I thought this is very cool!

Aerogel, one of the world’s lightest solids, can withstand a direct blast of
1kg of dynamite and protect against heat from a blowtorch at more than
1,300C.

MoMo’s back.  Hope to see you at the October event.

I enjoy Jim Cramer, both on TV and online, thinking he’s a welcome spark in an otherwise drab and conservative field.  This, however, is the maddest I have ever seen him.  He’s going out on quite a linb by being so forceful.

For those interested in the current tension in the hedge fund world, the letter from the recently-imploded Sowood Capital Management to its investors provides a glimpse into what went wrong.

In this case, it’s annotated by Marc Andreessen, which makes it more insightful.

Andy Shaindlin has a post discussing corporate and higher ed alumni efforts.  He touches on the usual points on similarities, and ends with the question:

Do the private sector and higher ed have things to learn from one another when it comes to alumni relations?

I’ll take the conversation to another track by proposing that corporate and higher ed alumni communities are really the same thing: an effort to create externalities in a network of connections.  Each of the connections have emotional, economic and physical dimensions.

In the context of my recent thoughts on stupid networks, I believe that each of these communities would be better structured as an application built on the social layer of the internet, when that is mature.  In its absence, they move on to create proprietary networks to reap the short term benefits.  My old company, SelectMinds, creates intelligent networks for its corporate clients and they continue to benefit immensely. When the socialOS is here, they would be well advised to jump on it to multiply those benefits.

Yesterday we had the June event for MoMo Istanbul.  This month’s format was five 10-minute presentations.  I must say that I enjoy the theme-free, rapid succession pitch format quite more than the set topic/theme events we’d had.

Yesterday the entrepreneurial passion was evident in all the speakers.  The enforced 10-minute limit helped keep the audience alert.  I look forward to having a few more of these in the coming months.

Speaking of the next few months, we’re entering a summer hiatus at MoMo Istanbul.  The next meeting will be in September.

For the June meeting, we’re back to the format where 5 companies present products/services/projects in a strictly-enforced 10 minute presentation.  This month we’re at Ericsson. See you on June 4th.

Let me know if you need an invitation.  This month we tried socializr for the electronic invites…

Mobile Monday Istanbul’s May meeting is on Monday.  The topic is Handsets.  Hope to see you there.

Monday was one of the best Mobile Monday Istanbul events ever.  See the MoMo Istanbul blog for a recap.

MoMo Istanbul’s April meeting (on Monday, April 2nd) topic is User Generated Content.  Turkish media veteran Nuri Colakoglu is one of the presenters. He’s good, so I trust it will be a good meeting.

UPDATE: Also confirmed as a presenter is Firat Gonenc, the CEO of Trend Tech and Retromedia.