From corporate to personal

When Alexa von Tobel decided to take a job with Morgan Stanley out of college in 2006, she had no idea that she would be dropping out of business school and founding her own online company in just three years. LearnVest, a website that primarily aims to teach women about managing personal finances, has already attracted over 80,000 visitors since its launch in November 2009. It has garnered over $5 million in venture and angel funding and was recently named as one of 2009’s most promising startups by the TechCrunch50.

Tobel came across the idea of starting a tutorial for personal finance when she realized that it was something everyone needs but few have actually mastered. “I couldn’t believe that I was working as a trader,” she recalled at a Yale talk two weeks ago, “yet knew nothing about how simple things like credit cards and mortgages work.”

After spending two years at Morgan Stanley, Tobel decided to work for a file-sharing startup to gain some entrepreneurial experience. Six months later, she matriculated at Harvard Business School, only to drop out a semester later to start LearnVest. “Starting my own company was definitely daunting,” said Tobel, “but once I spent that first day just sitting at home wearing jeans, I knew it was for me and that I could not go back to the corporate world again.”

As a student at Harvard Business School, Tobel had screened her business idea through hundreds of peers, professors, and acquaintances to gain feedback. “I would find the smartest, brightest, most experienced people I knew and ask them for their thoughts about my idea,” she explained. And when they all expressed approval, Tobel knew that she had a viable plan. With the help of four professors and some enthusiastic classmates, she quickly assembled a development team and raised the necessary funds to launch the website. LearnVest is looking toward advertisements, live one-on-one professional tutorials, and bank referral partnerships to generate revenue.

Through LearnVest, Tobel hopes to educate women on managing their finances in a simple, easy-to-understand manner. “You can literally save hundreds of thousands of dollars by opening an IRA in your early 20s rather than waiting until your 30s,” Tobel said. “But no one teaches you these things, and no one wants to read through a thick, boring book just to learn this stuff.”

Certainly, the colorful buttons, user-friendly layout, and bold text make LearnVest much more aesthetically pleasing than the average textbook. So the next time you have a question about credit cards, tax forms, student loans, or more – take a look at learnvest.com and see for yourself.

-LYW

Argentina's Real Estate Boom

Even as the long-term economic prospect for the United States real estate sector seems sober, at best, investors have not completely abandoned the asset class. Following the bursting of the United States housing bubble, interest has particularly shifted toward overseas real estate holdings, primarily in South America. Venues like Argentina and Brazil have seen an influx of foreign direct investment into their real estate sectors.

Although affected by the recent global downturn, the South American real estate sector has continued to prove a lucrative sector for two main reasons: lack of credit and paltry investment options.

Unlike the United States, mortgages in countries like Argentina are relatively hard to find and prohibitively expensive, often at rates of over 20%. Over 90% of high-end homes in the Argentinean capital, Buenos Aires, are paid for in direct cash exchanges. This means less leverage (and less risk). Thus, even as the United States mortgage bubble imploded, South American countries had buffers in place.

Moreover, investment continues to concentrate itself in the real estate industry because there are few other investment opportunities. Due to their own financial credit crunches in the past few decades, many South American nationals harbored general mistrust of financial institutions and their investment goods well before the latest global crisis. Over the past few months, these fears of financial products have become even more substantial, and rich South American investors continue to harbor their assets in the shield of tangible, illiquid holdings.

This South American housing boom continues to gather steam, even as other international markets like in China and United States have faced recent crises. It is therefore little surprising that the first Argentinean IPO in nearly two years will be the real estate developer TGLT.

—EH

Maybe Minority Report had it right

Remember the movie Minority Report? The 2002 film starring Tom Cruise featured a bewildering look into a possible future reality, including a vision of what computer technology might be like in a more advanced society. Sooner than many might have anticipated, an enterprising company is bringing part of that vision to life.

Becoming the master

“Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Surprisingly for a sedentary profession, more hackers run to skinny than fat; both extremes are more common than elsewhere. Tans are rare.” Eric Steven Raymond’s A Portrait of J. Random Hacker is part of a series of writings and directories he has created for one purpose: to perpetuate hacker culture by educating the next generation.

Raymond’s website, "How to become a Hacker", does not focus on what you might imagine such a site to contain. There is no discussion of how to steal bank account numbers or write keyloggers, how to write code for cheating online game systems or bypass computer system security. Instead, his writing focuses on dispelling the myth that hackers are a maliciously motivated group devoted to exploiting cybersecurity loopholes for personal benefit. In a world where the virtual world is increasingly intertwined with the real, he takes it upon himself to be the cultural anthropologist of the hacker community, and in doing so, explains to the world the difference between true hackers and “crackers”, the subgroup of hackers focused on malicious activities like those previously mentioned. He seeks to expand and perpetuate the hacker community in a way that is premised on the notion that “the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved … [and] no problem should ever have to be solved twice.” His site is dedicated to showing us the path to becoming part of this movement.

Take a look!

And remember, the fivefold path to hacker Zen…

To follow the path:
look to the master,
follow the master,
walk with the master,
see through the master,
become the master.

Barbie goes tech geek

Canada: Not as connected as Africa

Have you ever had a question you really wish you knew the answer to, but find out to your great dissapointment that there is no way anyone on Earth has the data, and even if there was a way, it would take a team of researchers to find your answer? Sort of like: what’s the most remote place on Earth, and how long it would take to get there from the nearest city?

Fortunately, the World Bank had the same question, as well as an idle team of researchers, resulting in a few beautiful maps about remoteness in the modern world. It turns out that some parts of Tibet are as much as three weeks removed from a city, unimaginable in the modern world, at least to me. Other surprises: northern Canada’s remoteness, and how connected the Amazon and sub-Saharan Africa are thanks largely to travel by rivers.

Flying with the dolphins

Harvard -- the clothing brand

Harvard is a brand, and a powerful one at that. Regardless of whether the styles pique your interest (and some have critiqued the line for its insistence on all things patterned), Harvard is testing the reach of its brand name in an interesting way: they're launching a new clothing line. In terms of whether starting a clothing line is a mistake for the university, I think that by the time your name brand is as strong as Harvard’s, you might be in the clear to put your name on just about anything. What might save the project is that Harvard intends to direct the profits toward financial aid for students. How nice.

Next on the chopping block... cookbooks?

It's no secret that the print business has some tough times ahead. From newspapers to magazines to the good ol' trashy paperback romance, the internet has undermined the print media's ability to give people what they want, when they want it.

However, if there's one genre of literature that stands a fighting chance, it's the cookbook. After all, these books are easier to carry around than the individual lists you get off allrecipes.com, never mind the fact that you probably don't want that $2000 MacBook Pro of yours anywhere near the frying pan.

So cookbooks are safe, right?


Apparently, not anymore.

Say "bye-bye Kindle" and "hello Vook." The Vook is a new innovation that combines books with videos and social media platforms. Vooks blend text and video into a single reading/viewing experience and exist for anything from thrillers to romances to fitness manuals to, yes, you guessed it, cookbooks that can now be read-watched. Each Vook, which typically features between 13 and 17 videos, is priced at around $6.99. They are available on the iPhone and the iPod Touch, enabling users constant access to the content whenever they want it.

So it all comes down to two options:

1. Reading "Cut the beef into thin slices and set it in the pan."
or
2. Watching your favorite Naked Chef sizzling some meat in the saucepan.

....Vook, please.
—LW

Dot-com... no longer?

Ever feel that URL’s are rather monotonous with their generic “.com,” “.org,” and “.net” endings? Well, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is making vast changes that will spice Internet addresses up to a whole new level. Currently, there are 21 generic top-level domain endings and 280 national/regional suffixes (e.g. .eu for European Union). However, come 2011, look forward to a massive expansion.

Starting in the spring of this year, ICANN will begin accepting bids from anyone who wants to create a new generic suffix (including suffixes with non-Latin scripts such as Chinese and Arabic). Successful bidders will be required to pay ICANN a one-time fee of $185,000 and demonstrate the ability to run a registry that manages the sale of addresses with the new suffix. With the number of corporations, entities, and individuals that exist in the world, the possibilities for new creations are infinite. For all we know, people could begin to domain-ize their own last names and put them up for sale. Imagine owning the “smith” domain and selling it to the 2.5 million Americans who have the same last name. For a $185,000 start-up fee, the business opportunity seems to be an incredibly lucrative one.