Today Susan and I are excited to announce that DailyLit has become a part of Plympton. We are big fans of Jenny, Yael and Jacky, the co-founders of Plympton, and love their commitment to serial fiction. DailyLit provides a great delivery mechanism for serial fiction and thus fits very well with Plympton. You can read more about the combination on the DailyLit and Plympton blogs.

Today Susan and I are excited to announce that DailyLit has become a part of Plympton. We are big fans of Jenny, Yael and Jacky, the co-founders of Plympton, and love their commitment to serial fiction. DailyLit provides a great delivery mechanism for serial fiction and thus fits very well with Plympton. You can read more about the combination on the DailyLit and Plympton blogs.

I use Wikipedia all the time. Sometimes to Susan’s dismay I will look up the answer to a question that has come up in conversation in the middle of dinner (I find that easier than remembering to look it up afterwards). I have linked to Wikipedia extensively from Tech Tuesday series. I refer our kids to Wikipedia as a source for many of their homework projects. And the list goes on. I have given money to Wikipedia in the past, but still their need to appeal to users for donations bothers me. D...

I use Wikipedia all the time. Sometimes to Susan’s dismay I will look up the answer to a question that has come up in conversation in the middle of dinner (I find that easier than remembering to look it up afterwards). I have linked to Wikipedia extensively from Tech Tuesday series. I refer our kids to Wikipedia as a source for many of their homework projects. And the list goes on. I have given money to Wikipedia in the past, but still their need to appeal to users for donations bothers me. D...

Later today I will be meeting with the students in Gary Chou’s Entrepreneurial Design SVA class (which Gary and Christina started together last year). We will talk about what’s happening in the labor market broadly and why that puts a premium on being a (micro) entrepreneur. As part of the preparation, I watched and read the materials that Gary had assigned for the class which included Max Levchin’s keynote from DLD. Max is super smart and working on some fascinating ideas around making more ...

Later today I will be meeting with the students in Gary Chou’s Entrepreneurial Design SVA class (which Gary and Christina started together last year). We will talk about what’s happening in the labor market broadly and why that puts a premium on being a (micro) entrepreneur. As part of the preparation, I watched and read the materials that Gary had assigned for the class which included Max Levchin’s keynote from DLD. Max is super smart and working on some fascinating ideas around making more ...

Part of what makes Google such a formidable company is their access to vast amounts of data combined with top talent in machine learning. For instance, every time someone picks a specific link from a Google results page that action makes Google just a tiny bit smarter about the relevance of that result for the particular query (for this type of person). As a shareholder in Google, I have been very happy with the returns this has produced. But from an overall social progress and market structu...

Part of what makes Google such a formidable company is their access to vast amounts of data combined with top talent in machine learning. For instance, every time someone picks a specific link from a Google results page that action makes Google just a tiny bit smarter about the relevance of that result for the particular query (for this type of person). As a shareholder in Google, I have been very happy with the returns this has produced. But from an overall social progress and market structu...

Last Tech Tuesday, we learned about atomic actions as a way of dealing with the problems arising from concurrency. I ended that post by pointing to the limits of atomic actions – most notably that the operating system and/or database system cannot provide arbitrarily complex atomic actions as it cannot possibly anticipate all the needs of different programs. At the time I also raised the question as to how atomic actions can be provided in the first place! Let’s start with the second question...

Last Tech Tuesday, we learned about atomic actions as a way of dealing with the problems arising from concurrency. I ended that post by pointing to the limits of atomic actions – most notably that the operating system and/or database system cannot provide arbitrarily complex atomic actions as it cannot possibly anticipate all the needs of different programs. At the time I also raised the question as to how atomic actions can be provided in the first place! Let’s start with the second question...

Today’s my birthday and I am turning 46. I quickly searched Continuations (via gawk.it) and it appears that I last blogged about my birthday three years ago. I am happy to report that not much has changed. Despite a fairly frenetic work pace over the intervening time with a lot of travel (and correspondingly less hair) I am lucky to be healthy and feeling full of energy. There is the occasional reminder though that my body is no longer thirty. And that got me thinking about something somewhat...

Today’s my birthday and I am turning 46. I quickly searched Continuations (via gawk.it) and it appears that I last blogged about my birthday three years ago. I am happy to report that not much has changed. Despite a fairly frenetic work pace over the intervening time with a lot of travel (and correspondingly less hair) I am lucky to be healthy and feeling full of energy. There is the occasional reminder though that my body is no longer thirty. And that got me thinking about something somewhat...

Recently Andrew Parker predicted that within 5 years we will have a specialized branch of the military dedicated to defending cyber space (just as we have the army for land, the navy for the seas and the air force for the sky). Given the recent attacks on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the past attacks on companies such as Google, the timeline for such a separate branch may have to be sooner. While I am in favor of strengthening our defensive and even offensive capabilities in...

Recently Andrew Parker predicted that within 5 years we will have a specialized branch of the military dedicated to defending cyber space (just as we have the army for land, the navy for the seas and the air force for the sky). Given the recent attacks on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal and the past attacks on companies such as Google, the timeline for such a separate branch may have to be sooner. While I am in favor of strengthening our defensive and even offensive capabilities in...

I have been meaning to write about the NY Times piece on royalties in the age of streaming music. People have talked about how real dollars have turned into digital nickels when music went online and sales went from records to individual songs. With streaming, the argument goes, “the river of nickels looks more like a torrent of micropennies.” The first big gaping whole in the article was that it made no attempt at unpacking what part of the economics goes to labels versus individual artists....

I have been meaning to write about the NY Times piece on royalties in the age of streaming music. People have talked about how real dollars have turned into digital nickels when music went online and sales went from records to individual songs. With streaming, the argument goes, “the river of nickels looks more like a torrent of micropennies.” The first big gaping whole in the article was that it made no attempt at unpacking what part of the economics goes to labels versus individual artists....

I have started a series of posts which I called Scylla and Charybdis – or why startups are hard. The idea is that on pretty much anything you can err on both sides and only a relatively narrow middle will let you succeed. One of those that will merit an entire post shortly is the adoption of new technologies. You can be too early or too late! The particular technology I want to talk about today is HTML5. For some time now we have had several of our portfolio companies explore whether they can...

I have started a series of posts which I called Scylla and Charybdis – or why startups are hard. The idea is that on pretty much anything you can err on both sides and only a relatively narrow middle will let you succeed. One of those that will merit an entire post shortly is the adoption of new technologies. You can be too early or too late! The particular technology I want to talk about today is HTML5. For some time now we have had several of our portfolio companies explore whether they can...

One of the things I always realize as I write Tech Tuesdays is just how much there is to potentially know on any given topic. Entire books have been written on concurrency alone and there is already a long list of research papers published in 2013. Sometimes this realization can be genuinely daunting – any one human can know so little of all available knowledge. But I digress. Today’s post will be an attempt to write a conclusion to this mini series on concurrency. As I pointed out at the end...

One of the things I always realize as I write Tech Tuesdays is just how much there is to potentially know on any given topic. Entire books have been written on concurrency alone and there is already a long list of research papers published in 2013. Sometimes this realization can be genuinely daunting – any one human can know so little of all available knowledge. But I digress. Today’s post will be an attempt to write a conclusion to this mini series on concurrency. As I pointed out at the end...