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 Generation of Influencer Targeting -
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.
First Quantum Computer Sold - Brace Yourself for the Storm Ahead
Keith Rabois: Websites are dead, reinvent for mobile -
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 functionality and performance, but that gap is closing quickly. HTML5 apps now have access to most native functionality/components - accelerometers, multitouch interfaces, geolocation, camera, contacts list, compass, local storage, etc. The performance of HTML5 is still lagging - multitouch interactions are very clunky and native hardware acceleration doesn’t exist - but that won’t last forever. The browsers on phones will and are getting better, multitouch will improve, and it won’t be long before we see native hardware acceleration needed for games in browsers (Apple will have to keep up with Google on this one to stay competitive).
Developers crave a write-once-run-anywhere application ecosystem - one in which widely supported standards rule the day. The traditional web has taken off because of this paradigm (companies flourish from low development costs and ubiquitous support). If every company has to develop 10 flavors of their application (iOS 3, iOS4, Android 1.3-3.0, Blackberry, etc), everybody suffers. Fewer apps of lower quality for consumers to enjoy.
As a consumer of apps, I hope Keith is dead wrong.
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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, the total world-wide storage capacity is roughly the same as a single adult human’s DNA. Roughly speaking, the total power of all the world’s computers are equivalent to one human.
Before you draw too many conclusions about man’s intellectual dominance over machines, bear in mind they’re gaining on us, and gaining fast. According to Moore’s Law, processing power is doubling every 2 years (some would argue 18 months, but I’ll stick with the conservative measurement for this discussion) . Hard disk capacity follows a similar trend, doubling in capacity on the same cycle. On the flip side, human cognitive capacity is stagnant.
Taking it a step further, in 2008 it was estimated there were roughly 1 billion computers in the world. If Moore’s law holds, in 10 years each computer will have 32 times the current processing power (a doubling every two years for a total of 2^5 = 32x). In 20 years, computers will be 1000x more powerful. Somewhere close to 46 years from now a single computer will be 1 billions times more powerful, or as powerful as all computers in the world today. The computer on your desktop will be your intellectual equivalent by 2057.
It seems Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity is just around the corner.
(Note: these calculations are incredibly simplified, but do provide an interesting estimate)
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Interesting news from Search Engine Land - it appears Bing is stealing result data from Google. A little dirty in my opinion.
