Continuations

This past Saturday, Susan and Oliver from Ziggeo organized the third New York City Videohackday. Turnout was terrific with over 100 participants and 18 teams submitting a project. The format of a one-day event works well and appears to attract a more diverse group of participants. I gave a brief opening talk describing what it means to hack, which I characterized in this context asTo rapidly build an inelegant but effective solution to a problem, often using tools and parts in ways other than...

Years ago I worked with the team at Tacoda on the technology for audience based targeting. Some of my work there wound up in a patent that was sold along with Tacoda to AOL. I don’t know if this patent is part of the patents recently sold by AOL to Microsoft but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were. I also worked closely with Joshua on a number of patents filed for by del.icio.us and sold along with the company to Yahoo. Yahoo of course has recently started a massive patent lawsuit against Face...

After some initial uncertainty it appears that the data released yesterday is in fact from the Ashley Madison hack that had been announced a little while back. The data contains not just email addresses but a lot of other information including internal corporate documents. As for the email addresses there will be some percentage that was entered by others as Ashley Madison did not require an email confirmation (so I would take any revelations with a grain of salt). I believe that this hack an...

Whenever I write about about either income inequality or basic income guarantee I usually get a comment how none of it will matter if we don’t help people get out from underneath debt first. I was also reminded of that recently when I heard how much interest some students are paying on their student debt. And I have started to read Debt: The First 5,000 Years which is fascinating. So here is an idea. What if there was a site for crowdsourcing debt relief in a lottery format. People contribute...

I have long been writing about climate change on Continuations. Mostly it has been about more evidence with the occasional call to action. Today is such a call if you live in London: Our portfolio companies AMEE and Twilio together with IBM, CapGemini and others are organizing an Environmental Data Hack Weekend this coming weekend. Climate change is showing up in data everywhere. But many of the data sets are dispersed and not easily accessible. The Environmental Data Exchange was built by Di...