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.
The hunt for Jim Gray
This article on volunteers helping with the hunt for Jim Gray is interesting to read. I hope it helps find him; and maybe that the ad hoc efforts lead to something more permanent that could help others in similar situations. Update (from Tim). Charlie Catlett wrote on Dave Farber's IP list: "The Amazon Mechanical Turk team has created a site…
Farecast and Actuarial Modeling
I think Farecast's new Fare Guard service is really interesting. It basically seems like an actuarial model applied to a predictive technology, creating a new form of insurance as a result. That's neat….
Netflix "Watch Now"
I just noticed an AP article that says Netflix is launching "Watch Now," a way for you to watch movies delivered over the Internet: After accepting a computer applet that takes less than a minute to install, subscribers will be able to watch anywhere from six hours to 48 hours of material per month on an Internet streaming service that…
Amazon S3 is everywhere
Seems to me that everywhere I turn, I'm hearing about someone doing something cool with Amazon S3. Here's a collection of some of the things I've noticed. Jeremy Zawodny put together a great list of S3 backup tools. Two to note in particular are duplicity, which has an S3 backend and is in Debian stable, Macports, and Fedora; and JungleDisk,…
Four stories on why iPhone third-party apps matter, from a long-time Treo user
I mentioned earlier how disappointed I am to see that the iPhone will not support installation of third-party applications unless those apps are approved by Apple, and presumably distributed by Apple or Cingular. Merlin Mann continues to speak for me on the impact of this; I heartily endorse both his Digg-inspired assessment that this "does indeed suck monkey butt" and…
"Let OS X developers at the iPhone. Please."
I agree completely with every word in Merlin Mann's excellent post, "Let OS X developers at the iPhone. Please." Apple, you need to listen. As I said in the earlier Radar round-up, "Ten Things I Want From My Phone": [D]on't lock the platform. I never even thought about buying a sidekick because of this. If I can't install what I…
ETSY ETSY ETSY ETSY ETSY
I continue to be unbelievably impressed with Etsy (which is sort of an eBay for handmade items) and how creative they are in building their community. Their latest move made me giggle hysterically because I was so happy about it: A couple of months ago, Etsy leased its first ever commercial space in Brooklyn, NY. Being the creative folks that…
Daylife launches
Congratulations to my friends at Daylife, which launched this morning. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to the company and friends with several people there.) Upendra Shardanand, the founder, originally described the idea to me as "like IMDb for the news" — a way to browse through histories and connections of the people, places, and topics that make up news stories. It's…
Where news stories go to die
It's Friday, December 22nd, a few days before Christmas. U.S. streets are packed with shoppers rushing from store to store to complete their holiday plans. Next week, Monday is a holiday, and the week that follows is the quietest time of the year for the news. What better night than tonight to issue this report? The Homeland Security Department admitted…
The wisdom of the wisdom of crowds
News.com has a very interesting article about the use of prediction markets at Google, Yahoo (mentioning Radar's TechBuzz collaboration), Microsoft, and HP. The Microsoft section reinforces the research done at HP on this years ago, that the use of a prediction market to forecast business results helped expose information that people weren't willing to share directly with their bosses: The…