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A great icon of our time, and one of the few heroes of the grapethinkers, has decided today to take a medical leave of absence from Apple until the ‘end of June.’ He’s found out his medical problems are more complicated than he thought. Remember though, he’s known for quite the dramatic comeback. All in the essence of a brilliant storyteller, one that lives a story and achieves immortality. Bahahaha!
Posts are circulating around the blogosphere like crazy lately about new studies showing grape seed extract to kill leukemia cells. It triggers apoptosis, which essentially means the cancer cells commit cell suicide. Fascinating stuff. The significance of grapes… we’ve talked about resveratrol here a lot and the anti-oxidant healing powers of wine. This stuff is becoming quite the cultural phenomenon. Grapes? who would have thought
My financial adviser notified me last month that our bank Wachovia is going to be 
acquired by Wells Fargo. It’s also been recently announced that Wells has exceeded $3 billion in environmental financing. Seems like they’re taking full advantage of this economic crisis and positioning to become a major player. Wondering what they’re gonna do with that 3 bil?
President-elect Obama has proven pragmatism and decisiveness with the completion of his energy and environmental team. He apparently understands the issues and is ready to lead.
His team includes:
Lisa Jackson, Administrator of the EPA: former commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection
Nancy Sutley, Chairman of White House Council on Environmental Quality: former energy advisor to California governor, Gray Davis
Carol M. Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change: former EPA administrator under Bill Clinton
Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior: Colorado Senator
Tom Vilsack, Secretary of Agriculture: former Iowa Governor
Here’s a demo of a cool semantic app from Adaptive Blue… it’s called Glue. The app lives on top of the browser as an add-on and intelligently recognizes whatever item you’re browsing on, whether it be a book, movie, song, restaurant, recipe, or wine, and lets you see what your friends thought of it to help you make a decision.
The most interesting part of the demo is at 0:58 where he asks who is involved in vertical/niche social networks for different things such as movies (Flixster) and virtually no one raises their hand. Facebook and Myspace have pretty much grabbed the whole social networking world as far as actual webpages that people visit to interact. Now where the innovation comes in is on top of the browser and on the phone. The only real websites that have a chance these days are dynamic marketplaces (Foodzie, Etsy).
