Land of opportunity in digital news media: Buenos Aires

Miranda Mulligan, right, and me, left, with the startup teams.

We hear a lot about the next Silicon Valley, but we don't hear much about the Valley of Death. That is where 80 percent of tech startups go to die.

Startups die or join the walking dead mainly for two reasons: they don't have enough cash or they don't have enough knowledge to get to the next stage of development. They are unable to show investors that their project could be commercially viable.

The Media Factory News Accelerator, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, wants to change those odds of making it across the Valley of Death.

Nomadic life: the kindness of friends, family

Pickup soccer below the 16th century city wall in Cartagena, Colombia, old port city on the northeast coast.

You can't do what Cindy and I have done for the past five years without the support of friends and family. They have encouraged us to live a life without a home by making their homes available to us.

We sold our house and everything in it in 2008 so that we would be free to go where my next consulting or teaching gig would take us. That meant most of three years in Guadalajara, Mexico, two years in Beijing and now betwixt and between Atlanta, Miami and Cleveland.

Cindy has been our guide for all this time. She has planned dozens of side trips for us, worked out itineraries, picked out places to visit and even assembled historical background for me to study. She has recorded it all in thousands of photographs.

Most recently I was in Medellin, Colombia, for a few days, giving a lecture and workshop at a journalism conference.