Hacking is everywhere

Hacking is our new manifesto. With the marcopocalypse staring in our face, the pressure to hack our current economy is greater than ever. Fortunately, it is also now easier to get our hands on resources and begin hacking the stale industries that need reinvention. Everyday, I see more and more of such examples. I want to share it here and hopefully inspired more smart entrepreneurs to start hacking our industries.

Hacking Uninsured WorkersDr. Ores is also a physician who runs a nonprofit health care cooperative for city restaurant workers that he sees as a model for how national health care could work.

Under the plan, he charges each restaurant a dollar each month for every seat in the establishment and pools the money. In return, any employee from those restaurants can visit him free of charge, whether for a cut finger or the flu.

The need is acute: A 2005 study by the New York State Restaurant Association reported that almost 75 percent of the city’s restaurant workers — about 120,000— have no health insurance.


Hacking Mobile Devices
“Five years ago, there were no counterfeit phones,” says Xiong Ting, a sales manager at Triquint Semiconductor, a maker of mobile phone parts, while visiting Shenzhen. “You needed a design house. You needed software guys. You needed hardware design. But now, a company with five guys can do it. Within 100 miles of here, you can find all your suppliers.”

Technological advances have allowed hundreds of small Chinese companies, some with as few as 10 employees, to churn out what are known here as shanzhai, or black market, cellphones, often for as little as $20 apiece.


Hacking Music"Talking gross numbers that come directly to the band, we have made more money already than we have on the last record in four years," said Mathieu Drouin, the band's co-manager. "Without any intermediary, we're making 77 cents on the dollar for every record we sell" on iTunes. Under a label deal, based on Drouin's estimate, Metric would have earned closer to 22 cents.

Metric also took a page from album rollouts employed by much bigger artists such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. In addition, fans could purchase the album directly from Metric's own site (www.ilovemetric.com), which sold "Fantasies" at five price points, ranging from an $8.99 album download -- with an extra track not available on iTunes -- to a $64.99 "deluxe" package that included autographs, artwork and invitations to exclusive performances.


Hacking Legal
Today, Wilson Sonsini announced the launch of a "term sheet generator." It's basically a web tool that creates draft preferred financing term sheets for startups...So I think this is a brilliant step toward "open source law" which I've been advocating for a while. ....What this tool really wants to evolve to is having an open, wiki-style back end where practitioners can change and comment on the myriad of options and verbiage which would keep the tool evergreen based on the best crowdsourced legal opinions.


Hacking University
An Israeli entrepreneur with decades of experience in international education plans to start the first global, tuition-free Internet university, a nonprofit venture he has named the University of the People....“The open-source courseware is there, from universities that have put their courses online, available to the public, free,” Mr. Reshef said. “We know that online peer-to-peer teaching works. Putting it all together, we can make a free university for students all over the world, anyone who speaks English and has an Internet connection.”

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