Netizen

Friday, September 10, 2010

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.

Thursday, September 09, 2010

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.

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.

Wednesday, September 08, 2010

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.”

StartUp Anxiety For FourSquare?

Image representing Foursquare as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase
I touched upon this topic in a blog post weeks back when Facebook Places just went live.

Facebook Doing Location Is Like Google Doing Social, Almost

In light of this New York Observer article (In Facebook's Crosshairs), I feel the need to elaborate a little.

New York Observer: In Facebook's Crosshairs: He didn't make the trip himself, sending in his stead Foursquare's new VP for mobile and partnerships, a fellow named Holger Luedorf, who spoke at the event for only a few minutes and made clear that Foursquare was not yet sure about the nature of its "partnership" with Facebook. ...... The next day, Mr. Crowley wrote on Twitter that his 86-year-old grandma had called him and remarked that this Facebook thing "sounds like Four-Squared, but without the fun." .... the New York City tech scene, which badly needs a major local success story ..... turning their fledgling service—currently at some three million registered users and growing by about 18,000 new users per day—into the city's first true social media juggernaut. ...... Crowley wants Foursquare to transcend its status as a niche mobile check-in tool, and to become the platform upon which all other check-in tools, whatever they turn out to be, are built. ...... —if you control the infrastructure, you control the market. We see the same thing with Twitter and with Apple." ...... "My personal view is, it's going to be huge—Facebook huge," said Hunch founder Chris Dixon, an investor in Foursquare who is not known for polite optimism. "They'll have a huge brand and a direct relationship with users. ... They absolutely could become the dominant platform upon which all check-in services are built." ........ "your favorite, er, mobile + social + friend finder + social city guide + nightlife game thing" ...... Facebook's apparent desire to become the dominant platform for check-ins did not worry him ...... We're developing this really deep and rich road map for what we're going to do ..... the implementation of Places would be good for Foursquare in the long run because it meant Facebook would be doing the hard work of popularizing the hard-to-grasp concept of check-ins—location-based and otherwise—while the Foursquare crew was left to innovate and figure out new ways to make them useful to people and the businesses that want to sell them things. ........ Where Foursquare has an admired—some might say tricked out —API, Facebook has so far released only a read-only version of theirs, which severely limits what developers can build on top of it.

It is perhaps relevant to mention another company that I blogged about recently: FoodSpotting. That is a bi-coastal startup. But it does have a major New York City presence. So I guess hometown pride is warranted. But perhaps bi-coastal is the future. You get the best of both worlds. And you prove geography is not that relevant.

FoodSpotting does not do bland check ins, it does a very specific type of check ins. Does that mean FourSquare will some day wake up and eat up FoodSpotting for lunch? I don't see that as a possibility. FourSquare just can not do what FoodSpotting does. That same logic for Facebook, FourSquare is even more true. Facebook does not have the option to become an experience for which checking in is your starting point. On the other hand FourSquare could make claim that the FourSquare social graph is much more real than the Facebook social graph. The truth is they are just different.

FoodSpotting Is The Next FourSquare

Even if Facebook had not done Places, there were no guarantees FourSquare would survive and do well and see an IPO exit - my personal recommendation to the company - but the real news from the Facebook Places launch was it gave FourSquare a visibility that it never had before. How is that depressing? There were more check ins on FourSquare that day than any other day in recorded history.

If I were FourSquare, I'd still be more worried about Gowalla than Facebook, although I'd work extra hard to work out just the right partnership with Facebook.

The FourSquare founders are brimming with ideas they want to execute, features they want to add. The real action for FourSquare is in the front, it is not in the rear view mirror.

I look forward to FourSquare burning up all its 20 million and getting ready to raise its next round. Sooner is better.

It is unrealistic to think Facebook could have stayed away from the location space. It is also unrealistic to think Facebook can become the leader in the location space if checking in is not the starting point of the Facebook experience, which it isn't. Facebook Mobile is mini me. Facebook is a big screen web experience, primarily.

New York Observer: Foursquare’s Happy Growing Pains: Crowley said the space shortage has been not just inconvenient but detrimental to Foursquare's evolution ..... "There are three or four big-ticket items we've been talking about all summer," Mr. Crowley said. "All the specs are written—they're waiting there, like half of the designs are done—but they just haven't been implemented because we don't have an engineer that could work on it full time." ...."Or when the lounge furniture started coming together, it was like, 'Whoa, real conference rooms, with chairs!'"

In The News

VentureBeat: Blog Platform Tumblr’s Soaring Traffic Brings Growing Pains: seeing massive traffic growth ..... skyrocketed over the first half of the year and reached about 1.7 billion page views in the month of August. .... WordPress.com, an older, more established blog platform, recently reported 2.1 billion monthly pageviews ..... Tumblr, which employs about 10 people ..... Six Apart, a blogging pioneer whose TypePad service competes most directly with Automattic’s WordPress.com, recently announced it is folding the simplified blogging service Vox, which never gained firm traction after four years of existence. ..... You can give this to somebody who can barely program a VCR and they can do a blog post in a minute.” .... you can find a whole lot more of value on a Tumblr page potentially than on a Twitter page.

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.”

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Got Wings?

Image by twm1340 via Flickr

Technology Review: Web Service Goes Date A-Mining: Unlike sites that rely on questionnaires, Wings tries to understand who you are by picking up the social media bread crumbs you leave online. ..... Wings doesn't ask you about yourself. It tells you. The service requires a Facebook account ..... All that data is fed into the service's recommendation engine. ..... Sunil Nagaraj, chief executive and cofounder of Triangulate, the company behind Wings. ..... The company raised $750,000 in July .... the density of one's social network turns out to be an important factor ..... couples tend to be well suited if they have similar percentages of friends from their own country versus other countries. It matters as well whether your Netflix rental or music playlist history tends toward the mainstream or underground. And couples that have lots of overlap in the types of people they follow on Twitter tend to match well ...... collecting and analyzing social data the way Wings does could be a new branch in the evolution of Web services that make smarter recommendations without having to be told something twice --or even once.

This comes across to me as the next wavelet for the social web's evolution rather than finally that it service that will find us all our soulmates that other dating sites or we ourselves can't. Relationships are mysterious things. Statistical analysis might show most white people go for white people, black for black, brown for brown, but recommending the same might reenforce a pattern that perhaps has been steadily breaking.

But it's good to see yet another startup taking a crack at online dating. Online dating sure is a growing phenomenon. A lot of people also in crowded cities like New York seem to find online dating preferable to meeting someone random at some bar.

It is not one or the other. What works for you works for you. It could be online. It could be offline. It could be a friend of a friend. It could be a perfect stranger.

Relationship building though you get to do on your own. There is not yet a site for that.

Technology Review

What's Next for the Netflix Algorithms?: more than 100 million ratings covering almost 18,000 titles from nearly half a million subscribers ..... combining lots of algorithms with machine-learning techniques might be a good approach to handling large datasets in general .... such algorithms could be applied in market trading, fraud detection, spam-fighting, and computer security

Can You Trust Crowd Wisdom?those ratings can easily be swayed by a small group of highly active users. ..... studied voting patterns on Amazon, the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), and the book review site BookCrossings .... In each case, they found that a small number of users accounted for a large number of ratings.

Digging a Smarter Crowd Instead of using the characteristics of articles to run its recommendation engine's algorithms, Digg's system is based entirely on calculating connections between users

Getting Computers Into the Groove Computers have revolutionized the production, distribution and consumption of music, but when it comes to recommending a good tune, they're still sorely lacking..... more automated methods of music search and recommendation could become important as on-demand music becomes more popular, and sites feel increased pressure to help users find new music...... while analyzing music using computers is "a very interesting and promising area of research," it will be hard to create a music search engine that's both general and fully automatic. "Music similarity is such a personal and variable thing," Crawford says. "Two heavy-metal tracks may seem highly similar to a classical-music expert like me, but entirely different to a heavy-metal enthusiast, who may in turn regard the music of Brahms and Tchaikovsky as very similar, which would be laughable to me."

Recommendation Nation The truth is that I now get more good recommendations about more things, more often, from Bayesian algorithms than from my best friends..... Better technology doesn't mean worse friends.