Monday, January 2, 2012
2012
We are lucky to be starting the year with a few more days of family vacation with friends. In other words: the things that really matter. I have also been mostly off the grid for almost 10 days and will stay off for through the end of Thursday the 5th. I did the same last year and am happy with how it has let me reflect on the year past and prepare for next year. The regular scheduled programming on Continuations will resume on Monday January 9th. Until then: all the best for 2012!
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Wednesday, December 21, 2011
Public Parts by Jeff Jarvis (Book Review)
In Public Parts, Jeff Jarvis tackles the incredibly challenging and important topic of the impact of the internet on privacy and publicness. Jeff calls himself a “publicness advocate” in contrast with the often nameless “privacy advocates” who are cited whenever there is a discussion about a change in how Facebook works or the WSJ goes on an anti-cookie bender. As you can tell, I fall squarely in Jeff’s camp that publicness is largely a good thing (and like Jeff, I blog and tweet and check-in albeit in significantly lower volume than Jeff).
Public Parts starts off with a wonderful historical and cross cultural survey on privacy and publicness. Jeff pulls together information from a broad set of sources and this is a must read for everyone thinking about the topic. It is amazing to see the degree to which these two concepts are socially determined and how much they have changed across time and space. Jeff mentions the contrast between German co-ed saunas and the blurring of houses on Google Streetview as great examples of cultural differences.
Based on this background Jeff looks into what a definition of privacy would look like. He provides powerful challenges to many of the existing attempts at definition. And in the strongest accomplishment of the book goes on to provide an “ethic” of privacy and one of publicness. Instead of abstract definitions, these are concrete behavioral rules. The “ethic of privacy” applies to the recipient of private information, whereas the “ethic of publicness” applies to the potential originator. They could be loosely termed “caring” and “sharing.” If you have received private information you need to take great “care” in what you do with it. Conversely if you have information that might serve the public you need to consider “sharing” it.
Following this are some uneven chapters about privacy and publicness for corporations and government. They are uneven because these are big topics and it is difficult (impossible?) to do them justice in the space Jeff alots to each. As a result there are some relatively mundane parts, e.g. about Best Buy’s use of Twitter for customer service while some important questions aren’t pushed hard enough. For instance, can a company be transparent and yet still have a “strategy”? For much of history, the notion of being “strategic” was intimately tied to information asymmetry. I would have also liked to see more of a discussion of how the copyright and patent systems impact publicness.
These are minor issues though compared to the powerful conception of privacy and publicness as ethics. Anyone thinking about privacy and publicness and how the Internet is changing them should make sure to read Public Parts and also to engage with Jeff in the ongoing discussion he hosts over at his blog buzzmachine.
Tags: jeff_jarvis public_parts book_review
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Tech Tuesday: Survey Says!
Thanks for everyone who participated in the Tech Tuesday survey. I learned a lot. First off, not surprisingly, my audience overall is fairly tech savvy with 2/3rds knowing at least how to code up HTML and over 1/2 having done some programming.
Second, I was happy to find that the level of difficulty was about right and that if anything I should maybe add some harder “bonus” material.
Third, post length seems spot on with nearly 80% liking it as it is and roughly 10% each asking for shorter and for longer, so I will stick with roughly the existing length.
Fourth, it appears that all three proposed topics are of essentially equal interest (more on that claim below). The only thing that is clear is that all three of these are in fact good topics for my audience as only 10% wanted to hear about something different altogether.
Now I am going to restart Tech Tuesday next year with a sequence on Web Technologies. It does seem like a timely topic that would be useful for everyone including Congress to understand. Not that I expect to have members of Congress in the audience, but once the series is up, I will include a link to it whenever I write to one of my representatives.
So I claimed above that there really isn’t a meaningful difference between the votes for each of the topics. How do I figure that? Let’s leave out the “other” category and focus on the three remaining ones. There were 78 respondents for those categories, which conveniently happens to be a multiple of 3. A perfectly even distribution would be 26 for each of the three possibilities which would clearly provide no signal about preference.
So how much of a preference signal am I getting from the actual voting outcome of 24, 26, 28? One way to think about this is as follows. If people had no preference and were simply throwing darts, how often would the outcome show a difference of 4 or more between two topics? Now there is a mathematical way of figuring that out, but that’s a bit involved. Instead, I wrote a short piece of code to run a Monte Carlo simulation (you can look at the HTML for this post and it includes the Javascript code).
I could probably use a better random function than what’s built into Javascript but this should work as a first cut. When you run the code, you will see that around 87% of the time this size difference occurs “naturally” on a purely random selection among 3 topics. So not a lot of signal here!
Tags: tech_tuesday survey results
Monday, December 19, 2011
ALF Yourself: Tracking Your CO2 Footprint Via AMEE + Foursquare
Last week I was in London to spend time with the team from AMEE. On the flight to London, I read an article that provided a potent reminder of the importance of measuring CO2 emissions. The Independent had a big story on Methane gas being released from the Arctic sea floor off the coast of Siberia in far larger quantities than previously feared. Methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas (20x more potent than CO2) that was trapped beneath permafrost. The release of this gas is a great example of the non-linearities involved in climate change.
Now of course by flying to London I was contributing a fair bit of CO2 to the atmosphere. A couple of months ago, I was at a dinner having a discussion with someone about climate change with someone who quickly asked me: “Do you fly?” and when I answered “Yes,” he immediately retorted “Well, then you don’t care about climate change.” Now I had to explain that I try to buy offsets for all my flights but I also had to admit that I wasn’t very good a tracking that.
Thanks to AMEE and foursquare that problem has just gone away. AMEE has just released ALF, which stands for AMEE Location Footprinter (not for ALF). It works as follows: you go to http://alf.ameeapps.com and authorize access to your foursquare account. ALF then knows where you have been — in my case that would include having been at too many different airports over the last 5 weeks. ALF uses this data to calculate your CO2 transportation footprint and sends that to you as an email with a summary and detail on each movement (here is my summary from last week):
Going forward, I will be using this to purchase offsets for my travels. In fact, I am hoping that at some future point AMEE will let me add my credit card and automate the whole process.
So unless you happen to believe that all this man made CO2 is a good thing start measuring your footprint off foursquare now (yet another thing those foursquare checkins are useful for!).
Tags: amee foursquare alf co2 travel footprint
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Louis CK and the Future of Paid Content
Comedians get to say what most of us think but don’t have the courage or circumstance to say. Louis CK has a fantastic new special out (warning: if you are easily offended this is definitely not for you) that is full of hilarious but also poignant observations about the human condition. That special also marks a critical breakthrough in the future of content: it is a paid direct to consumer distribution.
If you like his style of comedy (as I do), head on over to LouisCK.net and pay your 5 bucks via PayPal. In return you can stream the special up to twice and download it without DRM. Yes that’s right — absolutely no DRM of any kinds so you can watch it on any device you have and as many times as you want to. All the money goes to Louis CK. He did a show at the Beacon Theater to which he owns all the rights. There is no intermediary here (other than Paypal for payments).
It will be very interesting to see how many people will conclude that this is a fair price and a good user experience that directly benefits the creator and as a result will pay instead of trying to get the show for free off a torrent or illegal download site. Louis CK has this to say on the subject: “Please bear in mind that I am not a company or a corporation. I’m just some guy. I paid for the production and posting of this video with my own money. I would like to be able to post more material to the fans in this way, which makes it cheaper for the buyer and more pleasant for me.”
While I don’t think the experience is perfect, I love the direct connection between creator and viewer (or listener). Here are some ways it could be better: there could be some social integration, there could be additional (even very short) content or some other item to be rolled into a slightly more expensive bundle (for purposes of price discrimination). Nonetheless, I paid my 5 bucks and it was well worth it. I will happily do the same again when Louis CK comes out with his next special. And I will happily do this for other artists and creators. This is the future of paid content.
Tags: louis_ck comedy payment content drm
Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Tech Tuesday: Asking for Direction
So I got up earlier than usual this morning to work on a post about more details on how CPUs work and some actual assembly language. In particular I was planning to introduce the notion of registers and maybe the stack (all of this using a neat web-based 6502 emulator).
But then it occurred to me that I really don’t have a good sense of whether this is what folks want to read about. So I figured I would provide a quick recap instead and then lay out some possible directions.
So far Tech Tuesday has covered:
1. An Overview of Building Blocs
2. Of Bits and Bytes (Binary Number System)
3. A First Look at the Central Processing Unit (CPU)
4. Main Memory (Dumb, Lazy and Slow)
5. Storage (Oh My, How It Has Grown)
6. No Computer is an Island (Networking)
7. Input/Output (Interrupts and Queues)
8. Operating Systems (Making It All Work)
9. Programming (A Start)
From here there are a great many places to go. So let me describe three different possibilities for what’s next and see if there are any strong preferences.
Programming Basics: This would take a language such as Javascript and introduce basic programming concepts such as variables and controls structures (e.g. branching, loops). Would probably leverage Codeacademy.
Lower Level Programming: This is sort of where I was headed before deciding to ask for direction. The sequence would start by taking a look inside the CPU and its registers. We would then examine some assembly code and work our way up towards programming in C.
Web Technologies: This would be a series of posts covering what HTML is, how the HTTP request cycle works, and how domain names are resolved to IP addresses. I might also throw in some CSS and Javascript.
I am planning to cover all of these topics and many more eventually so this is not a question about whether or not any of these should be part of Tech Tuesdays, rather what to cover next. So to get help with this I am trying to get a better sense of the audience currently reading Tech Tuesdays and what your are all interested in. There are only four questions. The more people answer, the better I can make the series.
Tags: tech_tuesday reader_survey
Monday, December 12, 2011
Patents and the Growing Anti-Commons
The patent wars have really been heating up. For some time now Apple has been going around trying to get various Android devices off the market based on patent claims. Now the shoe is on the other foot as a court in Germany has found in favor of Motorola Mobility against Apple based on a patent. Of course Motorola Mobility is in the process of being acquired by Google so that its trove of patents can be used in the fight against Apple and others. Apple is reaping what it has sowed. And in the last few days it has become clear that Apple has been punching both above and below the belt. Not only has Apple has sold or licensed several of its patents to a newly established troll but Apple has also been using patents to undermine open standards.
In the end all this patent litigation will accomplish absolutely nothing for the companies in question. Yes, maybe it will delay a competitor here or there for a short period of time. But in the end there are too many patents around already so it all becomes the equivalent of a slow moving trench war with all sides digging in. In the process countless lawyers will become incredibly rich and innovation will suffer as collateral damage. We are experiencing the tragedy of the anti-commons: instead of ideas combining freely to move us forward as a species we are fighting in court over their ownership. Here too Apple has played a rather sad role by patenting a variety of things that had clearly been out there already thus effectively removing ideas from the commons where they can be combined freely with other ideas!
Given all that it is especially galling to see the Supreme court on its way to extending the reach of patents into yet another realm: medical diagnosis. Apparently it could soon be a patent violation for a doctor to adjust the dosage of a drug based on measuring the level of a chemical in the patient’s blood. Leaving aside that this seems like a fairly obvious idea, it is frightening to consider the consequences of patents extending beyond pharmaceuticals to simply applying medical knowledge.
Tags: patents anti_commons innovation
Friday, December 9, 2011
The Courage of Big Changes
As soon as your new startup has some actual endusers a fear of changes sets in. What if people don’t like it? What if they start to protest? I sometimes meet startups with only thousands of users that are firmly in the grip of this fear. That’s why it is so awesome to see companies such as Facebook and Twitter with hundreds of millions of users still make big changes to their services.
As of today I have “New New Twitter” — while it doesn’t represent some fundamental change in how Twitter functions, it is a fairly radical redesign of the enduser experience. It is the kind of big change that companies often need to get from one level of scale to another. Facebook’s introduction of the news feed is maybe the best example of this: a dramatic change that was protested strongly by many people and yet was essential to growth and engagement.
This is not just true for companies but also individuals and families. That’s why at home we are in the process of just such a change: moving from the suburbs back to the city!
Tags: startups life changes
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Edmodo: Adding Greylock and Benchmark
After yesterday’s Twilio announcement, this will make two funding posts in a row but that’s just how it worked out: Edmodo today announced that the company has raised $15 million in a round led by Greylock and Benchmark. Reid Hoffman and Matt Cohler will be joining the Edmodo board. We are super excited about how this allows Edmodo to continue growing and deliver on their vision of connecting and empowering students and teachers. Congrats to the team at Edmodo!
Tags: edmodo funding usv
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Twilio: Fueling Up for Growth
Twilio has been growing rapidly in the US and they recently launched in the UK for voice with text coming soon. In addition to geographic expansion, Twilio has also been adding awesome new services such as Twilio Client and Twilio Connect. We are excited to be supporting Team Twilio together with the fine folks from Bessemer with a $17 million Series C financing. Congrats to the entire team on a fantastic year!
Tags: twilio usv bessemer financing
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