Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Ruby

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Techie, Tech Blogger, Iran Democracy Activist, New Yorker

"A former student asked me a few days ago how I learned Ruby on Rails. The answer was that I simply read a lot of great tutorials."


Techie, tech blogger, Iran democracy activist, New Yorker.

What do you want to be when you grow up? I just changed my Twitter and Facebook profiles to read the above. It used to be: Iran Democracy Activist, Tech Blogger, New Yorker.

And then there are distractions: The Movie Business.

Fundraising to be able to do full time Iran democracy work has not been easy: Selling 5% Of Nobel For 50K. I mean, if the Iranian American founder of eBay will not come along, who will?

Tweet 1, Tweet 2, Tweet 3, Tweet 4.

Not only do I not seem to have the knack for small dollar political donations, I think political work is meant to be public service, and so I am not going to discontinue my Iran work, I am going to do it on the side, part time. Insa-allah.

I have a LinkedIn email from Anu Shukla that has me psyched.
Location is southbay or virtual - exciting early stage opportunity. Will invest in training and ramp up for non Ruby engineering talent that are interested in learning. Competitive salary and stock.
This means, if I can get in, I get to telecommute from NYC, and I can spend the first few weeks learning Ruby. I am up for it. Besides this looks like might be Anu's new stealth startup. Anu is a serial entrepreneur. She is bigger than Sabeer Hotmail Bhatia because Bhatia basically disappeared after Hotmail, whereas Anu kept chugging all along, and with Anu it is like you ain't seen nothing yet. Her best is yet to come.
Image representing Anu Shukla as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
That is the impression I get. Offerpal Media is a bigger promise than the company she sold over a decade ago for was it 200 million dollars?

She is inspiring. I'd be honored to be part of her new stealth startup.

Mike Arrington Is A Sexist Pig: Say PeeeeG!
The Highlight Of My Internet Week
Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising
I Just Became Friends With Anu Shukla

I might even be open to moving to the other coast. But for now I should stay put. I think I like the idea of staying put in NYC and visiting the Bay Area often enough. That would be a swell arrangement.

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails: Download
Ruby on Rails Guides
Ruby on Rails - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruby on Rails Documentation
Top 12 Ruby on Rails Tutorials
Ruby on rails: up and running - Google Books Result
Ruby on Rails Tutorials - Tutorialized
Dribbble: Dan Cederholm and Rich Thornett | the Ruby on Rails Podcast
rails's rails at master - GitHub
Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Tutorial
Ruby on Rails Guides: Getting Started with Rails
Ruby on Rails Tutorial: Learn Rails by Example | by Michael Hartl
Ruby on Rails: the Ultimate Beginner's Tutorial
Ruby on Rails programming tutorials2 - Meshplex
Ruby on Rails Tutorial

Languages: English, Hindi, Nepali, Maithili (very good). Bhojpuri, Awadhi, Tharu, Urdu (good). Bengali, Sanskrit (so so).


Paul Graham: What Happens At Y Combinator: a portrait of YC is in some ways the complement of a portrait of the average startup .... an event called Demo Day, at which the startups present to an audience that now includes most of the world's top startup investors. ..... the details people omit in more public talks tend to be the most interesting parts of their stories ...... you hear just how screwed up most of these successful startups were on the way up. ...... Startups modify or even replace their ideas much more than outsiders realize. ..... Usually we advise startups to launch fast and iterate. .... real users, whose often surprising reactions to your product teach you what you should have been building. ..... Since there are a large number of points on the perimeter of most existing technologies at which one could push outward to create a quantum blister, what to build first is one of the most important questions we talk about. ...... The larval product should also have a larval business model. ..... Most things that happen to newly launched startups are bad. But paradoxically, these disasters are precisely the reason to launch fast: they all represent problems you're going to need to solve eventually, and the only way even to find out what they are is to launch. In practice they vary from technological bottlenecks to threats of lawsuits, but the most common problem is that users don't like the product enough. ...... the search space is huge ..... Some startups are immediately attractive, and they'll find it easy to raise money. Others are ugly ducklings, who will grow into swans in time ...... because raising money is like choosing an angle of attack for a plane. If you try to climb too steeply you just stall. ....... Once you start to get hard commitments from investors, more investors want in. ....... We still talk regularly with founders from the first YC batch in the summer of 2005. ....... Occasionally investors will say "I'm in" at Demo Day, but most of the convincing happens in subsequent meetings. ....... Getting a startup set up correctly is a nontrivial problem. ...... mediating disputes between founders. ..... Now, 5 years later, the YC alumni network is probably the most powerful network in the startup world. ..... Starting a startup was a very lonely undertaking when we did it ourselves in Boston in 1995. One of the goals of YC's batch model was to fix that, by giving founders the colleagues one would otherwise lack as companies with just 2 or 3 people. ....... even the most ardent boosters of other cities wouldn't claim they're at parity with the Bay Area. All other things being equal, Silicon Valley is the best place to start a startup. ...... Founders from other places are almost always surprised when they get here by the breadth and depth of support for startups. The Bay Area is for startups what LA is for the film industry. ....... The kind of horror stories you hear about investors dicking over startups rarely happen to those we fund. We almost never see broken termsheets. ....... "One of my goals since my last job was to stop working with mediocrity and find/surround myself with people smarter than I. YC definitely provided the quality of people I needed to be around." ...... The only person who's funded more is Ron Conway, and he may not have had such close interactions with all of them. ...... the intensity of YC.
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Friday, September 24, 2010

Scoble Chimes In On Angelgate

Scoble, Longhorn EvangelistImage via Wikipedia
Robert Scoble: The secret hell of tech industry angel investors: when the story broke, I thought it was just Mike being bombastic and trying to make something out of a dinner that he wasn’t invited to..... Mike stumbled into a story that has a ton of undercurrents. ..... The angel investor world is getting HYPER competitive .... Entrepreneurs are seeing access to lots of capital. ..... 10 people just are not going to have enough market power to do anything really naughty although it’s good to nip this problem in the bud, which is why I now support Arrington’s stance.
The early stage investment world is seeing major churn, but I would like a much larger geographical spread, not just on the continent, but globally. It will happen.
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Angelgate Rolls On

Ron ConwayImage via Wikipedia
TechCrunch: Ron Conway Drops A Nuclear Bomb On The Super Angels [Email]:The world of startups would be a better place if you spent less time complaining about deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and the cars you drive, and just helped entrepenuers build their companies..... These startups are binary …they succeed or fail so why waste time on deal structures, terms, vc’s, and valuations etc and just help entrepenuers build their companies..... I am tired of seeing you and engaging in idle chit chat and not sharing my true feelings. ..... .where no one was there to speak up for the interests of the entrepenuers.

Mike Arrington's mischievous post on super angels apparently has been gathering momentum. The first few VCs to speak up said Arrington was merely selling newspapers. Ron Conway, on the other hand, is blowing wind Arrington's way. Stop colluding, he says. This might just be a warm-fuzz thrown Arrington's way since the dude has been profuse in his past praises of Conway, deserved for the most part. Or perhaps the conversation is not over. More people will chime in over the next few days.

My take home word from Conway's email: binary.

Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

In The News

Bloomberg: ARM Rises as Oracle’s Ellison Says Company May Buy a Chipmaker:Ellison, 66, said at Oracle’s annual meeting in San Francisco yesterday that “you’re going to see us buying chip companies” to add to its resources in computer hardware.

TechCrunch: “WiFi On Steroids” Is A Go. Now Google (Or Someone) Just Has To Build It. Please Do. Fast.:the FCC’s 700Mhz spectrum auction .... “white space” ..... White space is the name given to the vacant airwaves between television channels, airwaves which are increasingly open as people move to cable and other methods of getting television. These airwaves have the potential to carry wireless data at speeds and distances that would make today’s WiFi seem antiquated. That’s why the white space has earned the nickname “WiFi 2.0″ or “WiFi on steroids”. ...... gives technology companies a way to innovate outside of the realm of wireless carriers or broadband providers ..... white space WiFi blankets cities and people can use WiFi phones instead of the the ones tied to carriers.

Google Public Policy Blog: FCC vote on white spaces lays promising foundation for “Wi-Fi on steroids”: y sets the stage for the next generation of wireless technologies to emerge .... will put better and faster wireless broadband connections in the hands of the public. ...... the beginning, and not the end, of crafting forward-looking spectrum policy
Nature: Relativity comes down to Earth: time speeds up if you climb just one rung up a ladder, and slows down if you travel at just 36 kilometres per hour

Time: Feeling Alone Together: How Loneliness Spreads: For some people, feelings of isolation are sharpest during times that are in fact defined by togetherness — celebrations or the holidays .... or perhaps especially in a crowd — it's possible to feel unbearably alone...... happiness, obesity and quitting smoking — can propagate like a wave throughout a network of people..... The effect was strongest among those in close relationships ..... one lonely person could influence whether his friend's friend's friend felt lonely. ..... it really is a fundamental human motivational state very much like hunger, thirst or pain." ..... loneliness is more like an indicator of the social health of our species on the whole — a temperature reading, if you will, of how well- or not so well-integrated we are as a population....... we are, by nature, a social species; we feed off our interactions with one another and thrive when we are inspired, challenged and supported by one another ....... passed on through feelings of mistrust and negativity..... lonely individuals think negatively about other people People may be spreading their negative feelings simply by frowning or making other unpleasant facial expressions, making hurtful remarks or even adopting uninviting body postures. . ... Over time, lonely people find themselves banished to the periphery of their social networks ...... It's not necessarily the number of connections people have that matters but the quality of them. Communities that encourage regular interaction among its members

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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Larry's Antics


My reading of the situation is and has been for a few years now that Larry Ellison believes his industry - data software - is going through what he calls a consolidation phase, and hence his relentless buying spree. His promise to the customer has been you will get simpler, integrated software. And now, after buying Sun, he is doing what his best friend Steve Jobs has been doing for a long time now: software hardware integration.

Bill Gates left the scene, but Larry never stopped competing. Larry want to do what Jobs did. He wants to surpass Microsoft in market value, and he is on his way.
New York Times: Oracle Growth Plans Worry Rivals and Customers: its larger ambitions — to supply just about all the technology, software and hardware, that businesses might need .... sales of $26.8 billion last year and hints of an annual revenue goal of $100 billion ... acquired a staggering 66 companies .... They bought every company we deal with. ...... Oracle’s sales representatives have earned a fearsome reputation as hard-line negotiators determined to squeeze customers. ...... complete systems rather than requiring customers to cobble together the parts. ...... Fusion ..... data center conquest plans clear ..... 60 percent of the food coming from within 100 miles of the city. .... paid $1,800 to attend the conference and runs her own software consulting business in Portland, Ore ..... a signal that Oracle intends to get aggressive and pursue growth
In The News

eWeek: Java Creator James Gosling: Why I Quit Oracle: “For the privilege of working for Oracle, they wanted me to take a big pay cut,” Gosling said. .... “In my job offer, they had me at a fairly significant grade level down,” he said. ..... All of our authority to decide anything evaporated.” ..... “My job seemed to be to get up on stage and be a public presence for Java for Oracle. I’m from the wrong Myers-Briggs quadrant for that,” he said. .... Gosling already had the sense that Oracle was “ethically challenged” .... they believed “Oracle would be more savage, IBM would make more layoffs.” .... Gosling says he felt the hand of Larry Ellison in nearly all the decisions affecting Java ..... Gosling paints the picture of Ellison being like a sports magnate from his sister city, Al “Just Win Baby” Davis, owner of the Oakland Raiders, who continually hires coaches and drafts talent only to run the show himself. ...... although Gosling said he never had direct dealings with Ellison, “He’s the kind of person that just gives me the creeps,” he said. “All of the senior people at Sun got screwed compensation-wise. Their job titles may have been the same, but their ability to decide anything was just gone.” ....... Java is bigger than any single vendor.”

ArsTechnica: Oracle surprises with new Sparc chip launch: Now christened the Sparc T3, the new processor will power a collection of Solaris-based T-series servers for Oracle, and will ship in 30 days.

The Washington Post: Huffington Snags NY Times Star

Wired: Writer for iPad Aims For Focus, Beauty, Simplicity:When you put the application in “Focus Mode,” it doesn’t even have spellcheck or cut-and-paste. Instead, it’s all about textual production — writing this phrase, this sentence, this word at this moment. As the creators note, “the idea is to activate it when you get stuck, blinding out everything else.”

New York Times: Google Campaign to Build Up Its Display Ads:More than 90 percent of Google’s revenue comes from text ads, and analysts say that Google’s stock is down about 17 percent this year because investors are waiting for the company’s second act.

For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again: Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older .... more than a third of people not yet retired plan to work beyond age 65, compared with just 12 percent in 1995. .... “That’s what I spent my whole life in pursuit of, was security,” Ms. Reid said. “Until the last few years, I felt very secure in my job.” ..... was let go from her $80,000-a-year job. ..... Her husband worries that she isolates herself and that she does not socialize enough. ..... “A job is more than a job, you know,” Mr. Mielock said. “It’s where you fit in society.” .... how to age-proof their résumés and deflect questions about being overqualified. ..... For now, she stitches together an income by gardening for neighbors, helping fellow church members with their computers, and participating in Internet surveys for as little as $5 apiece.

Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs: a hypomanic episode..... symptoms include grandiosity, an elevated and expansive mood, racing thoughts and little need for sleep.... He can work 96 hours in a row. .... a thin line separates the temperament of a promising entrepreneur from a person who could use, as they say in psychiatry, a little help. ..... just crazy enough .... “If you’re manic, you think you’re Jesus. If you’re hypomanic, you think you are God’s gift to technology investing.” ..... Instead of recklessness, the entrepreneur loves risk. Instead of delusions, the entrepreneur imagines a product that sounds so compelling that it inspires people to bet their careers, or a lot of money, on something that doesn’t exist and may never sell. ..... Next Zuckerberg Syndrome — the urge to find another Mark Zuckerberg before he starts another Facebook. ...... He does not socialize. He no longer reads books, nor does he watch TV or movies. He works from 8 a.m. until 10 p.m., seven days a week. ....... Jobs is also routinely described as a despot and control freak with a terrifying temper .... He is a gifted software engineer but a terrible driver. (“I hit things,” he says.) He’s perfectly at ease negotiating with V.C.’s, but has had just one girlfriend .... “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.”

The Long View of China’s Currency: The renminbi itself rose 21 percent against the dollar from 2005 to 2008, and the trade deficit continued to widen. .... A stronger renminbi will help China’s people — many of whom are hungry for better living standards, to judge by the recent labor strikes — buy more goods and services, and it will also help the rest of world produce more...... economies, like battleships, tend to turn slowly ..... But exports probably matter more for American jobs anyway, given that low-end toy manufacturing in Guangdong Province isn’t moving to Alabama or Michigan. ...... $10 billion of gross domestic product equals about 80,000 jobs on average. So every extra $10 billion of goods sold to China is like its own little stimulus program. ...... not all the items on the United States’ forbidden list are truly matters of national security.

TechCrunch: Zynga Moves 1 Petabyte Of Data Daily; Adds 1,000 Servers A Week:social gaming giant Zynga is one of the fastest growing tech companies of all time .... 10 percent of the world’s internet population (approximately 215 million monthly users) has played a Zynga game. .... more than 1,200 full time employees and includes 13 game studios.

CNet: Google News turns 8 amid news industry in flux:the site is currently driving 1 billion page views to news publishers' Web sites per month and Google currently operates 72 separate editions of Google News in 30 different languages....Google, raised in the church of data ..... the rise in "news spam," SEO-bait articles often written by low-paid freelancers that are designed mostly to surface within Google, rather than inform, educate, or entertain readers with coherent writing..... "content mills" like Associated Content and Demand Media are churning out short news-related pieces of content by the thousands in hopes of driving traffic to their sites

Google Blog: Google News turns eight
TechCrunch: Now that the Recession Officially Ended….Whatever Happened to that Other Shoe?
Business Insider: The Next Shoe Drops At The New York Times: Now Circulation Revenue Is Starting To Decline

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$400 Million, $140 Billion And 2020

Image representing Netflix as depicted in Crun...Image via CrunchBase
Wall Street Journal: A New Digital Battlefield: The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010
I expect these two numbers to have changed places by 2020. Everything is going online. TV is not going to be a separate medium for too long. The internet will eat up and digest the TV. But we are going to have to move to universal 100 MB plus broadband for that to happen.
Wall Street Journal: Web Start-Up Values Soar:In an echo of the 1990s dot-com boom, some investors also are giving lofty valuations to Web firms that have no revenue and that barely have a product out..... Quora ...... Blippy ...... Foursquare .... last year, when Twitter Inc. was valued at $1 billion during a round of funding, up from $95 million in mid-2008 when it raised a previous round of funding .... Many investors won't recoup their investments ...... SecondMarket, which operates an exchange where investors can trade the stocks of closely held start-ups ...... "There's a big disconnect between the public market and the private market" ..... Deal-of-the-day site Groupon Inc., for instance, was founded in 2008 and quickly brought in consumers eager to tap its discounts. By April when it received a $135 million investment from Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies Ltd. and venture firm Battery Ventures, Groupon was valued at about $1.35 billion.

Blockbuster Nears Bankruptcy:a milestone in consumers' shift away from brick-and-mortar video stores to films delivered by mail and the Internet

Netflix, Studio Reach Streaming Deal
A New Digital Battlefield:TV shows are emerging as a new front in the war over digital media between Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., amid their ongoing battles over electronic books and online music..... Several executives said those rentals could be a step toward a world where people see less advertising or stop paying for cable subscriptions—two principal sources of revenue...... Apple accounts for 57% of transactions in Internet video-on-demand movies, on a number-of-sales basis, and 53% of the TV shows market ...... The entire business of selling episodes of TV shows through services like Apple's and Amazon's is expected to generate only $407 million in 2010 ..... U.S. consumers and advertisers will spend about $143 billion on traditional TV advertising and subscriptions in 2010

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Super Angels, The Churning VC Game, And Catch Up Tech

Michael Arrington, famous blogger, and Tariq K...Image via WikipediaThere's web services - aka dot coms - and then there's clean tech, bio tech, nano. Dot coms have become much less pricey. Anyone can rent server space with Amazon. Pretty much anyone can write code.

"You can learn the basics of Ruby in two days," a techie told me a few days back. "And it is all on Google, all the material is free."

Clean tech, bio tech and nano are still capital intensive.

But the biggest returns are in what I am going to call catch up tech. This is the world of microfinance and global infrastructure projects. An annual 10% return is the floor when it comes to these opportunities. If the wise guys - and they were guys - on Wall Street had known to pump excess capital a few years back into catch up tech rather than housing, we might have skipped the pain of the past few years. You pump up housing value, and you sell mortgage based securities to each other. That was like setting the house on fire starting from the basement.

Mike Arrington, TechCrunch: So A Blogger Walks Into A Bar…
Master Of 500 Hats: Fire in The Valley, Fire in My Belly... and Yes, Mike, I Have Stopped Beating My Wife.
Fred Wilson: Collusion
Quora: Who are the Super Angels that Michael Arrington is talking about in his 9/21/10 Techcrunch post, "So a Blogger Walks into a Bar..."?
Silicon Alley Insider: Hooray For Mike Arrington

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