May 2010
18 posts
2 tags
The Artist is Present and Powerful
Saw the Marina Abromovic show “The Artist is Present” at MOMA yesterday. I was not a big fan of performance art previously, but was really moved by this. The combination of seeing a live performance with recording and broadcasting the audience’s reaction and participation is very powerful. The show runs through this Monday and if you have not seen it and are in New York I...
5 tags
Margins in the Cloud
Historically in the software business high gross margins were considered essential. It is not clear to me that the same logic will apply for cloud-based services. Their cost structure might wind up being quite different. Much smaller development teams can accomplish amazing things on top of a cloud stack substantially reducing the fixed cost component. On the other hand, COGS may increase...
AAPL and MSFT and GOOG
I saw on Twitter this morning that Apple has passed Microsoft in market cap. This is a momentous occasion and a testament to the extraordinary talent and vision of Steve Jobs. But the real challenge starts now for both companies. Apple needs to unveil a cloud strategy fast. I have written about this before (sorry, no links this morning - I am on Blackberry only), but with the progress on Android...
3 tags
Misattribution of Motive Can Kill (Business)...
A decade ago I was in the heat of a deal negotiation with a large company when they suddenly went silent for a week. I was furious. I thought they were trying to string us (startup) along to see if we might back off from some of our deal terms as the deal dragged on. Only much later did I learn that their deal team simply got pulled into a 50x bigger deal. And no-one bothered to let us know...
5 tags
You say you want a rEVOlution (by HTC)
So thanks to Google, since Thursday I have been playing around with an HTC EVO on the Sprint network. I have come away impressed and it has nothing to do with the EVO theoretically supporting 4G. I have mostly had 4G turned off - apparently it is a huge battery hog and the few times I did turn it on, I did not seem to be in a 4G coverage area. In any case, 3G speed has been fine for me on my...
3 tags
Artificial Life, Oil Spills and Transparency
Yesterday, a major barrier was crossed with the creation of the first artificial lifeform. Craig Venter and his team created a cell from scratch. Well not exactly from scratch: they created the DNA and inserted into an emptied cell. This is very similar to programming a computer — the hardware is the same but the software tells it what to do. When I explained this to my kids this...
4 tags
Google I/O and Open vs Closed
Probably the most interesting exchange on yesterday’s VC Panel at Google I/O was around how investors think about open versus closed systems. Dave McClure got the most memorable line of the day with “Open is for losers.“ Dave was obviously being provocative on purpose.
My own thinking here was captured by comments from Chris Dixon and Brad Feld. Chris pointed out that open...
4 tags
Google I/O VC Panel
I am headed out to Google I/O and am really looking forward to it. I greatly enjoy developer-oriented conferences and am looking forward to seeing a bunch of interesting demos in the Sandbox.
This afternoon, I will be on a panel. While panels often suck and I have been on my share of those, I believe this one will at a minimum be entertaining — since it has a bunch of people who all...
2 tags
First NYC Digital Learning Meetup
Tonight I am giving a talk at the First NYC Digital Learning Meetup. The event is organized by the folks from Startl, which aims to support and accelerate the development of companies that apply technology to enable learner-centered education. I am very much looking forward to speaking, as “Hacking Education” has been a long-standing interest for me.
My talk will be about the...
4 tags
Privacy and the Internet
I woke up this morning thinking that I should write a post on privacy, having read Fred’s post and danah boyd’s two posts over the weekend and Charlie’s post this morning. Then I realized, I should probably check what I have written about privacy here before, since it seems to be a recurring topic. So I re-read my own post from March of 2009 and concluded that my thinking...
Less is More (But Who Decides?)
Yesterday I read not one but two separate posts about removing features from products (sorry - no links right now as I am on BB only). This is a crucial topic for any software product / web service. In the physical world there are limits to creating monstrosities by piling on too many features. Buildings will collapse if you add too many floors to the top. Planes won’t fly if you load them...
4 tags
What a Week!
Periodically, I find that a week comes along in which a ton of important stuff on and for the web comes to a boil all at once. This is one of those weeks. Here are just some of the things that I am looking at
The Release of Office 2010 and the fight between hybrid mode (desktop + web) versus online only
Facebook’s extraordinarily complex privacy settings and its all-hands meeting to...
Broadening One's Perspective
I am on my way to Boston for MIT’s 100K contest finals. One of the wonderful things about participating as a judge in this is that it made me look at plans for businesses that are completely different from the ones I think about every day. Despite not knowing several of the industries well or at all (especially pharma), it was interesting to see how nonetheless certain questions are still...
2 tags
Business Plan Competitions
It is very rare that I find myself disagreeing with Chris Dixon, but the other day Chris tweeted
business plan contests are a terrible idea. investors care far more about founders’ bios. make it a bio pitch if you need to have contests.
I will be heading up to Boston tomorrow to judge MIT’s 100K competition and have a pretty different take on it. The purpose of a business plan...
2 tags
Appreciating Mastery
I love learning new things and have written about learning on this blog several times before. But I am also a fan of observing mastery. I seem to remember reading in Gladwell’s Outliers, that mastery requires at least 10,000 hours of doing something. This makes it unlikely that I will achieve mastery in most of the things I am doing outside my professional live. That doesn’t...
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HTML5, View Source and Innovation
I believe that PDF and Flash will hang around for quite some time. They are too widespread to disappear quickly. But I am excited about the rise of HTML5 and the gradual replacement of these closed formats. For instance, Scribd’s move to HTML5 is one such step. The reason for my excitement is mostly because I don’t like how PDF and Flash often break basic ingredients of the web,...
3 tags
TV and Internet Disruption
Bill Gurley has a must-read post up on how the $32B of affiliate fees will slow down the Internet disruption of the TV industry. I have one addition and one amplification for Bill’s excellent post.
First, the addition. More than just supporting an existing flow of dollars, bundling is in fact not only a logical but even a socially efficient model for costly to produce content, such as TV...
Becoming a Yoga Fan
In January I posted about staying fit (http://continuations.com/post/347328558/staying-fit) and mentioned that we started family yoga on weekends. While the kids’ participation has waned a bit, Susan and I have been quite consistent. In the past, I didn’t understand why some people were so fanatic about Yoga, but I am beginning to be quite the fan myself. So far I have found three...