This weeks guest was Atif Rafiq, head of Yahoo! Local for North America and previous founder/CEO of Covinga. He and Jason talked about the role of community building in creating a network of local business listings and also discussed Yahoo!’s overall strategy to leverage its various “horizontals.”  Atif talked about a number of the ventures he’s involved in, including the upcoming Local Search Summit on July 17th.

There were three callers on “Ask Jason” this week.  The first, Jonathan Johnson, wanted to know if Jason had any creative ideas for how to raise capital for his lifestyle business. Mike Stone, Jason’s second caller, wanted advice on how to effectively evaluate a competitive space and how to decide whether it was worth entering. Finally, the third caller, Greg Gerber, was looking for ways to attend entrepreneurial events/conferences without simply buying a ticket. Jason gave some great responses to these questions so make sure to watch the show and find out what he said!

On “The News with Lon Harris”, Jason gave his thoughts on the future of breaking news when discussing how quickly Michael Jackson’s passing was reported on Twitter vs. CNN. He also talked about Tesla Motors’ government loan, a lawsuit against Microsoft’s Bing, and sent security company Clear to the “Deadpool.”

Next week’s homework assignment is to read the book “How the Mighty Fall,” by Jim Collins.  Maybe you can be Jason’s star student on the air and earn your ticket to the TechCrunch50.
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