Posts filed under 'Internet & Technology'
Over the last 2-3 months, a lot of people have been watching my tweets and listened to my various conversations wondering what exactly I’m up to. I haven’t been able to say much, but can now finally talk about it. Biting lips for this long has been tough, but I can finally say I’m heading up Singularity University – some great coverage from TechCrunch and CNet (among others).
I’ve been fascinated with innovation and growth for many years, and my experience at Yahoo building and running Brickhouse was very foundational. Analyzing thousands of ideas, putting together great teams and working with some of the world’s best engineers to launch cutting edge products was a hell of a privilege. While at Yahoo, I established an important relationship between Brickhouse and NASA, which led to an invitation to the founding meeting of this initiative.
Once there, I was pretty well hooked. The vision that Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis laid out was extremely compelling: Fundamentally, the world is facing some very large challenges and the technologies identified by Ray can lead to scalable solutions to address these global issues. Add to that the interdisciplinary expertise brought by Peter’s experience and it was too much to pass up. They only had to ask once.
The full press release is here.
Great innovation almost always happens when two disparate concepts are brought together. At SU, we’ll be bringing together dozens of experts across several distinct, accelerating technologies and letting them think about some of the grand challenges facing humanity.
A well-publicized example is 3D organ printing. Scientists are combining 3D printing with stem stell research to ‘print’ human organs. And that is one idea…
February 3rd, 2009
As part of a new project, our team was donated some G1 Android phones to play with. Already being a T-Mobile customer, it was a no-brainer to play with it for a couple of days and I got to put the phone through its paces. Here’s what I discovered when comparing it to my Blackberry Curve (readers of this blog are no strangers to my endless attempts to optimize my mobile experience)…
SETUP
=====
Moving over to the G1 was very simple given I’ve been using a lot of Google services. I have Google Sync on my BB, so my contacts and calendar are already online and I use Remember The Milk for task (mis)management, so that was also easy. I was up and running in less than 5 mins, including IMAP setup
THE PRO’S
=========
- the G1 is intuitive and easy to use with an excellent interface
- the keyboard is surprisingly good and not having to hit ’shift’ for periods or numbers is huge – I could actually use this for medium-heavy typing efforts
- I downloaded a few apps and they worked really well. The big draw for me was Skype (worked well) and tethering (which I didn’t finish configuring)
- screen is awesome – very bright
- browser is awesome – very thorough and easy to use
- GPS! Fabulous (easy to update FireEagle)
- youtube on the phone – excellent
CONS
=====
- profile – bigger and heavier than my Curve
- battery life (SUCKS!) – big problem – lasts a half day with heavy use
- sliding open and turning sideways everytime I have to type – slight hassle and requires two hands
- calling someone requires way more clicks (and often, both hands)
SUMMARY
========
The Curve is totally optimized to be a great, great phone/email tool and other stuff (music, video) is secondary. The G1 is great for rich media but clunkier as a phone/email tool.
Overall, I’m sticking with the Blackberry for now as I make a lot of calls and emails and doing that really well with a whole day of battery life makes a big difference for me. But I will continue to play with the G1, and if I can get tethering working, then will carry it along on trips.
January 18th, 2009
Wow – when it rains it pours. After eight years of Bush drought we finally get a big relief – first Obama runs away with the election and now I just heard that he’s appointed Sonal Shah to his inner circle.
I first met Sonal in 2003 at the awards gala where she was appointed India Abroad’s Person of the Year for founding Indicorps. Then she then came out to California to run a big chunk of Google.org and we were housemates for most of last year, during which we became very good friends. I haven’t seen her much recently as she’s been heavily involved helping with the campaign, so was taken quite unawares with this fabulous news.
I am, however, not at all surprised. Sonal is an extraordinary choice. She’s dedicated her life to social causes and philanthropy and is one of the wisest, brightest, most energetic people I know.
Certainly if I were President I’d have her in my inner circle 
)
Go Sonal!! The full story is here.
November 10th, 2008
On my second last trip to Ireland, Pat Phelan, one of my favorite bloggers, bounced into the speaker’s dinner, handed me a SIM card and bounced right out again. Pat runs MaxRoam, a disruptive new telecoms play. On my recent trip, I put it through its paces.
WHAT IT DOES
MaxRoam helps avoid international roaming charges. Simple.
HOW
They put multiple numbers (all land lines) on the same SIM card. For instance, I have numbers for the U.S, Ireland, UK and Germany. If any of those numbers is called, my phone rings, wherever I am. I pay the local 25 cents (or whatever) charged by the local carrier. It costs 3 euros per month per number and you prepay the service. The SIM costs 25 euros. (Disclosure: because I’m an honorary Cork man, Pat gave me the SIM for free with a bit of credit to play with).
THE PROS
- being landlines, it’s cheap for people to call you
- you can get a new number right from the website and it works instantly (amazing)
- you can forward (for free) any of your numbers to a local landline OR a local mobile and nobody pays. Outside North America, this is monstrously cost-saving as the caller usually pays (a fortune). Here, Maxroam swallows the costs.
- 5 cent SMS worldwide (I didn’t test this)
THE CONS
- you can’t put your current number onto it (but you can forward your number to it)
- forwarding usually works, but occasionally it took 2-3 tries when I used it
- lots of numbers to think about
- you need a totally unlocked phone (I used an old Nokia)
- not the greatest website in the world (but who cares, it works)
OVERALL
After a bit of fiddling to get used to it, I’m hooked. I totally loved the service – can’t imagine traveling without it. Being able to forward a 212 number to a UK mobile and talking for hours for no charge internationally on a mobile was fabulous. I worked out I saved about $185 in my two week trip. The cost for my two weeks of rather frequent calling was about 14 euros. I’m hoping he adds a data service soon.
I think Pat is onto something really huge here. The addressable market for international roaming is monstrous, and creating an MVNO is a very interesting way of attacking it. I wish I could invest (Pat?, nudge wink?). More coverage on VentureBeat and TechCrunch.
Pat, by the way, is also behind Twitterfone.
June 18th, 2008
A proposal for an Ignite talk I submitted has been accepted for next weeks Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It’s going to be about the metaphysics of growth, something I’ve been thinking, reading & writing about for about 15 years.
I touched on this topic very briefly at Brad Templeton’s Nanotechnology Conference which we hosted at the Yahoo HQ.
This’ll be the first time I’ve ever talked about some of this stuff publicly, so the response should be interesting. The basic question is: “How does growth happen”? I’ll be talking about the basics of it and then applying the principles to the rapid growth environment of Silicon Valley.
Now all I have to do is write it…
April 15th, 2008
Previous readers of this blog will remember some of the travails with wireless telecoms (here and here). I’m happy to say that a large part of my hassles seem to have resolved themselves. I’ve moved my eight year old mobile number back out of Yahoo and signed up with T-mobile with a Blackberry Curve. I looked cursorily at some options: the iPhone is a non-starter for me without copy/paste, Verizon too expensive and AT&T just too bad… it was a particular T-Mobile feature that finally clinched it (many many thanks to Phil Wolff and Bill Campbell of SkypeJournal for that beauty of a tip). With a $9.99 monthly fee, my BB Curve will route calls over a wifi connection without costing me any minutes. Even better, if I start a call at home and then get into my car, it’ll seamlessly switch me over to the cell network. Given that I’m at a wifi connection about 70% of the time, it essentially means unlimited calling. Amazing to finally see one of the big guys ‘getting it’. In practice, it works most of the time – some calls are a bit VOIPy if the wifi isn’t good. As a final bonus, if I’m overseas, it means I can make U.S bound calls without roaming charges, which is doubly cool.
Which brings me to the final speed bump – international roaming. And for this, all hail Pat Phelan from MaxRoam, who bounced over to the blogger dinner at Blogtalk and left me a SIM and some credit to play with…
MaxRoam is a VMNO where you buy a SIM and phone numbers for countries you are traveling to, and if anyone calls any of those numbers, your handset rings wherever you are and you pay just local cell phone charges of about 25-35 cents. If you bounce around multiple countries, this is definitely for you…
I think Pat is onto something very huge here. The roaming marketplace must be in the billions and nobody is attacking it in such an interesting way.
The holy grail would be if I could use my Curve for laptop connectivity. That’s a lot to ask, but hey, it’s worked so far… : )
March 15th, 2008
Today is one of the happiest days I’ve had in a long time. Why? Well, Fire Eagle launched.
I was in London at the Yahoo UK office for the big moment, and had a couple of pints in the local pub with Tom Croucher-Hughes to celebrate.
I mentioned it in my opening keynote at BlogTalk 2008 in Cork on Monday and I’m now heading to Austin to celebrate with Tom and the crew. It’ll be a hell of a party.
Fire Eagle is a truly game-changing platform that has the potential to shift the internet to the next level. It’s not often you can say that. The team has been working super hard getting this out the door and deserve monster congratulations. Rabble gives some color to it here, and for more detail, Stephanie Booth recaps Tom’s presentation at FOWA here.
Update: here’s Tom’s announcement on YouTube
March 5th, 2008
Fabulous stuff. Our board has rejected the Microsoft offer (at least according to the WSJ). It’s going to be a highly intriguing few months as this plays out.
I wish I had a Live camera on some of the back-room proceedings!
(and by the way, how cool is Live??!)
February 11th, 2008
We popped some champagne yesterday as Gordon Luk and team launched BravoNation, an awards platform for websites (and individuals) to recognize achievements. We launched it via Andy Baio’s blog to start it small and sweet as the team wanted to control the growth. Gordon has more details in this post on next.yahoo.com
Congrats to the team!
December 21st, 2007
I was down at NASA Ames today for their holiday lunch with their key execs. NASA Ames is sponsoring the Co-labs initiative (NASA’s equivalent of Brickhouse). We’ve started having NASA folks speak at Brickhouse and are exploring other ways of working together. It was quite an experience, as like any kid, I grew up fascinated by space travel.
The big highlight was when Robbie Schingler took me on a little tour of the grounds and guided me into a dimly lit warehouse. In one corner I got a real glimpse into the future of space travel (but I can’t talk about it… 
But there, In another corner, was Pioneer 6 (or a copy), the legendary satellite that was expected to live for 6 months but kept going for 35 years… it’s just sitting there. It occurred to me that they must have dozens of these icons lying around, because… what do you do with them?
(I’m trying to get them to lend it to us!)
December 20th, 2007
Previous Posts
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=abaf0d2a-2da6-4e91-965b-61a391a68b61)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=8018520b-d34e-4764-87f8-654021dd98b5)
