This totally chimes in with my thought expressed at this blog a few times that most tweets in the future will not emanate from human fingers. Looks like some of them will emanate from the heart.
This video above is not of the Google car. This is Scoble being Scoble.
Robert Scoble: State of the art of self-driving cars on road today (Google, Ford, and Toyota): Turns out I actually caught one of these cars driving on Freeway 280 in January, reports Techcrunch and, back in 2007, I interviewed one of the guys, Mike Montemerlo, who now works on the Google Car ...... Google’s car goes a lot further because it has digital images and 3D maps of the road ahead and even more sensors and algorithms that let it even drive through intersections..... already they have helped me avoid accidents ...... I use my car’s computer more than my TV or nearly any other computer in my life. ....... my sons will be driving fully automated cars ...... The computers inside are safer than most adults.
The Official Google Blog: Sebastian Thrun: What we’re driving at: who also built a modified Prius that delivered pizza without a person inside ..... more than 1.2 million lives are lost every year in road traffic accidents. ..... self-driving cars will transform car sharing, significantly reducing car usage, as well as help create the new “highway trains of tomorrow." .... people spend on average 52 minutes each working day commuting ..... a glimpse of what transportation might look like in the future thanks to advanced computer science
Robert Scoble: State of the art of self-driving cars on road today (Google, Ford, and Toyota)
If Google was going to put out a TV, it was going to be software heavy, that was a foregone conclusion. If Google was going to put out a car, that was going to be software heavy. That was a foregone conclusion. Driving a car is not the best use of the human mind. This country lost it when it came to trains a long time ago. But now with software there might be a window to turn cars into trains. Too bad this whole thing seems to be a decade away. I already don't drive. I live in New York City. I wish the goodness upon the rest of the country. Not having to drive is a good feeling.
One small step for a company, one big step for public transportation.
It is said we live in an era when people will have not a few different jobs over a lifetime but a few different careers. The one job for life thing went out the window a long time ago. It has been so very true for me.
The immigration humiliation of the past two plus years has been a major blow to self esteem. You show up for enough tech events in town and you leave the impression you are one of those people whose startup never took off. The truth is I am about a year from my green card, and the startup thing will have to wait until then.
What to do has been no minor struggle.
A lot of people who know me think of me as a politician, and I have done some political work, sure, some pretty cutting edge stuff, I would like to believe. But I am who I am. I am a Third World guy. I don't think I have ever seriously contemplated running for office locally. I can get excited about microfinance, but affordable housing? I am not so sure. I am glad plenty get excited about that, and the people are well served, but I am not in that rat race personally.
It is not just a demand issue. It is not just about what the world wants. It is also a supply issue. In politics what excites me is the executive. The US presidency I find fascinating. But I could not say the same about the legislative branch. And that tells me I am cut for tech entrepreneurship. That fits into my personality type. I need much action.
Minus the web I am a fragmented person. I was born in India, grew up in Nepal, now live in America. America is not one country to me. There is the rest of America. And there is New York City. I try to think of New York City as a country on its own. I make a point not to step outside the city boundaries. And I am someone who has been to all parts of America. No one who ran for president of this country has seen as much of America as I have.
Larry Ellison takes his sailing pretty seriously. I take my politics pretty seriously. But I don't see myself in politics. I don't even see me doing the Bloomberg thing. I am perhaps too global. It is a mindset, it is a world view. In my case, it is just who I am.
I set out to raise 100K for my startup in 2008, and I did. I put the bank account in my business partner's name. ("Are you sure you want to trust me with all this money!") The Democratic primary over, I was going to focus on the startup like a laser beam. The McCain thing was not going to be much of a contest. I did not think so.
Back then it was about getting into the ISP space that I had started to call Web 3.0. How do you bring another five billion people online? By now I am much more interested in the mobile web. Looks like the mobile web has already engulfed much of humanity. Well, it is Mini Me for much of the world, but it is a start. Being able to do mobile phone banking is nothing less than revolutionary.
I have yet to buy my first smartphone. I have been pretty much broke during these two plus years of immigration humiliation. But I also look down upon that screen size. The goal has to be big screen wireless broadband for everybody. Third World people are not Mini Me people. And I spend so much time online everyday already that when I am offline I like being offline, untethered. You have to smell the roses, or in the case of New York City, the foul smell of the subway. I think that is also important.
When I do my startup in a year, right now it looks like it is going to be something in the mobile web space. I have a few ideas. I am going to learn some coding in the mean time, enough to lead teams.
In the mean time I will do pro blogging, social media consulting, I have coders who will work for you, I give them their pay and take my cut: let me know if you need some cheap, remote coding done. I am open to getting a job. I am about to put my profile up on a modeling site. I believe I could handle that on the side. I did get a call. I need to call back. I am open to more.
I could use some help with the pro blogging. Every startup worth its salt has a social media presence. This is like outsourcing some of the blogging. You let me do a post or two or three. On your part that would require you giving me an hour or two of your time, in person or on the phone, in person preferred, when you tell me your full story, your full story, and your startup's full story. And by full, I mean full. And you let me talk to the key people on your team. And you email me all the pictures you want to go with the posts. And I would spend hours on the posts. And after the posts come out, you should want to link to them from your site. If you get the full story out, that helps with your hard core users, they feel more included, and become more loyal, and it helps with the press. If they can do all the background research on you with little effort, they are more likely to do stories on you. And more stories the better. Every article written about you is so much free advertising. And it helps with your future investors. I don't have space issues like the mainstream media. I can give as much space to you as needed.
The attraction of the mobile web is that you are working with a pool of five billion people. There has to be an app for that. It is about becoming whole as a person. To me it is. I have a mobile web app in mind that grows to also end up with a big screen web presence. But one year is a long time in tech entrepreneurship. Maybe I will go back to my original idea. Maybe I will set up shop in Queens. But software speaks more to my butterfly effect instincts.
New York Times: Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic: they can transform society as profoundly as the Internet has ..... Robot drivers react faster than humans, have 360-degree perception and do not get distracted, sleepy or intoxicated ..... more than 37,000 people died in car accidents in the United States in 2008 ...... the technology could double the capacity of roads by allowing cars to drive more safely while closer together ..... the company’s ambitions reach beyond the search engine business ....... The project is the brainchild of Sebastian Thrun, the 43-year-old director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, a Google engineer and the co-inventor of the Street View mapping service. ...... deployment of the technology more than eight years away. .... Under current law, a human must be in control of a car at all times
This is an entrepreneur having turned a company into one big incubator. If you think about it, Google is one big incubator. The founders did the work on the search engine - and it was pretty fundamental - but then they, as a company, have been smart about laying out the vision, and going out there and finding the top people in their respective fields, hiring them, and giving them the resources to go do their thing.
Pretty much all breakthroughs from Google this past decade have followed that path. Looks like you don't have to sell or leave the company you started, or retire, to be able to do the incubation, venture capital thing. This is the corporation as an organism.
What's next? I wish Google were in a position to do something fundamental in clean tech, but it is not. Energy is not a software problem.
And now we learn the Einsteins at the patent office have granted not one but two location patents. In this land of plenty. I would not be surprised if Gowalla has the third one. If not why has FourSquare bothered competing with that little nuisance in the first place? Why not simply go ahead and sue like every big company seems to be doing to every other big company back there in Silicon Valley? With the exception of Larry Ellison. Larry is into fist fights. (Putting My Money On Larry Ellison)
Image via CrunchBaseThis is more than putting a few million dollars into Mike Arrington's pocket. The bad boy of Silicon Valley is going to be keep being the bad boy of Silicon Valley, but now he is bought.
"All your chats are belong to me," the Russian founder of Chatroulette said at one point. Well, Mikie, all your blog posts now belong to us. We are New York City. We own TechCrunch now.
We should let Larry and his boys out there in Silicon Valley duke it out with hardware. Let's not get into hardware. (Putting My Money On Larry Ellison)
New York City has the lead on the mobile web and we need to keep that and grow that. Web services have gone global by now, and that is swell, but that is another soccer field we can keep munching on.
BusinessWeek: HP, Oracle Lead Acquisition Spree Tearing Down Tech Barriers: The race to add businesses hearkens back to the early days of corporate computing, when IBM’s dominant mainframes included home-grown chips, software, storage and networking technology. With the advent of the PC, these technology areas split up into their own industries.
I am glad the writer drew this parallel between the mainframe and the PC, because just like that consolidation symbolized the end of the mainframe era, this current consolidation symbolizes the end of the PC era. The PC is running its final lap right very now.
The smartphone is here. The 2010s belong to the smartphone. The mobile web will engulf all of humanity. Big screen broadband will have to eventually get there, but it will not get there first.
The smartphone is an addition to the ecosystem. The smartphone does not replace the PC, it was not meant to. But there is going to be a device that will reside somewhere between the PC and the smartphone. I don't think the netbook is it, I don't think the tablet is it. But they look like siblings, sure.
The PC might stick around, but not at the center of the universe.
"(C)hips, software, storage and networking" will splinter all over again.
I am in talks to do social media for a yoga studio out there in Dumbo. I hope the talks go through because I sure am interested. Dumbo just so happens to be New York City's own little tech hub. There is no Silicon Alley. There is Dumbo.
Looks can be deceiving. I am Indian, so sure, I do know my yoga, but not as much as you might think. But I will learn. More.
BusinessWeek: HP, Oracle Lead Acquisition Spree Tearing Down Tech Barriers: broken down decades-old barriers between industries ..... HP, Oracle, IBM, Cisco Systems Inc. and Dell Inc., with a collective $100 billion in cash, have said they plan to keep making acquisitions. ..... The buyers are pursuing a vision of cloud computing, which lets customers store their software in massive data centers, rather than in the computer room down the hall. Record- low borrowing costs have helped spur the deals. ..... “Nobody wants to be Californicated by Cisco.” .... Oracle, the world’s second-largest software company, snapped up almost 70 companies in the past five years
I am putting my money on Larry Ellison. The guy, for one, has a track record, and a loud mouth, and a big stick. I don't know if you have been following, but the dude spent the past few years eating up all the small fish in his pond. He bought company, after company, after company. PeopleSoft made news, the rest did not make the same kind of news.
Now the shark is after the big fish. This guy has an attitude about him. He will jump into the water first and learn to swim later. Only, he knows how to swim. But the attitude is he would jump in even if he did not know how to swim.
The underbelly of this whole drama is that Larry Ellison is seriously trying to emulate his best friend, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has always integrated hardware and software, and so Larry Ellison was going to do the same thing. Steve Jobs got Apple to surpass Microsoft in market value, and now Larry wants Oracle to surpass Microsoft's market value, never mind that Bill Gates long retired.
HP is in for some tough times. And they just stepped on their own foot by hiring Thepo. That was not a good idea. When I say that was not a good idea, I am talking "strictly business."
This fight could last a few years, and most definitely will be worth watching.
Larry, give me data centers that are the size of servers.
Image by Zach Klein via FlickrChris Dixon's is a good blog to follow if you want to keep abreast developments in the fast churning VC industry. He is an entrepreneur and one of those angels that you will read about a lot, people who are changing the face of the game.
Chris Dixon: The segmentation of the venture industry: Venture capital has only existed in its modern form for about 35 years. ...... “customers” (entrepreneurs) have flocked to more specialized “products.” ...... segmentation by company stage. ..... The segmentation of the venture industry is healthy for startups and innovation at large, even if at the moment it might be uncomfortable and confusing for some of the people involved.
I like his conclusion here. He says, and I agree, that the churn has been healthy and the segmentation has been welcome.
Chris Dixon: If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough: My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. I applied to hundreds of jobs: low-level VC roles, startups jobs, even to big tech companies. I got rejected from every single one..... I had a strange resume .... I probably got rejected by someone once a day last week alone
And I am thinking the guy still has a strange resume.
OnStartups.com: Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started: If you asked me to tell you a list of three of the best decisions in my life, I can certainly tell you that regularly writing is one of them...... Writing on a regular schedule takes a lot of discipline, just like going to the gym or practicing a new martial art. ..... If you keep yourself dedicated to writing on a consistent schedule, those important values will carry over to other facets of life including startups. ..... By putting yourself out there and making yourself open to meeting as many people as possible, serendipity is much more likely to happen. ..... The majority of good things that have happened to me in business can be traced back to my writing
There are more great VC bloggers than there are great entrepreneur bloggers, and I have long wondered why. I have also long felt that situation needs to be rectified.
Social media is so essential. You need to do your own getting the word out. Most of your communication will be small group and perhaps intense. There will be a lot of in group communication. That is why social media is called social media and not mass media.
Updates that can sound bizarre to strangers are necessary staple to intimates.
But then there is also the matter of reaching out to people you might not be able to meet in person. Long form blogging is my favorite social media platform. It allows you to dip into far flung conversations. Meaningful participation becomes possible.
The VCs just have done a better job. I feel like I am half way to becoming a VC myself just from reading the many VC blogs. I have a pretty good feel of the churn that is going on in the VC industry right now.
Even former entrepreneur VCs will tell you, the real action is in creating companies, not in funding them. "All I do is write checks," Fred Wilson once said, which is an understatement, but it is the half truth.
I would go so far as to say every tech entrepreneur ought to blog. None of the top ones do. And I wonder why.
The list is not all that big. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Wordpress/Blogger, and FourSquare, and I think you are all set. If you are active on those five platforms I think you are really into social media. And you are reaching out to people you need to be reaching out to.
Regular writing is like working out for the mind. When you blog regularly, you read your news differently. You also read more.
Ben's Blog: Ben Horowitz: In Defense of Standards, Ethics, and Honest Financial Reporting at Hewlett-Packard: my business partner, Marc Andreessen, is on the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard. I note that I have no inside information, and this blog post is based purely on published material. In 2007, I sold Opsware, the company that I founded and ran to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6B. I worked at Hewlett-Packard from 2007 to 2008 as an executive in the software business. Recently, my old company Hewlett-Packard has been in the news—and not in a good way. ....... HP employs over 300,000 people. ..... Jodie Fisher had more access to the CEO and was paid more than 99.9% of HP’s workforce, despite having no traditional qualifications. ...... It is not an easy thing to fire a popular, highly successful CEO.
Something tells me this drama is far from over. The Oracle-HP alliance is now a full blown rivalry. This is about money. Like they say, follow the money. Oracle is now firmly in the hardware business as well, and HP feels eaten up. Oracle can do hardware, but could HP do Oracle-like software?
This is not about people getting along, or not getting along. This is about the money. And Larry Ellison might be dramatic, but he is first and foremost a businessman. His flare ups are market signals. Watch them and you are watching an industry churning.
I came across this post by Al on Tumblr - my idea of TV - not long back and was the first person to reblog it there. Yes!
It is an honest, relatable, inspiring post. And I said so in a comment.
To those of you who might not know - I do have a global audience - Al Wenger is a top notch VC in New York City.
I promptly created a Scala page. This is still early. I first blogged about Scala back in May, and Google still shows only a handful of websites dedicated to Scala. Wow.
I could hardly call Al a friend, we have met in person but once. And I am strict about using the family metaphor. Some weirdos in Kentucky spoiled it for me.
Al to me is a VC and a blogger, and that is good enough for me.
One small but not unimportant fact I learned about Al during my one meeting with him is that he is Mayor of some horse place upstate.
Scala - Wikipedia: Scala stands for "scalable language", signifying that it is designed to grow with the demands of its users..... Scala code can call Java libraries (or .NET libraries in the .NET implementation). ..... Scala's operational characteristics are the same as Java's. .... Scala is a pure object-oriented language in the sense that every value is an object. .... In April 2009 Twitter announced they had switched large portions of their backend from Ruby to Scala and intended to convert the rest. In addition Foursquare uses Scala and Lift
Image by grytr via FlickrGrow-your-own approach to wiring 3D chips 
