Month: February 2017

I spent this summer in Silicon Valley as part of the NewMe Accelerator. NewMe is the first Accelerator program focused on African-Americans. I had an absolute blast in California connecting to incredible mentors like Mitch Kapor, Ben Horowitz, Vivek Wadhwa, and, in my own way, both absorbing insight from, and, as the old man of… Read more Arrington, Race, and Silicon Valley

Ok, so were finally getting down to it. On at least two fronts, Apple has now essentially thrown out its draconian rules on what developers can and cannot do on its platform, and replaced them with essentially, no rules. The new “rules” appear to be, “its OK to do what you want in your app… Read more Apple fears the killer app

Today Apple announced a version 4 their iPhone OS. It seems to answer most of the open issues relating to the platform. All sounded good. But then, John Gruber over at Daring Fireball discovered a “hidden gem” in the new developer terms. here they are: 3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the… Read more Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad

Last night I wrote about Steve Jobs insane 3.3.1 section in the new iPhone developers license which Jon Gruber discovered here, and I just want to clarify something. People are writing that this is a ban on Flash, and cross platform tools. It is, but that is not what I am concerned about. 3.3.1 not… Read more Jobs Bans Non C Libraries. Insane Restraint of Trade

Roughly speaking the world’s economy has always worked as a giant pass-along-game between the planet’s citizens. Person A needed stuff from person B and person B needed stuff from person C and person C needed stuff from person A. So everyone needed everybody. It has been a kind of giant circle of needs. But as… Read more The problem with the economy: you aren’t needed any more

At my company, Kloudshare, a big part of what we are developing involves pushing boundaries of what browsers are expected to do. Generally speaking this is the case industry wide as the web browser is becoming more and more a real application delivery system. Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some… Read more Who cares about Chrome. IE6 Has 25% Market Share

Today Lehman is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and Merrill Lynch is being bought for chicken feed by Bank of America. The Wall Street sky is falling. but what does that mean to tech companies, and particularly to startups? The last five or six years have been all about community, “social media” and other… Read more Web Meets World (a.k.a. Web Meets Money)

Ok, this is only half a dig. Jakob is one of the most respected writers and thinkers about user interface on the web. He is clearly bright, and he writes intelligent and useful things. In fact I quote Jakob and reference his work all of the time. But I find his site unreadable. It hurts… Read more UI Guru Jakob Nielsen’s Site Is Unreadable

For some time now my team and I have been working on a new web service called Kloudshare. This is not a product announcement, but I mention it because it provides context for what I have on my mind. Kloudshare is a graph database platform implemented as a web service. The concept of a graph… Read more Memo To The Semantic Web: Drop “Semantic” And Become The “Graph Web”

For some time now my team and I have been working on a new web service called Kloudshare. This is not a product announcement, but I mention it because it provides context for what I have on my mind. Kloudshare is a graph database platform implemented as a web service. The concept of a graph… Read more Memo To The Semantic Web: Drop “Semantic” And Become The “Graph Web”

There is obviously lots of discussion about copyright around things like music and video on the Internet, but another area that is going to be very important that is only recently getting attention is the ownership of comments. This issue came to the fore recently when Robert Scoble commented on a post from Rob La… Read more Who Has Comment Copyright Ownership In A Disqus Era

This weekend there has been a fair amount of talk about the idea that Twitter is too important to be relied on as a centralized, non fault-tolerant platform. Both Dave Winer and Michael Arrington at TechCrunch are talking about the problem and how to fix it. The argument is that Twitter is not distributed. This… Read more Killing Twitter Before It Can hurt Us

Update: I have written a follow up to this article which is here. Today Adobe announced the public beta of a new Flash Player that is going to change the way we all use the Internet. More importantly, the new player changes the economics of the Internet. Interestingly the two really key features are not… Read more Adobe Introduces P2P Flash Player, Kills CDNs

I have said it before. Commenters over at CenterNetworks said I was crazy. They extolled the virtues of the market leading YouTube. But the numbers don’t lie. A year and a half later, Google can only muster approximately $1 CPMs from advertising on YouTube. This is stunning. Most advertising on YouTube is not monetizeable so… Read more The Stats Are In. YouTube Really Is A Turd

I believe it should be possible to start a small business and to have a small number of profitable customers, and to earn a living. From there, it should be possible to work hard, and to grow your business into something substantial. Until recently, this was the American way, and it applied to technology as… Read more Free is Killing Us. Blame The VCs

I have been interested in truly open developer friendly phones with the real capacity to support interesting applications since the announcement of the OpenMoko open source phone project. This is about a year and a half ago. Since that time, I have discussed and commented a lot about phones, and the various players, and one… Read more U.S vs. E.U. / iPhone vs. Nokia

Last week Apple opened up the iPhone and introduced a software developer’s kit (SDK) to allow third parties to develop software for the iPhone. This was a great step forward in that Apple had, for some significant period of time, suggested that writing software within the browser environment was sufficient, and that no native developer… Read more Apple’s iPhone SDK Prohibits Real Mobile Innovation

The relational database is becoming increasingly less useful in a web 2.0 world. The reason for this is that, while the relational database model is great for storing information, it is horrible for storing knowledge. By knowledge I mean information that has value beyond the narrow current conception of the given application. I mean information… Read more The Death of the Relational Database

Today Adobe is announcing the official release of Adobe AIR and Flex 3. While these announcements are not really news in that the products have been in beta, and usable for a year, today seems a good point in time to mark the official end of the Windows era. With AIR and Flex, What Adobe… Read more Adobe Introduces Windows Killer

Update: I have posted some of my additional thoughts and critiques 😉 in my most recent post: “Mitch Kapor’s Weekend at Bernie’s.” Yesterday I received an email that I have been anticipating would arrive at any time. The Open Source Application Foundation, creators of the collaborative PIM Chandler, announced that Mitch Kapor, its primary financial… Read more RIP Mitch Kapor’s Chandler

Marketing is still primarily perceived as a fuzzy touchy feely discipline. But the Internet is bringing this to an end rapidly. In ten years our current perspectives on this will seem quaint. Marketing will be much more like what Wall Street quant guys do. Everything will be math. There will be few “soft” taste judgments.… Read more In 10 Years, Marketing Will Be Taught In Engineering School

 In the last few years, phones have typically been categorized as either “smartphones” or “feature phones.” Smartphones are really just better phones. Conversely, the feature phone label is a particularly unfortunate euphemism for “crappy.” Thankfully, soon the category known as “feature phone” will begin to fade away. This is because most of the basic system… Read more THE END OF THE FEATURE PHONE. MARKET SHIFTING.