Web 3.0
About a year ago, I met up with Teresa Wu (of My Mom is a Fob and My Dad is a Fob fame). It was our first “Tweetup”, a word used by social media types to refer to meet-up’s between people who had only previously been friends over Twitter. It was a very geeky conversation [...]
Look ma, no battery!
While Moore’s Law may make it harder to be a tech company, it’s steady march makes it great to be an energy-conscious consumer, as one of its effects is to drive down power consumption in generation after generation of product. Take the example of smartphones like Apple’s iPhone or Motorola’s new Droid: Moore’s Law has [...]
Happy birthday Firefox!
While most people will (and should) think of today as the anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall (who can forget Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall“?), if you go back a mere five years (rather than 20), today was another fateful day for the Internet: the formal birthday of my favorite browser: [...]
Abacus 2.0
I’ve blogged before about the power of Wolfram Alpha, Mathematica creator Wolfram Research’s powerful online “knowledge engine” which is capable of, among other things, balancing chemical equations, looking up star charts, doing math, and even looking up medical information. But it’s good to know that, despite the sophisticated computational engine which underlies it, Wolfram Alpha [...]
Innovator’s Business Model
A few weeks back, I wrote a quick overview of Clayton Christensen’s explanation for how new technologies/products can “disrupt” existing products and technologies. In a nutshell, Christensen explains that new “disruptive innovations” succeed not because they win in a head-to-head comparison with existing products (i.e. laptops versus desktops), but because they have three things: Good [...]
USB H4x0rz
Back when I was still posting on Xhibiting, I was especially fond of interesting USB gadgets. Well, my good friend Anthony pointed me to this interesting gadget that he found out about through Engadget which takes my USB fascination to a whole new level: The product is from Thumbs Up! and apparently, after plugging it [...]
Innovator’s Delight
Knowing my interest in tech strategy, a coworker recommended I pick up HBS professor Clayton Christensen’s “classic” book on disruptive innovation: The Innovator’s Dilemma. And, I have to say I was very impressed. The book tries to answer a very interesting question: why do otherwise successful companies sometimes fail to keep up on innovation? Christensen’s [...]
Wolfram|Alpha reaches out to students
In educational circles, there’s always a philosophical debate between those educators who favor allowing their students to use tools like TI-89’s or computer algebra-capable software like Mathematica and those who don’t, with those favoring their use citing the ability of the tools to expand the scope of the curriculum, and with those opposed worried about [...]
HotChips 101
This post is almost a week overdue thanks to a hectic work week. In any event, I spent last Monday and Tuesday immersed in the high performance chip world at the 2009 HotChips conference. Now, full disclosure: I am not electrical engineer, nor was I even formally trained in computer science. At best, I can [...]
Worried about Google owning all of your data?
Although I’ve spoken at lengths about my love for Google, I am sensitive to privacy concerns that more and more people are having that Google just knows too much about me. Thankfully, the brilliant thinkers over at Google have created a new option to help those who are nervous about Big Brother Google: (Yes, it’s [...]
