There is a rumor that Amazon today will announce an Android based smartphone tomorrow. And despite repeated denials there is also a persistent rumor of a Facebook phone that might be Android based. In China there are already several custom phones based on Android, such as the one by Xiaomi. Some people are seeing this as further evidence that Android will fragment to a point where it will be no longer be a single platform. While that’s is a possibility, I actually think that it speaks to the ...

There is a rumor that Amazon today will announce an Android based smartphone tomorrow. And despite repeated denials there is also a persistent rumor of a Facebook phone that might be Android based. In China there are already several custom phones based on Android, such as the one by Xiaomi. Some people are seeing this as further evidence that Android will fragment to a point where it will be no longer be a single platform. While that’s is a possibility, I actually think that it speaks to the ...

Last Friday to Saturday I had the good fortune of being invited to crew on my friend Mark Hansen’s boat Sweet Lorraine (a beautiful J-145) in the 2012 Vineyard race. The course starts near the Stamford Harbor, goes up to the Buzzard’s Bay Light Tower and then returns south of Block Island all the way to Stamford for a total length of about 238 nautical miles. We are the rightmost boat in the picture below, taken shortly after the start. The crew consisted of extremely experienced and successf...

Last Friday to Saturday I had the good fortune of being invited to crew on my friend Mark Hansen’s boat Sweet Lorraine (a beautiful J-145) in the 2012 Vineyard race. The course starts near the Stamford Harbor, goes up to the Buzzard’s Bay Light Tower and then returns south of Block Island all the way to Stamford for a total length of about 238 nautical miles. We are the rightmost boat in the picture below, taken shortly after the start. The crew consisted of extremely experienced and successf...

Having taken some time off, I am excited to start Tech Tuesdays back up. We will continue looking at programming and the next topic are more complex data types which are also referred to as data structures. If you have been following the programming series, you may recall that we already had three separate posts dealing with data types. These introduced the concept of data types and discussed why they matter and how they are implemented. But those posts dealt with simple types of data such as...

Having taken some time off, I am excited to start Tech Tuesdays back up. We will continue looking at programming and the next topic are more complex data types which are also referred to as data structures. If you have been following the programming series, you may recall that we already had three separate posts dealing with data types. These introduced the concept of data types and discussed why they matter and how they are implemented. But those posts dealt with simple types of data such as...

The shift of usage away from the web and to mobile is going on in full force. About half of the US population now has a smartphone and that penetration is rapidly growing. That shift has been widely cited as a problem for Facebook. But generally the problem is stated in terms of a smaller advertising opportunity on mobile devices as a result of screen size. That goes back to Facebook’s own amendments to their IPO filings, in which they stated:“Although the substantial majority of our mobile u...

The shift of usage away from the web and to mobile is going on in full force. About half of the US population now has a smartphone and that penetration is rapidly growing. That shift has been widely cited as a problem for Facebook. But generally the problem is stated in terms of a smaller advertising opportunity on mobile devices as a result of screen size. That goes back to Facebook’s own amendments to their IPO filings, in which they stated:“Although the substantial majority of our mobile u...

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...

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...

In the last two Tech Tuesdays we have learned about how functions let us define new words in a programming language and how arguments and other local variables are restricted to the scope of the function. Today we will take another look at arguments and how exactly information is passed into the function. Then Tech Tuesday will take the rest of the summer off and resume after Labor Day as I will take my usual late August break from blogging. To motivate today’s discussion take a look at the f...

In the last two Tech Tuesdays we have learned about how functions let us define new words in a programming language and how arguments and other local variables are restricted to the scope of the function. Today we will take another look at arguments and how exactly information is passed into the function. Then Tech Tuesday will take the rest of the summer off and resume after Labor Day as I will take my usual late August break from blogging. To motivate today’s discussion take a look at the f...

Last Tech Tuesday we learned about functions as a way to define our own words in a programming language. We saw that functions take arguments and return results back to where the function was used in the program. We refer to this transfer of control of program execution from the current code to the code inside the function as a function call or a function invocation (the function is called or invoked). As promised at the end of that post, today we will take a closer look at how the arguments ...

Last Tech Tuesday we learned about functions as a way to define our own words in a programming language. We saw that functions take arguments and return results back to where the function was used in the program. We refer to this transfer of control of program execution from the current code to the code inside the function as a function call or a function invocation (the function is called or invoked). As promised at the end of that post, today we will take a closer look at how the arguments ...

This past weekend was the first annual Ecommerce Hack Day in New York organized by Dwolla and Etsy with support from many other companies. I was delighted to be a judge as there were a lot of talented folks working hard on building interesting ecommerce hacks. Here are some of my takeaways from the weekend. First, there are tons of exciting APIs that people can use to build new ecommerce experiences. Marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay have APISs. So do ecommerce sites such as Amazon and Zappo...

This past weekend was the first annual Ecommerce Hack Day in New York organized by Dwolla and Etsy with support from many other companies. I was delighted to be a judge as there were a lot of talented folks working hard on building interesting ecommerce hacks. Here are some of my takeaways from the weekend. First, there are tons of exciting APIs that people can use to build new ecommerce experiences. Marketplaces such as Etsy and eBay have APISs. So do ecommerce sites such as Amazon and Zappo...

I am back from a 2 week break from pretty much all things Internet. With relatively few exceptions I stayed away from email, checking in, blogging, tweeting, reading Techmeme and all the other things I usually do during the course of a day. So what did I do instead and what did I learn from it?Read several non-fiction books including Dan Ariely’s excellent “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.” Take away: There are some low hanging fruit in making people behave more honestly (with interesting i...

I am back from a 2 week break from pretty much all things Internet. With relatively few exceptions I stayed away from email, checking in, blogging, tweeting, reading Techmeme and all the other things I usually do during the course of a day. So what did I do instead and what did I learn from it?Read several non-fiction books including Dan Ariely’s excellent “The Honest Truth about Dishonesty.” Take away: There are some low hanging fruit in making people behave more honestly (with interesting i...

I will be taking most of the rest of August off from writing daily blog posts. I am largely doing this because I will also be unplugging from the constant information drip. This is the information equivalent of a purge diet. My theory is that we are mal-adapted to the supersaturated information environment we are in now. Our brains evolved in a setting that had much less information in it but what bits of information it had were super important as they often determined life or death. With sma...

I will be taking most of the rest of August off from writing daily blog posts. I am largely doing this because I will also be unplugging from the constant information drip. This is the information equivalent of a purge diet. My theory is that we are mal-adapted to the supersaturated information environment we are in now. Our brains evolved in a setting that had much less information in it but what bits of information it had were super important as they often determined life or death. With sma...