Posts filed under 'Blogging'
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
Readers of this blog (all three of them) will know that I don’t often comment on politics. And though my twitter feed has leaned towards the democrats, I’m more of a libertarian. Given the soaring heights of this occasion, though, I feel I must break my non-blogging policy and put down a few thoughts.
First, the Republicans:
- how can you call yourselves conservative after the insanity of the spending increases? What happened to fiscal prudence?
- McCain, what in the name of all that is holy possessed you to put Palin on the ticket?
- Dubya, there are better ways of handling unresolved paternal issues than lying, invading one country and bankrupting your own
- Americans, how could you re-elect Bush in 2004? I mean, really…
And to the Democrats:
- what have you been doing in the last six years??
- please please don’t go too crazy with the spending
- whatever you do, please fix the healthcare system
And to Obama:
- many people I respect very highly got on planes or spent considerable time helping you out. That said it all for me. They include Sunil Paul, Robert Goldberg, Andrew Rasiej, Sonal Shah and who can forget Oprah leaning on Sam Perry… thrilling.
There were times in the last 2-3 years that I despaired utterly for this country. Now I’m back up to ‘very concerned’.
November 10th, 2008
Wow, how bad a blogger am I (ok, I never really had the moniker anyway). But it’s way long since I updated the ole papyrus. I’ve been back from Europe for 2-3 weeks and it’s been non-stop meetings since. Let’s first start by recapping that trip.
First stop was London – a few meetings and some quality time with my god-daughters (little Irish identical twin girls). Next was Dublin for more meetings – I’m on the advisory board of PutPlace, so met with Joe Drumgoole and then lunch with Joe and Niall Larkin. Joe, after paying for lunch, also organized a very nice little meetup and some interesting folks showed up, including Paul Campbell, Marcus MacInnes, Eoghan McCabe and Dennis Deery. Oh yes, and I said hi to Bill de hÓra for 60 secs as he whizzed by… good to see him again, albeit briefly.
Then it was off to Hamburg, where Sarik Weber invited me to give a keynote address at the Facebook Developer Garage. Nice reviews of my talk here and here (if you read German).
Back in London, Tom Hughes-Croucher took me out to lunch and gave me this birthday card (like, a real one), which I haven’t seen for ages. Thanks Tom!
And finally, I met the BT/Osmosoft chaps… Jeremy Ruston, Paul Downey, Phil Whitehouse, Phil Hawksworth and others. Confabb is doing a very interesting collaboration with them that’ll beta at SuperNova.
June 16th, 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
Onto the Q&A… this should be the fun stuff…
Q: Why is x traffic study not being considered in your proposal
A: The study wasn’t done in time
Q: You’re claiming that after 400 new units the traffic will decrease?
A: [[can't hear answer]]
Crowd is getting raucous… “what are you doing about widening x road”?
The questions are specific to individual situations… lots of side conversations starting at the back of the room… some people starting to leave. Some folks getting annoyed. This is fun stuff!
Tough questions now, and the developer folks are trying to keep the conversation civil. Lots of arguments about projected traffic numbers.
UPDATE:
So I talked to some of the attendees afterwards and they said their complaint was that the developer plans to build way too many condos and time shares in Crystal Bay. The resulting project would increase the population of the town by about 4X, cause increased pressure on traffic, fire and pubic resources and be potentially detrimental to Lake Tahoe. Also their studies were curiously out of date. I have not talked to the developers yet, so this is a slightly one-sided viewpoint, but after hearing the presentation, I’d be extremely nervous if I lived there. Here’s a link to the petition if anyone wants their voice heard…
March 19th, 2008
Second speaker is up… mostly talking about road changes
“… we’re putting in guard rails where necessary…”
“… heh heh.. well, that’s it…”
“… if there’s a wildfire, folks can use our parking lots…”
7.50pm – Third speaker, who’s a “traffic engineer” – now talking through the circulation plan. Claiming the traffic is actually declining in the area. Folks are mostly sporting pursed lips…. especially as he’s now estimating 0.5% traffic growth per year for the next 20 years.
March 19th, 2008
Scene-setting: This is my first ever live-blogging effort. I’m in a town hall-type meeting in Boulder Bay, Nevada (on the shore of Lake Tahoe).
The topic is a proposal to tear down the Tahoe Biltmore, a lovely old hotel, and replace it with a 400-unit condo complex. Local residents are not happy, and about 250 of them are in this room listening with some suspicion. Apparently there was an earlier presentation in November which seems not to have gone down very well, especially around traffic congestion.
I’ve never witnessed small-town politics before, so this is new and fun stuff for me.
7.15pm – the developers are nervously starting a powerpoint presentation… sample quotes: “…we know a lot of you are worried about traffic…”
“… this is a work in progress and will continue to evolve… ”
“… tourist-friendly wellness center… ”
“… these projects have a rumor mill… ”
7.25pm – he’s now going through a set of slides diagramming what it’ll look like… lots of acronyms around project approvals
“… we are at the very early stages of this process… it’ll be a long time before anything gets decided… ”
On to the next speaker…
March 19th, 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
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