Ribbonfarm.com is a blog about business and innovation. At the moment it is written by me, Venkatesh Rao (I go by Venkat).

Here are some recent posts:

I work at the Xerox Research Center, Webster, where my research is in the areas of the ‘Future of Documents’ and ‘Future of Work.’ I am also heavily involved in social media evangelism at Xerox. Before I came to Xerox, I spent 2.5 years as a postdoc at Cornell, Raff D’Andrea’s research group. Before that I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, working on formation flight and team scheduling problems with Pierre Kabamba. Nominally, my background is in control theory, but most of the stuff I do involves a blend of controls, operations research and AI. Somewhere in the middle of graduate school, I also worked for a year at Sulekha.com, where I was among the first employees.

About the name…

The name ribbonfarm refers to the ribbon farms of 18th century Detroit — strips of lands 2-3 miles long, each with 2-300 yards along the Detroit river waterfront — that the then governor invented to resolve water disputes. I thought it was a great metaphor for a blog trying to get its thin slice of attention from the great river of eyeballs that is the Web. Here is a picture (courtesy, Detroit Public Library) of an 1818 map of Detroit that shows the ribbon farms.