The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Could Skype Be Microsoft's YouTube?
Image via CrunchBaseThe Skype founders did not have what it takes, or they would not have done the selling, twice. And that is a surprise to me because Skype is just wonderful. Skype hit 500 million users way before Facebook did. But somehow the monetization did not happen. A nine billion dollar exit is a decent monetization, would you say? Fred Wilson: Skype Out: Big companies mostly mess up entrepreneurial companies when they buy them and it really is best that companies like Skype stay independant and run by their founders if that is possible. ...... Skype filed to go public last year but the offering never came. ..... Maybe the company was having difficulty growing its revenues as fastMicrosoft missed out on the smartphone, Microsoft missed out on the tablet, and Microsoft is on its way to being hammered by Google on both Windows and Office. Although Microsoft has done decent in gaming, and it has made some early, smart moves in 3D computing.
Image via CrunchBase as the public markets wanted. Maybe the investors lost confidence in the management's ability to continue to build and grow Skype as an independent company. Whatever the reasons, Skype's experiment with being independent is over and I am disappointed. ...... We use Skype every day in our office. It is our videoconferencing system and increasingly our phone system. It works amazingly well. ...... Skype brought VOIP to the masses and I'm very certain that someday we will all be communicating by voice and video over IP, maybe via Skype, maybe be other services. It is the future for sure. ..... I'm not particularly inspired by the idea that Microsoft will do something great with Skype. But I do think they are a better corporate owner than eBay. The second acquisition of Skype isn't likely to change our daily usage of the service. But it may be an inspiration to VOIP entrepreneurs everywhere to think big and create new services that can someday be as big or bigger than Skype.
Monday, May 09, 2011
Hawking
New York Times: Life and the Cosmos, Word by Painstaking Word: In the 1960s, with Sir Roger Penrose, he used mathematics to explicate the properties of black holes. In 1973, he applied Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the principles of quantum mechanics. And he showed that black holes were not completely black but could leak radiation and eventually explode and disappear, a finding that is still reverberating through physics and cosmology. ....... With a cheek muscle, he signals an electronic sensor in his eyeglasses to transmit instructions to the computer. In this way he slowly builds sentences; the computer transforms them
Image via Wikipedia into the metallic, otherworldly voice familiar to Dr. Hawking’s legion of fans. ....... It’s an exhausting and time-consuming process. Yet this is how he stays connected to the world, directing research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, writing prolifically for specialists and generalists alike and lecturing to rapt audiences from France to Fiji. ........ At one point, he spoke of the special joys of scientific discovery. “I wouldn’t compare it to sex,” he said in his computerized voice, “but it lasts longer.” The audience roared. .......... despite the limitations, it was Dr. Hawking who wanted to do the interview in person rather than by e-mail. ....... Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world. ....... I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity. (Pause.) Perhaps one day I will go into space. ....... you’ve said elsewhere that you think it’s a bad idea for humans to make contact with other forms of life ....... Previously I have said it would be a bad idea to contact aliens because they might be so greatly advanced compared to us, that our civilization might not survive the experience. .......... I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease. But it taught me not to pity myself, because others were worse off and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition. I am lucky to be working in theoretical physics, one of the few areas in which disability is not
Image via Wikipediaa serious handicap. ........ My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically. ...... the Large Hadron Collider ..... It will be two years before it reaches full power. When it does, it will work at energies five times greater than previous particle accelerators........ our experience has been that when we open up a new range of observations, we often find what we had not expected ...... I had not expected “A Brief History of Time” to be a best seller. It was my first popular book and aroused a great deal of interest. ........ I entered the health care debate in response to a statement in the United States press in summer 2009 which claimed the National Health Service in Great Britain would have killed me off, were I a British citizen. I felt compelled to make a statement to explain the error. ....... I am British, I live in Cambridge, England, and the National Health Service has taken great care of me for over 40 years. I have received excellent medical attention in Britain, and I felt it was important to set the record straight. I believe in universal health care. And I am not afraid to say so. ........ the human spirit is capable of enduring terrible hardships. ....... I would go back to 1967, and the birth of my first child, Robert. My three children have brought me great joy. ....... (After five minutes.) I hope my experience will help other people.
Curation, Content Creation
Image by brjkt via FlickrI said at this blog several years ago that content and search will never go stale. We will come up with new forms of content creation. We will find ever new ways to do search. If you think about it, Facebook is search. Twitter is search. Facebook is content creation and curation. Twitter is content creation and curation. But looks like we are about to embark on a new era of startups that focus primarily on curation. And that is a good thing.
Social/New Media: Blurry Lines
Image via CrunchBase(Article first published as Social and New Media: Blurry Lines on Technorati)When we say social media, new media, we mean Facebook, we mean Twitter, we mean blogs. There are many, many other platforms, but those stand out. A lot of people don't realize this, but the blogosphere collectively is bigger than Facebook, just like the Chinese restaurants across America collectively are bigger than McDonald's.
"(W)e think as McDonald's as sort of the Microsoft of the dining experiences. We can think of Chinese restaurants perhaps as Linux: sort of an open source thing where ideas from one person can be copied and propagated across the entire system; that there can be specialized versions of Chinese food depending on the region. For example, in New Orleans we have Cajun Chinese food, where they serve Sichuan alligator and sweet and sour crawfish. And in Philadelphia, you have Philadelphia cheesesteak roll, which looks like an egg roll on the outside, but a cheesesteak on the inside. I was really surprised to discover that, not only in Philadelphia, but also inOld media was about broadcasting. I had a TV station, and there were few TV stations, and I broadcasted my message to you, and you listened. With new media I broadcast at you, you broadcast right back at me. We might talk past each other, but that's okay.
Atlanta, because what had happened was that a Chinese family had moved from Philadelphia to Atlanta, and brought that with them. So, the thing is, our historical lore, because of the way we like narratives, are full of vast characters such as Howard Schultz of Starbucks and Ray Kroc with McDonald's and Asa Chandler with Coca-Cola. But it's very easy to overlook the smaller characters - oops - for example, like Lem Sen, who introduced chop suey, Chef Peng, who introduced General Tso Chicken, and all the Japanese bakers who introduced fortune cookies. So, the point of my presentation is to make you think twice, that those whose names are forgotten in history can often have had as much, if not more, impact on what we eat today."
- Jennifer 8 Lee of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
Hunch Is About To Explode
".... more than 25,000 API clients making more than 400,000 calls per day ....."
Source: Chris Dixon: Taste Graph Infographic
Source: Chris Dixon: Taste Graph Infographic
Tweet From Husni Mubarak
Former dictators are entitled to tech news as much anyone else. That is what I think. What do you think? By the way, Mubarak, in Urdu, means congratulations. I don't know Arabic, but I have a feeling it might mean the same in Arabic. This bird's name has a meaning.
The Wilsons Were In Cairo Recently
Live Nation And GroupOn: That Offline Component
Image via WikipediaTo my understanding, the Live Nation proposition is that you might listen to all the digital music you want, pirated, bought, shared, what not, but when it comes time to pay, you will pay to see those artists perform. And so if the big chunk of the artists' money is coming from live performances, then it makes perfect business sense for that artist to give out her music for free. You want to steal? Steal. That business model of Live Nation has long fascinated me. And their tickets are pricey. At one point they were giving rise to monopoly accusations. But people are paying.
GroupOn reminds me of Live Nation. GroupOn has not come up with code that has confounded the minds of the Mark Zuckerbergs and Sergey Brins of the world. Their technology is quite simple. You could argue their business model is also equally simple, and hence the hundreds of copycats. But what I notice most is they took that step to go offline. They employ thousands of salespeople who go knock on the doors of local merchants. I find that proposition exciting.
Tweet Embed Option Needed
Image via WikipediaNo, Biz, Twitter Has Real IssuesI think Twitter needs to give me the same embed option that YouTube does. Very often I feel the need to embed a tweet at my blog. And I ended up taking a screen shot, using the Paint software to resize it and all. It is tedious. It is a few different steps. I think it is like five steps. Takes a lot of time I don't have.
Linking to a tweet is not the same thing. Just like linking to a video is not the same thing. And taking a screen shot makes the tweet go dead. The links freeze. There is no retweet button.
A tweet is like an atom. It is a basic building block of the web. And we should have the option to take the atom wherever.
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