I love whiteboards. They are an essential tool for explaining an idea or running a brainstorming session. Drawing an idea helps me better understand my thinking. We have whiteboards in every meeting room at the ATDC, which are constantly used by our startups.

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There are a handful of websites, like Amazon and IMDB, that I constantly look things up on. If you want to know what rating a movie has on IMDB, you go to your browser address bar, type www.imdb.com, wait for the homepage to load, enter the movie name and click search. This is a 3 step process that can be reduced to 1 using a bookmark.

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That’s right, Apple reported selling 3.7 million iPhones in 2007, but less than 2 million were activated. That leaves over 1.7 million iPhones which have probably been unlocked and are being used on networks other than AT&T.

Apple still makes a pretty penny on the sale of iPhones, but is missing out on an estimated $10 per customer per month payment from AT&T for these 1.7 million phones. That’s $200 million a year.

This news, along with some disappointment with product announcements at Macworld Expo have sent Apple’s stock tumbling 34% this year. Might soon be a good time to get some Apple stock on the cheap.

How do know what’s going on in our community, the communities next door and the rest of the world? Most of us rely on the traditional new gathering and distribution establishment (ie, CNN) to provide us information. In some occasions that source can have real value. But in others it can really under deliver.

Over the past few years I’ve begun to seek additional news sources to stay informed. I’ve subscribed to the WSJ, BusinessWeek, Entrepreneur Mag, Wired, Fast Company, Business 2.0, and Inc. I learned an enormous amount by reading these publications. But the most valuable new source I’ve developed over the years is citizen news.

Blogs, videologs, podcasts, and social news sites provide a wealth of news that the networks ignore or simply never hear about. They also provide great coverage on very niche topics while giving you opinions that the networks are afraid to express.

I thought I’d share the news sources that I find most valuable to my tastes and interests:

• Digg.com — social news site
• BoingBoing — obscure but entertaining news
• TWiT’s This Week in Tech podcast — great tech news discussion
• CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast — more tech news discussion
• BusinessWeek’s podcasts
• NPR’s podcasts
• A ton of blogs — complete list is here