Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Jason Schuller on Promising Solutions for Simple Websites and Blogs about our just-launched first product Barley: Barley is already beautifully branded and is dubbing itself as a “this-generation content editor” which I have actually bought into just from the teaser. From what I’ve read, it will be a hosted solution geared toward non-technical people (in other words, an actual human-usable website…
I try to get to the Keystone Observatory at least twice a year in the spring. It is only a few miles from our home and a great way to think about all things extraterrestrial. Last night I took my nephew Ethan. We saw Jupiter with four of its moons (one of which was transiting Jupiter), Saturn and two of its moons, Castor and Pollux (binary stars part of the Gemini constellation),…
Bijan Sibet: For as long as I can recall, both as an entrepreneur and a vc, startups have been asked to pay their investors legal expenses related to their investment. Whether the company raises $500k or $5MM it has become “standard” that the company foots the investors legal bill. I didn't understand it then and I still don't…
Fred Beste, on Ben Franklin TechVentures in Bethlehem, puts it best: I am not aware of any facility that matches this place. I’ve stated it this way: This is the building that every mayor wishes were in his city. It doesn’t get any better from an economic development standpoint. This is where you get the intellectual property, high-growth, high…
Jake Lodwick, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, writes about how poorly the acquisition process can go and how it seems to happen over and over and over in our industry in An acquisition is always a failure: The party ended in 2006, when we sold our company to IAC, a conglomerate owned by media mogul Barry Diller. Bit…
Jim Ray reviews Twitter #music: Tellingly, you can’t get to a musician’s tweets from within the app to decide whether you want to follow them based on the content of their stream, you’re just supposed to follow all of your favorite musicians and be in awe of their celebrity, I guess. Yesterday I tweeted that while Twitter #music looked nice it was…
From Dark Sky Company, the guys behind the relatively new web app Forecast, comes a great post about how web applications can perform as well as native applications: Granted, some apps must be native: OpenGL-based games, for example, or apps that access hardware capabilities that are not yet exposed to the browser (a shrinking list); but I don’t buy the argument…
Alex Hillman is one lucky guy: I’ve been to Australia twice in the last 12 months. Three different cities. All for coworking related activities. Sounds like great fun but he also has brought back what he's learned from his experiences down under for all of our benefit. Which goes along great with my How to tear break down the…
I just spent a few minutes playing around with Medium, a new "system for reading and writing", created by the makers behind great services like Blogger and Twitter. It was extremely validating to see that some of the decisions that were made by the amazingly smart and talented Medium team ended up being some of the same decisions we…
My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk chose your's truly as #4 of 19 people he thinks should be followed on Twitter. He says of me: his new project is something that I think has the real chance of blowing up in 2014. Keep an eye on him. I think he’s a great follow and someone who’s always been quite…
Me, in December of last year: Now they need to take a queue from Instagram (and many other modern mobile apps) and start uploading the photo immediately, rather than waiting for the user to click “done”, so that it seemingly uploads instantly. Flickr blog, yesterday: Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to…
Chad Dickerson, like many of us that run companies, gets a lot of solicitation via email. Some good. Most bad. He decided to do something useful with his response to one: I decided to write him back with some advice. I’m publishing my response on the hope that it will help salespeople produce better pitches (which will thereby…
As you may have guessed from the lack of posts, I'm busy. After leaving Viddler and taking some time to get things in order; I'm busy building Plain, Plain Space, and our first product Barley. Barley has been a smash hit and it isn't even publicly available yet. We've been overwhelmed by the response. We've had interest shown…
Dan Frommer recently said this about Foursquare's usefulness: The broad, public perception of Foursquare still seems to be that it’s all about being the mayor of some bar, or something useless like that, which actually hasn’t been the company’s focus for a long time. But it is a little hard for someone who only knows the old Foursquare…
There is no shortage of opinions on this topic but Wayne Barz takes a pretty good approach to answering, or not answering, the question How much should I raise? I certainly can’t answer your specific “how much” question in a single 1,000 word blog post. But I will suggest there are only three main buckets in which to…
Nick Bilton of The New York Times: In its headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., Apple is experimenting with wristwatch-like devices made of curved glass, according to people familiar with the company’s explorations, who spoke on the condition that they not be named because they are not allowed to publicly discuss unreleased products. Such a watch would operate on Apple’s…
Please do not be alarmed if you've noticed that I have unfollowed you on the Twitter. It isn't because I do not like you. It is, again, because I'm refactoring the way that I handle Lists on Twitter. The unfortunate consequence of this most recent refactoring, though, is that if you have a private account I may no…
Tantek remembers Aaron's encouragement to blog ideas and solutions: But the larger point here is that he turned a rant into a positive action. He challenged me to do something about it, to blog what I'd figured out, to provide a clear constructive encouragement instead of just a criticism. And.. If you believe something passionately, you should blog…
In a world where hitting 10, 50, and 100 million users seems to be the goal it is nice to see that a service can be a massive success at a fraction of that scale. GitHub just hit 3,000,000 users and their growth rate is still on the incline: This latest batch of one million amazing developers joined…
Remember Andrew Kim? The guy that rebranded Microsoft for free. Well, now he's going to work there. I can’t talk about the details of how things fell into place but the choice became obvious. I'll be designing for Microsoft as of summer. I promise that I’ll make the my greatest work ever while I'm there. Web creative types…
Alex Stamos: I was the expert witness on Aaron’s side of US vs Swartz, engaged byhis attorneyslast year to help prepare a defense for his April trial. It is an interesting read.
That is a lot of Earth-sized planets. A lot. For instance, look at what NASA estimates for our galaxy alone: Since the Milky Way has about 100 billion stars, there are at least 17 billion Earth-sized worlds out there. And then there are the countless billions of galaxies besides our own. I wonder if we'll ever make it…
Aaron Swartz, who tragically committed suicide yesterday, in an interview from 2007 when he was just 20 years old: If you talk to any woman in the tech community, it won’t be long before they start telling you stories about disgusting, sexist things guys have said to them. It freaks them out; and rightly so. As a result,…
DHH: If you’re not committed to your life’s work in a company and with people you could endure for decades, are you making progress on it? Yes. I am.