Today is 4/20. That is significant for two reasons. One is that it is my parent’s wedding anniversary. My dad likes to get license plates with significant numbers. For years the plate on our van was 11111. Later it was 1701 (any Star Trek fans recognize that number?). When my parents got a new car…
Category: web2con2006
Web 2.0 Conference After Thoughts
The conference was a lot of fun and it was interesting to meet people from all over who have a hand in or want to get their hands into the Web 2.0 craze. The speakers were basically an overwhelming mix of CEOs and whos who from every major Internet player. It was exciting to hear…
Sun’s Cool Toy
Sun labs is showing a project called sunspot. It is awesome. It is a tiny platform that lets you use Java to control a microcontroller that has all kinds of built in sensors. It is like a lego mindstorm for geekier people. Go to to get one: sunspotworld.com A sunspot will cost $500. This is…
Stuff from Microsoft labs
Here are a couple of interesting things coming out of MS: Photosynthe – pretty cool. Creates a point cloud in 3D of a group of photos. No human intervention required. It looks at your photos and puts them together – in panormas. It figures out details. Lets you zoom in. It is pretty cool. All…
Disruption: Harnessing the Collective Intelligence
Jim Buckmaster (CEO Craigslist) We manage with only 20 peope by relying on our users to manage what goes on on the site. The users keep us out of trouble. The site is the result of millions of user’s suggestions. They use feedback forums where users talk and they watch the conversation. They put up…
Alumni from last years Launch Pad
Zimbra Ajax enabled software. The cool thing about Zimbra is that they have a way to run offline. They are showing an email client right now that let’s you read and send emails while offline. Then when you reconnect they sync with the server. Pretty cool. They white label to hosting providers. They showing a…
Marissa Mayer – What google has learned
Company email list called Googlers. Sometimes it is about Tivo series 3. Sometimes it is about changes in snacks in the breakroom. A year or so ago the googler list was filled with comments on design of the Google home page. Mayer’s boss came to her and said this is ridiculous fix it and just…
Disruption Opportunity: Venture Capital – Roger McNamee , Ram Shriram
Shriram – Starting an Internet business has never been cheaper. Looks for teams that don’t have business guys early on. The business can develop as time goes on. Why take 5 million when you only need 1 million to start a business. He would rather see a business start lean and work lean with laser…
Mårten Mickos CEO of MySQL
MySQL has been about giving structured data to structured systems. So now “their” idea is to do what Google has done and get people to open source their data, share that data, then allow the world to access it like a database. “The biggest database in the world is already out there.” Build a “skype…
Kevin Rose – Digg
What we’ve learned. 600k registered people who find stuff and then digg it to the homepage. Rumsfield’s resignation set an all time record for Digg. It took 4 minutes for it to hit the home page. It took 25 minutes to make the Google home page. Showing Digg swarm right now. The Rumsfield bubble grew…