- Movember. You know, the month where you stash away the razor blades and grow manliness (read: a mustache). To honor this ancient and noble custom, Mr. Clean, the 54 year old icon for the Procter & Gamble brand, will grow an awesome mustache, the ferociousness of which will be decided by the number of fans to P&G’s Facebook page. After a hooped pirate earing, a mustache would be a fitting accompaniment in Mr. Clean’s mid-life crisis, me thinks.
- The NYT weighs in on the startup scene in Romania: an nice, feel good story of can-do chutzpah that should put a smile on every entrepreneur’s face. Savvy internet marketers already know this though: Romanians are among the finest programmers in the world. With talent like that, a vibrant startup scene was only inevitable.
- Here’s what’s keeping The Zuck up all through the night: Big brands’ aversion to spending on Facebook. Much of FB’s $70Bn valuation is based on the assumption that revenue will continue to grow, like Google before it. But if big brands shun Facebook for word of mouth advertising (and why shouldn’t they?), how feasible is FB’s ultra high valuations?
- Google Earth is a powerful tool for academic research of the archaeological kind has been already well documented. Here’s the tool in action, unearthing ancient secrets from the Arabian desert. Makes all the time you spend doodling around on GMaps seem worthwhile after all. Perhaps you’ll strike Inca gold, Indy style someday.
- David Tisch doesn’t dick around. The managing director of TechStars, New York, and grandson of self-made billionaire Laurene Tisch, is a major driving force for innovation in the New York tech community. Here’s a wonderful BetaBeat profile of the man who comes across as too cool to be hated on. David Tisch, are you on Twitter? Oh you are.
- Aaron Shapiro, CEO of digital agency HUGE, smart guy, and author of “Users Not Customers” got himself some nice free press by hiring out of work Borders employees to sell his book for him, articulating, in the meantime, what Borders did wrong (answer: everything). While that itself isn’t much of an interesting story, the book is the real deal. Check it out.
- Also on TNW: 29 reasons you shouldn’t date a tech entrepreneur (besides the fact that they are perennially broke. Until they hit it big time). Cons include: skinny jeans, silly mustaches (hey, its Movember!), API calls. Funny, if a bit stretched.
- And finally, here’s real noise becoming ‘Onionified’: Steve Berlusconi, that maverick, lovable, misogynistic, billionaire asshat, delayed the release of his latest love songs because of the financial crisis, proving that at least in some cases, he doesn’t act like a catoon version of every Italian stereotype.
