Yesterday, in my Tumblr dashboard, I saw a post by Marco about spam from Parallels. In it he saysI can confidently say that VMWare’s is the far better product. It’s much more polished, and most importantly, much more stable than ParallelsNow I have been running Parallels 4.0 since I switched to my Mac and I have been very happy with it (it has continued to be stable since I wrote my post). This is a simple (and single) datapoint, nothing else. Instead of blogging about this here (as I have no...

Yesterday, in my Tumblr dashboard, I saw a post by Marco about spam from Parallels. In it he saysI can confidently say that VMWare’s is the far better product. It’s much more polished, and most importantly, much more stable than ParallelsNow I have been running Parallels 4.0 since I switched to my Mac and I have been very happy with it (it has continued to be stable since I wrote my post). This is a simple (and single) datapoint, nothing else. Instead of blogging about this here (as I have no...

About a year ago, I wrote a post with the same title, except that it ended in a question mark. Since then I have become convinced that solving the problem of our ever growing data trails will require a reshaping of what we mean by and expect from the idea of privacy. Two things happened this week that brought this issue back to mind:On Monday in our partners meeting we got to talking about EZ Pass and how it creates a trail of a car’s movement (and by implication people movement). We talked b...

About a year ago, I wrote a post with the same title, except that it ended in a question mark. Since then I have become convinced that solving the problem of our ever growing data trails will require a reshaping of what we mean by and expect from the idea of privacy. Two things happened this week that brought this issue back to mind:On Monday in our partners meeting we got to talking about EZ Pass and how it creates a trail of a car’s movement (and by implication people movement). We talked b...

The New York Times has an API and developer network. The Guardian just announced the Open Platform. These initiatives are critically important in keeping the NYT and the Guardian relevant. Opening up and giving access to the existing articles and data is a great first step, but the trick will be to turn these into real hubs, which also allow for inbound news and data. The Guardian has taken a big step in this direction with its data store (kudos to the team at AMEE, which is a featured partne...

The New York Times has an API and developer network. The Guardian just announced the Open Platform. These initiatives are critically important in keeping the NYT and the Guardian relevant. Opening up and giving access to the existing articles and data is a great first step, but the trick will be to turn these into real hubs, which also allow for inbound news and data. The Guardian has taken a big step in this direction with its data store (kudos to the team at AMEE, which is a featured partne...

There have been some complaints that the big sites want to be providers of identity but don’t want to accept identity from smaller sites. I happen to think that’s (mostly) OK for right now but also constitutes an opportunity (see second paragraph). To become trusted providers of identity the large sites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon?, eBay? et al) will have to make significant investments in monitoring and administration. Spammers and others will spend a lot of time trying to create fake a...

There have been some complaints that the big sites want to be providers of identity but don’t want to accept identity from smaller sites. I happen to think that’s (mostly) OK for right now but also constitutes an opportunity (see second paragraph). To become trusted providers of identity the large sites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Amazon?, eBay? et al) will have to make significant investments in monitoring and administration. Spammers and others will spend a lot of time trying to create fake a...

“The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident.” - Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky Just one of many great quotes from Clay’s wonderful piece

“The expense of printing created an environment where Wal-Mart was willing to subsidize the Baghdad bureau. This wasn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor was it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident.” - Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky Just one of many great quotes from Clay’s wonderful piece

Short post today as I am on BlackBerry only and headed to Hacking Education. I just have a simple question - where is eBay? This crisis ought to be fantastic for eBay as folks are looking to unload stuff they don’t need and buy things for cheap at auction. Instead the WSJ today has one article about women selling their old clothes out of their closets and another about Amazon opening a game trading business. No mention of eBay in either article as even being a possible alternative (Craigslist...

Short post today as I am on BlackBerry only and headed to Hacking Education. I just have a simple question - where is eBay? This crisis ought to be fantastic for eBay as folks are looking to unload stuff they don’t need and buy things for cheap at auction. Instead the WSJ today has one article about women selling their old clothes out of their closets and another about Amazon opening a game trading business. No mention of eBay in either article as even being a possible alternative (Craigslist...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

Maybe yesterday was a big news day or maybe this has been known for a while and I simply wasn’t aware, but I thought that Google’s announcement yesterday of the Google Friend Connect API was a big deal (and yet seemed to pass virtually unnoticed – was off Techmeme within hours). When Friend Connect was first announced, I was pretty negative about how they had chosen to implement it. I did hedge at the time by saying “at least in its current incarnation” – and now Google has shown that they ar...

Disrupting Class is a book by Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn that applies Christensen’s theories around disruptive innovation to schools. First up a confession: I started this book twice and did not get past the first chapter! But after having read the two books mentioned in yesterday’s post, I decided to give it another whirl. As soon as I got into the second chapter I really began to enjoy it and from there on it was a quick read. The basic premise of the book is that ...

Disrupting Class is a book by Clayton Christensen, Curtis Johnson and Michael Horn that applies Christensen’s theories around disruptive innovation to schools. First up a confession: I started this book twice and did not get past the first chapter! But after having read the two books mentioned in yesterday’s post, I decided to give it another whirl. As soon as I got into the second chapter I really began to enjoy it and from there on it was a quick read. The basic premise of the book is that ...

So that’s probably too sensationalist a title, but I was struck over the last few days by how many times I encountered the same theme in different guises: using the web to do more with less! Here are just a few of the examples:A major article about Zipcar in this weekend’s New York Times magazine titled “Share my Ride”Young entrepreneurs coming to visit us and using Airbed and Breakfast to keep down their cost of travel (this is essentially people sharing their appartments)The sharing of offi...

So that’s probably too sensationalist a title, but I was struck over the last few days by how many times I encountered the same theme in different guises: using the web to do more with less! Here are just a few of the examples:A major article about Zipcar in this weekend’s New York Times magazine titled “Share my Ride”Young entrepreneurs coming to visit us and using Airbed and Breakfast to keep down their cost of travel (this is essentially people sharing their appartments)The sharing of offi...

Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as to not have to disclose a lot of information to others (including potential competitors). So how do yo...

Yesterday, I met with someone launching an exchange for privately held companies . The idea is to have a marketplace that is somewhere between the inefficient one-off negotiation of secondary sales on one end and going public on the other. Pretty quickly our discussion turned to the disclosure of information about these private companies. One of the reasons given for being a private is so as to not have to disclose a lot of information to others (including potential competitors). So how do yo...