Holy cow this is the new Tech Dinghy?!! I have to go back to school. While I am heavily endeared to the lumbering fiberglass beast from my college racing days, this thing looks almost (dare I say it)…sexy! Nice work to Fran and the crew - what a great way to celebrate 85 years. (http://sailing.mit.edu)
Briefly, On Agile (via Seldo)
“Agile is a process for managing software development. If you have a great team of smart people who communicate well and trust each other, they can use agile techniques to release lots of small iterations on a software project very quickly. This pattern of software release is often useful for startups. None of this is in dispute.
The problem is that with its rise in popularity, it has been both misunderstood and over-applied. If you have a good software team you can use agile, but if you use agile you will not automatically get a great team. If your team members communicate well and trust each other they can use agile, but if they communicate well and trust each other they could use any other methodology up to and including no fixed process whatsoever, and be equally successful. Agile changes your release pattern, not your people.
Bottom line: great teams produce great software. Great teams using agile release software every two weeks. Bad teams will produce shitty software. Bad teams using agile will release shitty software every two weeks.”
Well said. Tough to overstate how much I agree with this.
This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.
The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:
Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:
Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
You Know you Need to Reform Patent Law when…
Google just bought Motorola mobility for 12+ BILLION dollars. It would appear that they purchased the company not because there is significant synchronization and economies of scale, not because it was the right thing to do, but instead because of significant patent warchests that would allow Google to defend itself in court:
Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies - Larry Page
This is (excuse the pun) patently ridiculous. It’s not good for the economy, not good for innovation, and certainly doesn’t set a good precedent for up and coming firms that are looking to innovate. It’s tough to pay an army of lawyers when you’re just trying to keep the lights on and get VC backing.
As always, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in court, and what its impact on the mobile marketplace will be in the medium term.
Congress: please take a shot at reform - well, OK maybe after you reform yourselves.
Mark Cuban: If you want to see more jobs created, change patent laws
Every technology company I have is getting hit by patent lawsuits that are the biggest bunch of bullshit ever. Every week it seems like a new one comes up. Between having to pay our lawyers a lot of money to review each, to increasing insurance rates and settlement costs because we can’t afford to pay to fight the nonsense, it’s an enormous expense. So much so that money that would have gone to new hires to improve and sell the product has to be saved to pay to deal with this bullshit…Patent law is killing job creation.
"Kaspersky: In the Soviet days, we used to joke that an optimist learns English because he is hoping that the country will open up, that a pessimist learns Chinese because he’s afraid that the Chinese will conquer us, and that the realist learns to use a Kalashnikov. These days, the optimist learns Chinese, the pessimist learns Arabic…
SPIEGEL: …and the realist?
Kaspersky: …keeps practicing with his Kalashnikov. Seriously. Even the Americans are now openly saying that they would respond to a large-scale, destructive Internet attack with a classic military strike. But what will they do if the cyber attack is launched against the United States from within their own country? Everything depends on computers these days: the energy supply, airplanes, trains. I’m worried that the Net will soon become a war zone, a platform for professional attacks on critical infrastructure.
"
~ Evgeny Kaspersky in an interview with Der Speigel (via Schneier on Security)
Forget the Tech, the Fee (or lack thereof) is the Key to Mobile Payments
A number of companies are working hard to get payment systems in our mobile phones and cards. Contactless technology is great, but why such a race all of a sudden when the technology has been there for years? I’m perfectly capable of swiping my credit card and as a consumer it doesn’t save me THAT much time to get it out of my wallet. So why is everybody pouncing on this? One word: Fees.
For the last 50 plus years, credit card companies and banks like Visa and JPMorgan Chase have charged businesses fees for using their system of payment. These fees are a hugely profitable line of business and were completely understandable in the past when capital requirements to make the network function were very high - swipe cards, risk, payment systems, international networks, football-field sized super computers, etc.
Thanks to the exponential progress of technology, however, the cost to get a secure transaction from vendor to bank is approaching zero, and Point of Sale systems are diversifying from leased apparatus to mobile phone peripherals that allow you to swipe and pay without a huge monthly dig into your profit.
So - what’s so special about Google’s foray into the mobile payments business and why are banks developing competing systems? Google has said that (at least initially) they will not be charging transaction fees for their mobile payment systems. Their revenue will be driven by increased search and web traffic to their pages. This is a huge deal as there has never been a major institution willing to gain only the revenue of a secondary economic effect to power financial transactions. Banks make money on fees, but Google will make money when you surf more because of an enabling technology. Much like the web has “democratized” industries like music and publishing, this no-fee payment system could allow retailers and businesses to branch out on their own as well and significantly improve the bottom line.
The response from banks is to develop their own mobile payment systems or cooperate and make money through the no-fee model. JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo have banded together to start an SMS and e-mail based payment system to exchange money between their customers. If we use their bank system they are still able to take a small cut of each transaction as a fee. (Looking further, it’s actually a pretty big cut at an estimated $12-50 dollars).
Whichever standard prevails (if there is to be one major winner), or whatever turbulence this causes in the market as it’s figured out, I’m excited for what this burst of technology and ideas means for the general consumer and businesses in terms of transaction fee competition and expansion of options to accept payments. I feel that while it’s not where it needs to be for wide adoption at the moment it will hit its stride very quickly as the next series of major devices is released later in the year.
Looking forward to it!
Inspired via: WaPo Business article on Google’s new system.
Update your Delicious Bookmarks to Help the Migration to AVOS
I’m a huge fan of the Delicious bookmark service - mostly because it’s important for my pointer-based brain to be able to store content to read for later at work, at home, etc. Delicious is simple, and they’ve got some basic bookmarking technology that works with the browsers I use (both at home and at work).
AVOS has purchased delicious from Yahoo, which is good because it may breathe new life into the service. In order for them to be able to move your data, you should log in to Delicious and agree to the new Terms of Service from AVOS - that will allow them to migrate your data once the hand-off happens.
That said - I would also log in to the new AVOS site when the migration happens to make sure any privacy concerns you have are taken care of.
A friendly reminder to all my friends out there in the community that may still use the service. Click the link for this post to see my current bookmarks in case you’re interested.
Where Did My Tax Dollars Go?
Check out this awesome winner of the Google Data Visualization Challenge (http://www.datavizchallenge.org/)
via The Economist
EDIT: Honorable mention - the glass half full award went to this great tool that determines what tax dollars actually went to things you like supporting: http://www.meghantosh.com/datavizchallenge/
About Me
A strategy consultant with a passion for IT, geopolitics, economics, and the open ocean. Awed by simple, innovative solutions to difficult problems. This represents my favorite slices of the web and serves as networked storage for my brain which is now entirely pointer-based. Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization with which I may or may not be allegedly associated.
I Follow
Copyright © Theme created by 
