I love it when a plan comes together. The plan in question is the Edmodo Platform. When we invested in Edmodo in the fall of 2010, the company was just beginning to really grow its network of students and teachers. One frequently asked question was how Edmodo would be able to keep offering its features for free. I remember going to the ISTE conference in 2011 and having several teachers come up to me concerned that they would have to stop using Edmodo once it would start to charge. I assured ...

I love it when a plan comes together. The plan in question is the Edmodo Platform. When we invested in Edmodo in the fall of 2010, the company was just beginning to really grow its network of students and teachers. One frequently asked question was how Edmodo would be able to keep offering its features for free. I remember going to the ISTE conference in 2011 and having several teachers come up to me concerned that they would have to stop using Edmodo once it would start to charge. I assured ...

I usually take weekends off from blogging, but this one is just too good to pass up: Shapeways and Soundcloud have teamed up to bring out “the Vibe” an iPhone case which comes with a completely custom waveform as its back. I love this because it shows off the power of the platforms that Shapeways and Soundcloud have created. It also represents a completely unexpected use case for a sound file. And it is a completely organic, API-enabled collaboration between two of our portfolio companies. Al...

I usually take weekends off from blogging, but this one is just too good to pass up: Shapeways and Soundcloud have teamed up to bring out “the Vibe” an iPhone case which comes with a completely custom waveform as its back. I love this because it shows off the power of the platforms that Shapeways and Soundcloud have created. It also represents a completely unexpected use case for a sound file. And it is a completely organic, API-enabled collaboration between two of our portfolio companies. Al...

We are at a perilous fork in history where many of the choices that we are making now and in the coming years will determine whether we are headed towards an information-based utopia or dystopia. It is not any single choice that matters but rather their cumulative effect and how these choices interact with each other. Here is how I see the two possible extreme future states of the world: Utopia. Transparent information sharing. Global collaboration. Renaissance of arts. Reputation more import...

We are at a perilous fork in history where many of the choices that we are making now and in the coming years will determine whether we are headed towards an information-based utopia or dystopia. It is not any single choice that matters but rather their cumulative effect and how these choices interact with each other. Here is how I see the two possible extreme future states of the world: Utopia. Transparent information sharing. Global collaboration. Renaissance of arts. Reputation more import...

Once in a while I find myself in a product or strategy or biz dev discussion at a startup which goes something like: “we are doing xyz to defend against ”. My reaction is to ask whether xyz is also part of what the startup was trying to build in the first place. If the answer is no, then I will argue strongly that they shouldn’t do it at all. Why? Startups have very limited resources. They succeed by putting all of those resources into a singular effort. That means being on the offense and bu...

Once in a while I find myself in a product or strategy or biz dev discussion at a startup which goes something like: “we are doing xyz to defend against ”. My reaction is to ask whether xyz is also part of what the startup was trying to build in the first place. If the answer is no, then I will argue strongly that they shouldn’t do it at all. Why? Startups have very limited resources. They succeed by putting all of those resources into a singular effort. That means being on the offense and bu...

Song written and performed by our kids for Susan’s birthday yesterday. It was definitely the best present (followed by my scooping up a 212 number for our home line). Hat tip to the wonderful Keith Witty for working with the gang on this! And of course: I ordered “The Vibe” iPhone case from Shapeways with part of the waveform.

Song written and performed by our kids for Susan’s birthday yesterday. It was definitely the best present (followed by my scooping up a 212 number for our home line). Hat tip to the wonderful Keith Witty for working with the gang on this! And of course: I ordered “The Vibe” iPhone case from Shapeways with part of the waveform.

This week I have been trying out a new approach to meetings. Instead of using up the entire time in the calendar for the meeting itself, I am trying to keep the meeting a bit shorter (45 minutes in the case of a previously 1 hour meeting). I then use the 10 minutes afterwards for the immediate follow-up actions that came out of the meeting while the person I met with is still there. Often that involves sending emails, eg to introduce the person I was just meeting with to someone else. I have ...

This week I have been trying out a new approach to meetings. Instead of using up the entire time in the calendar for the meeting itself, I am trying to keep the meeting a bit shorter (45 minutes in the case of a previously 1 hour meeting). I then use the 10 minutes afterwards for the immediate follow-up actions that came out of the meeting while the person I met with is still there. Often that involves sending emails, eg to introduce the person I was just meeting with to someone else. I have ...

If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream issue. That was sort of the gist of Mark Cuban’s post. The first group of people who should really start t...

If Yahoo had any shred of credibility left with developers then it has succeeded in destroying that with its misguided patent lawsuit against Facebook. But the suit isn’t all bad. It has the potential to become a catalytic event for broader social awareness of the perils of software patents, similar to how the SOPA/PIPA battle moved copyright and its enforcement into more of a mainstream issue. That was sort of the gist of Mark Cuban’s post. The first group of people who should really start t...

In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to the enduser. For our purposes today we will look at a three item list. You may recall that the list is defined by the and ta...

In last week’s Tech Tuesday we learned about HTML which is used to describe the content of a web page. Today, we will inspect something called Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS for short) which determines what that content looks like. All of this belongs to Step 7 of the web cycle where the web browser takes the information retrieve from a web server to display the page to the enduser. For our purposes today we will look at a three item list. You may recall that the list is defined by the and ta...

It is easy to dismiss Rick Santorum’s promised war on pornography as more moralizing from a candidate who apparently questions the separation of church and state. But it exposes an important fault line in thinking about the Internet when seen in conjunction with Nick Kristof’s call in this Sunday’s New York Times for Backpage to stop carrying adult classifieds. At issue here is what constitutes an effective approach to the regulation of content and commerce on the Internet and is closely rela...

It is easy to dismiss Rick Santorum’s promised war on pornography as more moralizing from a candidate who apparently questions the separation of church and state. But it exposes an important fault line in thinking about the Internet when seen in conjunction with Nick Kristof’s call in this Sunday’s New York Times for Backpage to stop carrying adult classifieds. At issue here is what constitutes an effective approach to the regulation of content and commerce on the Internet and is closely rela...

The topic of last week’s Tech Tuesday was CSS, which determines the look and feel of the content of a web page (where the content itself is described in HTML). Today we will learn about Javascript, which is a programming language that lets us control the behavior of the web page (both by itself and in reaction to what the user does). Together HTML, CSS and Javascript determine what a web browser does in Steps 7 and 8 of the web cycle. What is a programming language? It is a language that lets...

The topic of last week’s Tech Tuesday was CSS, which determines the look and feel of the content of a web page (where the content itself is described in HTML). Today we will learn about Javascript, which is a programming language that lets us control the behavior of the web page (both by itself and in reaction to what the user does). Together HTML, CSS and Javascript determine what a web browser does in Steps 7 and 8 of the web cycle. What is a programming language? It is a language that lets...