February 2012
3 posts
And Then, Suddenly, It Works →
parislemon:
Chris Dixon:
An idea getting tried over and over tends to be a positive signal (which is one reason that competition is overrated). It’s very easy when you spend lots of time around startups to get cynical. You could tweet and blog predictions that every new startup will fail and how the ideas are derivative and you’d be right 95% of the time. The hard part – and what matters for...
And Then, Suddenly, It Works →
parislemon:
Chris Dixon:
An idea getting tried over and over tends to be a positive signal (which is one reason that competition is overrated). It’s very easy when you spend lots of time around startups to get cynical. You could tweet and blog predictions that every new startup will fail and how the ideas are derivative and you’d be right 95% of the time. The hard part – and what matters for...
And Then, Suddenly, It Works →
parislemon:
Chris Dixon:
An idea getting tried over and over tends to be a positive signal (which is one reason that competition is overrated). It’s very easy when you spend lots of time around startups to get cynical. You could tweet and blog predictions that every new startup will fail and how the ideas are derivative and you’d be right 95% of the time. The hard part – and what matters for...
January 2012
1 post
“That feeling,
when you reach into your pockets,
and realize you have nothing.”
– experience
December 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Weekend Projects - Rotten Netflix: Rotten Tomatoes...
Last weekend, I took a day to hack together an extension that injects Rotten Tomatoes reviews into the Netflix UI, so that you can easily see the critics’ ratings as well as Netflix’s personalized ratings.
Here are the links to the extensions for Chrome and Safari:
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bididflonamappcfophnbijljnfagepj
...
September 2011
1 post
6 tags
Building Apps On Top of Your Genome: OAuth For...
There’s an interesting TED talk up right now about the ‘Genomic Revolution’ (link to talk). The idea of the talk is that soon our genome will soon be so cheap to sequence, that it will become a key part of our ‘identity’ data. It will be used in providing personalized health care, but it will also be a core piece of data for other applications as well. Resnick...
August 2011
2 posts
“I will prepare and some day my chance will come.”
- Abraham Lincoln”
– Abraham Lincoln quotes
7 tags
App: Automatically Donate 10% of All Money In Your...
What if you could automatically donate 10 percent of all the money that comes into your bank account to charity? Would you do it?
This is one application I’ve been toying with building in my mind, but for the time being its more of a thought experiment than a real intention. Still, I think its interesting to consider this application from both the perspective of...
July 2011
1 post
Sometimes I Wish I Didn't Know
Over this past weekend I had some free time to catch up on TED talks and listen to some talks from iTunes University for inspiration (strongly recommend an amazing series of talks from the Stanford Entrepreneurship series - first time I’ve heard either Bill Gross or Jack Dorsey speak, and both of them made a strong impression on me).
Ironically, a lot of the things I’ve been thinking...
June 2011
5 posts
: Stock, Flow and why we are working on The Shared... →
thesharedweb:
I read an article today on The Shared Web, that discusses two types of value that you create from your work and uses them as a metaphor for media today - Stock (durable stuff - blog posts that can be read 2 years from now and still be useful) and Flow (status updates on Twitter that engage with…
“Truth is worthless without courage, and courage worthless without truth.”
– Experience
5 tags
10 Amazing SkillShare Classes I Will Teach
For those of you who don’t know me that well, or sadly haven’t had the chance to meet me, I’m really talented and amazing at everything I do. Thankfully, now there’s a new startup here in New York called SkillShare that lets you share your skills with the world, and more people will get to be some small fraction as amazing as I am. Hopefully you’ll get a chance to...
Facebook Connect + Facebook Payments = World...
Facebook is nearing 700 million users according to AdWeek, and in parallel, about 10,000 sites are adding Facebook Connect each day according to a December article. I couldn’t find the total number of sites that use FB Connect out there, but my guess is it’s in the millions (10k sites per day = 300k sites per month, if those statistics are well grounded). Anyways, the point is the...
5 tags
8500 Startups vs Skype
The recent Microsoft purchase of Skype for 8.5 billion dollars left a lot of people unhappy, and calling for Ballmer’s resignation as CEO. So, what could Microsoft have done instead of buying Skype? Well, what would happen if Microsoft invested 1 million dollars in 8500 startups, and gave them access to the distribution channels, expertise and technical resources that Microsoft has?...
May 2011
2 posts
bijan sabet: The real time vs the later web →
bijan:
Much has been written about the power of the real time web. it’s particularly powerful in a social and mobile context. I’m writing this post on my iPhone so I can’t link to it but i recall a great post by my friend john Borthwick on the realtime web that is worth re reading. I’ll add a link later.
10 Ways Tech is Changing Education (Part 3)
This is a continuation of a cursory overview on how tech is changing education, and what opportunities exist for startups in this space. Here’s the full bullet point list of what you may have missed:
Part 1
1. Online courses, video lessons, and lesson plans
2. Curation
3. Connections
4. Digital Textbooks and Visualization
Part 2
5. Online Problem Solving
6. Progress Tracking
Part 3
7....
April 2011
5 posts
5 tags
10 Ways Tech is Changing Education (Part 2)
This post starts where I left off last week: covering the 10 most important ways I think tech can impact education. I’ve been trying to identify these opportunities, and also brainstorm what types of startups can emerge in each of the areas.
Last week, I covered the first 4:
1. Online courses, video lessons, and lesson plans.
2. Curation
3. Connections
4. Digital Textbooks and...
3 tags
10 Ways Technology is Changing Education (Part 1)
Watching TED Talks, it seems like the most common theme is the paradigm shift that education is due for. The revolution in teaching and learning is two fold. On the one side it comes from new psychological studies about educational techniques, examining what works and what doesn’t. On the other side it comes from new possibilities on the technological frontier, that change the tools we have at...
Watchseawitchery:
I started out clicking strategically… and by the end was just wildly clicking and dancing in my chair.
biancavirina:
CLICK THE SQUARES.
THE WHOLE WORLD NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THIS.
THIS THIS THIS THIS!
2 tags
“About house prices: This is not a hockey stick.. it’s a ladder.”
– Kareem Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed Mohammed Fekry Amin.
March 2011
2 posts
6 tags
Subsidizing The Internet
I’ve been thinking a lot about whether or not there will be a shift in the way consumer content companies will make money on the Internet in the future. What services are a large number of consumers actually paying for on the Internet - Netflix, Pandora, Evernote, Rental Listings, maybe some task management tools, games? What else is there really? It seems most people are unwilling to pay...
“Every once in a while, amidst our petty wars and squabbles with each other,...”
– Juan Cole | Earthquake/Tsunami reminds us of Futility of War (via ericmortensen)
February 2011
3 posts
Consumption vs. Production
What’s the right balance between production and consumption of information?
They should cut you off after you’ve consumed some amount and say - that’s enough good sir, you’ve got enough material so go and produce something.
It’s gotta be a constant dance between divergence and convergence.
Let’s make an exchange economy for information too - what would happen...
: First Day Of Beta Invites - And New Features →
thesharedweb:
Hey Everyone,
Thanks so much to all the people who came to check our our site today after the first round of beta invites. We really appreciate all the great feedback we’ve been getting. We’re hard at work pushing new features into the system, and you should notice things getting updated every…
January 2011
2 posts
Predicting Stocks Via Twitter - Sun Spots and...
I just saw this article about doing sentiment analysis on Twitter in order to predict stocks (and I put these thoughts on TSW first because that’s where I posted the article):
Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market
This was the other idea that Kareem and I were talking about working on before we started working on The Shared Web. We wanted to do sentiment analysis on Twitter, and on the...
3 tags
Graph Theory: Who Knows Who?
Next to no one reads this blog, so I decided to brain dump some thinking I’ve been doing recently about social networks and graph theory. I’m working on a product called The Shared Web - which is all about content curation leveraging the power of social networks. While thinking about this, my economics background led me to the following question:
Assume that I have limited time and therefore I can...
December 2010
6 posts
Labmda: Your thoughts in bytes →
kareemamin:
I recently read in a book on speed reading that one of the reasons you may daydream while listening to someone speak, is that invariably thought is faster than speech. The author went further and boldly estimated that on average you think at about 400 wpm vs speaking at 150 wpm. This got me…
Google's OS Anti-Trust: History Repeats Itself?
We are moving towards a world where the traditional OS is replaced by the browser, with Google spearheading this transformation in computing paradigm.
I was thinking yesterday about different applications that could be built for the new cloud operating systems, and then I realized that I would have a hard time competing with whatever applications/services Google bundled natively with their...
“Latency: How quickly are transactions supposed to return success or failure?...”
– Facebook | The Full Stack, Part I
November 2010
5 posts
Turn Web Pages Into Services!
UPDATE:
Just came across a Mozilla proposed standard for doing something similar to what I was proposing in this article (should be implemented in newer browsers):
https://developer.mozilla.org/En/DOM:window.postMessage
—————————
I’m currently working on doing communication between cross-domain iframes, and if anyone has done this...
“An authentic choice at one point in time, is less important than authentically...”
Yo - Photoshop is CRAZY!
You know what people don’t talk enough about? Content aware fill in the new photoshop!
Watch this video to understand the madness:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NH0aEp1oDOI
Simply highlight something that you don’t want to be in the picture, let’s say a plane in the sky, and it replaces it with what it approximates the natural background would look like without it.
This is...
Why Instagr.am Is Successful - Make Art Easy
If you haven’t already played with instagr.am, it’s an application that lets users take photos on their iPhone and apply artsy filters to them. The filters make the photos look way better than they originally do. Then they also make it very easy to share the photos out to existing social networks with ease. The app reached 500,000 downloads in it’s first month, and although...
June 2010
4 posts
Seattle JS
Last week I attended my first SeattleJS (Javascript) event. This is an event for programmers in the tech community to get together and share knowledge around javascript.
They’ve only had 2 events so far, the first one being all about node.js (Server-side Javascript - here’s an intro talk about node ). Node.js seems to be what the Javascript community is buzzing about right now, and...
The Problem with Focus Groups
If Facebook had concept tested their newsfeed with users 4 years ago when it first came out - odds have it, they would have immediately shot it down. Judging from the backlash it generated, if Facebook trusted in focus groups or in the prescience of their customers, they would never have built what is arguably their core distinguishing feature.
Similarly, Apple, who is known for it’s...
Detect Google Chrome Plugin Version
We have been developing Chrome extensions, and I thought I’d share how we solved a problem we faced.
We needed to be able to detect what version of the plugin was connecting to our servers. If we change our backend, we want to be able to say that older versions of the plugin which are no longer compatible need to update. The chrome API doesn’t offer any way to detect the version directly.
...
Back to Blogging
Once upon a time, not too long ago, I tried to blog.
In particular, I tried to blog about philosophy, and how technology was interacting with the way I thought about philosophy. I would consider those attempts a major FAIL (there was no FAIL blog at the time). My writing was convoluted, my blog posts were long enough to put War and Peace to shame, and I stopped after about 4 articles. There...