"news from the past" entries

Baby's 60th Birthday

Radar's predictive sense is drawn from the 'wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst' as we seek to collectively surface the emerging trends of the technology sector. However, from time to time, it's appropriate to look back at the milestones that have shaped the digital industries which we all inhabit. One of these milestones falls tommorow in the Northern…

You Become what You Disrupt – (part two)

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users. This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop….

Everything I Knew About Metcalfe's Law Turns Out To Be Wrong

In the recent Release 2.0, which covers the next generation of CRM, I invoke Metcalfe's Law, which I've always understood to state that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users on the system." Well, maybe not. Release 2.0 subscriber Simeon Simeonov, a partner at Polaris Venture Partners, sent me a kind…

The Industry Standard is back. Why?

The Industry Standard ably chronicled — and, eventually, mirrored — the Internet boom that began a decade ago and died a few years later. (Disclosure: Despite its occasional excesses, I am honored to have been associated with the magazine.) After years of noticing that thestandard.com was still receiving ample traffic and — with one brief exception a few years back…

Marcel Proust, Alpha Geek

Tim recently sent around a recommendation for The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage's enjoyable look at a decidedly pre-Silicon Valley tech boom, although the inflated promises of that period (i.e., the telegraph will bring about world peace) remind us of some of the more outlandish dotcom-era claims. Tim's note about Standage's book (which I recommend as well) provides a good reminder…