March 2012
20 posts
4 tags
Students are Woefully Prepared for Internet Age...
Over the last four weeks I have met with numerous college students and recent graduates who are interested in working for tech startups. I have been surprised to discover how woefully their schools have prepared them for how to find a job in the age of the Internet. The vast majority of thses students do not have their own name registered as a domain, have their Facebook profile as the first...
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Tech Tuesday: Web Browser (Part 2)
Today is the wrap up of the initial web cycle. Last Tech Tuesday, I introduced Javascript as determining the behavior of a web page and interacting with HTML (the content of the page) and CSS (the look and feel). Now it makes sense to revisit the Web Browser, which needs to put all those pieces together to actually display the web page and let the user interact with it. By now it should come as...
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Movie Review: The Hunger Games
This weekend I went to see “The Hunger Games” with our oldest son (12). His twin sister separately saw the movie as part of a friend’s birthday party. For anyone who has been behind a gigantic rock, er, I mean doesn’t have children who are fans of Suzanne Collins’s novel on which the movie is based, here is a brief plot summary. The Hunger Games is set in a...
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Offense is the Best Defense for Startups
Once in a while I find myself in a product or strategy or biz dev discussion at a startup which goes something like: “we are doing xyz to defend against <name of other startup or big company>”. My reaction is to ask whether xyz is also part of what the startup was trying to build in the first place. If the answer is no, then I will argue strongly that they shouldn’t do it...
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Choosing Our Information-Based Future: Utopia or...
We are at a perilous fork in history where many of the choices that we are making now and in the coming years will determine whether we are headed towards an information-based utopia or dystopia. It is not any single choice that matters but rather their cumulative effect and how these choices interact with each other.
Here is how I see the two possible extreme future states of the...
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Tech Tuesday: Javascript
The topic of last week’s Tech Tuesday was CSS, which determines the look and feel of the content of a web page (where the content itself is described in HTML). Today we will learn about Javascript, which is a programming language that lets us control the behavior of the web page (both by itself and in reaction to what the user does). Together HTML, CSS and Javascript determine what a web browser...
4 tags
Pornography, Human Trafficking and the Internet
It is easy to dismiss Rick Santorum’s promised war on pornography as more moralizing from a candidate who apparently questions the separation of church and state. But it exposes an important fault line in thinking about the Internet when seen in conjunction with Nick Kristof’s call in this Sunday’s New York Times for Backpage to stop carrying adult classifieds. At issue here is...
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45+10=1 hour (Getting Things Done)
This week I have been trying out a new approach to meetings. Instead of using up the entire time in the calendar for the meeting itself, I am trying to keep the meeting a bit shorter (45 minutes in the case of a previously 1 hour meeting). I then use the 10 minutes afterwards for the immediate follow-up actions that came out of the meeting while the person I met with is still there. Often that...
Song written and performed by our kids for...
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Yahoo Facebook Patent Battle: Mobilizing Engineers
If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream...
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Tech Tuesday: CSS
In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to the enduser.
For our...
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Edmodo Platform: Connecting Developers to the...
I love it when a plan comes together. The plan in question is the Edmodo Platform. When we invested in Edmodo in the fall of 2010, the company was just beginning to really grow its network of students and teachers. One frequently asked question was how Edmodo would be able to keep offering its features for free. I remember going to the ISTE conference in 2011 and having several teachers come up...
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The Vibe: Shapeways + Soundcloud = Awesome
I usually take weekends off from blogging, but this one is just too good to pass up: Shapeways and Soundcloud have teamed up to bring out “the Vibe” an iPhone case which comes with a completely custom waveform as its back.
I love this because it shows off the power of the platforms that Shapeways and Soundcloud have created. It also represents a completely unexpected use case for a...
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A Rational Internet Venture Valuations Bubble
There is no doubt in my mind that venture valuations have become incredibly stretched. I have been thinking about why that is and what will come of it.
First off, here are the factors contributing to the stretching of valuations. It starts with the genuine potential for building hugely valuable businesses, which is based on four key factors:
1. The immense possibility for scale on the Internet...
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Heyzap Releases Self-Documenting API
Heyzap’s API announcement is technically yesterday’s news, but there is so much to like here that I figured I would write about it today.
First, they announced this on their newly launched developer blog. Etsy has had a developer blog for some time and I think those are a terrific idea. Engineering tends to be a big part of startups and yet often doesn’t have an external voice....
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Dispatch from London
Very short post as I am about to get on a plane to fly back from London to New York (and Virgin Atlantic does not yet have wifi on its flights). Reading the papers in London and talking to people it is clear that the European debt crisis is very much on everyone’s mind while we at home seem to be enthralled with either the latest startup valuations, or Rush Limbaugh and maybe the Republican...
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Tech Tuesday: HTML
Over the next three Tech Tuesdays we will cover the three essential technologies that together make up the bulk of most web sites: HTML, CSS and Javascript. This is Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser uses these three (which were all retrieved from one or more web servers) to construct a web page. The easiest way to think of how these three make up a page is as follows: HTML is the...
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Oxford Style Debate About Facebook
Earlier today I participated in an Oxford-style debate in London of the motion “Facebook Is Not Your Friend.” I argued for the motion together with Baroness Susan Greenfield. Taking the opposing view were Ben Hammersley and Lewis Iwu. This was a lot of fun as the Baroness and I have very different takes on this subject. She came at it from a neuroscience and cultural perspective...
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Bringing Time Back to the Web (Or: The Struggle...
Evan Williams apparently recently said that there is an issue with all of us being stuck in a kind of “continuous present” on the web (ironically, I can’t find that quote right now). I am certainly stuck in that all powerful present many days. There is so much new output hitting the web every day that one can barely scratch the surface of it, let alone delve into the past....
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Who Is Next After Newspapers?
Yesterday I tweeted out this fascinating chart about what has happened to newspaper advertising revenues:
The chart comes from this blog post by a professor named Mark Perry. In the comments to the post there is a brief discussion that points to the shift away in classifieds to Craigslist and other outlets as a primary reason.
I went to be shortly after tweeting that and couldn’t help...
