"startup" entries

Four short links: 1 June 2011

Four short links: 1 June 2011

Fair Use, Equation UI, Startup Numbers, and Data Search Engine

  1. Putting Fair Use Forward (Chronicle of Higher Education) — lawyer and academic collaborating on guidelines for academic fair use, intended to remove the chilling effect of the fear of being sued. Great quotes: People deal with fuzzy laws all the time, she argues. “Obscenity is impossible to define, and yet people have some idea of when they’re committing an obscenity or not. You could walk through your life being haunted by the specter of litigation in every aspect of it. But people don’t usually do this in their other free-speech rights.” (via David Adler)
  2. Scrubbing Calculator — clever UI for solving equations without needing to know how to solve equations. Imminent death of mathematics skill in the US predicted, film at 11. (via Dan Meyer)
  3. Startup Genome — a report, written from research into 650 startups. Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A) Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
  4. Zanran — search engine for graphs, charts, and data. (via Pia Waugh)

Improving the landscape for organic startups

A congressional committee will hear a "crowdfunding exemption" proposal next week.

Next week, Sherwood Neiss will testify in favor of a small offerings exemption for investments, which could spark a revolution in grassroots entrepreneurship.

Four short links: 31 March 2011

Four short links: 31 March 2011

Historic Debt, Historic Naming, Autonomous Quadcopter, and Entrepreneurial Thought

  1. Debt: The First 5,000 YearsThroughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors. (via Tim O’Reilly)
  2. Know Your History — where Google’s +1 came from (answer: Apache project).
  3. MIT Autonomous QuadcopterMIT drone makes a map of a room in real time using an X Box Kinect and is able to navigate through it. All calculations performed on board the multicopter. Wow. (via Slashdot and Sara Winge)
  4. How Great Entrepreneurs Think — leaving aside the sloppy open-mouth kisses to startups that “great entrepreneurs” implies, an interesting article comparing the mindsets of corporate execs with entrepreneurs. I’d love to read the full interviews and research paper. Sarasvathy explains that entrepreneurs’ aversion to market research is symptomatic of a larger lesson they have learned: They do not believe in prediction of any kind. “If you give them data that has to do with the future, they just dismiss it,” she says. “They don’t believe the future is predictable…or they don’t want to be in a space that is very predictable.” […] the careful forecast is the enemy of the fortuitous surprise. (via Sacha Judd)
Four short links: 11 March 2011

Four short links: 11 March 2011

Mobile Data, Startup Ideas, Sci Foo, and Instapaper

  1. The Coming Mobile Data Apocalypse (Redmonk) — it is clear that the appetite for mobile bandwidth will grow exponentially over the next twelve to eighteen months. With high volumes of smartphones shipping, more and larger form factors entering the market, and the accelerating build out of streaming services, bandwith consumption is set to spike. Equally apparent is that the carriers are ill provisioned to address this demand, both from a network capacity perspective as well as with their pricing structures.
  2. Hamster Burial Kit and 998 Other IdeasFor Seth Godin’s Alternative MBA program, this week the nine of us came up with 111 business ideas each. But ideas are only valuable when someone (like you) makes something happen. What follows are our 999 business ideas, free for the taking.
  3. Sci Foo Short Videos — questions posed to Sci Foo attendees with interesting answers. I liked “What Worries You?”
  4. Instapaper 3 Released — all the features are ones I’ve wanted, which tells me Marco is listening very closely to his customers. Again I say: Instapaper changes the way I use the web as much as RSS did.

“Copy, paste, map”

The FCC and FortiusOne launch IssueMap.org, a citizen-generated mapping tool.

IssueMap.org, a new project from the FCC and FortiusOne, aims to convert open data into knowledge and insight.

"Copy, paste, map"

The FCC and FortiusOne launch IssueMap.org, a citizen-generated mapping tool.

IssueMap.org, a new project from the FCC and FortiusOne, aims to convert open data into knowledge and insight.

Four short links: 3 February 2011

Four short links: 3 February 2011

Commandline for Story, Dystopic Predictions, Studying Failures, and Two Great Tastes

  1. Curveship — a new interactive fiction system that can tell the same story in many different ways. Check out the examples on the home page. Important because interactive fiction and the command-lines of our lives are inextricably intertwined.
  2. Egypt’s Revolution: Coming to an Economy Near You (Umair Haque) — more dystopic prediction, but this phrase rings true: The lesson: You can’t steal the future forever — and, in a hyperconnected world, you probably can’t steal as much of it for as long.
  3. Why Startups Fail — failure is a more instructive teacher than success, so simply studying successful startups isn’t enough. (via Hacker News)
  4. Computer Science and Philosophy — Oxford is offering a program studying CS and Philosophy together. the two disciplines share a broad focus on the representation of information and rational inference, embracing common interests in algorithms, cognition, intelligence, language, models, proof, and verification. Computer Scientists need to be able to reflect critically and philosophically about these, as they push forward into novel domains. Philosophers need to understand them within a world increasingly shaped by computer technology, in which a whole new range of enquiry has opened up, from the philosophy of AI, artificial life and computation, to the ethics of privacy and intellectual property, to the epistemology of computer models (e.g. of global warming). I wish every CS student had taken a course in ethics.
Four short links: 7 January 2011

Four short links: 7 January 2011

User Experience, Big Data Case Study, DimDim Acquired, Secret to the Web

  1. Users Can Self-Report Problems — users self-report 50% of the problems that professional usability testing uncovers, and they find problems that usability testers don’t. (The other way to look at this is: self-reporting only finds half the actual problems in a site)
  2. The Learning Behind Gmail Priority Inbox (PDF) — challenges faced by Gmail Priority Inbox and how they beat them. Priority Inbox ranks mail at a rate far exceeding the capacity of a single machine. It is also difficult to predict the data center that will handle a user’s Gmail account, so we must be able to score any user from any data center, without delaying mail delivery(via Hacker News)
  3. DimDim Acquired by Salesforce — congrats to the founder, who was an OSCON speaker, and his team. The open source remains, but will not be contributed to by Salesforce. DD Ganguly, the founder, is a good smart chap and I look forward to his next project.
  4. WWIC — As Tim said when he forwarded this around: This is absolutely brilliant. Think deeply on it. Act on it. (via Alex Howard in email)
Four short links: 28 December 2010

Four short links: 28 December 2010

Amazon Records, Social Bookmarking, Female Founders, and CSS Framework

  1. Amazon Sold 158 Items/Second on Cyber Monday (TechCrunch) — I remember when 20 hits/s on a Sun web server was considered pretty friggin’ amazing. Just pause a moment and ponder the infrastructure Amazon has marshaled to be able to do this: data centers, replication, load balancers, payment processing, fulfillment, elastic cloud computing, storage servers, cheap power, bandwidth beyond comprehension.
  2. Quick Thoughts on Pinboard (Matt Haughey) — thoughtful comments, and an immediate and just as thoughtful response. (I am a happy pinboard user who is also looking forward to the social networking features to come)
  3. Female Founders — impressively long list of female startup founders. (via Hacker News)
  4. Less Framework cross-device css grid system based on using inline media queries. (via Pinboard)
Four short links: 22 December 2010

Four short links: 22 December 2010

Etherpad, Scala, Journalism, and Mazes from Ruby

  1. ietherpad — continuation of the etherpad startup. Offers pro accounts, and promise an iPad app to come. (via Steve O’Grady on Twitter)
  2. Scala Collections Quickref — quick reference card for the Scala collections classes. (via Ian Kallen on Twitter)
  3. Raw Data and the Rise of Little BrotherTurns out, despite the great push for citizen journalism, citizens are not, on average, great at “journalism.” But they are excellent conduits for raw material — those documents, videos, or photos.
  4. Theseus 1.0 — impressive source maze builder in Ruby contributed to the public domain. (via Hacker News)