October 2009
19 posts
4 tags
One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose...
One of the great things about being focused on investing in web services is that the technical challenges faced by almost all of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio tend to be the same. The solutions on the other hand vary widely. Some companies rack their own servers, others are at traditional hosting companies and some are entirely in the cloud. Some use Java, others PHP,...
6 tags
More (Too Much?) Free from Google: Turn-By-Turn
Yesterday, Google announced something stunning: free turn-by-turn directions for Android 2.0 to be first available shortly on the Droid phones. It is stunning because the previously cheapest software only alternatives were apps such as Navigon ($89.99) and TomTom ($99.99) for the iPhone (as an aside, stand alone GPS devices with turn-by-turn directions can now be found on Amazon for as little as...
4 tags
It Is 2009. Why Is "Groupware" Still So Hard?
I haven’t actually heard anyone pitch what they do as “groupware,” as the name apparently got such a bad reputation historically to have been banned. But it still makes a convenient shorthand for describing tools to help groups with coordination and communication (I am open to better suggestions). What is surprising though is how hard it is to find a groupware solution that...
We Must Research Geo-Engineering
If you either follow the Freakonomics blog or any of the global warming / CO2 coverage, you will have by now encountered the tiff over the “climate chapter” (Chapter 5) of Superfreakonomics. If not, you can read Levitt’s most recent defense and compare with an impact summary written from the other side. I don’t want to weigh on the particular chapter, but it does raise the...
6 tags
Newspapers and EReaders (My Kindle Experience)
I am late to the Kindle show. Having grown up in Europe and going back there for vacation a fair bit (and reading books mostly on vacation and otherwise via DailyLit), I did not want to buy a US-only device. So I jumped on the international Kindle, pre-ordering as soon as it was announced (something I may regret when the Nook or the Apple Tablet arrive). I have now had my Kindle for a few days...
2 tags
Everything You Wanted To Know about MongoDB (But...
The NoSQL movement has been gathering a lot of steam lately (despite some folks misgivings about the name). There have been meetups in major cities around the world — most recently in Berlin — and there is a big conference coming up in Atlanta.
I am happy to say that MongoDB has been extremely well represented at all of these and is generating a lot of interest. But what if you...
4 tags
The (Re)Convergence of User Experience?
Something big may be happening to user experience. Bing and Google will soon be showing tweets as part of the search results (they have both licensed the full Twitter firehose and Marissa Meyer yesterday demoed a version of “Social Search”). Google is already returning videos from Youtube as search results and apparently will soon be offering music. Bing video results can be played...
2 tags
Breaking Down Walls: Tracked.com
Someone recently said to me that the most interesting things happening on the net these days are breaking down the walls between disparate realms of information and between different modes of interaction. Google Wave is a big attempt to at breaking down walls. Another take is launching today from our portfolio company Tracked.com.
Tracked.com breaks down two walls: first, it smoothly integrates...
2 tags
Silence Is Not The Same As Agreement
A while back I did a series of posts on board effectiveness. In it I wrote the following about conducting a board meeting:
Actively solicit input on decisions from every board member. Some people are oddly quiet in group meetings. Don’t assume that means they are in agreement with everything that is being said. Yes, it should be the directors responsibility to speak up but that doesn’t mean...
4 tags
Why Is Microchunked Video for Education Not (Yet)...
Apparently some of the early television shows were essentially “filmed radio” (I know I have heard this quote a number of times, but of course right now I don’t seem to be able to find a link on google). In other words instead of developing a format native to the new medium, things got started with an essentially literal adaptation. The equivalent in online education is...
2 tags
We Ain't Seen Nothing Yet
Yesterday was an impressive day in tech news. Here are three announcements that caught my attention:
Wolfram Alpha releases an API
Apple makes in-app purchases available for free apps
Google announces it will distribute ebooks
I believe that each of these is important in their own right (and they may make it into their own blog posts). But what is mostly on my mind is how much is changing...
4 tags
A Mind Bender Worth Testing
As I wrote last year, I am not a fan of the reasoning behind taking the Large Hadron Collider into operation. If you have followed this story, then you know that last fall, the attempt to start experiments failed with a meltdown of some magnets causing a significant delay. Then this summer, there was a report of more problems with magnets, which somehow lost their ability to operate at high...
5 tags
What Goldman Sachs Should Do
In yesterday’s “Dealbook” column in the New York Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote that Goldman Sachs is headed for record bonuses and is thinking about making a $1B charitable contribution as a way to deflect criticism. That to me seems to fall far short of what they should do. First, a one-time charitable contribution is a case of “So fuehlt man Absicht und man ist...
3 tags
Hospitality Quotient For Your Web Site
One of the highlights at the Union Square Ventures Portfolio Summit last week was having Danny Meyer speak. Danny is the founder of Union Square Hospitality Group (which includes some of the best and most enduring restaurants in New York) and the author of the must-read book “Setting the Table,” in which he describes his approach. Danny spoke about what it takes for a business to...
3 tags
The Importance of APIs
This afternoon I am participating on a panel for Yahoo! OpenHack NYC titled “Building on Others’ APIs: A Strong Foundation or Recipe for Disaster.” That will make a good complement to yesterday’s discussion at the USV portfolio summit where we spoke about the importance of having an API. In preparation for the summit, I asked Oren Michels from Mashery whether he had a...
3 tags
USV Portfolio Company Summit
I am really looking forward to today. We have the founders and/or CEOs of our portfolio companies in town for our annual portfolio company summit. We consider it a privilege to be able to convene such an awesome group of folks. We always come away having learned a ton of things. Here are some of the topics that we are planning to cover today:
Living in a multi-device world. With iPhones...
2 tags
A Good Day for Ruth Reichl
So most people would not think of the sudden closing of Gourmet Magazine as a good day for Ruth Reichl, the magazine’s editor. I assume for the moment that is true for Ruth Reichl herself (the New York Times quotes her today as being sad about the loss of an institution). Yet I think she might find some time from now that this was a good day for her. A day that liberated her from the many...
4 tags
Excited about Flash and HTML5
Adobe made a couple of big announcements about the future of Flash on mobile platforms. First, they announced that RIM has committed to making full Flash available on BlackBerries. Second, they showed an early version of compiling Flash into native iPhone apps as a way of getting them into the app store. Now some of the discussion has focused on all the problems with flash. And yes, there are...
3 tags
Seeding Online Education Breakthroughs
A little while back I wrote a post describing how scale is the critical challenge for education on the web. I was reminded of that on my trip to Berlin, where I met with a couple of online education startups. Both of them have interesting (and very different) approaches and both of them are thinking hard about how to get to scale. The key questions they currently face are “whom to...
