Last Tech Tuesday I offered some very rough guidelines for making technology choices in a startup. I was going to write today about how to evolve that over time, but one of the comments suggested that it would be great to pick something that won’t immediately require a massive rewrite if you hit user growth. So a bit more today on this initial choice. I agree with the suggestion but with an important caveat: make a choice where you don’t sacrifice agility. At the earliest stages the single mo...

Last Tech Tuesday I offered some very rough guidelines for making technology choices in a startup. I was going to write today about how to evolve that over time, but one of the comments suggested that it would be great to pick something that won’t immediately require a massive rewrite if you hit user growth. So a bit more today on this initial choice. I agree with the suggestion but with an important caveat: make a choice where you don’t sacrifice agility. At the earliest stages the single mo...

It is easy for me to remember Pi Day because it also happens to be Susan’s birthday (Happy Birthday!). The digits of pi have some amazing properties and are fun to explore with kids as a great way of learning about math. For instance, here you can search for any pattern in the first 200 million digits of pi (including say the kids’ birth dates). This year I worked with our son Michael on a little program to approximate pi by using polygons with increasingly more sides. The program computes th...

It is easy for me to remember Pi Day because it also happens to be Susan’s birthday (Happy Birthday!). The digits of pi have some amazing properties and are fun to explore with kids as a great way of learning about math. For instance, here you can search for any pattern in the first 200 million digits of pi (including say the kids’ birth dates). This year I worked with our son Michael on a little program to approximate pi by using polygons with increasingly more sides. The program computes th...

From a purely engineering perspective we can calculate the optimal amount of interference for a particular band of spectrum. We want just enough to achieve coverage. Any more is simply a waste of power. It is that knowledge of a hypothetically perfect solution that leads us down the path of saying that spectrum should be auctioned off with the network built out by the winning bidder. That, and the idea of using the money generated from the auction to help with the budget deficit. Both of thes...

From a purely engineering perspective we can calculate the optimal amount of interference for a particular band of spectrum. We want just enough to achieve coverage. Any more is simply a waste of power. It is that knowledge of a hypothetically perfect solution that leads us down the path of saying that spectrum should be auctioned off with the network built out by the winning bidder. That, and the idea of using the money generated from the auction to help with the budget deficit. Both of thes...

Because I consider myself a peer progressive who believes in some role for government and the existence of market failures, I usually don’t agree with Senator Rand Paul. But I strongly support the basis of his filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination: highlighting the excessive powers available to and sought by the President with regard to killing American citizens without due process. I have long felt that President Obama is completely on the wrong side of the drone program which is an exampl...

Because I consider myself a peer progressive who believes in some role for government and the existence of market failures, I usually don’t agree with Senator Rand Paul. But I strongly support the basis of his filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination: highlighting the excessive powers available to and sought by the President with regard to killing American citizens without due process. I have long felt that President Obama is completely on the wrong side of the drone program which is an exampl...

I have been wanting to write about the sequester for a couple of days and have been stymied by not knowing where to start because I deeply disagree with both sides. It’s a bit like observing two of our kids fight with each other when both are clearly in the wrong – who do you turn to first? So here is my attempt at blurting it all out in condensed version. We need to change pretty much everything about the federal budget: how much money goes through government, how it is raised, what we spend...

I have been wanting to write about the sequester for a couple of days and have been stymied by not knowing where to start because I deeply disagree with both sides. It’s a bit like observing two of our kids fight with each other when both are clearly in the wrong – who do you turn to first? So here is my attempt at blurting it all out in condensed version. We need to change pretty much everything about the federal budget: how much money goes through government, how it is raised, what we spend...

This is the first of a new series of Tech Tuesday posts on Technology in Startups. Today’s topic: choosing your technologies. As a startup when you are just getting going, you have the luxury of picking any technology you want – you don’t yet have a legacy set of choices to contend with. It’s completely greenfield and that level of choice can be both exhilarating and daunting (what if I pick the wrong technology? cf Paradox of Choice). So what are some guidelines for thinking about that choic...

This is the first of a new series of Tech Tuesday posts on Technology in Startups. Today’s topic: choosing your technologies. As a startup when you are just getting going, you have the luxury of picking any technology you want – you don’t yet have a legacy set of choices to contend with. It’s completely greenfield and that level of choice can be both exhilarating and daunting (what if I pick the wrong technology? cf Paradox of Choice). So what are some guidelines for thinking about that choic...

My older son asked me yesterday about how colors on the screen work. We started talking about the history of the RGB color model including early color screen technology. That eventually led to a discussion of how the RGB color space is three dimensional with 256 values on each axis for a total of 2^24 or roughly 16 million colors. Since a display is only two dimensional how would you go about showing the entire color space? From that question we talked about projections (from 3D to 2D) but al...

My older son asked me yesterday about how colors on the screen work. We started talking about the history of the RGB color model including early color screen technology. That eventually led to a discussion of how the RGB color space is three dimensional with 256 values on each axis for a total of 2^24 or roughly 16 million colors. Since a display is only two dimensional how would you go about showing the entire color space? From that question we talked about projections (from 3D to 2D) but al...

Google just acquired DNNresearch, a spinoff company from the University of Toronto led by Geoffrey Hinton. The DNN in the company name stands for deep neural networks. As I have been learning from Professor Hinton’s online course, these are networks with multiple “hidden” layers of neurons. A hidden layer sits between an input and output layer. Hidden layers are responsible for much of the power of modern neural networks and the breakthroughs that have occurred are how to train these hidden l...

Google just acquired DNNresearch, a spinoff company from the University of Toronto led by Geoffrey Hinton. The DNN in the company name stands for deep neural networks. As I have been learning from Professor Hinton’s online course, these are networks with multiple “hidden” layers of neurons. A hidden layer sits between an input and output layer. Hidden layers are responsible for much of the power of modern neural networks and the breakthroughs that have occurred are how to train these hidden l...

Securing your site or service has become ever more important as the number of attacks is rapidly on the rise. As I have written before on Continuations I am not a fan of overreaching security legislation as a response. If we don’t want to keep these efforts at bay it will help if we do a better job with security. Increasingly that means you are only as secure as some of your key vendors. In particular hosted email and DNS have proven to be big holes. If you use hosted email make sure that it ...

Securing your site or service has become ever more important as the number of attacks is rapidly on the rise. As I have written before on Continuations I am not a fan of overreaching security legislation as a response. If we don’t want to keep these efforts at bay it will help if we do a better job with security. Increasingly that means you are only as secure as some of your key vendors. In particular hosted email and DNS have proven to be big holes. If you use hosted email make sure that it ...

Germany’s parliament today passed the highly controversial “Leistungsschutzrecht” which is an ancillary copyright that requires payment for excerpting from and linking to content in some instances. When I walked around in a slight daze at Chicago O'Hare this morning after an all too short red eye flight, my Twitter feed was full of German friends and others outraged about the bill (just look for #lsr). Jeff Jarvis – who spoke out strongly against the law at this year’s DLD conference – i...

Germany’s parliament today passed the highly controversial “Leistungsschutzrecht” which is an ancillary copyright that requires payment for excerpting from and linking to content in some instances. When I walked around in a slight daze at Chicago O'Hare this morning after an all too short red eye flight, my Twitter feed was full of German friends and others outraged about the bill (just look for #lsr). Jeff Jarvis – who spoke out strongly against the law at this year’s DLD conference – i...