./emilychang my data stream

A Few Good Women
In the Democratic primaries, Barack Obama first distinguished himself in the area of foreign policy; criticizing an atrophied approach to international affairs in both parties, he promised a new approach to diplomacy and national security. As the country waits impatiently for inauguration day, his appointments in those areas indicate that change is indeed on the agenda: In a major adjustment for the realms of foreign policy and national security, his new approach will be led by women.

10 tough questions to ask yourself before raising money
I seem to spend a lot of time convincing people not to raise money. The #1 culprit is not The Downturn or a lack of good ideas. The real problem is that people are trying to raise money too early when things are still half-baked. Here is my top 10 list of tough questions all entrepreneurs should ask themselves before trying to raise money.

TwitSnip
A simple tool for posting small snips to Twitter. It lets you "quote" text on any web page. The nifty thing about TwitSnip is that it tries looking up the @user for the website and linking back to the source.

Rososo
The name of the site is a play on RSS. Rososo is a simple, clean, guilt free way to keep track of your bookmarks. You can test out the site by adding bookmarks on Rososo before registering.

Getting Real About Agile Design
Agile is here to stay. The economic difficulties of the past months have finally put waterfall out of its misery; now more than ever, long requirements phases and vaporous up-front documentation aren?t acceptable. Software must be visible and valuable from the start. For many designers, Agile is already a fact of life (and for those less accustomed, some recommended reading follows at the foot of this article). We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear-research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs-we just need new techniques. Now is the time to get real, and prove design can adapt, if we want to stay relevant in these increasingly unreal times.

iPhone soars to 16.6% of smartphone market
The iPhone is now not only the second most popular smartphone in the world but has saved the smartphone industry from a decline this past summer, according to a research note by Needham analyst Charlie Wolf. Apple?s handset has represented about 16.6 percent of the entire smartphone market worldwide for the quarter ended in September and is now second only to Nokia.

TextFlow
This word processing collaboration app combines the best of the old off-line desktop with the new possibilities of web-based software, where users work anywhere, any time, on any connected computer. [Beta]

PeopleBrowsr
A simple visual dashboard that adds more power to Twitter, your other online identities and those of your friends.

Tidy Favorites
Tidy up your favorite bookmarks and surf the web with this next-generation, user-friendly interface. Bookmarks are saved as thumbnails in which you can drag and drop the thumbnails to rearrange your preferences.

Social Mention
A social media search engine that tracks user-generated content. Results are aggregated from popular social media services, such as Flickr, Digg, and Twitter.

Kontagent
A viral analytics platform for social network application developers. The Kontagent platform is built from the ground up to provide deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service. The platform works directly with the Facebook API, and will soon support OpenSocial and the MySpace platform.

Tweetag
A twitter search app that lets you browse the twittosphere by tags.

Mocklinkr
A hosted, interactive collaboration tool for your mockups. Upload your mockups to a central location, give your clients a URL to view and review all of the mockups for any particular project.

Feed Rinse
An RSS tool that lets you automatically filter out syndicated content that you aren't interested in. It's like a spam filter for your RSS subscriptions.

Splitweet
Easy management for multiple Twitter accounts and brand monitoring. Splitweet allows the Twitter users to compose a list of accounts and distribute their tweets, choosing their release in one or more of their accounts. You can also follow your following tweets from all of your managed accounts in Splitweet.