the onda

Great op-ed piece in the Times today that argues the case for the FCC to get out of the pocket of the telco lobby to hopefully open up some spectrum.

While I agree that bandwidth may be as important to our emerging information economy as oil was to the industrial one, we'd do well to keep in mind that digital + wireless essentially means that in the long run there should be no scarcity of bandwidth, and that as such there is no natural way for carriers to form a cartel to control supply. Sure rolling out 3G and LTE/4G costs a lot of money in infrastructure up front, but these costs can be recouped in short order. More importantly, the semiconductor companies and Internet powerhouses (think Intel and Google) are well incented to find ways to make cheaper technologies like Wimax work, if only the government gets them the spectrum.

My favorite part of the piece: the title, OPEC 2.0, helps to really contextualize the issue of open spectrum to the regular Joe currently paying $4.30/gallon for gas.

Every great startup has an exciting and superb "founding story:" eBay and Pez dispensers, Apple and the garage tinkering of the two Steves, Microsoft and its BASIC, and so on. In the case of Amazon and its web services (AWS, albeit not quite a startup but close enough), the founding story goes something like this: aware that they had built up incredibly robust excess capacity for handling the peaks of e-commerce traffic on Amazon.com, the bright minds from Seattle decided to offer the same capacity to the rest of the web, kicking off the era of cloud computing for the thousands of customers that signed up for their triple threat of services: S3 (storage), EC2 (compute cyles), and SQS (messaging queues).

And yet, if AWS is using Amazon.com's excess capacity, why has S3 been down for most of the day, rendering most of the profile images and other assets of Web 2.0 tapestry completely inaccessible while at the same time I can't manage to find even a single 404 on Amazon.com? Wouldn't they be using the same infrastructure for their store that they sell to the rest of us?

Outages like this one will for sure fuel the fire of all of the startups trying to sell "cloud redundancy" to people who want to fail over seamlessly between providers.

Everyone appears to love my little Japanese friend Tengu which I received as a belated birthday present from my sister and brother-in-law. Essentially a Tengu is a USB-powered set of LEDs that make faces depending on the ambient noise. So when you play music, Tengu "sings along" with you (as he is doing in the picture here).

It's an interesting reaction people have to it; upon first hearing what it does, almost everyone says "that's it!?!" surprised by the fact that it needs to plug into a computer at all (which sadly it only uses for power). But after watching it for a little while, observers become entranced in trying to determine the pattern of its various facial expressions. It speaks volume not only to good toy design (from what I can discern from the packaging it is Japanese only) but to the power of our natural anthropomorphic tendencies. When we see what we recognize as vaguely human, we tend to bond with it at an emotional level, no matter how silly the device is.

Having seen the mesmerizing power of the Tengu, I now want someone to build a Tengu does something more useful with its host's networking capabilities. What about taking a page out of Ambient's products and showing a happy Tengu when the market is up and a sad one when it is down? Or better yet, what about combining data from the Internet with some sort of locally derived sensor data to provide context-relevant mood swings?

Perhaps this is a perfect Arduino physical computing project...

A couple of months ago my brother-in-law gave me an advanced copy of "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0," a "business history" of Web 2.0 by Businessweek reporter Sara Lacy that I promptly threw in the trunk of my car due to a) the fact that I don't like business books and b) because Lacy had just had quite a snafu at SXSW during an interview with Facebook's Zuckerberg.

Well this morning while unpacking a car full of kids at the beach, I realized I had nothing else to read and decided to give the book a shot. I was pleasantly surprised and would recommend it heartily to anyone interested in the history of tech and business, and particularly anyone who cares about what makes Silicon Valley so special.

Lacy follows the genealogical tree from the dot-com boom into the Web 2.0 ecosystem and does a really good job of extracting insight from what must have been countless hours of interviews with founders, entrepreneurs, and executives. Among the better pearls of wisdom: the dot com bubble created a whole load of entrepreneur-friendly capital in the likes of Peter Thiel and his Founders' Fund let Web 2.0 entrepreneurs bypass the typical challenges of VC-based rounds of funding, and focus instead upon building early traction.

The best thing I can say for the book is that as a reporter, Lacy does a good job of portraying the characters she covers. Having met a bunch of these guys during the course of Tabblo (as potential advisors, investors, etc.), I was really struck by how well she "gets" what they are about, and how good of a job she does at telling apart the people who are in Silicon Valley to make money, those who are there to battle internal demons, and most importantly, those who go there to dent the world.

A great beach book.

This gag rule on all iPhone developers imposed by the SDK's NDA is ridiculous. As the Pragmatic Programmers are pleading today, please Apple open it up!

I've never been a huge fan of the term "live web," often used to signify all of the quasi-realtime communications streams that let people swarm and collaborate around particular issues. But it is in fact the combination of these plus Google that have made hacking on things much more interesting. The great collaborative outboard brain makes everything easier and better.

I remember exactly 10 years ago this summer discovering Linux, and more importantly, how because of the tech savvy communities around various parts of it, Linux made UNIX not suck anymore. If some byzantine feature got you tripped up, no matter how arcade, there were always loads of places to turn to for help, without counting Alta Vista and Google which were themselves magical oracles on all of these topics.

If you want a reminder of what it was like to say, deal with Solaris or Windows NT, have a look at what iPhone development is. Outside of some high gloss Apple documentation, and one paltry mailing list, you're stuck figuring it all out for yourself (which I think helps to explain why the current crop of AppStore apps are so mediocre in quality).

Come on Apple, don't go against the grain of the web...