Continuations

Probably the most interesting exchange on yesterday’s VC Panel at Google I/O was around how investors think about open versus closed systems. Dave McClure got the most memorable line of the day with “Open is for losers." Dave was obviously being provocative on purpose. My own thinking here was captured by comments from Chris Dixon and Brad Feld. Chris pointed out that open is the basis for more overall consumer surplus generation (i.e. more total net benefit to society), while closed is the b...

Just as I was bout to start this post, I saw Marco’s Entry “On Database Joins” where he quotes a tweet by @codinghorror on joins being super expensive and explains how Tumblr avoids them. Tech folks at our portfolio companies have probably all heard me say that “joins are evil” because they will make it really difficult for your service or site to scale past a certain level. Of course, once you start to program without joins, you pretty quickly demote your database engine to perform object (o...

In January I wrote a post saying that we need a standard for cloud databases. That post is now the #2 search result on google for “cloud database standards” and there are still no results that even hint at emerging standards. So it will be fun today to moderate a panel on this topic at the Glue Conference with Alex Iskold and Stu Charlton. I am planning on a lot of audience participation as there are a lot of technical folks at the conference. Here are some of the questions I am planning to c...

Dalton Caldwell announced yesterday on his blog and on Twitter that app.net has reached its initial funding goal. I look forward to seeing what happens next and am watching the api spec on Github. Here is what I believe would be interesting to see: a clear roadmap for embracing emerging standards and creating new ones where needed to allow for a future of decentralized social networks. It would a huge benefit to society if we can get with social networking to where we are with email today: it...