“As we get older we gain a little perspective on the material, the perishable, the finite. We age, and as we do, the people we love die, move away, stop loving us. Now if the house caught on fire, I might not take anything. And the things I cannot live without are easily transported but not easily won: a great, brilliant man who loves me, his head on the pillow next to mine, his hand around my waist. My dad’s voice on the telephone line. I want clean, fresh air, and at least one good laugh every day. I feel guilty saying this, having built a career in fashion – an industry that at its center is all about accumulating more things – but I believe it: we really don’t need much.”
- Cary Randolph (Via Jessica Chu)
The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Doing Two Tech Startups
What is better than doing one tech startup? Doing two tech startups.
So I am doing two tech startups. And the newer startup is actually moving faster. But there is symbiosis.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Ai Fiori FoodSpotting DrinkUp
Photos From MetroMix
I showed up. On time. And I waited and waited and waited. This place was fancy. I took myself around. I was dressed in my usual black, only it was not a Brazil shirt with an overcoat on. It has been so nice these past few days. I was wearing a dress shirt. I am not much of a T shirt person. I like proper shirts. I like T shirts when they come with jackets.
I had some muchies they had at the bar. Then they brought a bowlful to my table itself. I finished one bowl. They brought another. I ordered a pineapple juice. I asked for a glass of water.
I showed up. On time. And I waited and waited and waited. This place was fancy. I took myself around. I was dressed in my usual black, only it was not a Brazil shirt with an overcoat on. It has been so nice these past few days. I was wearing a dress shirt. I am not much of a T shirt person. I like proper shirts. I like T shirts when they come with jackets.
I had some muchies they had at the bar. Then they brought a bowlful to my table itself. I finished one bowl. They brought another. I ordered a pineapple juice. I asked for a glass of water.
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Jeff Bezos: Still Innovating
Image via CrunchBaseJeff Bezos was not having the greatest of time when the dot com collapse happened in 2000. The guy still had a lot of money in the bank, but the press was full of critics who said Bezos has never made a dime for his investors, it was only a matter of time before his money runs out also. Bezos proves the bozos wrong. Not only that, Amazon grew like crazy through the Great Recession. And somewhere along the way he gave the world the cloud: Amazon Web Services. He suggested servers were like electricity. Don't buy your own little generator. The dude is a visionary, sure.
San Francisco Chronicle: Why I, Jeff Bezos, Keep Spending Billions On Amazon R&D: Random forests, naïve Bayesian estimators, RESTful services, gossip protocols, eventual consistency, data sharding, anti-entropy, Byzantine quorum, erasure coding, vector clocks … walk into certain Amazon meetings, and you may momentarily think you’ve stumbled into a computer science lecture...... Look inside a current textbook on software architecture, and you’ll find few patterns that we don’t apply at Amazon. We use high-performance transactions systems, complex rendering and object caching, workflow and queuing systems, business intelligence and data analytics, machine learning and pattern recognition, neural networks and probabilistic decision making, and a wide variety of other techniques ..... our architects and engineers have had to advance research in directions that no academic had yet taken ...... Service-oriented architecture -- or SOA -- is the fundamental building abstraction for Amazon technologies. ...... Our e-commerce platform is composed of a federation of hundreds of software services that work in concert to deliver functionality ranging from recommendations to order fulfillment to inventory tracking. ...... to construct a product detail page for a customer visiting Amazon.com, our software calls on between 200 and 300 services to present a highly personalized experience for that customer .... our key data services store many petabytes of data and handle millions of requests per second ...... The storage systems we’ve pioneered demonstrate extreme scalability while maintaining tight control over performance, availability, and cost. To achieve their ultra-scale properties these systems take a novel approach to data update management: by relaxing the synchronization requirements of updates that need to be disseminated to large numbers of replicas, these systems are able to survive under the harshest performance and availability conditions. These implementations are based on the concept of eventual consistency. The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS)...... our Simple Storage Service, Elastic Block Store, and SimpleDB all derive their basic architecture from unique Amazon technologies ..... product data ingestion and categorization, demand forecasting, inventory allocation, and fraud detection ....... advanced machine learning techniques provide more accurate classification and can self-heal to adapt to changing conditions .... The diversity of products demands that we employ modern regression techniques like trained random forests of decision trees to flexibly incorporate thousands of product attributes at rank time...... Technology infuses all of our teams, all of our processes, our decision-making, and our approach to innovation in each of our businesses. It is deeply integrated into everything we do. ...... Whispersync, our Kindle service designed to ensure that everywhere you go, no matter what devices you have with you, you can access your reading library and all of your highlights, notes, and bookmarks, all in sync across your Kindle devices and mobile apps. The technical challenge is making this a reality for millions of Kindle owners, with hundreds of millions of books, and hundreds of device types, living in over 100 countries around the world—at 24x7 reliability. At the heart of Whispersync is an eventually consistent replicated data store, with application defined conflict resolution that must and can deal with device isolation lasting weeks or longer.... We live in an era of extraordinary increases in available bandwidth, disk space, and processing power, all of which continue to get cheap fast..... we have unshakeable conviction that the long-term interests of shareowners are perfectly aligned with the interests of customers...... As always, I attach a copy of our original 1997 letter. Our approach remains the same, and it’s still Day 1.
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