Continuations

The last two Uncertainty Wednesdays we have looked at entropy as a measure of uncertainty. Today I want to tie that back to the original communications context in which Shannon introduced it. We can use our really simple model of a world with two states and two signal values to do this. We have analyzed an example where the signal was a test. Now think of the signal as actually being an electric impulse sent down a wire by a local observer. The observer gets to see perfectly which state of th...

I am finally getting around to writing about the third paper in my MIT PhD thesis. The first paper was an empirical analysis of the impact of information technology on firm size. The second paper provided a model for how improvements in information technology can result in hybrid organizations. The third paper is both the most ambitious and also the most theoretical – it attempts to provide a general framework for analyzing communication in organizations. In rereading it I found a fair number...

The team at Twilio has done an amazing job making telephony accessible to developers. Making and accepting calls, as well as sending and receiving texts is now as easy as a couple of lines of code. The simplicity of Twilio’s API is such that most developers are literally up and running within minutes. At the same time because of the ingenious REST API which makes calls and messages addressable, there is no limit to the complexity of the applications that can be created using Twilio. Now Twili...

When I was an entrepreneur raising money I tended to make a classic mistake: trying to convey all the amazing things we were doing in great detail. This is a terrible strategy. Why? Because too much detail buries the story of your business and also makes your business seem, well, complex. And investors are afraid of complexity. Imagine for a moment a pitch that describes in great technical detail creating a custom processor, a custom operating system, a new relationship between hardware produ...