I would like to see if your challenge at Guidewire is still alive. My team at CoreConnex, Inc. has been working many long hours to make our Corelytics Financial Dashboard the premier solotion for small businesses. Corelytics applies predictive analytics to data that lives in company accounting systems. In a matter of seconds the dashboard displays trend lines, future projections, tracks financial goals and shows business owners how thir company compares to other similar companies in their vertical market. It’s build for the non-MBA who knows their business but is not a financial expert. We are addressing a severely underserved market and aim to help make financial management and decision-making clear and relavant. Stacks of numbers don’t cut it. Pictures that tell the story are the key. We believe this is the only way to get the small business management team on the “same page”. Check us out at http://www.coreconnex.com. Now, who do I talk to at Guidewire?

Actually I’m Japanese making a web service “PIRIKA” that help clean up entire world.
http://www.pirika.org

Our project is very small now but the problem that we are trying to solve is very big.(Over 4.5 trillion cigaret butts are thrown on the ground around the world each year.)

I promise you to do our best and I’m looking forward to meeting you in near future. Thanks.

my God, thank you. my mantra to kids in school today is….do something that matters. thank you for stating this so elegantly.

today the most valuable companies are – coupons (groupon) ,games (zynga) and facebook. far away from when the most valuable companies were cicso, hp, orcl, dell, enterprise s/w — people who actually built stuff. apple is the only exception.

facebook, i am pretty certain, is a net negative on GDP (yes, i will do something productive once i get done talking to my friends). i guess it today for real falls into entertainment. like comcast or CBS or Hollywood.

as a country, we do not add to our capital stock with coupons, games and social media. and in the case of games and social media, the people using the products are not adding to our capital stock. kids in s. korea go to school for 220 days, vs. our 180. when they’re home, they study. we play games and use FB. we are now 26th in the world in math skills.

i started a successful company in 1979 – soft-switch, and another company in 2009. this company – GolfTripGenius.com – is in the golf industry so maybe i am part of the problem. people ask me what’s different, and i reply with these 2 points:

1. location does not matter. at all. my developers are in the UK, romania and the Ukraine. they’re brilliant, hard working, articulate and cost less than half of US rates.

2. the world is your mentor. if it’s 2 am and there is a bug, well, just google it and you will find 20 people who had and solved the problem.

So……….we are producing graduates who are not as well educated, and certainly not as hungry, who want to work on stuff that hardly matters, and yet it is easier and easier to hire graduates who are smart, hungry and very well trained. there is very little friction cost in a virtual world, thnx to skype, web ex, git, tender, toggl and all of the other tools that allow virtual collaboration.

we all know the old line about going from rags to riches to rags in three generations. it may apply to nations, as well. very scary.

what’s really troubling is how few people want to even have a conversation about this.

I’d like to think we’d have the drive to keep going when times get tough anyway, but when your goal is to keep people out of the ER, the motivation is baked in.

Great post. I think that part of the problem is that investors are not only endorsing flavor of the day startups but also actively pushing entrepreneurs to move away from hard problems and towards things that can make a quick buck. I’d love to chat with you. My company Mindblown Labs (Mindblownlabs.com) is using mobile gaming to tackle financial literacy.

Prof Daniele Pauletto
https://plus.google.com/101145554831727652521