Pacifica Fund

Tim O’Reilly and the ETech program committee have done a service for the audience here that not all have appreciated: They called in the military. From robots that have seen combat, to complexity theorists who take military funding, from a […]

A lot of investor conferences have audience votes for best pitch at the end of the show. That’s not part of the program here at ETech, but why should that stop me: The Due Diligence award for best pitch of […]

Letting computers substitute for human translators in alleviating mankind’s Tower of Babel is one of the most frequently hyped and recycled ‘futures’. But, after plugging away for 50 years, what’s been accomplished is rather modest. Market analysts predict that in […]

I’ve been giving Ross Mayfield some grief of late, so time to balance by pointing out his excellent post on risks and needs of hiring in startups. I’ll mention one more thing to beware – what I call ‘hiring down’: […]

A few posts back, I tossed off the phrase “…what you have is not a business, and not a product, but a feature. ” Which proved not so informative to the discussion as I might have hoped, since I had […]

We have come to the end of a tumultuous year on the Internet and in real life, and it’s a good point to sum up what we’ve built and learned. There’s been plenty of self-congratulation as we went along, so […]

Kevin Kelly excerpts from Bayles’ and Orland’s Art and Fear: The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded […]

(I’ve been promising this post on music business models seemingly forever, so time to deliver. I’d like to thank Kevin Laws, Kevin Kelly, Umair Haque, Roji, and the Armed Liberal for, variously, inspired conversation, informative posts, and provocative questions that […]

Apparently provoked by Weinberger’s blog on Shirky at PopTech, we seem to be having a reprise of the power law brouhaha, with A-lists and C-lists exposed and waving about. Meanwhile, Jarvis puts up a thoughtful post on blogs as personal […]

I seem to be hitting on security stories this week. Via BoingBoing, here’s a screed from financial cryptographer Ian Grigg, decrying the obviously poorly thought out threat model behind the seemingly ubiquitous SSL protocol. (For those not into crypto jargon, […]