"talks" entries

Four short links: 13 April 2012

Four short links: 13 April 2012

Being Contrary, Microsoft Tools, JOBS Doom Warnings, and Fibre ROI

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 13, 2012
  1. Change the Game (Video) — Amy Hoy’s talk from Webstock ’12, on being contrary and being successful. Was one of the standout talks for me.
  2. Rise4Fun — software engineering tools from Microsoft Research. (via Hacker News)
  3. Why Obama’s JOBS Act Couldn’t Suck Worse (Rolling Stone) — get ready for an avalanche of shareholder suits ten years from now, since post-factum civil litigation will be the only real regulation of the startup market.
  4. Socio-economic Return Of FTTH Investment in Sweden (PDF) — This preliminary study analyses the socio-economic impacts of the investment in FTTH. The goal of the study was: Is it possible to calculate how much a krona (SEK) invested in fibre will give back to society? The conclusion is that a more comprehensive statistical data and more calculations are needed to give an exact estimate. The study, however, provides an indication that 1 SEK invested over four years brings back a minimum of 1.5 SEK in five years time. The study estimates the need for investment to achieve 100% fibre penetration, identifies and quantifies a number of significant effects of fibre deployment, and then calculates the return on investment. (via Donald Clark)
Four short links: 2 January 2012

Four short links: 2 January 2012

Finland Schools, Open Source Prezi, Debit Cards for Hackers, and Sensor Startups

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | January 2, 2012
  1. What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success (The Atlantic) — Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted. This is a magnificent article, you should read it. (via Juha Saarinen)
  2. impress.js (github) — MIT-licensed Prezi-like presentation tool, built using CSS3 3d transforms. I’ve never been happy with the Prezi because I fear data lock-in. This might be a way forward. (via Hacker News)
  3. Facebook Offers Debit Cards to White Hat Hackers (CNet) — paying vulnerability bounties without handing out cash. I figure it’s the start of a loyalty program. Will Facebook learn what the hackers spent the money on? Interesting possibilities opened up here.
  4. Green Goose — interesting startup selling consumer sensor hardware. My intuition is that we’re platforming too soon: that we need a few individual great applications of the sensors to take off, then we can worry about rationalising hardware in our house. The biggest problem seems to me that we’re talking about “sticking sensors on milk cartons” rather than solving an actual problem someone has. (“There are no sensors on my milk cartons” is not an oft-heard lament)
Four short links: 22 September 2011

Four short links: 22 September 2011

Feedback, Open Source Marketing, Programming in the Browser, and Twitter's Open Source Realtime Engine

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | September 22, 2011
  1. Implicit and Explicit Feedback — for preferences and recommendations, implicit signals (what people clicked on and actually listened to) turn out to be strongly correlated with what they would say if you asked. (via Greg Linden)
  2. Pivoting to Monetize Mobile Hyperlocal Social Gamification by Going Viral — Schuyler Erle’s stellar talk at the open source geospatial tools conference. Video, may cause your sides to ache.
  3. repl.it — browser-based environment for exploring different programming languages from FORTH to Python and Javascript by way of Brainfuck and LOLCODE.
  4. Twitter Storm (GitHub) — distributed realtime computation system, intended for realtime what Hadoop is to batch processing. Interesting because you improve most reporting and control systems when you move them closer to real-time. Eclipse-licensed open source.
Four short links: 18 April 2011

Four short links: 18 April 2011

Community, Metrics, Sensors, and Unicode

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | April 18, 2011
  1. Your Community is Your Best Feature — Gina Trapani’s CodeConf talk: useful, true, and moving. There’s not much in this world that has all three of those attributes.
  2. Metrics Everywhere — another CodeConf talk, this time explaining Yammer’s use of metrics to quantify the actual state of their operations. Nice philosophical guide to the different ways you want to measure things (gauges, counters, meters, histograms, and timers). I agree with the first half, but must say that it will always be an uphill battle to craft a panegyric that will make hearts and minds soar at the mention of “business value”. Such an ugly phrase for such an important idea. (via Bryce Roberts)
  3. On Earthquakes in Tokyo (Bunnie Huang) — Personal earthquake alarms are quite popular in Tokyo. Just as lightning precedes thunder, these alarms give you a few seconds warning to an incoming tremor. The alarm has a distinct sound, and this leads to a kind of pavlovian conditioning. All conversation stops, and everyone just waits in a state of heightened awareness, since the alarm can’t tell you how big it is—it just tells you one is coming. You can see the fight or flight gears turning in everyone’s heads. Some people cry; some people laugh; some people start texting furiously; others just sit and wait. Information won’t provoke the same reaction in everyone: for some it’s impending doom, for others another day at the office. Data is not neutral; it requires interpretation and context.
  4. AccentuateUs — Firefox plugin to Unicodify text (so if you type “cafe”, the software turns it into “café”). The math behind it is explained on the dataists blog. There’s an API and other interfaces, even a vim plugin.
Four short links: 28 March 2011

Four short links: 28 March 2011

Demo Talks, Twitter Analysis, Free Courseware, Open Source VoIP

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 28, 2011
  1. Anatomy of a Y Combinator Demo Day Pitch (Bryce Roberts) — lovely deconstruction of the basic six slide show, demonstrating exactly how to give a talk with your audience in mind.
  2. Who Says What to Whom on Twitter (Yahoo! Research) — we find a striking concentration of attention on Twitter—roughly 50% of tweets consumed are generated by just 20K elite users—where the media produces the most information, but celebrities are the most followed. One of the researchers is Duncan Watts of Small Worlds fame.
  3. Saylor Foundation Free Education Initiative — notes, readings, tests, that take you through the curriculum for real university courses. Important because most online education stuff is either lectures, or course notes, but never enough for you to autodidacticise. (via Regan Mian)
  4. Blink — A state of the art, easy to use SIP client available for Mac, Windows and Linux. SIP = open standard for voice over IP. (via Simon Phipps)
Four short links: 25 March 2011

Four short links: 25 March 2011

Passionate Virtuosity, Developer Relations, Beautiful Wikipedia, and Paper Recommendations

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | March 25, 2011
  1. Bruce Sterling at SxSW (YouTube) — call to arms for “passionate virtuosity”. (via Mike Brown)
  2. Developer Support Handbook — Pamela Fox’s collected wisdom from years of doing devrel at Google.
  3. Wikipedia Beautifier — Chrome plugin that makes Wikipedia easier on the eyes.
  4. science.io — an open science community. Comment on, recommend and submit papers. Get up-to-date on a research topic. Follow a journal or an author. science.I/O is in beta and is currently focused on Computer Science.
Four short links: 23 July 2010

Four short links: 23 July 2010

Reputation Systems, Faceted Search Tutorial, Video Utility, and Chinese Slang

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | +Nat Torkington | July 23, 2010
  1. 5 Reputation Missteps (and how to avoid them) (YouTube) — a Google Tech Talk from one of the authors of the O’Reilly-published Building Web Reputation Systems.
  2. Solr on EC2 Tutorial — the tutorial shows how to index Wikipedia with Solr. (via Matt Biddulph)
  3. clive — a command line utility for extracting (or downloading) videos from Youtube and other video sharing Web sites. It was originally written to bypass the Adobe Flash requirement needed to view the hosted videos..
  4. ChinaSmack — how to talk smack online in Chinese. (via BoingBoing)