December 2010
6 posts
On Secondary Marketplaces
In addition to SecondMarket and SharesPost, a new marketplace for secondary trading of private company stock is opening up, called Xpert Financial. According to Techcrunch, Xpert Financial differs from the competition in that it A) is electronic and automated and B) has some (debatable) approval from the SEC and FINRA.
Personally, I *love* the idea of these secondary markets. Democratizing the...
Parrotfish from Embed.ly
I’ve been using a really interesting Chrome browser plugin for the past week. It’s called “Parrotfish” and made by the fine purveyor of embedded content, Embed.ly.
You know how in New Twitter you get to see previews for certain link types on the right side of the page? Like yfrog images or youtube videos can be viewed directly in New Twitter without clicking away from...
I wrote a script to auto-reblog any post...
“Give hackers an inch and they’ll take you a mile.”
– Paul Graham on Tablets. However the quote is broadly applicable to platforms in general and concisely explains the success of nearly every great tech company: Apple, Microsoft, Sun, Salesforce, Facebook, Google… Or, in the parlance of Steve Ballmer: “Developers, Developers,...
DNS and Internet Standards
Yesterday, Peter Sunde (of PirateBay fame) announced the beginning of a project to create an alternate DNS system. DNS is the system by which domain names are mapped to IP addresses: think of it as the telephone book for the Internet. If you have Techcrunch’s name, you need someway for your computer to look up Techcrunch’s IP address. That’s DNS. (hat tip to @albertwenger for...
Wikileaks Drama v2.0
Back in September I wrote a blog post saying that the Wikileaks drama reminded me of Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson Sci-Fi novel) and the need for Data Havens to prevent censorship on the web.
The plot thickened today as apparently Amazon took down hosting of the Wikileaks site under political pressure from Joe Lieberman. Senator Lieberman’s office announced the takedown as a triumph, but...