November 2011
20 posts
2 tags
Privacy and Facebook
So Facebook settled with the FTC over privacy and Mark Zuckerberg wrote another apologetic blog post (as pointed out by Liz Gannes this is his tenth). Part of the need for these apologies comes from Facebook’s aggressive approach to releasing features which at some level is admirable in a company of their scale. But what is really driving the problems is a fundamental conundrum about...
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Tech Tuesday: Operating Systems (Making It All...
I ended last week’s Tech Tuesday on Input/Output saying I might write next about programming in assembly language, but it has since occurred to me that I should cover at least one other high level topic first: operating systems. That seems more logical since the operating system (OS) is what makes all the parts of a computer system work together. In fact, I alluded to that last week in the...
4 tags
Hugo (Movie Review)
On Saturday, I went to see Hugo by Martin Scorsese with our two boys and my Mom who is visiting from Germany. It was my Mom’s first 3D movie and she was thoroughly enchanted by the effects, reaching for floating elements several times and loudly oohing. The 3D was used well throughout and with only a few “poke at the audience” moments that all more or less worked. As an aside:...
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Giving Thanks (To Teachers)
Since I am taking tomorrow and Friday off from blogging, I figured I would write about giving thanks today. I am finding a great many things to be thankful for from good health to amazing work (that frankly doesn’t feel like work at all). But the specific thing I have in mind today is giving thanks for and to the teachers in our lives. I am always encouraging our children to thank their...
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Tech Tuesday: Input/Output (Interrupts and Queues)
So far in Tech Tuesday we have taken a first look at how a computer does its work (processor), where it keeps data for quick access (memory), where data is kept longer term (storage) and how computers talk to each other (networking). Today’s topic is how to get data in and out of computers and to and from such things as printers, keyboards, screens, sensors, and more. These things are...
4 tags
Sharing: One Network (To Rule Them All) or Network...
Yesterday, Techmeme was ablaze with posts about sharing on Facebook’s Open Graph. A CNet post by Molly Wood with the title “How Facebook is ruining sharing” appears to have kicked it all off. In it she argues that the automated (“frictionless”) sharing via Open Graph apps results in a lot more noise rather than signal. Marshall Kirkpartrick at RWW holds the same...
3 tags
Shapeways Brings the Future of Stuff to New York...
When we announced the USV investment in Shapeways a little over a year ago, I pointed out the potential to make New York City a global center for 3D printing. Since then the Shapeways team has done a lot to make that happen. Here are just a few of the highlights. First, the founders relocated themselves and their families from Eindhoven in the Netherlands to New York City. Then they proceeded...
6 tags
Republic, Lost and United
Yesterday saw the beginning of a massive effort across a large number of Internet companies to help stop PIPA/SOPA legislation. While that is an important fight it is worth asking - can we afford to fight bad bills one at a time? Why do we even wind up with terrible bills like this in the first place? In his new book “Republic, Lost” Larry Lessig accumulates an impressive amount of...
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American Censorship Day
Starting today and for the foreseeable future the “Continuations” at the top of this blog will be covered with a call to Stop Censorship. If you read yesterday’s Tech Tuesday post on networking or are familiar with the history of the architecture of the Internet you know that a lack of global control was a core principle behind the design of TCP/IP. That has been key to the...
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Tech Tuesday: No Computer is an Island...
It is funny how quickly we take things for granted that didn’t exist just a few years back (obligatory reference to Louis C.K. rant about appreciating technology). Today the thought of using a computer that’s not connected to a network is almost unimaginable. What would you do on that computer? How would you install new software? How would you send/receive email? How would you browse...
Work on an Amazing Community: Wattpad is Hiring...
A few months ago we invested in Toronto-based Wattpad. In introducing the investment, I wrote the following paragraph on the Union Square Ventures blog:
Wattpad is a community for telling and reading stories. Collectively, Wattpad users last quarter spent an amazing 2 billion minutes writing and reading stories on Wattpad. During that time, nearly three quarter million new stories or parts of...
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Wikipedia, Occupy Wallstreet and the Possibility...
Whenever my kids tell me how their teachers don’t want them to use Wikipedia as a source I redouble my effort to show them why Wikipedia is important and how it works. In particular, I make sure they understand how to look at the history of a page and to check out the discussion or “talk” page that sits behind the content page. Two principles of those pages are critically...
1 tag
Emergency Broadcast System Fails Social Test
While I was driving the kids around on the weekend one of the radio stations announced that there would be the first ever nation wide test of the Emergency Broadcast System. My almost immediate reaction was something like “isn’t Twitter now the Emergency Broadcast system”? I wound up forgetting about the whole thing seconds later (probably because I arrived at whatever place I...
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Thinking About Social Networks
This morning on Techmeme I ran across three interesting and thought provoking pieces about social networks (all from within the last 24 hours it seems):
1. Maciej Ceglowski’s “The Social Graph is Neither” (10 points for great title alone) is a hilarious dissection of what’s wrong with explicitly declared relationships and even with the act of declaring relationships. It is...
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Tech Tuesday: Storage (Oh My, How It Has Grown)
So far of the building blocks for computer systems we have covered processors and memory. We have seen that processors have become massively faster and that memory has become massively cheaper. Today we will learn about storage and find that it has become massively bigger. Throughout this discussion we will use a somewhat eclectic reference point: the length of that great American novel...
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Margin Call (Movie Review)
Susan and I saw Margin Call on Saturday night. The movie has a great cast, including Jeremy Irons, Kevin Spacey and one of my personal favorites, Paul Bettany. My theory is that the more you know about finance, the more you will have trouble enjoying this movie. That’s because Margin Call gets some finance language and mechanics wrong including in a very early scene where Eric Dale,...
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Startup Weekend Syracuse
I am about to get on a plane to fly up to Syracuse for Startup Weekend. Really looking forward to meeting the participants. It is awesome to have many more people exploring startups as an alternative to working at some existing company! Was also pleased to see Twilio as a sponsor — after all, the first version of GroupMe was built on top of Twilio over a weekend.
One of the many...
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Don't Need No VC (True for Lots of Companies)
Roger Ehrenberg has an excellent post today on the question of whether there are too many companies or not enough venture capital. Roger’s answer, which I agree with, is “neither” - but there are too many companies that act as if they will raise venture capital. And Roger points out correctly that most of those companies would be much better off if they never put their sights...
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Greece and Occupy Wallstreet (and Startup...
The European Union (EU) has been a work in progress for many years. Since its inception there has been tremendous tension between what can be decided at the EU level and what is decided by the individual countries. Despite an expensive European Parliament the vast majority of the power is held by country governments. That’s in stark contrast to the US where thanks to the Federalists, the...
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Tech Tuesday: Main Memory (Dumb, Lazy and Slow)
In “Of Bits and Bytes” we learned that all kinds of data such as numbers, text, graphics and much more can be represented as sequences of bits. Then last week we saw that instructions for the CPU are also simply sequences of bits. Now going back to the Overview, memory is the place where computers keep the instructions and the data so that the CPU can get to them relatively quickly...
