This weekend marks the fifth anniversary of the kidnapping and murder of five year old Samanta Runnion. Samantha was playing outside her home with a friend when a man approached, in broad daylight, and said he had lost his dog. She spoke to him briefly before he grabbed her and dragged her into his car. Samantha was smart - she knew to yell and fought to free herself, but it wasn’t enough. Her body was found a few days later. She had been sexually assaulted and murdered. The man convicted of the crime had sexually abused children before abducting and killing Samantha, but was acquitted on the charges. He was 27 years old.

It’s almost a scary coincidence that at the same time this weekend, authorities in Tacoma, Washington found the body of a missing 12-year old, Zina Linnik, who was abducted right off the street near her home on the Fourth of July. As it turns out, they believe she was taken and killed by a convicted child molester who has abused other children, including brutally raping his half sister. A month ago, Kelsey Smith was abducted and murdered in Kansas City, Madeline McCann was taken in Spain, and an enormous child pornography ring was busted, rescuing something like 33 kids from adults who were raping and molesting them. Some of them were infants.

On the anniversary of Samantha’s death, we’re also wrapping up the final days of the auction we’re holding to benefit the organization made in her memory. I am so glad that we picked such an important cause. Through the Joyful Child, Samantha’s mother, Erin, and a team of people work tirelessly to change and influence the laws against child offenders in this country. They use the Samantha’s Pride program to help parents in other communities to band together and put child safety activities in motion, like keeping watch of playgrounds and scouring the landscape for suspicious behavior.

They also work with other parents of children who’ve fallen victim to fight laws and help other parents. 1 in 4 girls will cross paths with a child molester before their 18th birthday. What happened to Samantha Runnion could happen to your child, my niece, or any kid in our society. I don’t need to be a victim or a parent to understand the need for an effort to put a stop to this.

I’ll be making a cash donation to the Joyful Child this week, in addition to the auction proceeds (which are in part already on their way!). If you’d like to donate in Samantha’s honor, please visit The Joyful Child.

Everybody in my family is incredibly close. I have three siblings, Tony, Lisa and Marie, who I know and hang out with like the closest of friends, two step-siblings who have been in our lives so long, they’re no different than blood relatives, and a half-sister unrelated to me who is every bit my family as anybody else. We are very tight with our parents and grandparents, and all seven of the nieces and nephews are treated as if they’re gold. We were raised Italian and European. That should tell you everything. If anything ever happened to any of them, I would go bananas.

On April 30, 2007, Lisa Stebic was last seen at her home in Plainfield, IL. She is 37 years old, a mom and would have never left her children, yet has not been seen or heard from since. Her cell phone and wallet were also gone, but there haven’t been any transactions or calls since. My oldest sister, Lisa, is a friend of the family and spent the day today, along with 700 other people, looking for her. I can’t even imagine. Please visit the Website dedicated to the search. You never know.

I have thoroughly enjoyed everything that’s gone on with the iPhone. From the minute it was first unveiled, the marketing behind it, all the media and blog coverage, everything. People were excited. It was talked about for weeks. The commercials with the happy music, people lining up at stores around the country, all the anticipation for it. It wasn’t enough to motivate me to make the effort to buy one, mind you, but it was really cool to watch, no less. I’m not much of a gadget girl, and to be honest, I want a Blackberry anyway.

I am, however, really intrigued (and a little excited) about the innovation iPhone will bring to cell phones and PDAs, and more importantly, how people will use them. The idea of a phone that has internet access, music and phone service isn’t exactly novel when you think about it, but Apple makes it look painfully simple, and most of all, put it into words we, the mass audience, understands. What that means is adoption, and adoption means evolution. I can’t wait to see what all of the other companies will roll out to keep pace with the product.

I think it will also be a tipping point for changes in how the mass market uses internet and phone services. That’s kind of exciting, too, because it means there may be opportunity for start-ups to play into. I vaguely recall a few iPhone commercials positioning the phone and internet as ambiguous, as if somehow the two combined is much better (and that having it this way makes perfect sense). From what I’ve heard, AT&T isn’t running iPhone calls over IP, but it doesn’t matter. Just planting that simple concept of internet-and-phone-in-one in the mass consumer’s mind is a big step towards a very cool future. It will be interesting as things continue to develop.

I was on Techmeme.com tonight and saw this. It’s kind of true, really, because eBay owns a part of Craig’s List and basically launched a rival site, but it still just read funny. I like Cade Metz. He also writes for PC Magazine and usually has good stuff.

Most of the women I know in the city are also enterpreneurs. It’s nice because every friend you have more or less knows what it’s like to own a start-up company, but on the down side, it usually means everybody’s too busy to get together. We’ve fixed this by making time to hang out every couple of weeks, meeting up for low key, casual drinks, brunch or dinner at cool little hot spots around the city (you can read more about it here). Sometimes it’s a handful of girls, sometimes a few, it’s very chill. Today, three of us met for brunch and mimosas at the W hotel in Westwood. The scene is backyard patio, lots of grass and trees, and it’s been perfect weather. Everybody’s new so people are also making good contacts, and we all invite new people who also either executives or enterpreneurs. We have drinks, get something to eat, talk about owning a business, guys, hiring interns - you name it. It’s nice to be around people going through the same kind of stuff as you are, plus it never hurts to wear something cute and hang out at like a hipster in a city like Los Angeles. We sat poolside for a bit after, until everybody had to run off to whatever’s next. It was definitely a cool way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

From an article in the New York Times today:

“What you may not realize is that what is free is actually costing us a fortune,” Mr. Keen writes. “The new winners — Google, YouTube, MySpace, Craigslist, and the hundreds of start-ups hungry for a piece of the Web 2.0 pie — are unlikely to fill the shoes of the industries they are helping to undermine, in terms of products produced, jobs created, revenue generated or benefits conferred. By stealing away our eyeballs, the blogs and wikis are decimating the publishing, music and news-gathering industries that created the original content those Web sites ‘aggregate.’ Our culture is essentially cannibalizing its young, destroying the very sources of the content they crave.”

I haven’t read the article yet, so I can’t really comment, but the argument seems interesting (though I think the Amateur is King mindset on the web will quickly change as entertainment and media continue to move in).

I admit I’ve always viewed “social networks” as more as a token phrase for the new and naive in internet business than anything else, given that communities have existed and thrived online long before the first profile page was hammered out on Facebook or MySpace. Media and business both seem very quick to believe that these online platforms are the end-all means that people will engage, and worse, that we as a user base won’t evolve to other forms of interaction.

This kind of narrow mindset isn’t much different than how others once believed the paddle boat would never be replaced by the steam ship, or that we would forever rely on the floppy disc to store information. We all know the end of the story in both of those situations. What surprises me is how few people are thinking about what’s going to happen next, and more importantly, planning ahead for it.

The next phase in “Web 2.0″ will have little to do with community and everything to do with media and entertainment, and this will reshape the market as we know it. Up until this year, both entities had little to do with the web - media was still fighting to hang onto its print components, and entertainment still focused on selling seats in movie theaters. Both have finally figured out that it’s a losing battle and are quickly making moves to establish online presence and distrubtion.

What this means for social networks is increased competition of passive entertainment, and worse, by fierce competitors with deep pockets and giant resources that many existing internet companies may not have. The only advantage is that entertainment and media are still relatively clueless on how to succeed online and ultimately, may never learn how to make it happen. In order to compete, however, existing social networks and online companies need to think about - and position for - what’s ahead.

Unfortunately, everybody seems focused on the past or the present (including large players), and developing around it instead. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be hearing about new social networks or companies toting the community mantra, but more creative ideas that 1. Play into the entertainment/media trend or 2. Provide some kind of service or solution to either market. Instead, we’ll see lots of failures and fade-aways in the coming year, which is too bad because the opportunities at the moment are truly endless.

I spent last Friday at the offices of The Joyful Child, the organization that is going to benefit from the StyleDiary charity auction (which is going on now). I have to admit, I’ve spent a lot of my life wanting to do something important, for a cause, but sitting in the room with everybody was an incredible experience. Erin Runnion can’t be much more than my age and yet she carries the hugest weight on her shoulders - not just in losing her child to something so insane and senseless, or running a non-profit and all that goes into it, but in her tireless effort to try to prevent it from happening to other people’s children.

She’s surrounded by the most amazing, talented team that helps move the whole effort forward everyday, and it’s incredible what all of them know about the law, congress, and the system. There are pictures of Samantha everywhere. You can tell she was sweet, creative and happy, and absolutely loved by her parents. I don’t think anyone could walk out of there and not be completely blown away by the problem and the enormous obstacles they’re facing in trying to stop it. I couldn’t look at the pictures of her daughter and not want to do all I could to help.

I believe that child predators are getting out of control in our country. 1 in 3 girls will meet a child molester before their 18th birthday, which means if you have three daughters, one is going to be a victim. For boys, it’s 1 in 6, and whether or not either gender survives depends on whether or not they knew their abuser. Child pornography has been proven statistically to provoke would-be attackers and at this time, it’s running rampant on the web. 31 children were recently rescued from a pornography ring that spanned an insane amount of countries and included infants and babies. I don’t have to be a parent or a victim to understand the dire need for something to be done about this. It is happening to all ages, genders, backgrounds, colors, shapes and sizes. Samantha could have easily been my niece or your daughter. That’s how serious the issue has become in our country.

Erin said that they’re launching a new social network for surviving parents, which will help serve as a collaborative and communication platform for those who are fighting for the cause. My friend Jen and I are lending our technology experience to work with the group in finding ways to use and maximize the platform, provide training and create “web 2.0″ campaigns that include viral efforts across the web. We will also be working to create a coalition of technology companies to work with the group to help create better, more unified tools for finding missing children. Many believe that had the right technology been in place, Samantha Runnion would have been found within minutes of her abduction. That we could potentially save people’s lives is just enormous.

It sounds really easy when you read it in text, but the reality is that it’s going to be a huge undertaking that’s only just really starting. I have never felt so small as I do looking at the road ahead for us, particularly in just learning what is where so that we can figure out what’s in place and what’s needed.

I read articles like this and this and it makes me crazy that I am not doing more with what I know about telecom and the internet. I have worked on the very opposite side of where you are right now, way past this web page and the ISP you subscribe to, through all the routers and networks, the data centers - all the way back to the engineers who develop and drive the web as you see it happening. Nearly every Tuesday for the past eight years, I’ve sat on calls with a former Lucent engineer-turned-start-up-CEO-turned-acquired-CEO and learned about what was next for the IP and telecom networks, and more importantly, how it’s all going to work.

So, when I see headlines about Joost being bundled in the televisions of the future or that mobile carriers are fearful of VoIP, I’m not surprised. It’s sort of like looking at your watch as you see the train arriving on time to the station. Rupert Murdoch talking about media zipping over the device of choice, all the entertainment companies moving into the industry, even the DRM issues - all predictable when looking at the evolution taking place at the internet’s back-end. View it from there and you can actually kind of gauge what will happen with some accuracy. I’ve been doing it since I started my first internet business.

Internet video is an example. It could be seen coming a good six months before it actually hit. Not because of YouTube’s popularity, but because broadband speeds getting faster, compression technology getting better and networks converging together were creating the right climate for it to happen. Just like predicting a storm over Toronto, it’s almost as clear and can be as on track.

And, it’s actually very easy to understand. Traditional telephone, television, radio, mobile/cell phones and the internet were at one time all individual pipelines feeding the world its communications. These things are all converging into a single channel, the IP network, and it’s in turn shaking up more than a half dozen old, established industries. This is because it’s widening and leveling the fields that they play in. It’s the natural progression of disruption.

Entertainment, media, internet and advertising are all in a tailspin of change from it, because it’s not just breaking down the old strongholds and control in those industries, but because it’s also throwing them together as competitors in a single sandbox. Proven, fixed and very tightly managed processes that have controlled industries for decades are being broken down, to where the average Joe can now create a company to compete and win against a media giant, or become celebrity famous without ever speaking to an agent or publicist.

The same goes on and on (and on) for dozens of other things. Expect to see more Joost-like companies come into the works. See cell phones as personal media devices, video content becoming more like your television shows, and advertisers finding new creative ways to reach everybody. Your mobile phone and house phone will be universal. Nothing is going to be single device dependent. Don’t give up all of your control to the users - the future isn’t going to be about creating what you want to watch but where and when. And, definitely get familiar with the long tail because as MySpace and YouTube gobble the masses, it’s going to be a freeding frenzy within the niches.

When things go down at the carrier level, it’s rarely seemed to be a question of “if” but “when”, and at the end of the day, that’s what’s driving everything else that’s happening. Watch the web from here and I think you’ll get a real glimpse of what’s next. After all, smart enterpreneurs look for the wave coming in and paddle to it, not try to jump in after it breaks.

StyleDiary was in the Wall Street Journal today. The article was on social shopping, which I happened to also speak on a panel about at a retail trade event this past week in Boston. I’m going to add the pictures to my Flickr page . After lunch, I got the chance to walk around Beacon Hill with Cate, a friend and amazing journalist for the top fashion trade magazine. Some of the streets are made out of big round stones. Incredible. It was cool.

I’m going to write about my take on social shopping sometime after the charity auction. Right now, things are hectic between this and some other things going on with StyleDiary, and on top of it, have a new project launching shortly. I do have something to say on the topic, especially after hearing all the insight and questions at the conference. It is great to be in the WSJ article.