Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Intelligent Manufacturing


Factories getting carted away to Mexico was that "huge suction sound" Ross Perot heard way back in 1992. That image still persists. The Great Recession has made those fears much more concrete and real. Those jobs that are gone are gone. That seems to be the thinking.

The Mobile Web, The Audio Medium, The Global South

the human in the loop: The Audio Medium: A Third World Revolution Waiting to Happen Even a cheap feature-phone can be made to play audio content. And cellphones have high penetration in the developing world .... Cellphones will need to support easy phone-to-phone transfer of audio content ..... Podcasts may be a niche medium in the U.S., but there will be enough demand for audio content in the developing world that it will be as ubiquitous as blogs are in the western world. And like blogs and other long tail text content, content publishers will create content without the expectation of revenue; this audio content will be free and/or ad-supported...... All the existing content in text form can automatically be converted into audio form. This is huge, because it makes all existing text content accessible to the developing world...... 5 centuries ago, the written word replaced the spoken word as the dominant means of information transfer. I am rooting for the spoken word to stage a comeback.

Monday, November 01, 2010

Lykke Li: Get Some



(Via Fred Wilson)

Dropio Acquired

Image representing Sam Lessin as depicted in C...Image by jessica vascellaro via CrunchBaseI was just over at Mark Peter Davis' blog for this blog post and learned there Dropio has been acquired - wow - and by Facebook? Congrats, people.

FourSquare Office, Dropio Technology
Digital Dumbo: Here I Come
Venmo And Frictionless Payments
Social Media Week: The Best NY Tech MeetUp Ever
The Far Future Of Databases At The Dropio Offices
A MeetUp Has Me Excited: Y + 30

How Companies Get Valuated

I don't know a whole lot on the topic. I have a broad idea. I get the concepts. But I have not bothered to master the details. There are too many versions, too many ways they get done. Android is not fragmented, what is really screwed up and fragmented is how companies get valued.

How companies get valuated reminds me of when they taught me several pre-Charles Darwin theories of evolution at high school. They were all over the place. They all lacked the basic beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution.