Paul Graham, partner at early-stage investment fund Y Combinator and author of Hackers & Painters, argues in his essay How to be Silicon Valley that there are two essential ingredients for a place to successfully breed startups: rich people, and nerds. And because both groups are highly mobile, that is ALL you need. Fancy buildings don’t matter, because the crucial stage of a startup is when there are a few founders sitting around brainstorming, which can happen anywhere.

So if all you need are rich people and nerds, what attracts these two groups of people to any particular place? Well, Graham argues that above all, you need a world-class university - one that competes with the likes of Stanford and MIT - because smart people gravitate to where there are other smart people. And the second thing you need is a place where students will want to stay after they graduate and where rich people will want to live, a place with good weather and personality.

Charlottesville is an amazing place, and it would seem to fit the bill. Nicknamed The Hook, the town is best known as home to the University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. And C’ville was recently named the best place to live in America. The beautiful surroundings of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the college-town culture, an incredible music scene, great weather and a laidback atmosphere all help attract plenty of diverse, affluent people to the town. But for some reason, there are just not a lot of startups being created here. On this mashup by fourio, web 2.0 start-ups are mapped globally. There are none, until now, in Charlottesville. Why is that?

Simple. Charlottesville needs more nerds.

UVA’s graduate engineering school is ranked 37th nationally. Ouch. There’s the problem right there. Not great for a school that trades the Best U.S. Public University title back and forth with Berkeley and Michigan every few years. BTW, what’s Berkeley’s engineering school ranked? 3rd. Michigan’s? 9th. Double ouch. They’ve got more nerds.

UVA is in the middle of a $3 billion capital campaign right now which is targeting $150 million for the School of Engineering. Graham argues that to really change the landscape, UVA should take that money and recruit 50 top engineering professors with signing bonuses of $3 million each. It’s a bold move, but it would certainly change the playing field overnight and turn C’ville into a startup mecca.

We’re very pleased to have just been featured on the Tourism Internet Marketing Blog, which is authored by Jens Thraenhart.

This is especially exciting, given Jen’s extensive experience working in the travel industry.

Jens is currently the Executive Director at the Canadian Tourism Commission. He has worked with several leading hotel chains, including The Four Seasons, Kempinski, and Marriott, is the co-founder of Wow Travel, and sits on the boards of the Hospitality Sales & Marketing International Association and the Travel Industry Association of America.

We want to thank Jens for introducing us to his readers and agreeing to be a founding member of our site. I personally am looking forward to having him share some juicy insider hotel recommendations!

Well, Spain anyway. News of VibeAgent’s imminent beta release is spreading like wildfire throughout the blogosphere!

Here’s a quick shout-out to our friends at BajoCoste, the Spanish travel blog, for introducing their readers to VibeAgent.

We hope to see Spain well represented in the VibeAgent community!

Four tech guys living in an apartment in downtown San Francisco have just launched Justin.tv, a site where you can watch the world through the lens of a camera strapped onto the helmet of one Justin Kan. Live. Twenty-four hours a day. Even when he’s taking a leak. Apparently until either you, or Justin, cease to exist.

Oh, and you can also chat about it in real time with others who are doing the same thing, or watch highlights of his life. Or you could call Justin directly. Go ahead! His number, posted on the site, is 415-948-3219.

Justin was formerly the founder of Kiko, a now defunct online calendaring company that he started two years ago and was funded by Paul Graham’s early stage fund, Y Combinator. They ended up selling the assets of the company for $258,000 on ebay, and now Paul’s back as the financier behind Justin.tv.

So, what’s it like watching Justin’s life? Well, he mostly goes around meeting with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and other twenty-somethings hanging out in SF. A few days ago the cops showed up at his apartment in response to a prank caller claiming there was some bad sh*t going down. Oh, and there was the night when all his buddies tried to push some site to the top of digg. Not exactly HBO.

But the interesting thing here is that the guys behind Justin.tv are apparently using the web site to test out their technology and garner some publicity so that in the future, when they launch their *real* business, we’ll all be able to stream our lives to the world 24/7 wherever we may be. Think about how awesome that will be. Um… yeah.

Are these guys brilliant marketers? According to Alexa, Justin.tv has skyrocketed after only being live for seven days to a traffic rank of 3,086. Not bad, really. And the media is flocking…who wouldn’t want to write a story about these guys…inevitably it makes us all ask the question, “(Why) Would people want to watch my life 24 hours a day?”

Or is Justin.tv going to end like the story of the man who had his name legally changed to dotcomguy, and locked himself in his house in January 2000 for a year with a few dozen web cams and a laptop with an Internet connection, so all the world could watch him…um…shop online.

Dotcomguy also generated massive publicity, and was reportedly getting about 20 million page views a day on his site the first month he went live. But by the time he finally emerged from his house a year later and rode off on his moped, the sponsors funding his adventure had reneged on their commitments and dotcomguy had become a joke within the tech community.

The most popular video in the blogosphere right now is this one by Michael Wesch (see http://www.ksu.edu/sasw/anthro…), Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.

It’s pretty awesome - worth spending the next five minutes of your life watching, no matter who you are.

I’ve got to give a shout-out to the guys at 37 Signals here.

They have written, as far as I’m concerned, the best book in existence on how to develop a web app, called Getting Real. This book is fun and easy to read - you can bang it out in a day - but it’s the type of book you’ll constantly be referring back to as you work to build the perfect app. Here’s a peek:

Decisions are temporary so make the call and move on
Done. Start to think of it as a magical word. When you get to done it means something’s been accomplished. A decision has been made and you can move on. Done means you’re building momentum.

But wait, what if you screw up and make the wrong call? It’s ok. This isn’t brain surgery, it’s a web app. As we keep saying, you’ll likely have to revisit features and ideas multiple times during the process anyway. No matter how much you plan you’re likely to get half wrong anyway. So don’t do the “paralyis through analysis” thing. That only slows progress and saps morale.

Instead, value the importance of moving on and moving forward. Get in the rhythm of making decisions. Make a quick, simple call and then go back and change that decision if it doesn’t work out.

Accept that decisions are temporary. Accept that mistakes will happen and realize it’s no big deal as long as you can correct them quickly. Execute, build momentum, and move on.

Brilliant. I just decided I’m going to read this thing a fourth time starting tonight! And they’ve also recently made it available for free online for all you penny-pinchers.

Max, our Tech Director, sent me this yesterday, I think it’s hilarious.

He assures me I’m like the guy in panel 2, but I’m sure he’s just being kind.

I’m reading a book right now that is a real page turner - The Cluetrain Manifesto.

I’m not quite done yet, but this is one of the best thing i’ve read on how the Internet is changing the world and the implications for commerce.

Here’s a quote that just resonates:

Markets are conversations; and
Conversation is fire. Therefore,
Marketing is arson.

Marketing has come to be about the stuff business moves, not about the stuff that moves business - ideas. Talk that lasts is about stuff we can’t stop talking about. In other words, what makes the most meaningful ideas combustible is also what makes them inextinguishable.

If this is something you are remotely interested in or make a living from, I’d buy this book right now - I guarantee it will be $14 very well spent. You can even read the whole thing for free online here.

Want to be a mystery shopper for Small Luxury Hotels of the World? Me too!

Apparently, SLH is seeking 200 volunteers to become mystery shoppers for the luxury hotels they market, all expenses paid (travel to and from hotels is your responsibility).

Sadly, I think I’ll have to pass this time around, on account of the work we’re doing here to help create what we hope will be millions of mystery shoppers…but if you’re available, click here to learn more and send in your application today!

Thanks to BlogonTravel for the head’s up.

Technorati is great, but sometimes it’s hard to filter through the muck to get to the good stuff.

So if you happen to be looking for the definitive list of travel and tourism blogs online, Guido over at Happy Hotelier has come up with the most comprehensive list I’ve seen so far. There are more than 125 blogs and counting, so there’s plenty of reading to catch up on!

Thanks Guido, this is a great resource for those of us “in the biz”.