November 2011
5 posts
Hacker takes control of Water & Sewer... →
A district in Texas had HMI (human machine interface) software used to manage water and sewage infrastructure accessible to the Internet and used a password that was just three characters long to protect the system, making it easy picking for a remote attack.
4 tags
Watch
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Alex Karp, CEO Palantir, on Charlie Rose →
Fascinating discussion on civil liberties, the fight against terrorism, and how a Silicon Valley company, Palantir, is helping to protect you on both dimensions. Palantir is one of the biggest companies in the Valley you’ve likely never heard of.
Random thought after watching this, a fun connect-the-dots. Peter Thiel was a derivatives trader on Wall Street that went on to found PayPal....
July 2011
2 posts
Free public Wifi coming soon? →
The new IEEE 802.22 standard has been published and will finally allow manufacturers to start producing standardized devices that will use the white space vacated by analog TVs over two years ago. The standards will provide networking in areas over a 62 mile radius at speeds of up to 22Mbps.
Mobile (NFC) Payments are coming.... →
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Death of the QA Team
I see it happening time and time again, amazing software companies (eg: @BrainTree, @asana) operating without a Quality Assurance (QA) team and producing nearly flawless products. It seems counter intuitive - developers producing quality code when there’s no one to check their work - and yet it’s becoming commonplace. Why are software companies killing off QA teams (or never creating...
June 2011
5 posts
The kimono is coming off Google+ →
Well done @google, can’t wait to see your social products emerge. You have peaked my interest.
Warren Colbert: Involver + Klout + Audi = Next... →
cognited:
Who’s Involved? - Audi, Klout, Involver
What is this? Klout & Involver have partnered to offer a new medium for brands to publish “gated” content to their fans and followers. Brands can set gates that are defined by Klout scores, a measurement of a user’s social media influence….
Balance Financial Raises $1.2M →
Congrats Devin, Rebecca and team! I’m excited to be on board, looking forward to a great things.
May 2011
1 post
First Quantum Computer Sold - Brace Yourself for... →
April 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Keith Rabois: Websites are dead, reinvent for... →
Keith is a very bright guy but he’s going to be on the wrong side of history regarding native apps. It will take a little while, but HTML5 will emerge as the dominate app format, much as the web emerged as the dominate format over native desktop applications (less a few computationally intensive applications, eg Photoshop). Yes, native apps have long held the advantage over HTML5 in terms of...
February 2011
3 posts
3 tags
World's Total Computational Power = One Human
Ars Technica just published a great article on the total computational power and storage capacity of all the world’s computers. Conclusions? The total “instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second.” Equally intriguing,...
WatchMary Meeker’s take on the latest mobile trends. Fascinating read.
Bing - Bing Is Now Google →
Interesting news from Search Engine Land - it appears Bing is stealing result data from Google. A little dirty in my opinion.
November 2010
2 posts
Proof San Francisco is the Center of Technology →
Why it's important to vote →
October 2010
7 posts
Dems - 20% Chance of Retaining the House →
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Codesion Acquired by Collabnet →
Congrats Guy, Mark and Team! It’s been a pleasure working with you over the past 18+ months, you deserve all the success you’ve achieved.
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WatchA little San Francisco history
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Online Advertising is Alive and Well - $7.29... →
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What's so great about GoogleTV? →
“What’s so great about GoogleTV?”, TechCrunch asked readers today. Or more generally - what’s so great about a settop box (be it GoogleTV, Apple TV, Roku, Boxee, etc) that brings the Internet and associated services to your television? Is it much ado about nothing or will these consumer products take off?
It’s no secret the functionality of these devices provide...
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W3C: Hold off on deploying HTML5 in websites →
While I respect the efforts the WC3 has put forth drafting the HTML5 specification (how could I not, a ‘Stachowiak’ co-chairs the working group), it’s time to move forward, not hold off. HTML5 development began in 2004 and final approval of the spec isn’t expected for another 2-3 years, an incredible 8-9 years from start to finish. In today’s agile software world...
6 tags
WatchA trip down Sand Hill Road….
September 2010
2 posts
8 tags
DVCS Battle Heats Up - Bitbucket Joins Atlassian →
Atlassian announced their acquisition of BitBucket today, in the process placing a large bet on Mercurial as a viable player in the DVCS space. In my opinion, Mercurial is a great alternative to Git, with similar functionality and performance for 1/10 the learning headache, particularly for developers coming from SVN. I think this is a wise move by Atlassian and allows them to compete head on...
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Hardware Startups & Angel Investing
As the barriers to entry decrease, hardware start-ups are surging in number. What use to take $10M, $25M, or $100+ million in capital investment to get off the ground 10 years ago can be accomplished for less than one million today, allowing smaller scale entrepreneurs (Roku, FitBit, LiveScribe, etc) to dip their toes in hardware waters once dominated by large corporations with enormous...