What am I Doing Now?

san francisco summer
Photo by vgm8383 licensed under Creative Commons
“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.” – Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

It’s been two weeks since I last walked out of the Live Earth offices and the “so what’re ya gonna do nows?” just aren’t getting old yet.

The idea of perfection or an ideal future/job/family is loaded with false hope and bound to disappoint, not unlike San Francisco in the summertime.

Is that a depressing thing to say? (Remember, I got my Master’s in skepticism at USC). Au contrair. I’ll never know exactly what I want for the foreseeable future. Or at least I’d never admit to it. I like to allow for a little free flow, leave room for spontaneity, live day-to-day to the max and give a bit up to chance. (Was also an English major). It only gets better.

Call me a pretentious music snob (and you’d be right) but I’m too existentialist to even list Top 5’s because, well, at any given time or place that list would be different.

OK, here’s the latest:

  • Gulf Coast Benefit – on August 25th near you. I’m helping to organize west coast and promote.
  • Social Media Week LA – September 20-24th across LA (and 5 other cities in the world). On the advisory board to make sure this is amazing.social media week la
  • Two other opportunities that I will refrain from mentioning until I take the first steps toward beautifying their respective web presences, etc. (sorry no jinxies).

Am I getting paid? Not enough. Still looking? Yes. Happy? Hell yes. Staying in LA? I’ll go anywhere in the world for the right gig.

Hoping to set aside time to pimp out the resume and LinkedIn profile in the next day or two.

While the possibilities are endless as ever, a hunger for new challenges is met with a thirst for adventure. All good things.

I do appreciate everybody’s positivity, support, forwarding of job openings, and connecting of me to funded friends with promising start-ups.

Hit me up for lunch or to talk biz!

10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World

This post was written by Rob Reed. He is the founder of MomentFeed, a location-based marketing, strategy, and technology firm.

Location technologies are transforming how we experience, navigate, and ultimately better our world. From the global to the local, here are #10Ways geolocation is a positive force for good.

Social media has changed the world. It has revolutionized communications on a global scale, and the transformation continues with every status update, blog post, and video stream. The global citizenry has become a global network.

Since becoming widely adopted just a couple years ago, social media has supercharged social action, cause marketing, and social entrepreneurship. Indeed, the true value hasn’t been the technology itself but how we’ve used it. Today, a second wave of innovation is defining a new era and setting the stage for change over the coming decade.

Mobile technologies will extend the global online network to anyone with a mobile device while enabling countless local networks to form in the real world. We’ve decentralized media production and distribution. We’re doing the same for energy. And we’ll continue this trend for social networking, social action, and commerce.

The combined forces of smartphones, mobile broadband, and location-aware applications will connect us in more meaningful ways to the people, organizations, events, information, and companies that matter most to us—namely, those within a physical proximity of where we live and where we are. Can location-based services (LBS) change the world? Here are #10Ways:

1. Checking in for Good: If Gowalla and Foursquare have taught us anything, it’s that people respond to simple incentives. By offering badges, mayorships, and other intangible rewards, millions of people are checking in to the places they go. Apps like Whrrl take this a step further and enable like-minded “societies” to form on a local basis. The next step is for these apps to add greater purpose by encouraging more meaningful checkins and offering corresponding badges and stamps, thus mapping the cause universe. Or for a dedicated app to be developed that rewards conscious consumption, social responsibility, and civic engagement. Yes, the CauseWorld app features a cause element, but it’s not about cause-worthy places.

Continue reading “10 Ways Geolocation is Changing the World”

How to Host Your Own CitizenGulf Event on August 25th

How to Host Your Own CitizenGulf Event

Fishing Families Wait for Aid

Dear Friends:

Do you want to make a difference for the Gulf region communities affected by the oil spill, but don’t know how?

Both Gulf Coast Benefit and Social Media Club have decided to sponsor Citizen Effect’s CitizenGulf project. The effort has become a National Day of Action on August 25th, in alignment with the week of the fifth anniversary of Katrina. You can host your own local benefit!

The benefit — to be promoted by Gulf Coast Benefit — will help fishing families find a new, more sustainable future by providing education resources for their children. Catholic Charities of New Orleans is the beneficiary of all CitizenGulf National Day of Action donations. Citizen Effect will send 100% of donations, less credit card fees, directly to Catholic Charities to support education programs for fishing families.

Your Event Means a Summer Night of Jazz, Blues, Zydeco, and More

World of Coca Cola Party

If you want to host an event, we are suggesting a meet-up at places that can accommodate the following: People, hurricanes, New Orleans themed music (i.e. jazz, blues, zydeco) and a local green or environmental expert who can say a few things about the oil spill’s impact on the marine environment and the Gulf Coast economies associated with it. Registration will be $10.

The CitizenGulf team will set up your event page to ensure all proceeds go directly to the charities, with no worries about pass through fees. To sign up for your own event click here. We hope your Social Media Club will join us in time for a national roll-out of host cities on August 1.

Posted via email from Andy Sternberg’s posterous

My Pet Causes

For the past two years, I worked to raise awareness and funds to help stem the pressing environmental crises of our time: water, energy, climate. It was a great and successful run and I felt extremely lucky to be employed full-time doing what I love in support of critical causes that I believe in.

But regardless of the focus of my efforts (or career), my pet causes persistently tug at my soul.

What do I mean by “pet causes?” It has nothing to do with pets. Or rocks for that matter.

pet causes goose
photo by Claudio Gennari shared via Creative Commons license.

When I was a freshman at University of Iowa and finally arrived at the age of independence, I thought: “We’re on the verge of a revolution and I’m ready, along with my new-found peers and old high school buds, to take on the world and turn it on its head.” I was pretty much like every other 18-year-old in that respect.

But as we grow and the world around us invariably and abruptly changes in both inexplicable and awesome ways, we start to think we might need to guard or cherish that which we find essential, lest it gets taken from younger generations. After all, it doesn’t take a long time at university to realize that you’ve got it better than many.

What I saw growing up and discovering the world in the mid- to late-’90s was a U.S. carelessly at the top of its game on the verge of imminent denouement and with a widening gap between the haves and have nots. The dumbing down of our nation had begun spiraling out of control and it wasn’t even the Bush 43 administration yet.

I began to get angry about certain things that I was afforded yet others were not. Nothing extreme, nothing impossible, just middle class luxuries that I refused to take for granted and to this day hope to see universally available – at least on a hyperlocal level.

My Pet Causes:

  • The Arts in Public Education
  • Internet (specifically broadband) for All

Arts in Education:

I learned to read music at age five – piano lessons. By second grade we played the recorder in music class. I probably had a crush on my third grade art teacher. Didn’t we all?

But by the time I got to high school, art and music classes were already getting stripped from public schools thanks to a budget crunch. And they never would recover. Fast forward to 2010 and it’s beyond blaming TV, video games, or the internet. Creativity is going out of style. It’s no longer an option. This is bad.

Broadband for All

I’m sick enough right now about LA public libraries shutting down every Sunday and Monday. The fact that we can’t bolster our society by at least subsidizing access to high-speed internet is a goddamn shame. I’ve reported on all the OECD broadband surveys in which the U.S. consistently shows up in the bottom half. Obama has presented a plan. Let’s make it happen… and more.

What you can do:

A little bit goes a long way and just by reading this far, you’ve (at least subconsciously) helped my pet causes. Please visit the following websites for more info and to take action:

What are your pet causes?