Android has reached >50% smart phone market share.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-android-is-taking-over-the-smartphone-market-2011-11
3 months ago
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. PayPal developed very powerful data mining / analytics under Thiel’s leadership that became the basis for Palantir (Thiel founded Palantir with numerous other early PayPal-ers). Conclusion? Palantir’s novel data analysis tools - tools that are being used heavily by the US government intelligence community to combat terrorism in a post 9/11 world - are likely the reformulation of financial data analysis techniques Thiel crafted as a derivatives trader. Skills honed on Wall Street are now leading the charge against terrorism.
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, 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)
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.
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 already exists on your computer today. You want to watch Hulu, browser the web, or engage in any other function these devices enable, your PC can do it. Additionally, anyone with a bit of technological knowhow could setup a media PC in their living room and bring the functionality to their television screen. Despite this, there are a few strong reasons why I think these devices will succeed:
- The television is the best display in the house. Not only is it the largest screen in the house, it sits in the family room, the communal gathering place where everyone can enjoy content together. People don’t huddle around laptops or PCs, they huddle around the television. Additionally, the television is home to the premium sound system which makes content all the more enjoyable. I’d rather watch Hulu on the television in my family room than the monitor in my bedroom.
- These devices provide a frictionless means of bringing Internet services to the best screen in your house. The average American wants a turn key solution to meet their product needs, they aren’t interested in complex solutions that add to the numerous headaches they already have. Simple products win and these devices provide an uncomplicated means of getting Internet services on a television screen.
- We’ve seen it before in the gaming industry. People buy an Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo even though they already have the hardware (their PC) to play games on.
- Lastly, some people don’t even know it’s possible to bring the Internet to their television. Many people weren’t aware of mobile MP3 players until Apple unleashed the iPod. Similarly, many people aren’t aware they can bring the Internet to their television until someone puts a prepackaged device in front of their face.
What are your thoughts?
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 this doesn’t work. Technological innovation can’t wait for someone to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’ of a formal specification. There are features the world wants now and browsers are capable of delivering, why hold off? Let’s forge ahead and deploy away!
As a savvy slashdot reader said:
“Those who ship code win.” You can sit there and tell everyone to ‘hold on’ all you want but if you don’t give them a good reason to stop pushing forward with the implementation, they aren’t going to wait for your consortium to debate for another five years. We’re moving forward. There will be bumps. The time for discussing a completely perfect approach has passed and browsers will thrust what support they can into practice, warts and all. At some point this has to be done, it will never be truly perfect.
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 with GitHub. Keep using that $60M from Accel wisely, Atlassian.
