The Great Seduction

Keen on Jeff Jarvis

As the author of popular BuzzMachine blog and the 2009 hit What Would Google Do, CUNY Assistant Professor Jeff Jarvis has established himself as one of the liveliest and most incorrigibly optimistic new media pundits. If anything, Jarvis’ incorrigible optimism has grown since his book about Google.

Having lived through a prostate cancer scare, which he blogged about in intimate detail, he is now writing a new book a defense of publicness, entitled Public Parts which will be published next year. As Jarvis told me when we talked about the past, the present and the future of media last week, Public Parts will argue that our current obsession with defending privacy is counterproductive, both to us as individuals and as a society.....

Keen on Ron Conway

If Silicon Valley has an angel, it’s Ron Conway, the legendary early stage investor who has backed many of the greatest Internet start-ups including Google and Facebook. Last week at the Social Currency Crunchup at Stanford University, I had the good fortune to sit down with Conway for a few minutes
to talk about technology, entrepreneurs, investors and the next big thing in the Valley.

In his avuncular selflessness, in his apparent concern for everything and everyone but himself and in that reassuring thick shock of silver hair, there’s certainly something angelic about Conway. But dig a bit into Ron Conway and you get a sense that behind all that reasonableness there’s a remarkably shrewd operator who has minted a fortune for himself, his investors and his entrepreneurs. My sense – for what it’s worth – is that the guy has multi-million dollar eyes. He is a brilliant watcher, an acutely sophisticated observer of the tech space, a remarkably perceptive businessman who doesn’t miss a trick. That’s where his unique talent lies and that’s why he is amongst the greatest early stage investors of our times.....