Explain Business – Entrepreneurship Focused Forum

Now here is a neat little forum for the budding entrepreneurs. It is run and managed by Stanford Alum entrepreneurs and offers advice on “starting a business or running a small business” especially in these trying times.

Even though the forum is less than a month old, already lots of folks have asked some interesting questions. And they have been duly answered by experts. Questions like,

• One man ad agency - how much should I charge?
• Do I need to incorporate if I am launching an iPhone App?

The forum is unlike the usual forums. All the questions follow a flat hierarchy and are characterized by tags rather than topics. The most recent questions automatically pop to the top thus making it easier for users to read/answer them. You can also instantly vote for any question that you like. And of course, you can even subscribe to get an alert if someone answers your pertinent question.

I enjoy this format much better over the typical boring mundane forums where everything is overly structured and answers are many levels deep. We love this forum so much that we have added a link to Explain Business on our blog. Yes, our readers can now ask questions directly on that forum and get an instant response back. So start asking your questions on Explain Business and let Stanford alum answer them for you.

Allvoices.com - A refreshing approach to news and events

Each day, I visit dozens of websites including blogs, news sites, forums and even social networking platforms. The purpose is keeping tabs on various technologies, events, and of course to see what else is going on around me. Whether it is political, sports, IT or even finer side of life, I prefer to find it online. And sometimes, I even write about some of it (like right now) at some forum or on one of my blogs out there…

Allvoices.com is one such startup out of the valley that has caught my attention and has literally made some of my surfing easier. It not only organizes information professionally of everything that I want, but also gets my point of view out there faster.

The first thing that you see is not textual information, but a world map. As a user, you choose the region that interests you and it takes you to the news and events related to that region directly. Remarkable. For example, the story of sudden death of Benazir Bhutto spread around the world like wildfire. There was hardly any website, blog, newspaper, TV, radio that did not cover the event in detail within minutes of its happening. Even CNN listed found Benazir's death as the most sought after event on its website. Within two days of its happening, it has probably achieved the notoriety of becoming the biggest news story for 2007. But allvoices.com seems to have found a way to filter and bring the best of these stories out for its readers.

http://www.allvoices.com/people/Benazir-Bhutto

I get to read what the other newspapers are talking about, view comments left by people and also add my own blogs/feeds/comments to this list. Wonderful!

As another example, I was watching some news story on TV and a name Miliband came up in UK. I clicked on the map of UK on allvoices.com and got complete details about him, including a link to Wikipedia of his entry.

I think this is the future of how we shall gather news, read, and comment. It is a mix of traditional (imported news items from major players including fox, cnn, bbc etc) with a blend of blogs and viewers comments. CNN is trying to do something similar with iReport, but so far allvoices.com seems a better effort. Good job guys.