Elon Musk has successfully acquired Twitter. Many people seem convinced he will ruin it in short order. And while that’s of course conceivable, it is also possible that he will fix some long running problems. It’ s not like Twitter had been a well-run company. So now seems like a good time to resurface what I had tweeted in April.Restoring full API access would dramatically shift power back to endusers. We could run apps other than the official Twitter client for interacting with Twitter, whi...

“Two out of three ain’t bad” is the title of a Meat Loaf song but is also the idea behind triangles: situations in which you can achieve only two of three objectives. The classic example is the idea that in manufacturing you can have any two, but not all three from fast, cheap, good. (*) Much of the current debate about social media and how to regulate it is people shouting loudly past each other because they are pursuing different objectives in what I believe is a social media triangle: Free...

I recently wrote a post about requiring APIs for social and other applications that have more then 1 million users. Now that is an approach to the problem of market power that adds new regulations. There is an alternative that would go the route of removing existing laws which I want to discuss today. What prevents someone today from creating their own programmatic control over services? Why can’t I simply write code that interfaces on my behalf with say Facebook? After all, Facebook’s own ap...

Today the team at Clarifai is releasing an amazing second version of their API that makes two breakthroughs available to every developer: custom training and fast visual search. The beauty of Clarifai’s API when it first launched was that you could be up and running in minutes and get great results with their models. But what if you wanted to train your own concepts? Well, if you were a bigger customer willing to pay, Clarifai would train a custom model for you. With the newly released versio...

The greatest trick Uber ever pulled was to convince regulators that it is an open technology platform. That trick may no longer work if the California verdict that some Uber drivers are employees is upheld (I am assuming that the company will appeal the decision). For disclosure, USV has two related investments with Hailo and Sidecar. Both companies have struggled and to no small degree because they did not pull the same trick. Hailo focuses primarily on the licensed market where rates are se...

API pricing requires striking a tricky balance between the needs of developers and the cost/profitability of the provider. I am on the boards of several companies that provide APIs as their primary business model, including Twilio, Dwolla and Sift Science and have been in long discussions about the relative merits of pure usage-based pay versus some type of bundle pricing (sometimes also referred to as t-shirt pricing). This morning Ziggeo which provides video recording, storage and playback ...

Today is Labor Day which is meant to celebrate the workers movement (as an aside, in Germany and much of the rest of the world this is held on May 1). That might be a good time to think about what organizing labor might mean in the future. One of the major economic trends we are currently seeing is the breakdown of traditional employment and the rise of labor marketplaces for free lancers, such as Uber, Task Rabbit and WorkMarket (to name just a few). The valuations for at least some of these...

Shapeways is a partner for Google’s brand new MadeWithCode initiative aimed at getting more girls excited about coding and computational thinking. What is important about this initiative is that it will broaden the understanding of what can be done with code. Code is not just games or websites. Increasingly it is everything and everywhere (even in a long piece on computational thinking in MotherJones). So what I am particularly excited about is how this initiative will introduce a many more p...

If a picture is a thousand words, then a video is a thousand pictures. Our brains seem built for extracting a huge amount of information from the shortest clips (and even animated gifs). Prior to smartphones capturing video was sort of a pain but now there is a Cambrian explosion of new recordings. This leads us to expect video in more and more places, whether that’s Instagram or a news article. This change in expectation over time will affect all sorts of online services, whether that’s recr...

Yesterday, the EFF filed an amicus brief signed by some of the big names in computer science and software engineering to support the court decision in Oracle vs. Google that APIs are not copyrightable. The brief is well worth reading because it lays out in detail many of the instances over the last decades in which the non-copyrightability of APIs has turned out to be important for innovation. I also support this view which is based on concept that functions or methods themselves are not copy...