Marc Hedlund

Marc Hedlund is an entrepreneur working on a personal finance startup, Wesabe where he is Chief Product Officer. (He also blogs at Wheaties for Your Wallet.) Before starting Wesabe, Marc was an entrepreneur-in-residence at O'Reilly Media. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Sana Security, co-founder and was CEO of Popular Power, a distributed computing startup, and founder and general manager of Lucas Online, the internet subsidiary of Lucasfilm, Ltd. During his early career, Marc was Director of Engineering at Organic Online, and was CTO at Webstorm, where he wrote one of the Internet's first shopping cart applications in 1994. He is a graduate of Reed College.

"Kind of Screwed"

Andy Baio's copyright run-in is an all-too-familiar story.

Andy Baio believed that the cover art used in a project was a fair use modification. The photographer for the original photo disagreed, and threatened Andy with a lawsuit.

Wacky Google/Verizon net neutrality theory

Nobody knew for a long time what Google and Verizon were cooking up on the network neutrality front, and after the release of their brief, two-page roadmap nobody still knows. All the usual Internet observers have had their say, and in general the assessment is negative. My first reaction was to ignore the whole thing, mainly because the language of the agreement didn't match any Internet activity I could recognize.

"Subscribers: 1"

I was blown away tonight to find that one of my favorite blogs has only one subscriber in Google Reader – me. How can this be? MADLEY (somewhat NSFW) is written by Cory Madley, a jewelry and clothing designer who owns a boutique in Venice, California. Each of her posts is almost completely visual – a compilation of (I take…

"If you don't vote, you can't bitch"

Once, many years ago, I was waiting in line at the Post Office on election day. One postal worker asked another if she had voted, and the second responded, "Hell yes, I voted. If you don't vote, you can't bitch, and I am not giving up my right to bitch!" I was thinking about that the other day when trying to decide whether to buy a new iPhone 4 or wait to see what happens with Verizon at some point in the future.

The iPad and immersive computing

Multitasking on the iPad could prove to be a limitation, not an asset.

The iPad apps and features that Marc Hedlund most looks forward to are those that make immersive computing experience more ubiquitous and useful.

37signals' "Profitable and Proud"

I love the idea of this new blog series from 37signals, "Profitable and Proud." The first post covers Campaign Monitor, a mailing list service. Having used Campaign Monitor for several companies, I can attest that it's a fantastic service with extremely responsive employees — like 37signals. The 37s are obviously furthering their point that venture capital isn't needed, and isn't…

The iPad and computing's middle ground

How much computing happens between the phone and the laptop? We'll see.

The iPad doesn't quite achieve full-fledged "embedded" status, but Marc Hedlund says it does move computers and networks closer to activities that so far have been difficult to reach. One simple example: Phil Schiller's demo of the iWork spreadsheet app, Numbers, in the iPad launch keynote showed a spreadsheet tracking a local soccer team. It's a great demo. Would you carry a laptop around a soccer field?

What brand of freedom would you like?

Apple's restrictions and Google's openness have more in common than you might think.

Apple is closed and Google is open, right? Not exactly. Marc Hedlund says Google is at least as restrictive about the data on its servers as Apple is about the apps in its App Store.

News from Appland

A look at the early momentum of iPad applications

Carsonified — a site that proclaims on its home page, “We’re hugely passionate about the web” — declared the death of the web this week in, “Bye Bye Web, Hello Apps.” The post makes the case for mobile apps, especially iPhone apps, and their advantages over web apps. I certainly won’t be calling web apps dead for a while, but I’m impressed by how much activity has been unleashed by the app world. Here are some stories from Appland this week.

The Second Netflix Challenge and Privacy Research

Okay, if you're just catching up with this story, go read this first — Netflix's announcement that it was canceling its second Netflix Prize challenge over privacy concerns. Next, head over to 33bits.org, blog of one of the co-authors of the paper on de-anonymizing Netflix users from the first Netflix Prize challenge data, to read the authors' open letter to…