just when you thought we were (mostly) broke-

Last night I was reading a wikipedia entry on Google (if you're bored, look up a well-known company or person on google. I promise you'll find it fascinating!) & I was astounded that within two years of its founding, it recieved 25milly in funding. I thought that was crazy talk, but my techie husband assured me that in the "old days" (as I call them) or "golden years" (as he prefers to call them) throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars into web startups was anything but uncommon. With the US economy as it is then, articles like this are particularly interesting. Do you think money should be poured this freely into social start ups? Where do you think funds would best be diverted given the needs of our society? Check out the WSJ article below-

MONEY RUSHES INTO SOCIAL START-UPS

By GEOFFREY A. FOWLER

As Wall Street and other investors clamor for a piece of social-networking giant Facebook Inc., Silicon Valley venture capitalists are betting on a new generation of companies that hope to unshackle social networking from personal computers—and shift it to the cellphone.

On Thursday, Color Labs Inc., a phone-based social network founded by veteran entrepreneur Bill Nguyen, is opening its doors. The Palo Alto, Calif., start-up recently secured $41 million from top venture-capital firms including Sequoia Capital even before the company's iPhone and Android apps were ready to debut.

The idea behind Color is that a phone's location-sensing abilities can build a user's social network for them, allowing users to share photos, video and messages based simply on the people they're physically near. The company's view on privacy is that everything in the service is public—allowing users who don't yet know each other to peer into each other's lives.

Color is just one of a growing number of social start-ups betting on smartphones that are now attracting a venture-funding rush. Many of the companies feature photo taking and sharing at their core, such as Path Inc., founded by former Facebook executive Dave Morin. It received $8.5 million last month from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Index Ventures. It has also had conversations with Google Inc. about a buyout, according to a person briefed on the discussions. Google declined to comment.

Another phone photo-sharing company, Instagram, was barraged by inquiries from nearly 40 investors before settling last month on $7 million from Benchmark Capital.

We would have people show up at our offices every other day wanting to meet while we were trying to get work done," said Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. Since launching in October, the service has nearly three million users, he said.

In addition, Yobongo Inc., a three-week-old iPhone app that lets users chat with people located in their geographic area, said Wednesday it raised $1.35 million. In January a group-texting service called GroupMe said it raised $10.6 million.

The flood of venture capital into mobile social start-ups is the latest sign of Silicon Valley's Web-fueled boom. In recent months, investors have driven up the valuation of Facebook above $60 billion and social-gaming company Zynga Inc. to $10 billion.

Behind the spurt of new services is also the idea that the phone, carried by people at all times, can reinvent the notion of a social network by sharing more real-time information about where people are, what they're seeing and even who they're around.

The phone "provides a platform for developers to build experiences that are more personal in nature," said Path's Mr. Morin. What's different now is the ubiquity of smartphones and tablets. "Now you have an opportunity to create these experiences at scale," he said.

The rush into mobile social companies also comes as Facebook is honing in on phones. Facebook, which has more than 200 million users of its services on cellphones, this week bought mobile-technology company Snaptu and earlier this month acquired group chat room service Beluga.

In both deals, the purchase price wasn't disclosed.

Last year, Facebook also unveiled a check-in service for its phone apps that allow users to volunteer their location to friends, and also find deals from nearby businesses. The company is now at work on efforts to integrate its capabilities deep into phone operating systems, potentially expanding the sorts of things people can do with their Facebook friends on the go.

A Facebook spokesman said the company's platform is used by many phone apps.
"We're excited to be the technology that many of the leading mobile apps are using to help people connect with friends through games, music, photos and commerce," he said.

Unlike Facebook, Color eliminates the acts of "friending" and selecting privacy settings. That's because when it is turned on, Color collects global positioning, gyroscope, ambient lighting and other data from phones to determine who else is in close proximity.

That means users will temporarily join the group of people at a birthday party or rock concert—even strangers on a train. Phones running the Color app automatically share photos and videos taken with other phones running Color nearby.

"Instead of seeing your friends online alone in front of a PC, we allow people to interact with each other in real life," said Mr. Nguyen, who previously founded online music start-up LaLa, which was acquired by Apple Inc. in 2009, among other companies. Of the $41 million that Color raised, $25 million came from Sequoia and $9 million came from Bain Capital Ventures, with the rest from Silicon Valley Bank. "Color is at the confluence of the mobile, social and local phenomena," said Sequoia partner Doug Leone, of the 30-person start-up, which is seven months old.

Services like Color raise questions about how people might use them and deal with privacy. Mr. Nguyen said Color doesn't ever promise that photos, location and other information will be private.

Such capabilities will require good faith from users (for example, to keep public photos G-rated) and could push people to change their social behaviors.

Color's business model, like many free mobile social services, remains a work in progress. Mr. Nguyen said the company might eventually sell premium services to local businesses like restaurants, which might be able to highlight photos of popular dishes or daily specials, or learn more about which Color-using customers come to the restaurant most often.

"Do you think my butt looks big?"

I'll never forget an instance last year during which my husband (then fiance) and I encountered a gaggle of girls in figure-hugging mini dresses, sky-high heels & dramatic makeup...out and about at 2pm at a bat mitvah. True story - we were touring a seaside venue popular amongst the NY set for hosting weddings & a variety of other events and occasions. My husband said he literally had to look away because by appearing to look in their direction, he was sure he was breaking some type of law. Curled eyelashes, teetering stilettos - I couldn't for the life of me believe what I was seeing. As such...I may have excused myself to the restaurant's restroom where a group of them were headed..I wanted to get in their heads for one second. Crazy! Beyond the "what did you do Friday night?" conversation - here they were, adjusting their dresses to butt-skimming heights and trading sex tips.

OMG. An article published in this past weekend's WSJ describes a scenario very much like the one I observed, and just barely delves into the tip of the iceberg concerning the phenomena of little girls dressing like Kim Kardashian. I truly wish the author had delved into the subject a big deeper as an emerging tend within the popular conciousness. Why would mothers who embraced the feminism of the 80's allow their girls to imprison themselves as they have? Little girls have always wanted to try mommy's lipstick & go on dates, but when does the innocence end and tales of 'how I went down to Aaaron last night" begin? As a girl (woman, I should say) whose mother still analyzes her hemlines, the fact that tween can moonlight as an extra from the film "Burlesque" shocks me.

For your reading pleasure...

Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?

by Jennifer Moses

In the pale-turquoise ladies' room, they congregate in front of the mirror, re-applying mascara and lip gloss, brushing their hair, straightening panty hose and gossiping: This one is "skanky," that one is "really cute," and so forth. Dressed in minidresses, perilously high heels, and glittery, dangling earrings, their eyes heavily shadowed in black-pearl and jade, they look like a flock of tropical birds. A few minutes later, they return to the dance floor, where they shake everything they've got under the party lights.

But for the most part, there isn't all that much to shake. This particular group of party-goers consists of 12- and 13-year-old girls. Along with their male counterparts, they are celebrating the bat mitzvah of a classmate in a cushy East Coast suburb.

In a few years, their attention will turn to the annual ritual of shopping for a prom dress, and by then their fashion tastes will have advanced still more. Having done this now for two years with my own daughter, I continue to be amazed by the plunging necklines, built-in push-up bras, spangles, feathers, slits and peek-a-boos. And try finding a pair of sufficiently "prommish" shoes designed with less than a 2-inch heel.
All of which brings me to a question: Why do so many of us not only permit our teenage daughters to dress like this—like prostitutes, if we're being honest with ourselves—but pay for them to do it with our AmEx cards?

I posed this question to a friend whose teenage daughter goes to an all-girls private school in New York. "It isn't that different from when we were kids," she said. "The girls in the sexy clothes are the fast girls. They'll have Facebook pictures of themselves opening a bottle of Champagne, like Paris Hilton. And sometimes the moms and dads are out there contributing to it, shopping with them, throwing them parties at clubs. It's almost like they're saying, 'Look how hot my daughter is.'" But why? "I think it's a bonding thing," she said. "It starts with the mommy-daughter manicure and goes on from there."

I have a different theory. It has to do with how conflicted my own generation of women is about our own past, when many of us behaved in ways that we now regret. A woman I know, with two mature daughters, said, "If I could do it again, I wouldn't even have slept with my own husband before marriage. Sex is the most powerful thing there is, and our generation, what did we know?"

We are the first moms in history to have grown up with widely available birth control, the first who didn't have to worry about getting knocked up. We were also the first not only to be free of old-fashioned fears about our reputations but actually pressured by our peers and the wider culture to find our true womanhood in the bedroom. Not all of us are former good-time girls now drowning in regret—I know women of my generation who waited until marriage—but that's certainly the norm among my peers.

So here we are, the feminist and postfeminist and postpill generation. We somehow survived our own teen and college years (except for those who didn't), and now, with the exception of some Mormons, evangelicals and Orthodox Jews, scads of us don't know how to teach our own sons and daughters not to give away their bodies so readily. We're embarrassed, and we don't want to be, God forbid, hypocrites.

Still, in my own circle of girlfriends, the desire to push back is strong. I don't know one of them who doesn't have feelings of lingering discomfort regarding her own sexual past. And not one woman I've ever asked about the subject has said that she wishes she'd "experimented" more.

As for the girls themselves, if you ask them why they dress the way they do, they'll say (roughly) the same things I said to my mother: "What's the big deal?" "But it's the style." "Could you be any more out of it?" What teenage girl doesn't want to be attractive, sought-after and popular?

And what mom doesn't want to help that cause? In my own case, when I see my daughter in drop-dead gorgeous mode, I experience something akin to a thrill—especially since I myself am somewhat past the age to turn heads.

In recent years, of course, promiscuity has hit new heights (it always does!), with "sexting" among preteens, "hooking up" among teens and college students, and a constant stream of semi-pornography from just about every media outlet. Varied sexual experiences—the more the better—are the current social norm.
I wouldn't want us to return to the age of the corset or even of the double standard, because a double standard that lets the promiscuous male off the hook while condemning his female counterpart is both stupid and destructive. If you're the campus mattress, chances are that you need therapy more than you need condemnation.

But it's easy for parents to slip into denial. We wouldn't dream of dropping our daughters off at college and saying: "Study hard and floss every night, honey—and for heaven's sake, get laid!" But that's essentially what we're saying by allowing them to dress the way they do while they're still living under our own roofs.

—Jennifer Moses is the author of "Bagels and Grits: A Jew on the Bayou" and "Food and Whine: Confessions of a New Millennium Mom."

Top earners? Who dat???

One of my goals with this blog is to understand finance as a whole; to truly understand how the things I read on print pertain to my life and my future. An article recently published by the Wall Street Journal titled "Top Earners May Face Big Hit" struck me as a great example of the philosophy that I hope to espouse with this blog.

This article summarizes a recent presidential panel's modification of certain tax credits and deductions which currently exist of our current tax system. Their proposal, as stated by the WSJ, "could hit higher earners hard, largely by wiping out deductions and investment breaks that tend to especially benefit those who make enough money to itemize their taxes." I'm sure, that by the time you read that last sentence, you thought "ok, whatever, high earners...zzz...NEXT!" So would I, and I did, but my darling husband sent this article to me with a high 'alert' attached - could this mean something to me and mine?

Why yes, indeed it could and it does. In plain language, the panel proposed that the deductions that "high earners" receive for mortgage interest payments be removed from our current tax credit system. It's thought that "high earners" can recoup this loss from other types of changes encompassed within the proposal but the question is...are all "high earners" the same? I think not. I would never think of myself as a high earner - in my opinion, I get paid a very modest salary. My husband earns more than I do - is he rich? Nope, not at all (in fact, my closet can definitely attest to this fact) What he does have is an excellent credit score & a tendency to save, which allowed him to put a down payment towards a lovely apartment. I'd say a good amount of his salary goes towards the mortgage & housing costs, and now his concern is mine - that the proposed change would dramatically affect his take-home salary and tax return.

The point is - does it seem right to create something that would greatly impact what was such a huge life decision for him? Who qualiifies as a "high earner"?  While I am the first to agree that our nation needs to implement drastic changes so as to reduce our nation's budget deficit, it's pretty clear that there is something of note here, namely, that our definition of a "high earner" needs some further clarification within the context of individuals who utilize tax credits to make saavy business decision to their benefit and others. Color this whatever party color you'd like, but could we afford our apartment without the mortgage tax break? Probably not. We'd rent out an apartment, steadily losing money on a place we could never permanently call our own. What will we do if this passes? We're not panicking, but it does have us rethinking some of the larger decisions we've each made over the years (like taking out school loans, for example).

What about you? How would the proposed modifications change your life? Would any of your recent life decisions be impacted? What type of changes would you propose to our current tax system?