Nikola Tesla’s name inspired Elon Musk’s electric cars. It’s a measurement unit for a magnetic field and even adorns a rock band. Yet many still consider him an underappreciated inventor, not only because of the long shadow of Thomas Edison but also because he often eschewed financial glory for creativity, making him a compelling role model for today’s Silicon Valley.

Now Dorrian Porter, a Menlo Park entrepreneur, wants to erect a statue of Tesla in downtown Palo Alto to remind everyone that today’s digital connectivity would not be possible without the Serbian American inventor. The statue would also be a free Wi-Fi hotspot.

“I think every chance someone has to look him up and learn about him they will be surprised they didn’t learn too much about him in high school,” Porter says. He’s launched a Kickstarter campaign with accompanying videos to muster support and financing.

But the project has bigger goals than just a tribute to one of science’s great minds. Porter hopes that when entrepreneurs do learn more about Tesla, they’ll be inspired to focus less on financial gains and more on what their innovations can do for the planet.

-Caleb Garling, San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2013

Creating 3D animation videos with maximum effectiveness and minimum effort is a delight with GoAnimate. Cartoon and animation advertisements work wonders for marketing and this tool makes it all the more efficient. The service is completely automated, with “drag and drop” functionality you only have to pick and choose from various rich template options. It has a very spontaneous user interface with a text to voice function with adjustable voice tone features. You can also import voices, sound effects and music. You never have to download anything on your disk and videos can be posted to YouTube to maximize reach.

-Ashwin, Olinda Services, April 26, 2013

“He reports that over the two-month period after Greystack posted the video, its website traffic rose 250 percent. Furthermore, according to Troia, Greystack’s leads have increased more than 40 percent as a result of people downloading the call to action mentioned at the end of the video.

“Visits to multiple pages on the site are up 200 percent since implementing the video,” he says, “and visitor time on our site is up about 400 percent since we added video to our pages.”

-Greystack Digital Marketing, May 1 2013

“I sometimes find that though I like a particular tool or service, finding a way to allow access for all our staff and learners, on the assumption that only a few would actually use it to begin with, is quite challenging. This isn’t just an issue with small companies such as Xtranormal, but also with software providers as big as Adobe. We now have a site licence for Adobe CS6, in the past we were quite restricted on how we could use other versions of Adobe Creative Suite as it was on a per machine basis.

So what am I recommending now?

Well it’s GoAnimate.”

-James Clay, E-Learning Stuff, April 24, 2013