Tech
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A Tale of Two Polar Bears
(a parable about risk-taking) Two polar bears — we will call them Bold Bear and Timid Bear — sit on an ice floe that is slowly drifting away toward open, warmer water. As their comfortable, known perch begins to melt they discuss their predicament: Bold Bear: “This ice floe has been great for the past… Continue reading
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The Power of Scarcity – Part 2
In startups, teams are — by necessity — small. I’ve worked on bootstrapped development projects where the same five people wrote code, tested, created documentation, and even did ads. (Turns out software engineers don’t make for good marketers, though a sketched ad featuring cavemen discussing ERP was pretty funny…at least to us). Once a company… Continue reading
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The Power of Scarcity – Part 1
Full disclosure: I was there at the dawn of the microcomputer age. Seeing an old Atari joystick washes nostalgia over me. I remember the simple joy of typing in pages of BASIC code of a program in a magazine — and then the tedium of finding the one error that kept it from running. And… Continue reading
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The Great Netbook Experiment
So, I purchased a netbook over the holiday — an Acer AspireOne to be precise. It came with XP Home loaded on an internal 8GB solid state drive…Which lasted about an hour while I downloaded Kubuntu which I’ve wanted to experiment with for a while. The whole idea behind a netbook is that all your… Continue reading
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Adobe Air
Ever since the Web moved from being a tool of academia to a platform for commerce and communication, companies have looked for ways to leverage its “access from anywhere” and “zero install” nature for applications. I’ve written about this before when the industry I then worked in was consumed by the hype over Web-based applications.… Continue reading
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When the Database Gets it Wrong
One of the outgrowths of the digitization and mass collection of personal information is the ability to match disparate bits of data into a profile of individual, a profile that can then be used to make certain judgments about that person. Privacy considerations aside for a moment, when it works it is tremendously powerful. But… Continue reading
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David Byrne’s “Survival Tips” for Musicians (and Record Companies)
In the January issue of Wired David Byrne reviews the current economics of the music industry. The classic model of a recording company handling production (the recording studio), promotion (touring), and distribution (CDs) is being displaced at each step. Recording studios are now laptops, promotion is now a MySpace page, and distribution is now a… Continue reading
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Creative Uses of Office for Mac
The folks at Microsoft’s MacBU have taken some heat for this (as the decision to develop and promote a community site for innovative Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents when Office 2008 is, well, late). Some cool examples nonetheless. What would Professor Lessig say about the copyright to these examples… www.artofoffice.com Continue reading
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Real Estate in Second Life
In the past few years, MMORPGS have become more than a place to play games or engage in virtual conversations evolving into a place for commerce and economic experiments. It is common for people to sell game objects (swords, spells) from MMORPGs like Everquest on eBay for real currency. Companies have begun using these enviornments… Continue reading
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Municipal WiFi
As we become more reliant on computers in business and education a new type of poverty is created, that of technology haves and have-nots. This gap is commonly referred to as the “digital divide.” This Wired magazine article discuss one effort to bridge that gap using the power of free, wireless Internet access. http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2007/04/wifiproject_0403 Continue reading