Every Google Search Is Like A Tweet, A Facebook Update

Google 的貼牌冰箱（Google refrigerator） (Photo credit: Aray Chen)Google has had it this entire time.

Granted they publish the top words and phrases for the year and all that. And every search makes the search engine even smarter. But much of what Google does with our search queries stays in the background.

If Google were to figure out a way to publicly display all our searches in real time they might give Twitter a run for the money. What they are sitting on is huge.

And I don't mean literally list the searches. Things more interesting than that can be imagined.

Google allows you to search the web. What if Google made it possible for you to also be able to search through searches made through the Google search engine? That would take the lid off. And there is no telling.

And to think Google has had this the entire time.

Twitter Integration Into Google's Search Plus
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

For example, Google would tell me how many times people have conducted a search on my name today.

Kickstarter

2011/06 Yancey Strickler from CreativeMornings on Vimeo.

Fred Wilson: Understanding Kickstarter
Now This Is What I Call A Blog Post

Apple Doing Well

Image via CrunchBaseDaily Mail: Apple is now bigger than Microsoft and Google combined - and worth more than the gross domestic product of Sweden

- The tech giant's stock is worth more than the market capitalisations of rivals Google ($196.8bn) and Microsoft ($256.1bn) combined.
- Apple's profits recently passed $1 billion a week and the company now sells a million iPhones a day.
- Apple's stock is worth more than the gross domestic product of Sweden - $458 billion.
- Apple is worth more than all the gold in the American Federal Reserve - $350 billion
- and all the illegal drugs in the world, $321 billion
- sold 37.04million iPhones - its flagship product - and 15.43million iPad tablets, doubling from a year earlier.
- its war chest of cash and securities to almost $100billion - more than enough to plug December's U.S. budget deficit.
- Apple's iPhone business is now bigger than the whole of Microsoft .... The company's smartphone division generated $24.4 billion of revenue in the quarter up until December, whereas the whole of Microsoft generated $20.9 billion in the same quarter.

Clearly Apple is an iPhone, iPad company like Microsoft used to be a Windows, Office company.

Related articles

• Apple is now worth more than Microsoft and Google combined (dailymail.co.uk)
• Apple now worth more than Google, Microsoft combined (currentindiaaffairs.wordpress.com)
• Microsoft + Google = Apple - SlashGear (slashgear.com)
• Apple Now Worth Than Microsoft And Google Put Together (cultofmac.com)
• Apple Now Worth More Than Microsoft, Google Combined (business.time.com)
• Apple's iPhone business makes more money than the whole of Microsoft (buzzom.com)
• Motorola 'demands' 2.25% of all iPhone, iPad sales (fiercewireless.com)
• Apple is now worth more than the GDP of Sweden (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Apple Employee: The New iPad's Screen Is 'Truly Amazing' (AAPL) (businessinsider.com)
• Apple's iPhone Business Alone Is Now Bigger Than Microsoft (businessinsider.com)

Apple Is Being Unreasonable

Apple Inc. (Photo credit: marcopako )FOSS Patents: Apple requests U.S. preliminary injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus based on four high-power patents
The Verge: Apple seeks to ban Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, but it's really going after Android 4.0
CNet: Apple seeks U.S. ban on Galaxy Nexus
The Next Web: Apple moves to ban the Samsung Galaxy Nexus in the U.S., attacking Android 4.0 with 4 tough patents
Electronista: Apple's new Samsung lawsuit targets Siri-like search, more
Phandroid: Apple at it again, file injunction request against Galaxy Nexus

This reminds me of the Cold War. The Soviets would threaten to obliterate America. The Americans would threaten to obliterate the Soviet Union. They went back and forth for decades. Finally they came to their senses and started talks to dismantle their nuclear weapons, much of them. But first they achieved Mutually Assured Destruction. As in, both would disappear if either carried out the threat.

Instead of the big companies engaging in such Cold War style drama it would make sense for them to come together and take the lead on software patent reform. Things in that department have been crazy for a while. And the big companies themselves have suffered much. Patent trolls have milked the big companies over long years.

For Apple to get offended by Siri like services would be equal to Google saying the search box is theirs and theirs alone. No, it isn't.

Apple right now is acting Soviet.

Software patent wars are energy that needs to go into innovation. There is plenty of work for the industry to do.

Tumblr Spam

Corporations And Now Government?

Image via WikipediaRIM is in trouble. Their flagship BlackBerry is in serious trouble. The iOS assault is total.

BusinessWeek: U.S. Air Force May Buy 18,000 Apple IPad2s for Flight Crews

Steve Jobs stayed true to the consumer. That is how he started his career. That is how he ended his career. But now the iPhone and the iPad together are going places that Steve Jobs studiously avoided. He disliked the idea of having to sell to this one CIO person who would decide on behalf of hundreds and perhaps thousands of people working in that company. Instead he preferred to go straight to the consumer.

That still has not changed. It is not the CIOs of the world that are making these decisions. Those Apple loving consumers, guess what, many of them work for these companies. Ends up many of them also work for government.

And RIM is being pushed off the cliff.

If 90% Of The People Start Voting

Image via WikipediaA Facebook Supported Online Parliament

These blog posts probably belong at my other Barackface blog, but never mind.

I was thinking, if Facebook were to manage to create an online parliament for an entire country, the percentage of people voting might shoot into the sky. The average in mature democracies right now is 50% I think. I can see that going up to an unheard of 90%.

It is like in Nepal there was a democracy movement in 1990. And it was successful. Nepal became a multi-party democracy. Before that it was a monarchy that called itself a no party democracy. As in, there was a parliament. What else do you need to be a democracy, right?

Anyways, there was now democracy. But then the communists came out of the woodworks. The most ultra among them called for a boycotting of the "bourgeois" election. 60% of the people voted. Those communists then claimed that means 40% of the people sided with them! Go figure.

But then I just had to share that relevant story.

A Facebook Supported Online Parliament

I just came across this interesting idea on TechCrunch.

Jon Evans: Is Facebook Finally Going To Do Something Interesting?

An online parliament would be nice. The administrator would invite people or keep the voter pool open. The online parliament would allow for the holding of elections and subsequent debates.

Say I run an organization that has 500 members. I would use the Facebook Online Parliament to get all members to join, and then to hold elections, and to hold subsequent debates. The debate of course would include the organization's budget.

The election process has the nomination process. Say there are five offices and 30 people running for each of them. The organization should have the option to hold a run off election between the top two vote getters.

I think it would be fun. It would be great. It would make some serious noise if Facebook were to make it possible to do this at large scales. How about being able to do it for an organization with 10,000 members? Or a country with half a million people? Or, god forbid, a country with 50 million people? The election commission of the country would have to put together an official list saying these Facebook members are voting citizens. That would be a challenge, but a much lesser challenge than is the putting together of the current offline voter lists. They leave out too many people in the first place.

This would be huge.

This is not Facebook Groups. The Facebook Online Parliament would be a whole different ball game, a different magnitude altogether.

I hope they nail this by the next F8 Conference.

This online parliament would be great for democratic organizations where each person is one vote. Something different would have to be built for corporate organizations. Facebook should go ahead and built that too.

Buy Asana. Integrate it into Facebook. Add features.

Have Started Playing CityVille

I am a pretty accomplished farmer at Farmville on Facebook. But then I have not been active in months. I have played Angry Birds on Google+. But today I decided to play CityVille on the Google+ platform. It is fun.

I had managed to never spend a dime on Farmville. Cityville cost me 10 bucks on the first day. I am like, I can't wait, let's go get some energy. That was five bucks. Before you know I had put down another five bucks for a few thousand coins.

The Zynga business model works.

I am in mind to go back to growing my city only organically, as they say in tech startup world. Act lean.

I see me spending a few minutes every day to slowly build my city.

Farmville Farmer's Market: My Idea
Played Farmville After Long Months
Farmville Has Not Been Loading For Me
Farmville's Got Competition

Now This Is What I Call A Blog Post

Kickstarter (Photo credit: Laughing Squid)There are blog posts and there are blog posts. Check out this blog post by the phenomenon by the name of Kickstarter.

There are crazy days and then there are days like yesterday. Kickstarter has experienced some frantic hours but nothing like what happened in the 24-hour span between Wednesday at 6:54pm and Thursday at 6:44pm. Two million-dollar projects, a major political speech involving Kickstarter, an amazing band launching a project for a comeback 20 years in the making... the list goes on. Here's a minute-by-minute breakdown of the day's events.

Related articles

• Kickstarter's craziest 24 hours (kickstarter.com)
• Double Fine Adventure On Kickstarter (rubbishcorp.com)
• Kickstarter comes of age as a big-time funding platform (gigaom.com)
• Kickstarter Comes Into Its Own (allthingsd.com)
• Meet the New Kings of Kickstarter: How Double Fine Gamified Game Funding (readwriteweb.com)
• This Kickstarter Project Raised Nearly $1 Million in One Day (businessinsider.com)
• Kickstarter sees two projects hit the $1 million mark (slashgear.com)
• Kickstarter racks up over $2 million for two projects (news.cnet.com)
• Kickstarter racks up over $2 million for two projects (news.cnet.com)
• 5 Critical Steps to Getting Your Creative Project Funded on Kickstarter (thinktraffic.net)

HTML5

Wikipedia: HTML5

the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997) ...... core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well ..... introduces markup and application programming interfaces (APIs) for complex web applications ...... Many features of HTML5 have been built with the consideration of being able to run on low-powered devices such as smartphones and tablets. In December 2011 research firm Strategy Analytics forecast sales of HTML5 compatible phones will top 1 billion in 2013. ...... new video, audio and canvas elements, as well as the integration of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) content that replaces the uses of generic object tags ........ new elements, such as section, article, header and nav, are designed to enrich the semantic content of documents ...... The W3C is developing a comprehensive test suite to achieve broad interoperability for the full specification by 2014, which is now the target date for Recommendation. ..... advancing HTML5 to Recommendation provides the entire Web ecosystem with a stable, tested, interoperable standard. ...... Ian Hickson of Google is the editor of HTML5. ...... Some deprecated elements from HTML 4.01 have been dropped, including purely presentational elements such as font and center, whose effects are achieved using Cascading Style Sheets. There is also a renewed emphasis on the importance of DOM scripting (e.g., JavaScript) in Web behavior. ......... In addition to specifying markup, HTML5 specifies scripting application programming interfaces (APIs) ...... The canvas element for immediate mode 2D drawing. ..... Timed media playback ..... Offline Web Applications ..... Document editing ...... Drag-and-drop .... Cross-document messaging ..... Browser history management .... MIME type and protocol handler registration ..... Microdata .... Web Storage, a key-value pair storage framework that provides behaviour similar to Cookies but with larger storage capacity and improved API. ..... Geolocation .... HTML5 alone cannot provide animation within web pages. Either JavaScript or CSS3 is necessary for animating HTML elements. ..... XHTML5 is the XML serialization of HTML5. .... XHTML5 requires XML's strict, well-formed syntax. ...... September 2011, 34 of the world's top 100 Web sites were using HTML5 ..... As of 1 April 2011, this logo is official. ..... The W3C then said the logo "represents HTML5, the cornerstone for modern Web applications".

Niggas In Paris

Paris Action (5)
Paris Action

#hiphopnews Jay-Z & Kanye West Heat Up The 'Net, Explode W/ "N*ggas In Paris" Music Video: Grammy-win... bit.ly/AsgsaX #omgstacks

— Izu Ent. (@OMGStacks) February 9, 2012

The Email Conundrum

Cover of Groundhog Day/Ghostbusters/StripesFred Wilson: The Black Hole Of Email

I don't want to make email work better for me. I don't want to hire an assistant to do email for me. I don't want to try some new magical app that will make email better for me. ...... I give email an hour in the morning, an hour in the evening, and I dive into it throughout the day. The result is probably three hours a day in total. That's all I'm going to give email. And it is not enough to manage the inbound flow.

I don't have this problem. Usually when I am online I treat emails like they were text messages. I read and reply immediately. Saves me time. Short replies are not considered rude since I was polite enough to reply immediately. If I read an email but do not, can not reply immediately I use the Mark It As Unread feature to come to it later. I mean, Gmail is so central to my work, when I am emailing, I am working. My tech consulting team is global and email is absolutely the best way to keep moving. I look forward to the emails.

But then I don't read half the emails I get. You see who or what (usually what) sent it, you read the subject line and you realize they are not even worth deleting. Deleting would cost time. Instead I might mass delete in a few months. Mass deleting emails is fun. It is amazing how emails lose value over time. (Inbox Zero)

But I am nowhere close to Fred Wilson's scale. My question to Fred is, how big is your Inbox? Granted you don't read more than three out of 10 emails you get, but is your Inbox 99% full? Have you paid for a petabyte of Gmail space? Did Zynga go IPO?

That is not to say the Inbox is not a serious innovation territory. But the ultimate barrier there is human. You could end up with the best filters and still end up with too much email. I mean, if you have only three hours a day for email, there are only so many emails you can read. So you better have a great ultimate filter for people whose emails you don't want to miss.

I already have those filters. I use several platforms. If you are a stranger who just wants to say hello, send a tweet. That is the best way. If you know me well, send a Facebook email.

I don't even use the Priority Inbox. I guess I don't have an email problem. Not yet.

Reimagining The Inbox The Simple Way
Adam Smith And The Inbox Space
The Inbox: Like Search Before Google
The Inbox Could See New Life This Year
2010: Location, Random Connections, The Inbox, Frictionless Payments
The Search Results, The Links, The Inbox, The Stream
My Gmail Prayers Heard: Multiple Inboxes

Who you gonna call?

Spotify Vision Specialist: A No Go

My pitch two days ago (over email) with Spotify has ended up being a no go, and that's okay. One has to be Vision Specialist to one's own startup. For me that is microfinance. I am thinking six months. Max six.

Spotify Now Advertising On Netizen

+ 20-25 hours a week, rare week 30, 6 months
+ $100 per hour plus an equivalent in equity, 5K sign up bonus
+ 20 hours of face time with the CEO, 1-2 hours at a time, spread over
the final 4 months
+ 10 hours each with the top 10 people in the company - face time (not
phone, not Skype)
+ A few trips to Sweden in Spring/Summer
+ Interacting with as many employees as possible mostly in party settings

Vision Specialist
Spotify right now is headed to becoming a mid-tier company.
Noone thinks of it as a future Google/Amazon/Facebook.
My job would be to create that vision and inject it into the company.
I think Spotify could end up a truly big tech company.

Hardware (IBM) -------> Software (Microsoft) --------> One Site
(Google/Facebook) -----> Content/Mindfood (music/movies/books)

I hope to launch my own microfinance startup later this year.
http://technbiz.blogspot.com/2011/02/googlefacebook-of-microfinance.html
That is why I never thought in terms of going full time with you guys.
Otherwise it would have made tremendous sense to do so. You guys are
pre-IPO.

SmartWatch

GigaOm: Sony to try the smartwatch game for a second time

Twitter ---> Instagram ---> FoodSpotting
Seven Screens

When you move from the level of Instagram to the level of FoodSpotting there are 100 possibilities. It is the same when you move from the smartphone to the smartwatch. The smartphone is Instagram. The smartwatch is FoodSpotting and 100 other services like it. You are looking at Tens Of Billions Of Devices.

Dating In The 80s, Pre eHarmony

Via Wiktor Macura

Boxee is Cannibalizing Television

GigaOm: Boxee clashes with cable companies over encryption

Piya O Re Piya

Instagram Does Not Know What It Has On Its Hands

Image via CrunchBase

"The only thing that will make other platforms happen is natural growth of the team. I think we didn't expect how quickly we'd grow a year ago when we were like ‘oh let's work on Android next.' Everything became a priority, and because everything became a priority we had to focus on what was most important which was to keep the site going and make users really happy. A person is a person is a person no matter what phone you own. I'm excited to be on Android someday. Are you kidding me? Our growth is going to double." - Kevin Systrom

This is an insane thing to be saying.

Instagram is one of those lucky companies that does not have to worry about money. It can raise money. And it is not true there are only 10 good engineers on the planet. So if it not lack of resources or talent, what holds them back?

I think the Instagram guys might have hit the jackpot but they don't really fathom the full implications of what they have in their hands.

They should raise 50 million and grow to 50 engineers. Right away.

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Istagram
Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram

The Empire Strikes Back, Finally

Seattle Times: Motorola wants patent royalties from Xbox, Windows 7 a court in Germany seems inclined to side with Motorola in the company's patent fight with Microsoft in which Motorola would like Microsoft to pay it royalties of 2.25 percent in sales of Windows 7 and Xbox 360, among other products. ...... Microsoft Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9, the Windows Media Player and the Xbox 360 infringe on those two patents. ..... have to do with video compression and decompression technology, covering methods for reducing the amount of bandwidth needed for video that is streamed online..... At stake are millions of dollars in royalties, along with strategic competitive advantages. ..... Microsoft itself has a number of patent agreements in place in which manufacturing companies pay royalties to the software giant. Microsoft has not disclosed how much it gets in royalties, but Microsoft attorney Brad Smith has suggested in the past that about $5 per mobile device "seems like a fair price."

Granted the Google Motorola integration has not happened yet, the purchase has not gone through, but don't tell me the people at Motorola do not feel the need to get on the right side of their future boss, Larry Page. They know exactly why he bought Motorola.

World War III Time: Let's Go To War
Android Has To Be Kept Free

Or if these legal steps have been a long time coming, just goes on to show how software patents need fundamental reform, for everyone lives in glass houses.

But until that reform happens, the Android people have to simply fight back. Owning Motorola patents helps.

Eminem: Sing For The Moment

Chrome For Android

You'd think they'd have done it sooner.

10X Not 10%

Google: What’s your X? Amplifying technology moonshots
http://www.wesolveforx.com

Big Data Democratization By Wolfram Alpha

Image via WikipediaThe Verge: Wolfram Alpha Pro democratizes data analysis: an in-depth look at the $4.99 a month service

... the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The "reports" that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats...... Wolfram Alpha presents a different way of interacting with knowledge and data than anything else out there on the web ..... Wolfram Alpha is excellent at returning answers to mathematical queries and scientific queries, but it also can provide results based on its structured data. Most people know it now as one of the sources for Apple's Siri feature on the iPhone 4S. ..... in many cases the service can provide better results from Siri than from text queries because there is "more structure to what they're saying" than what most people have trained themselves to type into search fields. ..... provide "reports" instead of just "answers." ..... The first and most obvious feature is that users will get an account at Wolfram Alpha with a complete history of their queries, uploads, and downloads. ...... any number of export options — including a basic Excel spreadsheet, vector graphics, and JSON data if you'd like to integrate the data into your own web app. ...... the Computable Document Format (CDF). CDF is a browser plug-in that enables interactivity with charts, graphs, and other data. ..... an "extended keyboard" which is similar to the larger keyboard available on its mobile apps. This makes it easier to enter mathematical symbols without having to remember obscure keyboard combinations ...... Users will also be able to use images as inputs ...... if you uploaded a set of dates and prices, Wolfram Alpha will actually try to determine exactly what those prices represent. ...... put yourself in the mindset of a small business owner. Instead of trying to hassle with interpreting a spreadsheet of website traffic and sales data, he or she could upload it to Wolfram Alpha Pro ...... not just for the realm of academics and research. Regular users may not have had much reason to dig into the service before now, but the ability to bring the entire brunt of Wolfram Alpha's computational engine on any arbitrary piece of data democratizes the idea of statistical analysis.

I did not have to invent email to be able to use Gmail. There will be Big Data versions of Gmail. I as a user should be able to do Big Data stuff without launching a Big Data company. We will see much more of that happen. If anything Big Data will show up as a hugely democratizing force. We will realize every single human being literally sits atop an oil field. There is money to be made.

Yep, The Twitter Embed Feature Is Here

I Got New Twitter Now goo.gl/fb/WwmpT

— Paramendra Bhagat (@paramendra) February 7, 2012

This is huge! Now all I ask for is the ability to search through all my tweets. I want Twitter to be my Dropbox.

I Got New Twitter Now

I Got New Twitter Now

I am so excited. I think this means now the embed feature is live for me. Golley. I have waited so long for that embed feature. If I can embed YouTube videos, why can't I embed tweets? That has been my long standing question. Now answered.

Being Able To Embed Tweets Is A Revolution
Tweet Embed Option Needed
Dick Costolo Of Twitter
Twitter Integration Into Google's Search Plus
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Twitter, France And Germany
Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google
Twitter Is Seeing Rebirth
Twitter Asks

A Day Made of Glass

Source: Mashable

Jis Jagah Pe Khatam

TicketMonkey "Monk-A-Thon"

Hackers, biz-brains, scholars, and new friends,

We're eagerly looking forward to seeing you at the TicketMonkey "Monk-a-thon" (read: Hack-a-thon) this Saturday! We will kick-off with a short presentation from the team starting at 2pm, followed by a strategic session to map out a gameplan for the day. We then divide into teams led by a TicketMonkey developer, each focusing on a particular development objective, and the fun begins.

If you have a laptop you prefer to work on, please bring it. If you need one, we'll have a few computers and extra monitors on-site. We'll have a constant supply of pizza, hors d'oeuvre, coffee, tea, soft drinks, beer, and wine to keep things flowing. At 4:30, promptly, Matt (cc'd) will provide his interpretation of Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On, and other karaoke favorites. Please let me know if you have any specific dietary restrictions or song requests Matt will be happy to accommodate.

Address: 505 West 37th Street (NW corner of 10th ave) Unit 202
Time: 2:00 pm

We're very excited to work with each of you and see you in action. Welcome to the jungle.

Warm regards,

Manick Bhan
CEO & Co-founder

LinkedIn, Facebook, Quora, Google+, Twitter

Adele: Set Fire To The Rain

Amit Gupta: Safe

BusinessWeek: How the Social Web Saved a Young Entrepreneur’s Life In just the few weeks following his diagnosis and blog post about it, Gupta said he was told the registry’s website got more traffic than it had ever received in its entire history.
VentureBeat: Take that Leukemia! Photojojo’s Amit Gupta has found a donor
NDTV: Indian-American Entrepreneur Amit Gupta Finally Gets Bone Marrow Donor
Huffington Post: Amit Gupta, Co-Founder Of Photojojo, Finds Bone Marrow Match With Help From Social Media Campaign
NY Daily News: Internet star undergoing bone-marrow transplant

Amit Gupta Favorited My Tweet
Super Amit, Super Swabbed
Mike Bloomberg, Amit Gupta

So Facebook Went IPO

Big deal. And I don't mean that in a sarcastic way. It really is a big deal.

GigaOm: Facebook just revealed its Kryptonite: mobile
GigaOm: Zynga & its Facebook Problem
New York Times: From Founders to Decorators, Facebook Riches
Jim Romensko: The Graphic Artist Who Is About To Become A Facebook Millionaire
Wired: Facebook’s ‘Letter from Zuckerberg’: The Annotated Version
Above The Crowd: Why Facebook Clearly Belongs In The 10X Revenue Club
AllThingsD: Zuckerberg Is the Billion-Share Man: Who Owns What, Who Makes What in the Facebook IPO
BusinessWeek: Zuckerberg Controlling 57% of Facebook Seen as Risk to Investors
Mark Zuckerberg: My Desk
Pando Daily: Mark Zuckerberg Loves It When A Plan Comes Together
Inside Facebook: The details: Facebook spent $68 million on acquisitions last year
ReadWriteWeb: Biggest Winners In Facebook's IPO
Mashable: Facebook IPO Reveals How It Made $3.71 Billion in 2011
Guardian: Facebook IPO sees Winklevoss twins heading for $300m fortune
Guardian: Facebook's letter from Mark Zuckerberg - full text

Facebook And Big Data
Finally Facebook Lets Me Reach Out To Non Friends
Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough
The Google/Facebook Of Microfinance
Facebook Will End Up The Social Graph Operating System
Should FourSquare Be Scared Of Facebook?
Facebook Alternative? Dave McClure Is Full Of It

Randi, The Flamboyant Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg In 2005
Jessica Mah, Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg Loves Union Square Ventures
Zuckerberg Has Stature
The Twins Were Rowing Boats

Spotify Now Advertising On Netizen

Image via CrunchBaseThis blog just landed its biggest advertising deal ever. Spotify is going to place two text link ads at this blog for $598. Two text link ads for a year. The space is going to be used to place job openings.

I just helped Spotify land a superstar developer, and the text link ads followed.

The Spotify Event Was Great
The Spotify CTO Talk
Sean Parker's 2009 Email To Spotify
Sean Parker: Mystery Man

They might even have a consulting gig for me in a few weeks. Their guy I need to have dinner with - "Dinner is on me" - Howard Smith, Chief Recruiter, Spotify - is in Europe and
Image via Wikipediahence the delay. He should be in town in two weeks.

Howard first wanted me to come in full time. I said I can't do that. I have a few balls in the air I can't drop. The idea was that I'd get into some kind of a full time Chief Evangelist role. I said I could do that or I could come in as a Vision Specialist, for about six months. I think Spotify has what it takes to become one of the truly big tech companies in the world. For me it is the most exciting tech company in New York City in terms of how big it could grow.

And so we are talking.
Image via Wikipedia
And I have a hidden agenda: I am trying to get to Sean Parker. (My Take On AirTime (4)) If Sean Parker is as excited about Spotify as I am, we got a few things in common.

Gun Gun Guna

Ben Horowitz And Dave McClure

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeBen Horowitz: Why Has Andreessen Horowitz Raised $2.7B in 3 Years?

I was just reading this blog post by Ben Horowitz - great blog, by the way - and could not help thinking this guy sounds a lot like Dave McClure, only at a much larger scale. Dave McClure wants to help build your accounting department.

Investment firms aspire to be incubators. It is not like, here's the money, and now go build. The money is good, heck, it is the primary thing. But then there's the advice, the network.

I mean, look at this, this looks like a FoxConn report. As in, we cooked 30 tons of rice today and 12 tons of pork.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/2659065551/ via CrunchBaseIn 2011, we hosted over 600 portfolio presentations to corporate customers and partners at our office in Menlo Park. These presentations resulted in more than 3,000 introductions between portfolio companies and prospective Fortune 500/Global 2000 senior executives.

We’ve built relationships with over 4,000 engineers, designers and product managers, and we’ve made more than 1,300 introductions to our portfolio companies, resulting in 130 hires within the portfolio.

We added over 550 executives to our network in 2011 and made more than 300 executive introductions to our portfolio companies.

We’ve had nearly 400 interactions with media on behalf of our portfolio companies.

Amazon, I Never Received My Book

Twitter Integration Into Google's Search Plus

Image by Getty Images via @daylifeDick Costolo in GigaOm: “Google crawls us at a rate of 1300 hits per second… They’ve indexed 3 billion of our pages,” Costolo said. “They have all the data they need.”

The Next Web: 2009: Total Tweets Tweeted Nearing 5 Billion

http://gigatweeter.com/counter: 29 Billion Tweets

Twitter Blog: Measuring Tweets

If there are 29 billion tweets out there and counting, and according to the Twitter CEO Google has indexed three billion of them, then obviously Google does not have access to all the tweets out there. There is some cooperation that is necessary. And so far it has not been forthcoming.

I speak for the consumer. If tweets are not included in Google's Search Plus Your World, that is not a good thing. I hope the two giants work things out.

Dick Costolo Of Twitter
Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose
Twitter, France And Germany
Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

Dick Costolo Of Twitter

Pando Daily: The Real Story of How Dick Costolo Kicked Investors Off Twitter’s Board
VentureBeat: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: 2012 is going to be the Twitter election
AllThingsD: Twitter CEO Says Board Changes “Not Some Ninja Move”
TechCrunch: Twitter’s Dick Costolo: “We’re Growing Faster Than We Have Ever Grown Before”
GigaOm: Twitter CEO: Google has all the data they need
Business Insider: We Just Heard A Rumor That Twitter Wants To Buy Tumblr, But Here's The Truth
AllThingsD: Costolo: Twitter Isn’t Looking to Censor Anyone

Yosemite

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

Via Saaya Yasuda

Six Is Half A Dozen: Tweets From Suster

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Istagram

Shit Birds Say

Via Craig Newmark

MegaUpload: The SOPA/PIPA Aftermath

Image via CrunchBaseThe Shout: Megaupload: A Lot Less Guilty Than You Think

The heart of this case is whether and when an enterprise can be held criminally liable for the conduct of its users. ....... “Can the Grokster theory of CIVIL liability even be the basis for CRIMINAL copyright claims?” This has never been decided by any Court. ...... Rojadirecta’s lawyers at Durie Tangri have challenged the U.S. Government’s assertion that criminal liability arises from linking to infringing content. The lawyers argue that judge-made secondary infringement liability theories, including Grokster style inducement, cannot be the basis for a criminal copyright violation because the criminal copyright statute doesn’t mention secondary liability. Congress considered and rejected statutes that would have created such liability, in COICA and PROTECT IP. In sum, due process doesn’t allow incarceration under a civil legal theory that the Supreme Court dreamed up in 2005. The issues yet to be decided in Rojadirecta apply to the Megaupload case as well. ...... The list of overt acts show that the object of the conspiracy was infringement by Mega users. ....... If the idea is that Mega conspired with its users to infringe, those users may or may not have been criminally infringing copyright. They were located all over the world, and may or may not have acted willfully, i.e. intended to violate U.S. law. Again, the government would basically have alleged an agreement to violate a U.S. CIVIL law, including by many people who are not subject to U.S. rules. ....... Is it a federal crime to conspire to induce others to violate a U.S. civil law? ....... The answer to that is an obvious “no”. ...... prosecuting this case against Mega, especially if Defendants get good criminal lawyers who also understand copyright law, is going to be an uphill battle for the government. ..... the indictment identifies four films that the defendants supposedly distributed before release: The Green Hornet, Thor, Bad Teacher, Twilight–Breaking Dawn Part 1. But Count 4 only charges one such act of prerelease infringement, the movie Taken. What about the other films? Why were those not also charged? .......... Finally, this case is extremely interesting from a JURISDICTIONAL standpoint. One of the very first issue to be litigated will be extradition to the United States. Does the United States have jurisdiction over anyone who uses a hosting provider in the Eastern District of Virginia? What about over any company that uses PayPal? That’s a very broad claim of power, and I expect it will be vigorously contested.

TorrentFreak: Mega Aftermath: Upheaval In Pirate Warez Land

While last week’s shutdown of MegaUpload is of huge interest in itself, but a wave of aftershocks and side-effects are proving equally fascinating to watch. In addition to causing all sorts of problems for legitimate users of file-sharing services, there is no avoiding the fact that certain elements of the piracy scene are in a mess. But amazingly, still the beat goes on. ....... The perception of the established ground rules had been changed, without the passing of a single new law. ....... “If the US government can come for Kim Dotcom it can happen to almost anyone,” a file-hosting operator told TorrentFreak on condition of anonymity. “I’m trying to think of everything I did possibly wrong in the last 3 years and worrying about that and the next 3 years also, if we even have that long.” ..... For many hosting sites it was time to react – quickly. ......... drastic actions taken by services such as Filesonic and Fileserve who shut down all 3rd party sharing and, like many others, closed down their affiliate payout programs ...... file-hosting competitors such as 4shared, Rapidshare and Hotfile had grown as users hunted for spare capacity ...... huge libraries of both legitimate and pirated material were wiped out as filehost after filehost deleted an impossible-to-calculate number of files and closed down thousands of suspected infringing accounts. ....... For more than half a decade Hollywood and the recording industry have spent millions of dollars not so much on actually eliminating illegal content, but getting rid of links to content such as those found on BitTorrent........ But this week, without a single cease and desist being sent, cyberlockers across the globe not only self-deleted vast quantities of files, but in doing so made millions of links across thousands of ‘linking sites’ completely useless too. ......... While there is money to be made in torrent sites, the content sharers there are largely altruistic. ...... But like worker ants whose nest has just been smashed apart by angry humans, others are utterly unfazed and just want to know which hosts are still paying out. Despite the climate of fear, quite a few hosts say they are ...... Cyberlockers are in a mess, but already recovering. Release sites are continuing, albeit with a reduced number of multiple links to the same content. ...... Perhaps the best test is whether it’s now very hard or impossible to find and download popular content. Not even close.

This MegaUpload stuff is related to SOPA/PIPA. The people who lost the battle in Congress hit back in New Zealand. There is no fighting the technology. But the music and movie industries have the option to come up with new business models.

The Solution Is Tech Heavy, Data Heavy

Mark Suster's Web Second Applies To Instagram

Image via WikipediaSomeone also needs to shout Android!Android!Android! to them Instagram folks.

Kevin Shitstorm Of Instagram

Mark Suster: Web Second, Mobile First

In the long run it will not be an issue of first and second. Right now I am talking to a client who has this iPhone app in mind that I think would be great on all three platforms: iPhone, Android, web. I think I have convinced him, but now it is just a matter of money. If the money is tight he will start with iPhone only. My team will build him an iPhone app first.

Seven Screens

But then the real news here is Mark links to a blog post from Fred Wilson where Fred Wilson links to a blog post from me.

A friend was quick to note. And I was quick to pass that message on to Mark in his comments section.

Safe House
Getting To Meet Mark Suster In Person
Local Response: Monetizing On "Their" Behalf

I wish there were a few top tech entrepreneurs who blogged like Fred Wilson and Mark Suster do. As in, regularly, or at all. Where is Sean Parker when you need him?

John Borthwick Of Betaworks

Betaworks Shareholder Letter

Michael Jackson: Remember The Time

Via Ilyasah Al-Shabazz

Davos 2012

Livestream

Watch live streaming video from worldeconomicforum at livestream.com

Watch live streaming video from worldeconomicforum at livestream.com

Watch live streaming video from worldeconomicforum at livestream.com

Arkansas Dude

Google Should Get The Twitter Firehose

Image via CrunchBaseAll tweets are public. On Facebook many things are private. But that is not at all true of Twitter. So it makes absolutely no philosophical sense for Twitter to not give Google access to all tweets.

Twitter fundamentally misunderstands real time. Real time is not only real time as it is happening now, today. Real time is also real time as it happened in real time two years ago, two months ago. And I want access to all my tweets.

Twitter Should Open Up Its API ---- To Google

If Google were to have access to all tweets, it would show them in the Google search results. Maybe Twitter should make available only tweets that are at least 50 hours old. That I can understand. Because you don't want people doing Google searches for real time results. For that they should go to Twitter. But for all the old tweets, Google is best positioned to serve them to us. I mean, Twitter is not even trying.

Giving Google that access will suddenly give Twitter all this amazing real estate on which to serve big display ads.

Twitter, France And Germany

Image via CrunchBaseWhen I read these headlines I was like, oh no, China is at it again. Ends up the guilty parties are France and Germany. And we all know Twitter never was allowed to enter China in the first place.

Sergey Brin's Is The Right Stand

Twitter Blog: Tweets still must flow
The Next Web: Twitter isn't censoring you. Your government is.
technosociology: Why Twitter's new policy is helpful for free-speech advocates
Marketing Land: Twitter Now Able To Censor Tweets, If Required By Law, On A Country-By-Country Basis
Jillian C. York: Thoughts on Twitter's Latest Move
Boing Boing: Twitter caves to global censorship, will block content on country-specific basis as required

Something tells me there is going to be a ruckus.

Digital Dumbo