so you could easily listen to it on the go (and check out his kids’ pictures later – there were only about five of them).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Thus\u2014allegedly\u2014spoke soon-to-be ex-President George Bush. It may be an apocryphal tale but I do so want it to be true. And speaking of entrepreneurs, Michael Birch, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/scurry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}