- Questioning University — my take on the issue of whether a university education (particularly CS) is still relevant or whether kids should go straight to startups. So what do I tell my kids? Should I urge them to go to university? Should I tell them to jack it all in and run off and join a startup? This is what’s occupying my mind now.
- Still Cripped by Free (Simon Phipps) — the freedoms of free and open software (the ability to use it for whatever you want, to improve it or give it to others who can then improve it) represent creative and financial independence. Fifteen years after open source and business really started to get dirty with each other, the misunderstanding is still widespread that it’s about price. Simon has a clear and robust essay about the latest UK procurement guidelines to show why price can be subverted in a way that freedom cannot.
- The Private and Social Costs of Patent Trolls — Using stock market event studies around patent lawsuit filings, we find that NPE lawsuits are associated with half a trillion dollars of lost wealth to defendants from 1990 through 2010, mostly from technology companies. Moreover, very little of this loss represents a transfer to small inventors. Instead, it implies reduced innovation incentives. (via BoingBoing)
- Facebook’s Teams and Use of Data — great talk by Adam Mosseri of Facebook, where he covers the composition of teams at Facebook, how they use data to make decisions, and when they don’t use data to make decisions. (via Bryce Roberts)
"startup" entries
Four short links: 17 November 2011
University Relevance, Free as in Dom, Patent Trolls, and Facebook Teams
The Daily Dot wants to tell the web’s story with social data journalism
A new media startup tries to mine the social web for stories.
The newly launched Daily Dot is trying an experiment in community journalism, where the community is the Internet. To support their goal, they’re applying the lens of data journalism to the social web.
The Daily Dot wants to tell the web's story with social data journalism
A new media startup tries to mine the social web for stories.
The newly launched Daily Dot is trying an experiment in community journalism, where the community is the Internet. To support their goal, they’re applying the lens of data journalism to the social web.
MagAppZine's goal: From PDF to app in about 15 minutes
MagAppZine looks to make mobile app creation easier for publishers.
The next TOC Sneak Peek webcast will feature Paul Canetti, founder of MagAppZine, a platform that allows publishers to create custom apps. Here, Canetti talks about starting the company and the benefits he sees for publishers.
Four short links: 16 August 2011
Doctorovian Keynote, Bagcheck Tech, Render Webpages, and Science Reading
- Cory Doctorow’s SIGGRAPH Keynote (BoingBoing) — the latest from Cory on reforming copyright.
- Bagcheck Technology — great list of services and systems used by the Bagcheck folks.
- Berkelium — library to render webpages via Google’s Chromium web browser. (via Joshua Schachter)
- Sci Foo Reading List — Edd Dumbill shared his reading list from Science Foo Camp.
What publishing can learn from tech startups
Todd Sattersten on how a startup mentality applies to the publishing world.
Author Todd Sattersten believes the publishing industry has a lot to learn from tech startups. Agile development, iteration and adaptation all have a place.
Support vs Access: Why Highlighter picked Seattle
A new tech-publishing startup chose Seattle over New York or Silicon Valley.
Seattle is where it's at, at least for the recently launched annotation application Highlighter. Co-founder and CEO Josh Mullineaux talks about the company, where it's headed, and why Seattle is home.
Creating the ideal conditions for tech startups
European tech entrepreneurs have concerns about startup environments.
Creating economic conditions that are beneficial to startups is increasingly important for governments. What are the factors that will attract and retain top talent?
Four short links: 30 June 2011
Buying a Micro, Education Entrepreneurship, Faceted Search, Vector-Graphics Scripting
- Electric Dreams – The 1980s ‘The Micro Home Computer Of 1982’ (YouTube) — from a reality show where a gadget-using family are forced to relive 30 years of technology invention, one year each day. This clip is where they’re forced to choose a microcomputer from the rush of early hobbyist machines in the 80s: Spectrum, Dragon-32, etc. (via Skud)
- K-12 Entrepreneurship: Slow Entry, Distant Exit (PDF) — paper (from the set I pointed to yesterday) laying out in start terms the difficulty of educational entrepreneurship. Keeping the lights on and a teacher in every classroom consumes most of the annual money spent on education so that little is left over to generate or try new tools, techniques or approaches. Out of every dollar spent on education in 2005, only 3.5 cents was spent on materials, tools and services. Subtract the big mandatory purchases of textbooks and annual testing, and one is left with almost no free funds to deploy creatively. With class size reduction and teacher incentive pay ramping up around the country, the pressure on these budget lines continues to increase, reducing the dollars available for investment in breakthrough tools and services.
- VisualSearch.js — MIT-licensed open-source JavaScript library for augmenting search-boxes with facets and values. (via DocumentCloud Blog)
- Here Be Dragons (Bryan O’Sullivan) — the thorny problem of printing floating point numbers. Prior to Steele and White’s “How to print floating-point numbers accurately”, implementations of printf and similar rendering functions did their best to render floating point numbers, but there was wide variation in how well they behaved. A number such as 1.3 might be rendered as 1.29999999, for instance, or if a number was put through a feedback loop of being written out and its written representation read back, each successive result could drift further and further away from the original.
Four short links: 16 June 2011
Solar Wireless Sensors, CSS Lint, Options Explained, and Web Hacks
- Solar Powered Wireless Sensor Network — Chris is building wireless sensor networks using open source software and hardware that could be used in a variety of applications like air quality or home energy monitoring. It looks like he was inspired by Tweetawatt and is using xBee and ASUS wifi for communication in conjunction with Pachube for data display. (via MindKits)
- CSS Lint — validate and quality check your CSS. (via Jacine Luisi)
- An Introduction to Stock Options for the Tech Entrepreneur or Startup Employee (Scribd) — nice introduction to board, stock, options, finance, dilution, and more.
- Interesting Web Hacks (Quora) — You can quickly run HTML in the browser without creating a HTML file: Enter this in the address bar: data:text/html,<h1>Hello, world!<h1> (via Alex Gibson)