January 2012
11 posts
Timehop
Personal data on the web is growing rapidly. More people are spending a greater percentage of their time social networking (time spent per user on social networking sites has grown over 300% in the last two years). Additionally, there are more people coming online for the first time every day, and, based on current usage statistics, 4 out of 5 of those new users will engage with social networking...
Internet... Oh Wow.
Today, the Internet wins.
First, the PIPA/SOPA blackouts and rallies all over the US produced the following outcome (as reported by the New York Times):
[A] senior Senate Republican leadership aide said the Senate version of the bill was dead in its current form, and bipartisan negotiations had begun to revise it considerably. Senators from both parties want to address the Internet piracy...
“We are beginning to see ourselves not just from the inside, as an actor doing...”
– TimeHop in the NYTimes a few weeks ago (belated, yes)
part of the “we live in public” meme, which I’m trying to tease through these days
(via cacioppo)
Stop PIPA/SOPA Protest in NYC -- Jan 18th
Join the NY tech community in a rally outside the offices of Senator Charles Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand tomorrow. On January 18th at 12:30PM, the NY tech community is meeting up to protest at 780 Third Ave, NYC, and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to join in.
Senators Schumer and Gillibrand are currently supporters of SOPA, which is garbage. SOPA is dangerous to the growth...
Privacy in Social Networks
Privacy in social networking is inconsistent and thus confusing.
In private social networks (FB, Path, etc…), the only people that should see your content are the people you explicitly permission as a friend.
But if you write a comment on a friend’s photo, that comment will be seen by all of the photo’s owner’s friends… Which could be tens of thousands of...
“Most good things happen without a plan: friendships, falling in love, finding a...”
– » How to Have the Best Year of Your Life (without Setting a Single Goal) :zenhabits (via bijan)
I completely agree with this quote, but would add one piece. You have to put yourself in situations that maximize serendipity in order to have have these wonderful unplanned encounters. And most times,...
7thechelon asked: Hit there! I ran across a blog post stating you had a wicked spreadsheet for employee equity. I looked for it but could not locate it. The blog post Employee Equity: How Much? by MBA Mondays. Did you release it to the public or is it for private use?
How Crowdsourcing is Changing Science →
December 2011
2 posts
November 2011
14 posts
Celebrating Less
I have started reading all the app update messages in the App Store before upgrading my apps to the latest versions. The update messages typically fall into two buckets: 1) minor bug fixes and 2) big major feature pushes with lots of exclamation marks and Unicode stars.
I’ve never read an update message trumpeting that the app now does less than it did before (and nothing else). Makes...
Take This Idea: Console Social Games
Like any good investment idea, timing is essential. I think now is the right time to aggressively pursue social casual gaming on consoles. Why now?
All the major consoles (Wii, Xbox 360, PS3) all have open marketplaces so distribution in the consoles market today is easier than it has ever been before.
The Kinect is the fastest selling CE device ever. It’s a casual interface into an...
“Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to...”
– The Rise Of Pinterest And The Shift From Search To Discovery | TechCrunch
Semil Shah wrote a great post over on Techcrunch about Pinterest, but I don’t agree with all of it.
This quote captures the simple difference between search and discovery online. Semil’s right, discovery comes...
Content Licensing in Gaming
Video games based on movies almost always suck.
Movies based on video games almost always suck.
Why this is true is debatable. But empirically, it’s almost always true.
Something is always lost in translation when characters and brands attempt to cross media. Books <—-> Movies have the same problem. Books <—-> Video Games also generally suck, but this conversion...
ML-Class.Org
I’m four weeks into the free and open Machine Learning class taught by Andrew Ng (Stanford Computer Science professor). The class is hosted at ml-class.org.
This class is the future. I’m completely blown away by the quality of every part of it: The material scales nicely in difficulty. The user experience of the site is terrific. Andrew Ng does a great job of keeping the videos...
October 2011
10 posts
On Groupon
Since the Groupon IPO is coming up, I thought I’d muse a bit on them. I have purchased 7 daily deals since the model started. Here’s the details:
* 3 LivingSocial deals (Whole Foods, Amazon, and Upper Crust… all three places I already shop regularly and my purchases were not incremental to the stores).
* 2 Jetsetter deals (New hotels I had not been before, in places I travel...
When Steve Met Bill →
controlaltadam:
“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”
Great analogy. Over the years, Xerox lost a lot more than just “the TV” from its Palo Alto home. I wonder if they had homeowners...
1 tag
“Turn down a big VC firm.
Randomly pick a super large VC firm, hit the about...”
– Stumbled upon this 6 year old post from Rick Segal. From an end-of-year post full of advice for entrepreneurs. Made me spit up my coffee.
Onward to 2006 - The Post Money Value
Kaggle and Crowdsourced Competitions
I’m fascinated by Kaggle, a web service that provides competitions with prize bounties for crowdsourced to data prediction problems. They power the Heritage Health Prize, which is attempting to find the best model to predict which patients will be diagnosed with new medical conditions in the coming year. Beyond that one famous competition, there’s many more competitions listed on...
ELIZA
I love all the references Siri makes to her friend “Eliza.” Here’s one, but I’ve seen more.
ELIZA is actually Siri’s mother, if a relationship were to be established. It was the beginning of Natural Language Processing (NLP) bots, and it was the first time human users felt like they were communicating with a machine that really emulated human conversation and...
4 tags
She & Him →
parislemon:
Peter Kafka’s “Occam’s Razor” thought as to why the Siri voice is female and not male: because it would remind people too much of HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Cute. But wrong.
Actually, the voice varies from country to country. The UK version, for example, uses a man’s voice. I know this because I’m in England and got a demo of the feature here.
Also awesome: Siri didn’t...
New OHours
I’m running a set of OHours this friday morning. If you’re working on a startup, a student tinkering with projects on the side, interested in working at a startup, or thinking about leaving your job to pursue your own idea, then I hope to make these OHours a good use of your time. Sign up here.
September 2011
11 posts
I don’t always reblog… but when I do,...
Get Well, Amit! - The Official Postagram Blog →
This is amazing. I first met Amit back at a BarCamp he organized in ‘06 in NYC. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of getting to know him, or attended a Jelly coworking event (that was him), or if you enjoy Photojojo, the remarkable ecommerce-meets-media property (him too), then send him some love via Postagram!
1 tag
Stephenson's Subjective History
In my occasional free moments, I’ve been revisiting Neal Stephenson’s “In the Beginning… Was The Command Line.”
It’s a subjective (meaning: opinionated) essay on operating systems, open source software, Apple VS Microsoft wars, and many other hot geek topics of the late 90s. It was originally authored in 1999. Stephenson has since said that most of the...
6 tags
Learning to Teach
I spent a few hours yesterday teaching David Haber (@dhaber) an introduction to PHP and internet technologies. We covered both fundamental topics (such as, how the internet stack is organized) and practical topics (such as, how to set and retrieve a cookie on a client browser). I wouldn’t be surprised if I learned more in the process of teaching than he did in learning from me. Let me...
August 2011
3 posts
1 tag
