The impending Age Of Abundance was prophesied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Monday, May 02, 2011
Rana June: iPad DJ
She performed at this party. I told her, I have read about this, but it is so great to actually see this in person.
I have always been a consumer of music. The iPad might make me a creator too. Otherwise I have not been too excited about the iPad. I call myself a power user. I use the keyboard a lot. And I like the physical kind.
It is amazing what she does. Mind blowing, actually.
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Chris Dixon Kind Of Person
Image by Zach Klein via FlickrThere Are Two Kinds Of People In The WorldThis blog post by Chris Dixon has been making the rounds of the blogosphere. It has generated many comments at the blog itself. I happened to see the post soon after it came out, and I was the first or second person to leave a comment. I returned a few hours later, and there were already close to 100 comments. Obviously the post had sparked something.
Future Of The Internet: Easy, Says Dixon
One of my favorite Chris Dixon posts is equally short, it is one where Chris is relaying as to how the Internet stands to transform anything and everything.
Superfluidity
Image by markchadwickart via FlickrCNN: 4 trends shaping the emerging "superfluid" economy: A new paradigm is emerging, where everything is increasingly connected and the nature of collaboration, business and work are all being reshaped. ..... Transactions and interactions are growing faster and more frictionless, giving birth to what I call a "superfluid" economy. ...... Our devices are becoming smaller yet more powerful. Cost continues to drop. ..... Whereas a guru might advise “Know thyself,” a technologist might suggest “Quantify thyself.” ....... Technology tackles the challenge of self knowledge through the pursuit of full-systems quantification - creating a simulation and map of everything. ...... our preferences, buying behaviors and social connections .... financial histories and medical records. ...... making previously invisible information transparent means it can be quantified and measured, so economic value can be tied to it. ..... data can be converted to become a useful tool for crisis mapping and visualizing real-time information ..... Supply chains can be mapped to help us assess the carbon footprint of the products we purchase ...... an initiative to map the real-time statistics of the entire planet, dubbed the Earth Dashboard. .... close to a billion smart phones will be shipped worldwide by 2015. ...... the financial and infrastructural challenges of laying down cables will be leapfrogged as these places transition directly to a wireless web via mobile devices ...... the ‘unbanked’ are being brought into financial inclusion through innovative services like M-PESA that enable the transfer of money via mobile phones. ..... within a few short years, we may see billions more people connected to the internet and capable of participating in economic transactions ...... Comments, Facebook likes, recommendations, and reviews all contribute to the growing layer of social metrics that reveal general perception around brands, people, events, issues and topics of interest. Not only could this alter the way democracy works by gathering real-time sentiment and developing positive feedback loops for improving civil society, it also shifts the way people make decisions about purchases or lifestyle behaviors. ....... hundreds of peer-to-peer marketplaces that are springing up around the world ...... As money and exchange increasingly go digital, our assumptions about what “currency” means are also being challenged. ...... When the tools are in place to allow individuals or groups within a local area to easily exchange value without using traditional/centralized currency, it’s reasonable to expect a serious challenge to the ingrained public perception of money. ...... It is not necessary to abandon every time-tested practice and jump headfirst into something radically new. But, it is wise to integrate new approaches as a sort of hybrid “coopetition” - going from push to pull, defining a new capitalism, and welcoming “social” as a 21st century strategy. ...... Wealth is not just a number on a financial statement, but rather a celebration of sustainable and resilient communities, a clean environment and an educated and informed society.A Social Graph For When Everyone Is Connected
Is Location The Fifth Dimension?
Cover of A Brief History of TimeThe SimpleGeo Promise I put out this blog post earlier. And I have been thinking. Your laptop screen is 2D. Your smartphone screen is 2D. But Twitter and Facebook happened before FourSquare happened. The time dimension got added before location ever became a factor. Length and width were the first two dimensions. The third dimension was not spatial, it was time, chronologically speaking, pun intended.
But if you go into 3D computing, the third dimension is not location. Easy math, that would make location the fifth dimension of web tech.
That makes it really, really interesting to me. Location has several sub dimensions. Location can be local, it can be global. Local can be hyperlocal with all its associated richness. When you move from local to hyperlocal, that starts feeling like fractal territory all over again. Blows my mind.
Mutual Friends: Cindy Gallop
Mike Arrington And I: Close
Mike Arrington Liked My Comment
After I got a friend request from her on Facebook, I googled her up for the first time. Interesting. :-)
The SimpleGeo Promise
Image via CrunchBaseBefore Einstein the world was 3D. There were the three dimensions of space: length, breadth, height, the usual suspects. You could argue Euclid's world was 2D. Well, old man Einstein came along, and added the time dimension to the equation. And that had huge implications, humongous huge. I think that whole metaphor is a great way to try to understand contemporary web tech. I just read the name SimpleGeo in a tweet and I saw its promise. I had heard of it before, I think I might even have read a TechCrunch article on it months back.
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Just Watched The First Wedding Video
Image via CrunchBaseI just watched my first royal wedding video, although I noticed yesterday on Tumblr they were hard to avoid, not that I was trying to avoid, but I was not actively seeking them out. One thing I noticed was it was said two billion people watched it on television. Wow, those are World Cup Soccer numbers. Now, t-h-a-t is impressive. Brazil 2014
I came across the video when I dropped by the Google News page like I am likely to near daily.
Ignite NYC: Here I Come
Ignite, Set It On Fire
Internet Week: Going To Three Events So Far
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
July 1 Digital Dumbo: Do Not Miss
I tried and failed to get on any Internet Week panel. But something better might happen. I just saw this in my Facebook stream, and jumped at the opportunity. I am applying for my five minutes at Ignite NYC during Internet Week. Tikva, make it happen, please.
Me In The New York Times
BBC Calls
Me @ BBC
Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Me, BBC
I Have Been Quoted In Fast Company
Me @ CNN
When I read this article when it came out and blogged about it, I did not realize I was in the picture. I saw a Facebook status from someone else in the picture that made me realize I was in the picture. I looked. There I was. (Two Upheavals Already)
Manhattan’s Tech Start-Ups Settle in the Flatiron District and Chelsea
Friday, April 29, 2011
Cary Randolph: A Manifesto On Material Things
“As we get older we gain a little perspective on the material, the perishable, the finite. We age, and as we do, the people we love die, move away, stop loving us. Now if the house caught on fire, I might not take anything. And the things I cannot live without are easily transported but not easily won: a great, brilliant man who loves me, his head on the pillow next to mine, his hand around my waist. My dad’s voice on the telephone line. I want clean, fresh air, and at least one good laugh every day. I feel guilty saying this, having built a career in fashion – an industry that at its center is all about accumulating more things – but I believe it: we really don’t need much.”
- Cary Randolph (Via Jessica Chu)
- Cary Randolph (Via Jessica Chu)
Doing Two Tech Startups
What is better than doing one tech startup? Doing two tech startups.
So I am doing two tech startups. And the newer startup is actually moving faster. But there is symbiosis.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Ai Fiori FoodSpotting DrinkUp
Photos From MetroMix
I showed up. On time. And I waited and waited and waited. This place was fancy. I took myself around. I was dressed in my usual black, only it was not a Brazil shirt with an overcoat on. It has been so nice these past few days. I was wearing a dress shirt. I am not much of a T shirt person. I like proper shirts. I like T shirts when they come with jackets.
I had some muchies they had at the bar. Then they brought a bowlful to my table itself. I finished one bowl. They brought another. I ordered a pineapple juice. I asked for a glass of water.
I showed up. On time. And I waited and waited and waited. This place was fancy. I took myself around. I was dressed in my usual black, only it was not a Brazil shirt with an overcoat on. It has been so nice these past few days. I was wearing a dress shirt. I am not much of a T shirt person. I like proper shirts. I like T shirts when they come with jackets.
I had some muchies they had at the bar. Then they brought a bowlful to my table itself. I finished one bowl. They brought another. I ordered a pineapple juice. I asked for a glass of water.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Jeff Bezos: Still Innovating
Image via CrunchBaseJeff Bezos was not having the greatest of time when the dot com collapse happened in 2000. The guy still had a lot of money in the bank, but the press was full of critics who said Bezos has never made a dime for his investors, it was only a matter of time before his money runs out also. Bezos proves the bozos wrong. Not only that, Amazon grew like crazy through the Great Recession. And somewhere along the way he gave the world the cloud: Amazon Web Services. He suggested servers were like electricity. Don't buy your own little generator. The dude is a visionary, sure.
San Francisco Chronicle: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D: Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture...... Look inside a current textbook on software architecture, and you’ll find few patterns that we don’t apply at Amazon. We use high-performance transactions systems, complex rendering and object caching, workflow and queuing systems, business intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and pattern recognition, neural networks and probabilistic decision making, and a wide variety of other techniques ..... our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken ...... Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. ...... Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. ...... to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer .... our key data services store many petabytes of data and handle millions of requests per second ...... The storage systems we’ve pioneered demonstrate extreme scalability while maintaining tight control over performance, availability, and cost. To achieve their ultra-scale properties these systems take a novel approach to data update management: by relaxing the synchronization requirements of updates that need to be disseminated to large numbers of replicas, these systems are able to survive under the harshest performance and availability conditions. These implementations are based on the concept of eventual consistency. The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)...... our Simple Storage Service, Elastic Block Store, and SimpleDB all derive their basic architecture from unique Amazon technologies ..... product data ingestion and categorization, demand forecasting, inventory allocation, and fraud detection ....... advanced machine learning techniques provide more accurate classification and can self-heal to adapt to changing conditions .... The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time...... Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do. ...... Whispersync, our Kindle service designed to ensure that everywhere you go, no matter what devices you have with you, you can access your reading library and all of your highlights, notes, and bookmarks, all in sync across your Kindle devices and mobile apps. The technical challenge is making this a reality for millions of Kindle owners, with hundreds of millions of books, and hundreds of device types, living in over 100 countries around the world—at 24x7 reliability. At the heart of Whispersync is an eventually consistent replicated data store, with application defined conflict resolution that must and can deal with device isolation lasting weeks or longer.... We live in an era of extraordinary increases in available bandwidth, disk space, and processing power, all of which continue to get cheap fast..... we have unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers...... As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1.
9400 Workers In Six Years? Facebook Is Not Seeing Right
Image via CrunchBaseFacebook LocationMercury News: Facebook's plans For Menlo Park HQ: 9,400 Workers In Next 6 Years: The fast-growing social networking company, which currently employs about 1,400 people in Palo Alto, expects to reach full capacity at the Sun campus and nearby buildings on Constitution Drive by 2017. ...... Menlo Park is inviting the public to suggest what environmental impacts should be studied. The deadline for comments is May 26.You read about Facebook's new location, and you end up appreciating New York City so much more. You appreciate the subway, you appreciate the endless number and variety of bars and cafes in the city. You appreciate the whole damn package deal. NYC is the place to be. The banks imploded, and all of a sudden the tech sector in the city was flush with talent. By now there is even flush money.
Subscription Business Models For Mindfood
Image via CrunchBaseMindfood described as books, movies and music. Better than subscription is ad supported, but subscription is also pretty good. You pay a monthly fee and you get to access all books, movies and music ever created, being created. The movie people don't get this. They are like, oh no, we have to punish you by a few weeks if you are not going to show up at the theater. The music people get it a little. They are like, if you are going to get the music for free anyways, we are going to make you pay for live concerts. And the movie people are like, we can't get Brad Pitt show up at every movie theater. That's the whole point, that he can't be everywhere. Al Pacino does some Broadway stuff. But that is one location.
Facebook Getting Smarter With Social Ads
Image via CrunchBaseFacebook's Ad Space Is DifferentInside Facebook: Facebook Launches Three New Sponsored Stories Types For Pages, Apps, And Websites: turns user activity into ads shown to their friends ..... expand the kinds of user activity that can be converted into ads to include Page post Likes, app or game usage, and activity on third-party sites ...... powerful way for apps to grow their user count without disturbing game play with prompts to share or invite friendsI can see Zynga jumping all over this. Used to be Zynga could flood your streams with Farmville related stuff. I saw some of my Facebook friends ask, where is the button to turn this thing off? Now Zynga
Image via CrunchBasewill have a smarter way to get in. And Facebook will make money. This is like Google only charging you if people click on your ads. This model forces the Facebook advertisers to engage users. No engagement, no ad displays. This is smart. Tuesday, April 26, 2011
David Karp: Tumblr Or Hipstr
Some people in the media have been calling David Karp a hipster. I don't know about that. I know him to be a Tumblr. Or, rather, The Tumblr. But I don't know about hipster. I just don't know the guy. Never met him. None of that good stuff.
Monday, April 25, 2011
Journey Of Action: Latin America Tour Kickoff Party
Hip Hop Basics: Journey Of Action
April Fool?
Journey Of Action: Connecting The Dots: Social Activism: Social Media
Journey Of Action
The venue was the Purpose offices. It is an impressive startup, Purpose is. It has grown organically in two years to become a 40 strong team. I got to meet the Australian founder, Jeremy Heimans. Actually I just shot him an email.
Ugh. Finally I got to meet Kassidy and Ryan in person. They look just like in this picture.
April Fool?
Journey Of Action: Connecting The Dots: Social Activism: Social Media
Journey Of Action
The venue was the Purpose offices. It is an impressive startup, Purpose is. It has grown organically in two years to become a 40 strong team. I got to meet the Australian founder, Jeremy Heimans. Actually I just shot him an email.
Ugh. Finally I got to meet Kassidy and Ryan in person. They look just like in this picture.
Adaptive Text: The Book Deserves To Come Alive
Image via WikipediaThe Technium: What Books Will Become: a screen that we watch can watch us. The tiny eyes built into your tablet, the camera that faces you, can read your face. Prototype face tracking software can already recognize your mood, and whether you are paying attention, and more importantly where on the screen you are paying attention. It can map whether you are confused by a passage, or delighted, or bored. That means that the text could adapt to how it is perceived. Perhaps it expands into more detail, or shrinks during speed reading, or changes vocabulary when you struggle, or reacts in a hundred possible ways. There are numerous experiments playing with adaptive text. One will give you different summaries of characters and plot depending on how far you've read. ..... books with moving images. We don't have a word for these yet .... Text inside of moving images as well as images inside of text. .... This hybrid of movies and books will require a whole set of tools we don't have right now. Presently it is difficult to browse moving images, or to parse a movie, or to annotate a frame in a movie. Ideally we'd like to manipulate kinetic images with the same facility, ease and power that we manipulate text -- indexing it, referencing, cut and pasting, summarizing, quoting, linking, and paraphrasing the content. As we gain these tools (and skills) we'll make a class of highly visual books, ideal for training and education, which we can study, rewind, and study again. They will be books we can watch or TV we can read. ......... The current custodians of ebooks -- Amazon, Google and the publishers -- have agreed to cripple the liquidity of ebooks by preventing readers from cut-and-pasting text easily, or to copy large sections of a book, or to otherwise seriously manipulate the text. But eventually the text of ebooks will be liberated, and the true nature of books will blossom. ...... We can even filter the most popular highlights of all readers, and in this manner begin to read a book in a new way. I can also read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar or critic. ....... Reading becomes more social. We can share not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorrow we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we've read; from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. ........ Even a minor good work could accumulate a wiki-like set of critical comments tightly bound to the actual text. ....... dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event ....... Wikipedia is the first networked book. ...... This deep rich hyperlinking will weave all networked books into one large meta-book, the universal library. Over the next century, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit together the books of the world into a single networked literature. ....... no work, no idea, stands alone, but that all good, true and beautiful things are networks, ecosystems of intertwingled parts, related entities and similar works ........ The complete universal library, all books in all languages, will soon be available on any screen. There will be many ways to access a book, but for most people most of the time, any particular book will essentially be free. (You'll pay a monthly fee for "all you can read.") Access is easy, but finding a book, or getting it attention will be hard, so the importance of the book's network will grow, because the network is what brings in readers. ...... A book is an attention unit. A fact is interesting, an idea is important, but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, "The universe is made of stories, not atoms." ...... In the long run (next 10-20 years) we won't pay for individual books any more than we'll pay for individual songs or movies.Reducing price and enhancing quality is what businesses strive for. But the music and movie industries have been bummed out for years now because modern technology has managed to drive the price point to zero. That is like the price point attaining nirvana, no?
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