October 2010
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Way to die
I just learned by Dave that Chris Gulker died on Wednesday. (Somehow I missed the news at first pass.) I barely knew Chris, I knew enough to get that he was terrific guy, citizen, friend, photographer, blogger and much more. I don’t think it’s possible to die more consciously and graciously than Chris did. Dave’s… Continue reading
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The Data Bubble II
In The Data Bubble, I told readers to mark the day: 31 July 2010. That’s when The Wall Street Journal published The Web’s Gold Mine: Your Secrets, subtitled A Journal investigation finds that one of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet is the business of spying on consumers. First in a series. That same series is now nine stories… Continue reading
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The longer view
We have two iPhones in our family. Yesterday we traded in the older one — my wife’s first-generation model, bought in 2007 — at Radio Shack. They gave us $72.94 for the phone and charger, against $199 for a new 16Gb iPhone 4. We’ll probably trade our other iPhone, my second-generation 3g one, pretty soon too. Apple… Continue reading
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Food for re-thought
The summary paragraph of a great column by Tom Friedman: A dysfunctional political system is one that knows the right answers but can’t even discuss them rationally, let alone act on them, and one that devotes vastly more attention to cable TV preachers than to recommendations by its best scientists and engineers. Here’s a link… Continue reading
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Summer in the Fall
I took the picture above while I was crossing Harvard Yard yesterday. Pretty much captures the look and the mood of the region lately. It’s 72° on my back porch right now, 9 o’clock at night. It was another warm day here in eastern Massachusetts. While it’s snowing in Minnesota and raining everywhere else on… Continue reading
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Portrait of the artist as a young non-CEO
For folks interested in what makes Steve Jobs and Apple (same thing) tick, Being Steve Jobs’ Last Boss, in the current Bloomberg Businessweek, is helpful reading. It’s an interview of John Sculley by Leander Kahney of Cultofmac.com. Sculley had been a very successful president of Pepsico when he was recruited as CEO of Apple in… Continue reading
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I was overheard to have said…
Nice interview with Dan Levy of Sparksheet: From Part I: What opportunities does the widespread adoption of mobile smartphones present for VRM? This is the limitless sweet spot for VRM. Humans are mobile animals. We were not built only to sit at desks and type on machines, or even to drive cars. We were built to walk… Continue reading
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KCET’s brave move
I just learned by Craig Smith that KCET, the flagship PBS TV station in Los Angeles, is “going rogue.” Specifically, Craig says, “KCET will be dropping its PBS affiliation at the end of the year. That means if you live in Santa Barbara and want to watch the PBS NewsHour, Tavis Smiley, Charlie Rose, Antiques Roadshow or even Sesame… Continue reading
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Loose Links
So here are a bunch of tabs I just cleared off my browsers: Don Marti -> business -> ad targeting: better is worse? following up on Web ad targeting: can customers get a better deal? Robert Paterson: Three Wise Men. BBC: Sick PCs should be banned from the net says Microsoft LWN: Gilmore on the… Continue reading
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On trees that don’t grow to the sky
You could build a shallow history of computing by looking only at which company looked like it was taking over the world at any given moment. First there was IBM, then Microsoft, then Google, and now there’s Facebook. None of them ever did take over the world, and no one company ever will. It was… Continue reading
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Happy 42 Day
It’s 101010 today. In binary, that’s 42. It’s also the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. And, as it happens, our son’s 14th birthday. You can imagine how very cool that is. Continue reading
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The Business Movie
Went to see The Social Network last night, and thought it was terrific. Even though most of the scenes set at Harvard and Silicon Valley were shot elsewhere, the versimilitude was high. And,while it was strange to see the recent past treated as history, the story actually works, and carries truth, even if it doesn’t… Continue reading