Is Facebook Questions A Quora Killer? (via Thought Experiments)

This is a great commentary on the benefits of Questions on Facebook…will share it!

First, let's dispense with the formalities. Question: Is Facebook Questions a Quora killer? Answer: Wrong question. Facebook's launch of Facebook Questions today adds yet another product to the ever-expanding multi-tool that is the Facebook social graph.  Whereas Quora is a utility in search of social critical mass, Facebook is social critical mass in search of more and better utilities. This is why we see Places, Payments, Deals, and other produ … Read More

via Thought Experiments

A Rather Unbelievable Story-Part 1

Someday, I have told my friends, I am going to write a story about “Waiting For Latvia”. This story would encompass a little piece of land in a faraway country that has managed to completely change my life just by sitting there…the same way it has been sitting there since World War II when my father in law was forced to flee it when he was 10 along with his family.

They were fled when the Soviets came in to take over Latvia and they shot at my husband’s family all the way into the ocean as they fled to Germany on a boat. As my father in law, OJ, recalls, they did not even lock the door behind them knowing they were walking away from everything they ever knew in order to keep their lives.

They ended up in a German internment camp for three years. Eventually, a host family in Wisconsin sponsored them to come and live with them. OJ was able to finish school and went to the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He met my husband, Eric’s mother, Janine there and eventually ended up in Sunnyvale, CA where they raised my husband as an only child. Janine died in 1991 of a brain tumor. OJ met his current wife, Baiba, after she emigrated to the US to find work, leaving her then-husband and two sons behind.

Baiba married OJ in 1997 and I met them both in 1998 when I started dating Eric. To say they both are characters is an understatement. OJ started telling me about “the land he left behind” almost as soon as I met him. Then in 2003, the Latvian government did something amazing and they contacted OJ to tell him that he was the only surviving heir of the half acre lot of land in Latvia. And would he please officially claim the land so he could start paying taxes on it. Immediately. On top of that, during the time that OJ was an absent owner, someone decided to build a restaurant on the land and operate a business…a shady business.

When OJ took claim of the land, Latvia was still considered a pretty downtrodden economy. The country had been depleted of their spirit by the Soviets. Then, things started turning around in 2005. They started turning around even faster in 2006 when the Soviets were making money hand over fist selling oil on the world market. And where did they want to spend their vacation time and dollars? On the warm beaches of the Baltic Ocean. Specifically, Jurmala, which has a white sand beach only a few blocks from OJ’s property. Then the real estate prices started to climb.

And THAT is where we really start this story. The story will unfold where OJ decided to sell the property for over 4 million Euros and we all had dreams of becoming millionaires. I will call the next post “Ghost Money”.  While waiting for the Latvian property to sell we have purchased two condos in Hawaii, moved to the Big Island of Hawaii for a year, purchased a BMW, and had some good times knowing it all was going to be alright “as soon as Latvia sold”.  The story has not ended yet, as we are STILL waiting for Latvia, but I wanted to get started on this story of risk, reaching, hope, faith, bad luck, and more so WHEN it has an ending, the first part of the story will have been laid down as a foundation.

So, stay tuned and sign up if you want to hear a good story!