January 2012
4 posts
NYCEDC: Hacking Green Data →
Starts this Friday night in NYC - via nycedc:
Go green with the Cleanweb Hackathon this weekend, where developers will hack together apps using energy and environmental data. The event kicks off Friday night with an icebreaker at the New York Academy of the Sciences, continues Saturday with an all-day, all-night hackathon at NYU…
Save the planet, one line of code at a time →
Cleanweb Hackathon via challengepostblog:
Want to change the world this coming weekend? Sign up for the Cleanweb Hackathon, which takes place Jan. 20–22 in NYC. Participants will build apps that tackle sustainability issues and resource constraints (issues related to energy, food, waste, water, and so on).
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
1 post
October 2011
2 posts
Obituary: the bookcase →
As much as I love my Kindle, I wonder how technology will replace the humble (or not so humble) bookcase’s other functions. Via motivatr:
Yet there’s no replacement yet for the expression one can make with a bookcase. Showing off what books you read tells the world your interests, politics, philosophy and even religion. It’s acceptable for any houseguest to peruse your bookcase and...
August 2011
2 posts
1 tag
“When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty...”
– Steve Jobs (via stewartmccoy)
2 tags
March 2011
4 posts
“We fly expensive semi-autonomous drones in the war on drugs and in Pakistan and...”
– Japan and Long Tail Risk - Continuations (via mikehudack)
“I think one of the difficulties of our present moment is that it’s difficult to...”
– Alex Steffen author of Worldchanging II (via poptech)
“I have always lived my life by making lists: lists of people to call, lists of...”
– Richard Branson (via entrepreneurwisdom)
February 2011
1 post
January 2011
2 posts
General Assembly: Three Reasons to Love This City... →
Congrats to General Assembly on their launch, not to mention this thoughtful blog debut:
By Mimi
“Despite the crush and the noise, I never tire of plunging into the crowd. I love the crowd as I love the sea. Not to be engulfed or lost in it, but to sail on it like a solitary pirate, content to be carried by the current, yet strike out on my own the moment it breaks or…
Stu Wall's blog: Good people don’t belong at a... →
stuwall on why hiring “good enough” people is a mistake for startups:
Outstanding teams have a multiplier impact, particularly at early stages. These teams will get good product out to market sooner, iterate faster, power through storms and attract more great people. These teams are more likely to hit the bimodal outcome that doesn’t involve lighting stock certificates on fire.
September 2010
1 post
“Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? Simple, Twitter gives...”
– Dave Winer: How to reboot RSS (via marco)
April 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Planes vs. the volcano
Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano’s ash cloud has many effects: creating stunning photos, stranding travelers, scaring horses (and even disrupting their semen shipments). Hotly debated by some has been the effect of the volcano on the earth’s climate. The grounding of thousands of flights per day surely represents a drop in emissions, but volcanoes emit CO2, among other gases,...
2 tags
Does complexity lead to collapse? - Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky’s new article The Collapse of Complex Business Models starts with the following passage:
In 1988, Joseph Tainter wrote a chilling book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. Tainter looked at several societies that gradually arrived at a level of remarkable sophistication then suddenly collapsed: the Romans, the Lowlands Maya, the inhabitants of Chaco canyon. Every one of...
March 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Visualizing energy subsidies
Image from Environmental Law Institute
Ecopolitology.org posted this visualization of the relative subsidies received by fossil fuels and renewables in the US over a six-year period. This is a helpful rebuttal to those who think that renewable energy is too highly subsidized.
However, like any visualization, it’s important to understand what has been omitted in the name of simplicity. ...
3 tags
Lotus inks deal with electric car startup (no, not...
The announcement today of the Lotus Evora 414E Hybrid at the Geneva Auto Show includes a deal between Lotus and an electric vehicle technology startup. As covered by earth2tech this morning:
EVO Electric, a U.K.-based startup developing a more efficient electric motor for hybrid and electric cars, will be getting a whole lotta attention in Geneva on Tuesday due to a major new partnership. The...
February 2010
6 posts
4 tags
"Batteries" of compressed air
While nanotech batteries, fuel cells and black boxes receive most of the attention, the most cost-effective methods for storing large amounts of energy are relatively down-to earth: pumped water and compressed air.
A compressed air storage firm, General Compression, announced today that it raised a $17 million round of venture capital. The basic technology is far from new. Essentially, it uses...
2 tags
The Bloom Box in context - how much is hype?
With all the current hoopla about Bloom Energy’s unveiling of a clean “power plant in a box,” it’s important to step back and look critically at the context in which this device is launching. An affordable solution for cleaner, efficient distributed power would indeed be game-changing, but two factors give me pause:
1) Cost: At $700,000-$800,000 each currently, this...
4 tags
Understanding the electric grid
With all the attention (and money) the smart grid has been receiving, it’s easy to forget that the American “dumb grid” is perhaps the most complex machine ever created.
As a first step in understanding the unseen underpinning of our modern electrical society, NPR’s interactive map of the US electric grid is a wonderful starting point: Visualizing The U.S. Electric...
3 tags
Sometimes reinventing the wheel is a good thing
By applying composite materials, widely used in lightweight vehicles, to the design of wheels for heavy vehicles, a Columbia University team has made it to the national finals of Walmart’s Better Living Business Plan Challenge.
[Their company] Composi-Tech – involves making significantly lighter wheels made of composite materials for large transport vehicles and buses, consequently improving...
3 tags
Progress towards a hydrogen economy? Sun + water...
Fuel cell vehicles are well and good, but the problem I’ve had with predictions of a hydrogen-based transportation economy is that of efficiency. How can we get cheap, abundant hydrogen? Making electricity from sunlight is inefficient on its own, further compounded by then having to use that energy in electrolysis to reach the ultimate goal: splitting water into its components.
A new...
1 tag
“For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
– H.L. Mencken, via @JPBarlow & Mike Perry
Web 1.0 Logo Mosaic
Web 1.0 Logos (Flickr)
“Netscape 3.0 Now!”
A recent mosaic of Web 2.0 logos prompted me to dust off my 1996-1999 collection of 88x31 buttons. Some are classics and some forgettable (I’d certainly forgotten about the “Now!” urgency of most of the buttons). The originals are mostly animated GIFs, which I’ve restored to their original blinking glory here.
December 2005
2 posts
Are founders necessary?
Conventional wisdom holds that nothing is more critical to a startup than its founders. A company’s founders are often glorified as the single essential ingredient in a successful business. What then of a company that isn’t started by businesspeople? I recently heard one perspective from Dan Ciporin, who was CEO of the price-comparison and product review site shopping.com until its...
Shanghai Bucks
From PE Week Wire: ”*** Best line I heard yesterday came from a VC who’s firm is exploring an investment partnership in China: “The lobby of the Shanghai Four Seasons might as well be Buck’s.”” Alas, I doubt the Four Seasons has got a proprietor to match Jamis MacNiven.
November 2005
2 posts
Why print magazines won't die: The Bathroom Theory
Ed Lewis, founder of Essence Magazine, spoke at the Yale School of Management last week about the challenges he faced as a black entrepreneur in the magazine business. When questions turned to the current competition from Internet-based media, Mr. Lewis stated firmly that print will continue to be around, since “you can’t take computers to the bathroom.” With e-paper moving...
When good things come from Newark
William Rosenzweig, founder of the Republic of Tea and a professor at Haas, believes that to be successful, an entrepreneur needs curiousity, courage, confidence, and commitment. Most ventures start with a seed of discontent, and in Rosenzweig’s case, the seed sprouted 30,000 feet in the air. On a flight from Newark, he spoke with his seatmate about their shared frustration of of not being...
October 2005
5 posts
The value of 12.5% of an MBA
Having finished my first set of midterm exams at business school, it’s a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned so far. Some of these things are reinforcements of things I once knew, but others reflect a new way of looking at the world: 1) Net Present Value is often an easy calculation, but no better than the underlying assumptions. 2) Business leaders realize that too few people...
Lessons in entrepreneurship - from a cat
Of the many qualities that make a successful entrepreneur, persistence is one of the most underrated. The web is full of good examples, but allow me to repeat and expand upon two metaphors I head recently: Watch a cat slowly slinking across the yard, creeping towards a bird, inch by painstaking inch. When he gets within a few inches from his prey, the bird takes flight and slips out of his...
The (Vicarious) Web 2.0 Conference Experience
For those of us unable to attend the Web 2.0 conference in SF last week, bloggers’ debriefings are the next best thing. So feel good about the $2800 you saved, and instead read a roundup of the highlights, as seen by one non-attending observer: Products with short, uniformly weird names (Squidoo, Zimbra, Rollyo, Joyent, Flock, …) Company presentations that came off (to some) as mere...
Yahoo's new advertising strategy - "Undefined"
I noticed this banner on Yahoo! Mail yesterday: Clicking on it brought me to an error page, unfortunately…
Bananas and PCs - What HP learned from Dole
Bill Gates is reputed to have said that “Intellectual property has the shelf life of a banana.” At least one company appears to be taking that message quite literally. It sounds almost like a joke, but today an executive of a consulting firm mentioned to me that the head of Hewlett-Packard’s PC division took his managers to visit Dole. He figured they could learn something...
June 2005
2 posts
Trichloranisole, Two-Buck Chuck, and Temperance
The last time I experienced a corked bottle of wine, I felt vaguely ill after drinking a couple glasses. Rather than risk i Standing over the sink with an inverted bottle glug-glug-glugging down the drain, I felt like a bizarro Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The lesson is clear. Charles Shaw should stop using natural corks in their $2 wine. Screw-caps are cheaper to manufacture, and do they really think...
The Temptation of Complexification
The title of this blog notwithstanding, complexification for complexity’s sake is an awful thing. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in application design. Yesterday, I was invited to participate in a “30-minute” conference call with the developers of a web-based application. An hour and a half later, I was still on the phone, listening as the application specs grew...
May 2005
4 posts
Nanotech is not an industry
Nanotech: “Hype or Reality?” Originally uploaded by complexify. I had the pleasure of attending a panel at the Commonwealth Club of SF last Tuesday entitled “Nanotech: Hype or Reality?” The participants were Joe Stetter of SRI, Mark Abumeri of Knobbe Martens, Paolo Gargini of Intel, Ron Mosso of NanoGram, and Warren Packard of Draper Fisher Jurvetson. For a...
Mr. Springer Goes To Oxford
Mr. Springer Goes To Oxford Originally uploaded by complexify. While flipping through cable channels last night, I happened to come upon VH1’s When Jerry Springer Ruled The World. What caught my eye was some very familiar footage. In fact, one of the shots was nearly identical to the photo I took above. In the spring of 1999, I was a student at Oxford, where I was involved with the...
Digital organization - Part I (Desktop Search)
In theory, it’s easier to organize digital data than paper files. Digital is certainly more space efficient, for a 3.5” hard drive can hold millions of pages filed in thousands of folders. However, finding and retrieving data has been much more challenging. One approach is to methodically systematically name and organize files in folders and subfolders, but this requires both...
Overcoming first post stage fright
I’m not normally afflicted by writer’s block. There’s something about the first post on a new blog, however, that is far more imposing than a blank sheet of paper. This resistance in writing for an online audience, I now realize, is not writer’s block but rather stage fright. Such a fear is irrational, of course, for a new blog’s audience can generally be counted on...
April 2005
1 post
New look
After some CSS work (of the trial-and-error variety), I’ve finally managed to get a three-column layout. Now I just have to tweak it to fix the colors and everything else. More soon…
January 2005
2 posts
Japanese businessman is tired
Very tired. As these mostly hilarious photos make clear.
Paperless paper snowflakes
Now there’s an easier way to make paper snowflakes, without all the dangers of safety-scissors and papercuts: Make-A-Flake (Thanks to Collision Detection for pointing this out.)
October 2004
1 post
Idea sites: food for entrepreneurial thought
halfbakery.com, thinkcycle.org, yet2.com, shouldexist.org, globalideasbank.org, totallyabsurd.com, ericzorn.com/ideaoven
February 2004
1 post
