"iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind."
Jan 29
Jan 21
Box.net Launches Flash-Based Universal File Viewer, Saves You Some Headaches
Last year, Box.net acquired a small company called Increo without giving much insight as to what they’d be doing with the technology. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of that acquisition: Box.net is launching a new integrated Flash file viewer, allowing users to immediately view over 20 file types from their browser, including most common document formats, images (including Photoshop), audio, and video.
Jan 13
"
Remember about, oh, a decade ago? Before 9/11? After the Battle of Seattle, when everyone was talking about multinational corporations taking over the world, about corporate states and all of that?
Yesterday, we officially tripped over this point in history.
Take a step back and consider the situation: Google is threatening to embargo a superpower, in retaliation for an espionage campaign.
"
Jan 09
The Lottery Lady
“Take the typical state lotto. If you knew all of the variables in the machine that draws the numbers, you can solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area.”
Ummmm….yeah…I’m gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. Most of those machines blow ping-pong balls around with air, which is most likely turbulent, and they are blown up into the slots when the lottery lady pulls the lever for the slot. Since, at a minimum, you can’t solve for the state of the lottery lady, you can’t “solve for which numbers will land in the winning numbers area.”
(Never mind the outrageous accuracy of initial conditions and precision of the calculations you’d need to solve for the movement of ~4 dozen ping-pong balls being blown around by turbulent air.)
From Slashdot comments, of course. And this doesn’t even breach the topic of Heisenberg Uncertainty…
Dec 22
"When Evan was at Pyra Labs they ran out of money. He laid off the team (actually just stopped paying them). Everybody hated him. He worked alone for a year in what I can imagine were far from optimal conditions. And what happened next? He sold his product (a little thing called Blogger) to a hot start-up (a little company called Google). The rest is history. And I’m pretty confident there would be no Twitter today if Evan hadn’t persevered back in the day."
Nov 18
"Of course a great way to show you can build stuff is to build a prototype of the product you are raising money for. This is why so many VCs tell entrepreneurs to “come back when you have a demo.” They aren’t wondering whether your product can be built – they are wondering whether you can build it."
Oct 30
ericfriedman:mikehudack:kevintwohy:
I’ve had these pictures stuck in my head for the last few weeks. The left is a sketch Jack Dorsey made of his concept for Twitter back in 2006, and the right (if you don’t remember) is what Facebook looked like in 2005 when it was essentially a sloppy version of Friendster for students of a particular Ivy League college. When something hits such immense scale, it can be difficult to remember that it once existed as such a fleetingly simple, unmitigated idea. Some of the sharpest people the industry could muster (along with hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars) have been bought to bear to cultivate these technologies into their present forms. But those are effects, not causes.
Think about that the next time you sketch something on the back of an envelope.
Oct 22
View of San Francisco from the Bay Bridge. Was on the way back from Napa this past weekend. (No Photoshopping… this is straight from the camera!)
Oct 06
Increo Solutions acquired by Box.net
I’m very excited to announce that Increo has been
acquired by Box.net!
In talking with the Box.net team, we realized that they shared our vision for the future of documents on the Internet and, with their solid product offerings and rapidly growing userbase, were well-primed to take a leadership role in the online collaboration space.
We could not be happier to bring our technology to Box.net and can not wait to deliver easy document previewing, annotation, and embedding to Box’s customers.
TechCrunch is covering the acquisition here:
“I spoke to Box.net CEO Aaron Leviebriefly about the acquisition. He says the key reason they acquired Increo is to integrate the collaboration and annotation functionality from Backboard. Increo’s underlying technology for displaying documents on websites is also attractive to Box.net.”
And Increo’s official statement on the acquisition is here:
http://blog.increosolutions.com/2009/10/increo-solutions-acquired-by-boxnet/
