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Harvard Business School recently launched its fourth annual alumni new ventures competition. I'm a huge fan of this competition having been a finalists judge the past two years and co-chair of the Boston chapter of the competition. What sets this competition apart from the plethora of others is its global reach, the scale of the enterprises that compete and the vast resources made available to all the competitors. The competition has two tracks: one for social ventures and another for for-profit businesses.

Come join the launch of the second President’s Challenge at Harvard! Professor David Edwards of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences will be speaking on the promise of social entrepreneurship. There will be food served, and students from across the University will be here to share ideas, find teams, and generally mix it up.

15 years ago I took a management strategy class at Harvard Business School being taught by Professor Clayton Christensen who was mostly talking about disruptive innovation. At the time Christensen was wildly famous, at least as far as business thinkers can be. He had recently published Innovators Dilemma and was on the cover of popular business magazines. Now I had been cold-called three times in as many days so I was really paying attention. What Christensen then proffered was this gem of management advice:

Each day at ExtensionEngine we track about 1,000 hours of our employees' labor of love across about 40 billable client projects and another dozen or so non-billable projects that are for either sales, training, development, philanthropy, etc.. That works out to more than a quarter million hours …

Hoping to create the definitive resource for all open Web technologies, Apple, Adobe, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera have joined the W3C to launch a new website called Web Platform. The new website, which just launched into alpha, will serve a a single source of relevant, up-to-date and quality information on the latest HTML5, CSS3, and other Web standards, offering tips on web development and best practises for the technologies. According to the W3C, the website will also display the status of a particular technology’s standardisation and cross-browser implementation. The site is also a wiki that allows users to ask, answer and rate questions similar to Stack Overflow, which seems the closes competitor. Originally, the site was open to just employees of the sponsor, but it seems to have opened to all registered users now. All documents posted to the Web Platform website are licensed under creative commons. While the initial content was provided by the member companies, website visitors are encouraged to share code examples, tips and tricks or any other relevant information using the Wiki. Building and maintaining interoperable systems on the web is a community effort and one that we at ExtensionEngine participate in on a daily basis. We look forward to engaging on Webplatform.org and contributing to ensure a bright, interoperable future!