Do you eat alone often? Are you checking emails while eating? How often do you eat with loved ones?
Do you turn the phone off at meetings? Or are you clandestinely checking email while others are talking?
Do you tell people off because you are too busy with Twitter and Facebook?
When you walk down the street, are you taking the street in? Or are you glued instead to your small screen?
When you ride the subway, are you enjoying the crowd? Do you sometimes say hello to complete strangers?
How often do you actually hang out with friends in person? Or has Facebook made that less necessary?
How many friends do you have? People you really know, people you will go out with for a drink, perhaps a lunch? When was the last time you made a new friend?
Do you have non tech friends? Perhaps people who are not on Twitter.
Can you hold conversations? Or do you find yourself longing for your small screen two minutes into one?
Do you spend at least one day a week when you don't touch a device? No computer, no phone.
Do you exercise? Do you eat well? Do you sleep well?
Chris Dixon: Web Services Should Be Both Federated And Extensible: The next step in this evolution is to create web services that are both federated (APIs) and extensible (Apps)..... The combination of Facebook’s data (social graph and check-ins) and SimpleGeo data/algorithms would create much more advanced feature possibilities than either service acting alone...... a “data threesome” ..... Allowing websites to be federated and extensible will open up a whole new wave of innovation
Two memes have been making the rounds: the web is dead, women in tech.
Chris Dixon, in this post, is referring to mash ups, high level mash ups. He is talking of "data threesomes" and how that would lead to "a new wave of innovation."
Some people have commented saying it is already being done. If it is, it is not mainstream yet.
People have been building APIs upon APIs. There is much data sharing going on, but not entirely enough.
What really matters is the end product, that final interface that the end user interacts with. A simple interface sitting on top of rich data interactions is what you want to shoot for.
Wall Street Journal: New York's Tech Start-Up Scene Comes Of Age: over the last decade, New York has been building a real tech center, where software, media, and ad-related startups are thriving, a venture capital community is growing and serial entrepreneurs are as commonplace as they are in Silicon Valley. ...... a general feeling here, a buzz, that there is momentum here ...... "As one of the most successful financial exits from the dot-com era, DoubleClick made people in Silicon Valley realize that there may still be some fire coming out of New York" ...... "Back then it was a gold rush mentality," he said of the late 1990s. "Now it's building a business." ...... the New York region ranks number four in total venture capital investment, after Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and Boston. ...... in terms of funding for software companies, New York ranked only second to Silicon Valley for venture capital funding in the second quarter ..... One New York startup that is well-known in Silicon Valley is Foursquare ..... "New York is a challenging city to build location-based services for because of its density, so once they built a product that could work well in New York City, they figured it would work well in other, smaller cities as well." ..... Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is now seen as a veteran among New York venture capitalists ..... there are now more angel investors and startup incubators in New York. Venture capitalists are also now more willing to provide seed funding than they had in the past. .... No one calls New York "Silicon Alley" anymore. "Now we just call it New York," Ms. Halper said. "The industry in New York has finally come of age."
I am waiting for two things. I am waiting for the Great Recession to get completely over and done with. And you will know that has happened when Facebook goes IPO. Facebook is waiting for the recession to completely end before it will file. And I am waiting for a tech company in town to go IPO. I think that company right now is looking like FourSquare. But I need to be hush hush about it because I am superstitious. An IPO is such a big deal. And it is not a given.
A few IPOs and New York City will have finally arrived on the tech scene in a way I would like. The DoubleClick exit was grand, but it was no IPO. I have a feeling once we see our first IPO, we will see a string of them.
And I am fervently hoping a tech revival in this city is not just about dot coms and software. I hope this city makes strides also in other emerging tech sectors like clean tech and bio tech and nano.
A lot of smart people who go to top colleges in this country end up in this city. It is that allure of New York City. It is that magic. So far this city has not made the best use of all that talent. This city has needed a painful recession to shake off the Wall Street suction pump and to release talent into more meaningful sectors like emerging tech.
Slowly but surely it is happening though. This city is going bonkers.
New York City has a huge advantage over Silicon Valley. That is that Silicon Valley by now is like this big, old, mature company. New York City - the city - is a startup. That cultural advantage is priceless.
New York Times: The Struggle for What We Already Have: When Google and Verizon, a month ago, put together a well-meaning proposal for enforceable net neutrality rules, the two companies were vilified by the net neutrality purists — because they wanted to exempt wireless..... Surely, this has to rank as the Mother of All Unintended Consequences: there is an outside chance that in its zeal to make net neutrality the law of the land, the F.C.C. could wind up as a regulator with very little to regulate..... Net neutrality is, in fact, incredibly complicated ...... Data networks, after all, have to be managed. The engineering is complex. The capacity is limited. Inevitably, some form of prioritization is bound to take place. Rules also have to be created that will give companies the incentive they need to spend the billions upon billions of dollars necessary to extend broadband’s reach and improve its speed, so we can catch up to, say, South Korea. ...... It has been desperately trying to find a way to re-establish jurisdiction over broadband services, while at the same time continuing to push for net neutrality. It has become a very complicated dance. ....... the Internet service providers have made it plain that they will sue to prevent the F.C.C. from asserting Title II jurisdiction over broadband. ...... The truth is, virtually every player involved wants the F.C.C. to have oversight over broadband services. ..... Consumers have come to expect an open Internet, and companies will violate net neutrality at their peril.
To most everybody it felt like Google did an about face. Google abandoning net neutrality? For the longest time Google had been one of the loudest voices for net neutrality. And then Google-Verizon happened.
The thing to do is not to face the reality of technical constraints of wireless broadband. The thing to do is to get rid of those constraints. There are technical solutions. There are market solutions. There are policy solutions.
Release more spectrum and fast. That is the policy solution. Introduce much more competition. That is the market solution. They did not achieve higher speeds and lower prices in South Korea by abandoning net neutrality.
Use of wireless broadband exploding is a good thing. Demand has been created. Now create supply.
