Caring about the security of your site or service is a bit akin to going to the dentist on a regular basis: It’s not pleasant, doesn’t really get you any visible results and costs time and money. Hence the people who care/go regularly are the ones who have had a bad experience by not doing so. In my own case that is now (sadly) true for both my teeth and security. My exposure to computer security issues started in the fall of 1987 when I was a freshman at Harvard. We had a bunch of VAX machin...

Caring about the security of your site or service is a bit akin to going to the dentist on a regular basis: It’s not pleasant, doesn’t really get you any visible results and costs time and money. Hence the people who care/go regularly are the ones who have had a bad experience by not doing so. In my own case that is now (sadly) true for both my teeth and security. My exposure to computer security issues started in the fall of 1987 when I was a freshman at Harvard. We had a bunch of VAX machin...

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful concert at Carnegie Hall: the YouTube Symphony. The YouTube Symphony is an orchestra that was assembled through auditions conducted via – you guessed it – YouTube. As such, the process was open to musicians from around the world which is entirely different from how orchestras (even youth orchestras) are traditionally assembled. The idea fits with a concept that we discussed at our hacking education conference: the Internet provides...

Yesterday evening I had the pleasure of attending a wonderful concert at Carnegie Hall: the YouTube Symphony. The YouTube Symphony is an orchestra that was assembled through auditions conducted via – you guessed it – YouTube. As such, the process was open to musicians from around the world which is entirely different from how orchestras (even youth orchestras) are traditionally assembled. The idea fits with a concept that we discussed at our hacking education conference: the Internet provides...

What you call things matters. There is a reason why “nomen est omen” goes back as far as ancient Rome. They of course believed that a person’s name determines (or at least reveals) fate, but more recently we have seen plenty of evidence of company or product names making a meaningful difference. And anyone who has done user testing will know that what label you put on a button can significantly impact how often it will be clicked. I was therefore happy to see that the Obama administration is ...

What you call things matters. There is a reason why “nomen est omen” goes back as far as ancient Rome. They of course believed that a person’s name determines (or at least reveals) fate, but more recently we have seen plenty of evidence of company or product names making a meaningful difference. And anyone who has done user testing will know that what label you put on a button can significantly impact how often it will be clicked. I was therefore happy to see that the Obama administration is ...

Our portfolio company 10gen has released the core of its MongoDB database under the GNU Affero General Public License (the drivers are licensed under Apache). Some people react to the Affero GPL by saying something along the lines of “that’s a new license which I don’t want to understand or bother with." I have some sympathy for that initial reaction (who wants to figure out legal stuff), but most of the same people would happily use GPL licensed code without checking whether it is v2 or v3. ...

Our portfolio company 10gen has released the core of its MongoDB database under the GNU Affero General Public License (the drivers are licensed under Apache). Some people react to the Affero GPL by saying something along the lines of “that’s a new license which I don’t want to understand or bother with." I have some sympathy for that initial reaction (who wants to figure out legal stuff), but most of the same people would happily use GPL licensed code without checking whether it is v2 or v3. ...

Just trying out a slightly attention grabbing headline. Of course Google didn’t do anything directly for the Palm Pre, but while I was out on vacation last week (and not blogging), Google did release a significant upgrade to the mobile version of gmail for the iPhone. What makes it significant is that it makes use of the iPhone browser’s local database capabilities (via Javascript) to provide not only a more responsive UI, but also offline access to email. All of that is delivered strictly as...

Just trying out a slightly attention grabbing headline. Of course Google didn’t do anything directly for the Palm Pre, but while I was out on vacation last week (and not blogging), Google did release a significant upgrade to the mobile version of gmail for the iPhone. What makes it significant is that it makes use of the iPhone browser’s local database capabilities (via Javascript) to provide not only a more responsive UI, but also offline access to email. All of that is delivered strictly as...

Google has finally officially launched their long rumored venture fund. Corporate venture funds have a somewhat spotty history and it will be interesting to see how the google team approaches this. My partner Brad started in Venture Capital with AT&T ventures, which was set up like a real independent fund with a GP/LP structure. That is clearly the way to do it if you want to optimize for returns. The description of Google Ventures given by the principals and on the Google Ventures site makes...

Google has finally officially launched their long rumored venture fund. Corporate venture funds have a somewhat spotty history and it will be interesting to see how the google team approaches this. My partner Brad started in Venture Capital with AT&T ventures, which was set up like a real independent fund with a GP/LP structure. That is clearly the way to do it if you want to optimize for returns. The description of Google Ventures given by the principals and on the Google Ventures site makes...

Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at maximum flexibility in how people use Twitter. This stands in fairly stark contrast with the very ti...

Twitter had some issues this weekend with folks sneaking Javascript code into profiles to effectively create self-replicating Twitter worms. These worms were exploiting a hole in which Twitter was not doing enough scrubbing of user inputs for the CSS customization of a profile page. While this was clearly a security flaw and had to be fixed, it does result from a basic philosophy which aims at maximum flexibility in how people use Twitter. This stands in fairly stark contrast with the very ti...

I have been reading Steven Johnson’s fabulous “The Invention of Air” which has made me aware of many connections I had never previously known existed. In a funny way it also provided a really useful perspective on something I have been thinking about recently: the future of music. Steven writes at length about what spurs “runs” of new ideas in science and identifies advances in technology as one contributor (in the case of Priestly notably the ability to pump air). What happens then is that n...

I have been reading Steven Johnson’s fabulous “The Invention of Air” which has made me aware of many connections I had never previously known existed. In a funny way it also provided a really useful perspective on something I have been thinking about recently: the future of music. Steven writes at length about what spurs “runs” of new ideas in science and identifies advances in technology as one contributor (in the case of Priestly notably the ability to pump air). What happens then is that n...

I was reading an article recently about how many college savings plans are totally under water following the plunge in the stock market. These plans theoretically offer significant tax benefits and so look quite attractive. A few years ago my broker was using this as the argument why we should put some money into them. But I had previous bad experience with doing something primarily for tax reasons that wound up really backfiring (converting an LLC to be treated like a C-Corp) and made sure t...

I was reading an article recently about how many college savings plans are totally under water following the plunge in the stock market. These plans theoretically offer significant tax benefits and so look quite attractive. A few years ago my broker was using this as the argument why we should put some money into them. But I had previous bad experience with doing something primarily for tax reasons that wound up really backfiring (converting an LLC to be treated like a C-Corp) and made sure t...

Yesterday morning, I participated in another meeting sponsored by the Mayor’s office and the NYC EDC to talk about the economic future of New York City. Up for discussion this time: the media industry. There is a lot of concern about employment in “old media” disappearing more rapidly than jobs will be created in “new media” (I have put these terms in quotes since I don’t really like them but they make ok placeholders for the basic idea). The morning was organized in breakout groups. The grou...

Yesterday morning, I participated in another meeting sponsored by the Mayor’s office and the NYC EDC to talk about the economic future of New York City. Up for discussion this time: the media industry. There is a lot of concern about employment in “old media” disappearing more rapidly than jobs will be created in “new media” (I have put these terms in quotes since I don’t really like them but they make ok placeholders for the basic idea). The morning was organized in breakout groups. The grou...