Email Solutions

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TechCrunch: Email Overload Fix: 3 Sentence Emails

Email has to be completely scalable. There can not be too much email. Not for nobody. That is the ultimate email solution. I could get 10 emails a day, or 10,000, and I still should not have to feel overwhelmed.

On the other hand, email has to have a holistic communication approach. It has to fit into the larger picture. That solution is multi platform.

One direction is condensing. It is about being able to visualize 10,000 tweets at once. Another direction is when you want to spend a lot of quality time with one or more people. Your communication platform should make that possible.

The inbox today is dreaded. That right there is a huge business opportunity, or two, or three. Gmail's Priority Inbox is a good step in the right direction, but it does not even begin to fathom the inbox of those who get deluged with emails.

Facebook helps. You get emails from people you are already "friends" with, or groups you signed up for. Strangers can email you, but they have to send out one email to one person at a time. Facebook email does cut out a lot of noise.

Twitter is my idea of the email client of tomorrow, but Twitter has been dragging its feet forever on adding features and simplifying its service.

The Gmail free phone is great. The voice feature of Gchat is great. Sometimes you want to dig into a conversation, and you want to zero in on a person, and text does not do it, so you talk. You get your headset going.

And then there is meeting in person. FourSquare can be a swell platform for that. FourSquare's social graph is special. While you are zeroing in on a person, you want to cut out all the noise, you don't want to be taking calls, you don't want to be seeing yet another incoming email.

For me blogging is an essential element of the larger complete communication platform. Being able to reach out to complete strangers who might also be talking about some of the same things you might be talking about is so very key.

But then all communication all the time is not what we could possibly be shooting for. Where is the time for non communication work? The time to get things done? The time to acquire new knowledge? Social is not 100% of the territory. Social is not 10% of the territory. The best communication platform knows when you are thinking, and lets you be: a phone that does not ring, a screen that goes into hibernation.

A good communication platform knows when you are on vacation. When you are off, you are off.
I have been impatient with Twitter. (User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town) And I have been impatient with Gmail.

You should be able to visualize 100,000 tweets right on the Twitter website. And perhaps for Gmail the next big push after the Priority Inbox will be the word cloud. I should be able to say, create a word cloud for all my unread emails for the day. And when I hover over each word, I should see the names of each sender associated with that word, with the option to click and go to that specific email.

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Fixing The Economy: Drastic Job Creation

Image via Wikipedia
Drastic job creation by the US federal government - as drastic as the bank bailout, as drastic as the stimulus bill - is what is needed, I think. And this has to be about creating and paying for the jobs of tomorrow.

But we can not take the FDR comparison too far. The biggest difference is that today America is in a global world. The global cooperation has not happened yet. The global institutions have not been created yet.

So many big things have to happen at once. Rapid pace political reform that sets America on the path to total campaign finance reform would be one, but instead you have the drama of old man Rangel dragging his feet all the way to jail time.

There are monetary moves to be made, and Paul Krugman has talked about this. I like the idea of letting inflation go up one notch so it becomes expensive for the private sector to keep sitting on the two trillion dollars it is sitting on.

I am leery of only construction jobs. I have not seen a big push for universal 100 MB broadband yet. A big chunk of that is political work that does not cost the government any money. It is about introducing some major competition in to that sector.

There is one overriding theme though. Most people seem clueless.

How to Fix the Economy: An Expert Panel: a paper forecasting high unemployment, low housing prices, and very low growth through 2017..... An expansion in credit, debt, and deregulating over the past 10 or 20 years got us here. ..... it will take time, but it need not take time. ...... We are unwilling to do drastic things that will improve the situation of households. You can do that by raising their income so they can meet their debt burdens. ...... Without drastic reforms to entitlement programs in the United States, we are really talking about something that will feel like the 1970s—but last for 20 to 25 years. ..... We should be thinking about modernizing our housing sector, improving the kind of mortgages we offer, and encouraging innovation. ...... Half of the budget is Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid... Nondefense discretionary spending is 4 percent of GDP. ..... I don't think we are going to modernize Fannie and Freddie very soon. Fannie and Freddie hold the preponderance of mortgages in the United States. ...... Non-Fannie and Freddie mortgages trade in the 6-to-8 percent category, as opposed to the 3½-to-4 percent category [for Fannie and Freddie mortgages]..... Roosevelt did things fast. He created the 30-year mortgage within months of his taking office. We need that kind of spirited innovation. ..... The most difficult issue was Too Big to Fail, and that was not dealt with. We are going to be creating even bigger financial institutions ...... We would have moved toward solving the problem if we had broken up the large institutions where they are not too big to fail. ...... It is jobs that are affecting housing prices, not the other way around. Mainly it is the failure to generate convincing economic prospects that keep people from hiring. ....... 16 percent of [Americans] would like to have jobs but don't. ..... something on the order of a 30 percent cut in Social Security taxes for four years. That would create immediate incentives for hiring. ....... continued backlash against domestic institutions ...... The key reason firms aren't hiring is that the economy is growing so slowly ...... more public projects .... Public projects are part of what we should be doing—New Deal, Civilian Conservation Corps-type projects—because unemployment is sapping the national morale. ..... general revenue sharing ..... the global economy faces a serious structural condition, and that is lack of global aggregate demand in which the developing countries continue to save and the developed countries no longer can finance prior levels of consumption ....... encourage China and other Asian countries to develop internally as opposed to simply externally for export. ...... we are not just broke once. We are broke about six times over ...... When a government is in an unsustainable fiscal position, spending more money does not improve the economy. ....... The only one that has the capacity to borrow in sizable amounts is the U.S. government. ..... to suggest that the government now contract fiscally in terms of reducing its deficits to me is simply going in the wrong direction. ..... people are very upset. They feel that the country is not theirs, and that a small group of wealthy people who get bailed out and bribe the government are in charge....... The issues are not that clearly understood today. The system is more complex. What has been legislated is a Rube Goldberg contraption. And that is wrong...... The engine of global growth is shifting from the United States to other countries ...... Firms are not buying new buildings, but they are buying new computers. ..... The most important thing we have going for us is our entrepreneurship and flexibility. ...... We are creating a Financial Oversight Council which will be worrying about systemic crises, and an Office of Financial Research, which is going to be collecting data. When we had this crisis we didn't know what was happening. ...... create jobs for the future, as opposed to jobs for current consumption ...... for the Federal Reserve to continue the quantitative easing and be even more innovative. They have to do more.

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IBM's Africa

New York Times: I.B.M.: Africa Is the Next Growth Frontier: I.B.M. will supply the computing technology and services for an upgraded cellphone network across 16 nations in sub-Saharan Africa. Its customer is India’s largest cellphone operator, Bharti Airtel, which paid $9 billion a few months ago for most of the African assets of Kuwait’s Mobile Telecommunications Company, or Zain..... The deal takes the broad partnership between Bharti and I.B.M., begun in 2004, beyond India. ..... in the last five years I.B.M. has invested $300 million in the region to build data centers, add country offices and foster technology training programs — and it plans to expand aggressively in the region..... the next major emerging growth market — Africa .... I.B.M. is targeting the linchpin industries of economies including telecommunications, banking, transportation, health care and energy...... only 23 percent of Africans have access to banking services, but already 8 million Africans use their cellphones for payments.

The for profit route is the route to go. The for profit route is the best way to do good for about 90% of the people out there, be it Africa, China or India. Or America. Most Americans take care of their families with jobs they hold with privately held companies.

In The News

New York Times: Oracle Profit Rises 20%, Higher Than Forecast: for a quarter that closed at the end of August, traditionally one of the slowest selling periods..... Safra A. Catz, a president of Oracle .... “I don’t believe there is any other company in the industry better positioned than Oracle,” Mr. Hurd said. ..... The legal squabble underscores the changing relationships taking place as the world’s largest technology companies begin to step on each other’s toes. .... Never one to back down from a confrontation, Lawrence J. Ellison, Oracle’s chief executive, threatened that H.P.’s lawsuit against Mr. Hurd could wreck the companies’ relationship. ..... Oracle continues to follow a multiyear strategy of acquiring business software makers large and small. The company hopes to become a one-stop shop of sorts .... tends to purchase companies with loyal customers who pay regular maintenance fees for upgrades and other services ... Oracle posted about $1 billion in hardware sales as well ..... Ellison vowed to unveil a host of new products at Oracle’s event next week, including systems that create tight links between hardware and software.
Google Ventures Hires an Entrepreneur-in-Residence: the man behind Google Voice ..... Google bought GrandCentral for a reported $45 million in 2007 and since then, Mr. Walker has been the product manager for real-time communications at Google. ..... Entrepreneur-in-residence is one of those only-in-Silicon-Valley jobs. Smart people get paid to sit around and think about new ideas, and investors get the chance to join an entrepreneur early in a new project, betting that lightning will strike twice. ..... “This business that we’re in as V.C.s is a social business, more about people than companies or products.” ..... the idea is that Google will eventually fund Mr. Walker’s next start-up..... there are still lot of industries like that out there.”

TechCrunch: Yahoo’s Internal Three Year Plan: 1 Billion Users And $10 Billion In Revenue: an increase in the number of unique visitors to Yahoo properties from today’s 622 million to a cool 1 billion. And an increase in overall Yahoo revenue from last year’s $6.5 billion to a whopping $10 billion.... short of some sort of massively popular new product, 1 billion unique visitors isn’t going to happen ... what Yahoo really needs is some serious product vision
How Small Countries Out-perform: A Guide (Spoiler: It’s a lot like Startups): By 2050 the United States will be the only G7 nation that is still one of the seven largest economies in the world. Our new peers... will be China, India, Russia, Brazil, Mexico and Indonesia. .... Israel and Singapore. These are two countries that had little in terms of natural resources and have far out-performed their larger neighbors ..... tiny Singapore has just 2% of the population of its giant neighbor Indonesia but its GDP is 35% of Indonesia’s ..... a culture of entrepreneurship ..... Israel .. indirectly benefited from its instability, in that most of the innovation in the late 1990s spun out of the army. ...... The President of Iceland Olafur Regnar Grimsson, who was on the panel, said his size has been an advantage in doing deals with the global giants because it’s not a threat and there are no political dustups. ...... One huge international giant, like Nokia in Finland, can have a disproportionate effect on the economy as it swings up and down with the market ..... What works best isn’t erecting some incubator but favorable tax policy, labor laws that allow for rapid company formation and failure and incentives for foreign investors. ..... Singapore’s GDP was down 8% last year but is up 18% in the most recent quarter.
Music Lovers, Be Prepared To Fall In Love Instantly – Meet The New Shuffler:Shuffler is excellent for music discovery
Social Payment Startup Venmo Raised $1.2 Million And Has A New iPhone App (TCTV): closed $1.2 million in seed funding last May led by RRE Ventures. Other investors include betaworks, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, as well as angel investors Dustin Moskovitz, (Facebook co-founder), Dave Morin (founder of Path, senior platform manager at Facebook) and Sam Lessin (Drop.io CEO)...... Andrew Kortina used to work at betaworks, where he was one of the original engineers on URL shortener bit.ly. ..... if it grows, businesses could start accepting Venmo payments simply by opening an account. .... If it can start collecting enough public data about what people are buying, that data could be very valuable to brands and businesses.

Facebook Competitor Diaspora Revealed: Sparse, But Clean; Source Code Released: All traffic is signed and encrypted (except photos, for now).... will include Facebook integration off the bat, as well as data portability. .... It is by no means bug free or feature complete
Facebook Expands Instant Personalization Program, Adds Rotten Tomatoes As Partner: The feature gives sites that have received Facebook’s blessing the ability to access any information you’ve shared with ‘Everyone’ on Facebook as soon as you arrive at the third-party site, with no authentication required. ... Yelp, Microsoft’s Docs.com, and Pandora .... a personalized web, where sites know what you’re interested in as soon as you arrive.....it was initially frustratingly difficult to opt-out of ..... people will totally freak out when they arrive at a site and it already knows who their friends are ..... “No revenue is ever exchanged as part of this program and user data cannot be transferred by partners to third-party ad networks.” .... reviews, food, travel, music, movies

Alex Payne: The Very Last Thing I’ll Write About Twitter: My unintentionally infamous tweet from months ago about a Twitter web experience that would compete with the best third-party clients ..... The new design is a pleasure to use, and encourages a kind of deep exploration of the data within Twitter that has previously only been exposed in bits and pieces by third-party applications. Browsing Twitter is now as rewarding as communicating with it..... the Twitter developer community needs to adapt to the post-#newtwitter reality. .... decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email

Google Latlong: View Near Real-time Flights Over The U.S. In Google Earth: a snapshot of all the airplanes in the air at any given time over the U.S., all placed at the appropriate coordinates and altitude.

BusinessWeek: Dell Plans More Than $100 Billion Spending In China:over 10 years ..... Steve Ballmer projects the country may replace the U.S. as the largest PC market next year. ..... The company spent about $23 billion in China in 2009 .... Dell China President Amit Midha
China Touts ‘Complete Package’ for California Railway: including financing .... linking Los Angeles and San Francisco .... trains that travel 350 kph (217 mph) and experience from building a 6,920 kilometer high-speed rail network, the world’s longest...... China will have twice as much high-speed rail track as the rest of the world combined by 2014 under a 2 trillion yuan ($297 billion) nationwide construction project ..... California’s planned high-speed rail network would haul passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2 hours and 38 minutes. The journey takes six to eight hours by car or about one hour by plane. ..... will eventually link San Diego, Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco.

Google's Social Efforts

Image via CrunchBase

New York Times: Google’s Chief On Social, Mobile and Conflict: Expect to see social tools from Google this fall, he said, but do not expect a brand new social network. Instead, Google will add social components to its core products..... another rivalry — the one between Google and Apple over mobile phones — as different than the one with Facebook. .... “I have been surprised at how important Android is for our business” ...... particularly interested in buying social networking and advertising start-ups, has picked up the pace of acquisitions .... “Most of the acquisitions that we are doing are focused primarily on technical talent”

Fred Wilson: Social Layers And Social Intention: FriendFeed was largely a social aggregator whereas Twitter is a service with specific social intent.

Mike Arrington: TechCrunch: Details Of The Google Social Layer Emerge: “Google Me will produce an activity stream generated by all Google products. Google Buzz has been rewritten to be the host of it all.

Search and social are apples and oranges, to use the very tired metaphor. Facebook can do social search, as it has every intention to do, and Google can do search social, but Google does not have the option to become Facebook. It does not need to.

Google can not ignore social any more than Facebook and Twitter could have ignored location. But Facebook can not, should not become Twitter, Facebook is no FourSquare. Google is no Facebook. It has no need to be.

Google Also Answered My Blog Search Prayer
My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes
Real Time Search: Where Google Can "Get" Social
A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine
Google Does Not Need Social Envy

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User Friendly Twitter? Get Out Of Town

Image via WikipediaThis New York Times article makes me feel like I felt when Google did the thing I wanted done on Blog Search and Twitter search results. I have been talking about simplifying Twitter, about taking it more to the masses. And now looks like Twitter is doing it, finally.

New York Times: Twitter Revamps Its Web Site: He has said he was surprised that so many people use the service — 160 million — given how difficult its Web site is to navigate. ..... If people want to learn more about the author of a post, for instance, they must go to a new page. It has been almost impossible to follow a conversation between two Twitter users. And while a quarter of the posts contain links, if people post a link to a photo, readers have not been able to see the picture without going to a new site. ...... people see two panes .... The timeline stays in the left pane. In the right pane, they can see more information about posts — like biographies of authors, photos and videos to which posts link — and conversations that spring from a particular post. .... Twitter now shows a continuous stream of posts so people do not need to click “more” to view additional posts.

Towards Threaded Conversations On Twitter
Twitter: The Obvious Missing Features
Twitter Has To Scale The Signals
Twitter Acquires Tweetie: The Drama
Twitter Need Get Work Done
Twitter Needs To Eat Into Its Ecosystem
A Ridiculously Good Blog Search Engine
Google Does Not Need Social Envy
Google's Prediction API
Google Also Answered My Blog Search Prayer
My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes
Real Time Search: Where Google Can "Get" Social

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Zuck In New Yorker

Image via WikipediaThis article has been getting a lot of play. It has been widely shared on Facebook. Did I say Facebook?

New Yorker: The Face Of Facebook: The site is a directory of the world’s people ..... Zuckerberg has three sisters (Randi, Donna, and Arielle), all of whom he’s friends with. He’s friends with his parents, Karen and Edward Zuckerberg ..... his favorite musicians Green Day, Jay-Z, Taylor Swift, and Shakira. ..... Zuckerberg’s Facebook friends have access to his e-mail address and his cell-phone number. ..... “Is there a site that streams the World Cup final online? (I don’t own a TV.)” ..... At 2:45 A.M., E.S.T., on August 29th, he was at the Ace Hotel, in New York’s garment district...... our shifting notions of privacy, revelation, and sheer self-display...... “I’m trying to make the world a more open place.” ..... one out of every fourteen people in the world has a Facebook account ..... “our new Caesar.” ..... Zuckerberg remains a wary and private person. He doesn’t like to speak to the press, and he does so rarely. He also doesn’t seem to enjoy the public appearances that are increasingly requested of him ....... He does not plan to see the film. ...... s pale and of medium build, with short, curly brown hair and blue eyes ...... five feet eight ..... distant and disorienting, a strange mixture of shy and cocky...... he sometimes talks like an Instant Message—brusque, flat as a dial tone—and he can come off as flip and condescending, as if he always knew something that you didn’t ...... Attached to the basement is the dental office of his father, Edward Zuckerberg, known to his patients as “painless Dr. Z.” (“We cater to cowards,” his Web site reads.) ....... Some kids played computer games. Mark created them...... Soon thereafter, Mark started taking a graduate computer course every Thursday night at nearby Mercy College. When his father dropped him off at the first class, the instructor looked at Edward and said, pointing to Mark, “You can’t bring him to the classroom with you.” Edward told the instructor that his son was the student........ News of the software’s existence spread on technology blogs. Soon AOL and Microsoft made it known that they wanted to buy Synapse and recruit the teen-ager who’d invented it. He turned them down....... e arrived in Cambridge with a reputation as a programming prodigy. He sometimes wore a T-shirt with a little ape on it and the words “Code Monkey.” He joined the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi, and, at a Friday-night party there, Zuckerberg, then a sophomore, met his current girlfriend, Priscilla Chan, a Chinese-American from the Boston suburbs........ had a knack for creating simple, addictive software ....... Their site, he says, emphasized dating, while his emphasized networking. ..... Sorkin .. professes extreme dislike of the blogosphere and social media ...... “It’s a group of, in one way or another, socially dysfunctional people who created the world’s great social-networking site.” ...... As it happens, Sorkin’s “The West Wing” is one of Zuckerberg’s favorite television shows. ...... he responded coolly: “I know the real story.” ...... A few days after we spoke, Zuckerberg changed his Facebook profile, removing “The West Wing” from his list of favorite TV shows. ..... after asking a friend to suggest a car that would be “safe, comfortable, not ostentatious.” He drives a lot to relax and unwind, his friends say, and usually ends up at Chan’s apartment. ...... They spend most weekends together; they walk in the park, go rowing (he insists that they go in separate boats and race), play bocce or the board game the Settlers of Catan. Sundays are reserved for Asian cuisine. They usually take a two-week trip abroad in December. This year, they’re planning to visit China. ...... Zuckerberg has found all his homes on Craigslist. His first place was a sparse one-bedroom apartment that a friend described as something like a “crack den.” The next apartment was a two-bedroom, followed by his current place, a two-story, four-bedroom house that he told me is “too big.” He rents. (“He’s the poorest rich person I’ve ever seen in my life” ...... a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook’s dominant color, because, as he said, “blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Standing in his kitchen, leaning over the sink, he offered me a glass of water...... Looking back, Chan said she thought that the time of the Yahoo! proposal was the most stressful of Zuckerberg’s life. “I remember we had a huge conversation over the Yahoo! deal,” she said. “We try to stick pretty close to what our goals are and what we believe and what we enjoy doing in life—just simple things,” she said. ........ In early September, Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page, “Priscilla Chan is moving in this weekend. Now we have 2x everything, so if you need any household appliances, dishes, glasses, etc please come by and take them before we give them away.” ...... s a giant sea of desks—no cubicles, no partitions, just open space with small conference room ...... Zuckerberg’s desk is near the middle of the office, just a few steps away from his glass-walled conference room and within arm’s length of his most senior employees. Before arriving each morning, he works out with a personal trainer or studies Mandarin ...... what an “intense listener” Zuckerberg is. ...... In the early years, Facebook tore through a series of senior executives. ..... most of Zuckerberg’s close friends, who worked for Facebook at the start, have left. ..... It’s hard to have a friend for a boss ..... s ultimate goal is to create, and dominate, a different kind of Internet ...... Privacy, he told me, is the “third-rail issue” online.

I don't own a TV either. Great minds think alike.

Your Facebook page is the homepage you always wanted since you heard of the internet. That is why Facebook grew so big so fast.

My favorite color is also blue.

I have not seen the movie. I am in no hurry to see it. I might not even see it. The movie promises to be an elaborate caricature. I am sure it is dramatic, but it is fiction. As for Facebook and Zuck, for me the truth is more fascinating than fiction. Give me a good book or two that tells the story.

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HTML 5 And Online Video

Technology Review: The Next Stage Of Online Video Evolution: CNN and The Onion, for instance, have used it to build out their video libraries, in part because it offers new design options. "The technology is far more expressive" ..... the new Web standard lacks some features of Flash ..... Flash is much better at letting developers use digital rights management software .... a full-screen mode--the absence of which is a glaring difference between HTML5 and Flash ..... not yet fully fleshed out in HTML5 is closed captioning and subtitles via synchronized time pegs

Internet access speed is a big enough bottleneck. But the evolution to HTML 5 promises to usher in a new era for online video. Hopefully the speeds will go up too, but those are two different domains. HTML 5 is to do with programming and architecture.

But HTML 5 is not just about video, although that is where much of the noise has been. It is being said the non video aspects are actually more exciting.

And it's kinda early. HTML 5 - whatever it is - is not quite here yet.

But Adobe has Flash and Microsoft has Silverlight. It is not obvious if they are competing or parallel technologies. Smart minds have made counter claims.

Technology Review: How HTML5 Will Shake Up The Web: lesser-known features could ultimately have a much bigger impact on how users experience the Web..... ts network communications and browser storage features--could make pages load faster ...... Web Sockets provide a website with an application programming interface (API) that opens an ongoing connection between a page and a server, so that information can pass between them in real-time. ... The effect of Web Sockets is something like moving from having a conversation via e-mail to having it via instant message ..... A feature called Web Storage lets Web applications store more data inside the browser, retrieve it more intelligently .... HTML5 allows developers to embed windows of animation onto a page .... improvements in the way browsers handle forms will reduce the amount of javascript needed and speed up page loading

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2D Space Time

Technology Review: Why Spacetime On The Tiniest Scale May Be Two-Dimensional: The latest thinking about quantum gravity suggests that spacetime is two-dimensional on the smallest scale. .... nobody is quite sure whether the terms 'space' and 'time' have any reasonable meaning at this scale..... there is a growing number of indicators (evidence is too strong a word) that point to that conclusion...... recent work in loop quantum gravity, high temperature string theory, renormalization group analysis applied to general relativity and other areas of quantum gravity research, all hints at a two dimensional spacetime on the smallest scale. In most of these cases, the number of dimensions simply collapse in a process called spontaneous dimensional reduction as the scale reduces ..... one of time and one of space

This space time talk reminds me of when I was at a Science House MeetUp months and months back (Thank you FBI, I no longer show up for Science House MeetUps) and this super smart Indian guy was going on and on about ridiculously small structures. And I remember putting in my word to suggest just like we found nuclear energy at the nucleus level, perhaps there are stores of energy at even smaller scales.

My Talk On Social Media At The Science House MeetUp
The Science House MeetUp
Obama's Got Momentum: He Could Defy History In November

James Jorasch who runs Science House later gently nudged me in the direction of algae. There is a lot of clean energy that can be tapped at the algae level, we don't have to go that small, he seemed to suggest.

Although this 2D space-time talk is quite speculative at this point.

In The News

Google Voice Blog: Fast Access To Google Voice With Android Widgets
Wall Street Journal: Digits: ‘Censored’ Gone; Craigslist Could Go Before Congress:adult services listings, which critics say had become an online red light district..... the House Judiciary Committee has scheduled a hearing on domestic minor sex trafficking ..... shutting down adult services “makes it less easy and less convenient and less normative to buy a child online for sex.”

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Online Measurement Creates A Muddle For Web Journalists: there is such a cacophony of information that it “impedes editorial decision-making” .... Chartbeat .. gives a minute-by-minute picture of what people on a site are reading, searching for, and so on. ..... Talking Points Memo .... news of Al and Tipper Gore’s divorce was doing better than news about the Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, so editors quickly moved the Gore item to a more prominent spot ..... the Daily Beast site: In October of last year, Nielsen measured the audience at 1 million; comScore counted 2.2 million; and the Daily Beast itself said it saw 4 million.

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Analysis: The H-P Suit Against Mark Hurd: his severance could be worth more than $35 million.

Wall Street Journal: Digits: Apple’s Review Guidelines: ‘We Don’t Need Any More Fart Apps’

New York Times: Bits: Betaworks And The Times Plan A Social News Service: News.me that is being developed in collaboration with The New York Times. ..... TweetDeck, a popular desktop client for Twitter, and Web tools like Bit.ly, a URL shortener, and Chartbeat, a real-time Web analytics service. ..... The Times Company, which participated in Betaworks’ most recent round of financing ...... “From the Times’s perspective, we think this is a really interesting way for a company like ours to foster an entrepreneurial culture through a start-up” ..... So far this year, Bit.ly has unshortened more than 30 billion clicked links .... Bitly.TV

New York Times: Bits: SAP Looks To Benefit From The Oracle Tempest:To most in the technology industry, Larry Ellison’s latest adventure — the rapid-fire hiring of Mark V. Hurd, ousted Hewlett-Packard chief executive, and the resulting Silicon Valley fireworks — is entertainment......McDermott called the Sun purchase “Oracle’s wild move into hardware.” ..... “What Apple has done in the consumer space, we’ll do in business applications,” he said.

New York Times: Bits: Ex-Sun Chief Gets Healthy With New Venture: “leverage technology in pursuit of better health.” .... the company will develop software and services to help people keep track of their health information and to create direct links between patients and health care providers.

New York Times: Bits: Apple Lifts Restrictions For App Approvals: In an about-face, Apple announced Thursday that it would change some of the strict and perplexing rules for developers ....Earlier in the year reports circulated that the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission were negotiating who could begin making antitrust inquiries to Apple over its stringent App Store restrictions.

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Google's Prediction API

Technology Review: Google Offers Cloud-Based Learning Engine: the smartest Web services around rely on machine learning--algorithms that enable software to learn how to respond with a degree of intelligence to new information or events...... Google-hosted algorithms could be trained to sort e-mails into categories for "complaints" and "praise" using a dataset that provides many examples of both kinds .... extracting emergency information from Twitter ...... machine-learning black box--data goes in one end, and predictions come out the other ...... "This API could be a way to get a capability cheaply that would cost a huge amount through a traditional route." ... Prediction API .... has the potential to be a leveler between established companies and smaller startups

We went from big, ugly computers - mainframes - to PCs. PCs were simpler. And over time they became pretty powerful. And then the cloud emerged. The internet itself was the cloud. So I agree with Larry Ellison when he claims he has always done the cloud thing.

We went from servers to data farms. And these data farms run by big companies like Google and Facebook are huge, big enough that the electricity costs are a major headache even for these rich companies.

When Larry bought Sun, I threw a challenge in his direction. Can you build data centers that are the size of servers? Or at least small data centers? That might be nano territory. But I figured what the heck? There is never too much drama in Larry's life. What is one more challenge?

One common denominator with these disruptive technologies is they have been democratizing forces. It has always been about making it possible for more and more people, more and more businesses. We basically want everybody to be able to go online.

Google's Prediction API is a step in that same direction, and I am glad. Suddenly even small businesses will be able to make sense of large quantities of data they might end up collecting.

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Clean Water, Obesity

Technology Review: Clean Water For The Developing World: Cotton fabric treated with nano inks produces a water filter that's efficient and needs little power to work...... kills bacteria with electrical fields but uses just 20 percent of the power required by pressure-driven filters ..... At least a billion people have access only to water contaminated by pathogens or pollution. ..... There are two major chemical methods: adding chlorine to the water to kill the bacteria, or adding iron, which causes the bacteria to clump so it's easily removed. ..... Filtration, in contrast, is attractive because it's simple. .... other low-power solutions take too long or are too complex.

Obesity is to America what water is to the Global South. So much of health care costs would evaporate if most Americans lost weight. So many of the diseases in the Global South would go away if everyone had access to clean drinking water.

Some say we already have the knowledge for both and I am not so sure. One of my insights from volunteering for Obama 08 was that Americans don't socialize enough. They don't meet each other in person enough. Their overeating has a direct relationship to their emotional malnutrition.

It is not true we know all we need to know about clean water. Obviously the water cleaning technologies we have are not cheap enough, not simple enough. Obviously. There has to be relentless innovation to reach the masses.

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Chris Dixon: A New Breed Early Stage Investor

Chris Dixon is a New Yorker. Chris Dixon has a day job. He is working to build a middle range, ambitious company. Hunch is one of those post-algorithm search engines. They try to bring in the human element more front and center.

Chris Dixon was not trained as a techie. He did not learn programming at school. But he is very much a creature of the tech world, the startup world. He very much fits my definition of a techie. He belongs. He will rule.

I wish more prominent tech entrepreneurs blogged like Chris Dixon does. But his blog is less that of a tech entrepreneur, and more that of an early stage investor.

I think Chris Dixon's real calling is not that he is a tech entrepreneur, but that he is one of those who are really defining early stage investing. If you listen to Dixon, you will think VCs are dinosaurs. They don't "get" it. They are not hands on enough. They don't really get their hands dirty. Writing checks no longer does it. You really have to be involved.

And this blog post by Chris Dixon is a jewel. It really distills a lot of what he has said over time.

GigaOm: Chris Dixon To VCs: Act More Like Startups: “have fewer meetings” and “have everyone at the firm blog/tweet.” ..... venture firms should act more like the startups they invest in, right down to his suggestion that they “have offices that look and cost like startup offices — or better yet, don’t have offices at all [and] spend your time visiting companies.” ..... VCs should not “talk/tweet/blog about your vineyard, yachting, golfing etc. while you tell your CEOs to work non-stop and be frugal.” ..... “Stop kidding yourself that you add a lot of value beyond recruiting/intros/governance/financing/selling companies.” ..... “Say no to companies. Saying “come back later” feels like a free option to you but actually hurts you and the startup in the long run.”

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