"the long view" entries
Dollars for nothing and your LiveJournal (almost) for free
LiveJournal was bought by a Russian company, SUP. As I pointed out earlier, the weak dollar makes foreign investment much easier. For the sake of math, let's assume LJ is worth $1M. That's 25M rubles now, but would have been 29M rubles two years ago. Don't be surprised to see a few more of these international deals go down as…
Value of Public Data
It's long been known that the US Census Bureau's TIGER dataset bootstrapped the booming US geospatial industry. Many other countries haven't had free access to their public data, and this has correspondingly retarded their local geospatial industries. There was a fascinating article in The Guardian about the value of public data, containing this great line: The government's chief adviser on…
CO2Stats: Measuring a Site's Impact
CO2Stats is a widget that tracks and calculates the CO2 emissions of a website. The emissions add up with each pageview (the widget below is starting at 0.000198). The widget tracks all pageviews on its installed websites and currently reaches one million uniques a month. As mentioned in the San Jose Mercury " It works on the assumption that…
Tribute to honor Jim Gray on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley
A tribute to honor Jim Gray will be held on May 31st, 2008 at UC Berkeley. The general session is open to all, followed by a technical session reviewing a small fraction of Jim’s lasting contributions. Registration is required to attend the technical session. General Session Program 9:00am – 10:30am, Zellerbach Hall Opening Remarks – Joe Hellerstein A Tribute, Not a Memorial: Understanding Ambiguous Loss – Pauline Boss The Search Effort – Mike Olson Jim’s Impact on Berkeley – Mike Harrison Jim as a Mentor: Colleagues – Pat Helland Jim as a Mentor: Faculty and Students – Ed Lazowska Why Jim Got the Turing Award – Mike Stonebraker Jim’s Contributions to Industry I – David Vaskevitch Jim’s Contributions to Industry II – Rick Rashid Technical Session Program 11:00am – 5:30pm, Wheeler Hall (Registration is required) IBM/Transaction Processing – Bruce Lindsay Tandem/Fault Tolerance – Development & Effect of TPC/A Benchmark – David DeWitt DEC, Architecture, Memex and More – Gordon Bell Writing the Transaction Processing book: “Is There Life After Transaction Processing?”
Global Venture Capital
Continuing on from my post on the effects of the USD slump on Silicon Valley, I see today that Russia is creating a state-run VC fund. Leaving aside the inefficiencies of a state-run capitalist enterprise, this represents a huge pool of cash that may let Russian entrepreneurs stay at home instead of coming to the US. And as the US…
Exchange Rate and Silicon Valley
What does the ever-declining value of the US dollar mean for Silicon Valley? The US dollar has been emulating a brick lately. With housing prices plummeting, subprime fallout ongoing, and oil prices soaring, the general economic news is grim but for the occasional "the investment environment is still sound" noises. What does this mean for Silicon Valley? At the moment…
Facebook Kremlinology
As word comes out about other investors in Facebook, I find myself still thinking about the significance of the Microsoft investment. Steve Ballmer admitted at Web 2.0 (video, jump to about 20m in) that the advertising deal with Facebook doesn't make them money. So is he doubling down on the bubble? The valuation is staggering. Not yet AOL-level ludicrous, as…
If volunteer communities increasingly add value to business…
If value increasingly comes from communities of volunteers outside the compass of corporate management, isn't it only right to shift resources to support these communities? I think volunteers can be supported without being paid directly. If they know their work will be improved to be more useful and will have lasting value, they'll have more incentive to contribute.
Long Now: The Arguments for Nuclear Power
On this past Friday night, the Long Now Foundation's Seminars on Long Term Thinking offered a provocative session from Gwyneth Cravens and Rip Anderson entitled "Power To Save the World". According to Stewart Brand's email writeup of the session: In the early 1980s Gwyneth Cravens was one of the protesters against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island, and…
Fortune Mag Bullish on Technology
I was fascinated by the take on the tech industry in David Kirkpatrick's recent story for Fortune magazine: This Tech Boom Has Legs. While it's true, as Marc recently noted, that Web 2.0 appears to be reaching a bubble level of hype, Kirkpatrick nonetheless notes good prospects for the adoption of technology, especially because of emerging markets: The tech boom…