From a comment thread over on Reddit:Check out the post here.
You think you know the situation. It's more complex than you think it is.
Short article at TechCrunch here. Choice quote:
Stuart Feigin, Oracle’s fifth employee says, ”There was no version 1 [of Oracle software] because everyone thought, well, no one buys version 1, it’s buggy. So we started with a version 2. Well, our version two was at least as buggy as anyone’s version 1…And I describe those early versions as the roach motel of databases. The data went in, but it didn’t come out.”
MG Siegler provides a mostly analysis free summary:
He noted that email is too cumbersome. There’s a subject field, a formal greeting, a closing. Teens are using SMS and IM because it’s much simpler. And that’s what Facebook is trying to add to everyone’s life, using email as the gateway drug, of sorts.
Highly astute comment in the ensuing comment thread here.
Complete article here.
See here Hopefully the stupid trope that the iPad cannot be used to create content will die one day.
WSJ quoting Best Buy CEO:
Mr. Dunn also said internal estimates showed that the iPad had cannibalized sales from laptop PCs by as much as 50%
Full story here
Fantastic talk given by Steve Blank from Startup Lessons Learned conference on the need to create an "entrepreneur school," to help one understand the process of keeping the lights on and finding initial customers, instead of conventional business school, which assumes you have already attained the state of large company.
Now the problem is, you can get a piece of advice telling you anything you want to hear. The problem I believe today, is not a lack of information, but a lack of a framework to take that information and to turn it into something that's actionable for you.
From an article over at Silicon Alley Insider:
Where did 2009's $500 million come from? Self-service ads, which appear on the right side of the screen on Facebook, accounted for about $250 million to $300 million.
The rest is split amongst engagement ads, a deal with Microsoft, and virtual goods.
Here's a good overview of OAuth over at Hueniverse. Choice quote:
There are many reasons why one should not share their private credentials. Giving your email account password to a social network site so they can look up your friends is the same thing as going to dinner and giving your ATM card and PIN code to the waiter when it’s time to pay.
This past weekend I had the pleasure of being a mentor for a team competing in the USC SS12 competition. SS12 is a weekend long coding event, organized around the theme of software aiding the disabled. There were 8 teams working on 8 projects (a few teams working on different instances of the same project) working against teams at UCLA.
This competition highlights the very interesting use of AI for aiding the disabled. All of the projects basically come down to using AI to stand in for a missing sense:
-Helping the color-blind see color. -Bridge between the deaf and the non (through a sign-language reading system) -Reading for the blind - My team's project
Reading currency, in particular. - here's an example of someone *else's* currency reader in action doing pretty much what ours (mostly) did. Here's the idea: someone who is visually impaired has difficulty telling what denomination US currency they're holding. The reason for this is that in the US, unlike other nations, all bill denominations are the same size. So, our task was to create something for your phone, which, when pointed at a bill, pronounces what denomination you're holding (see video for the idea in action).
We did this using the Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) algorithm. SIFT did the following for us: given an unidentified image, its key features are identified, and compared with the key features of images of US bills we have on file. The reference bill that returns the highest number of matched key features is returned as having highest likelihood of matching. Even if the image is rotated, crumpled, or otherwise messed with, SIFT is able to extract the essential elements that make that image unique.
Interestingly, we got the currency recognition working straight away, and spent the rest of the time struggling with the Android API.
On security issues with cloud computing:
You give your credit card to a waiter at a restaurant and they go in the back room with it. They could be running copies! If you buy something at Amazon, it's pretty damn safe, way safer than giving your credit card to somebody who you don't know, and them going away with it. I mean, think about what that's all about. And we're comfortable with that because we're used to it, but it's not safer than buying something online.