July 2010
1 post
Farmville Meets Mint.com
Unlike other games (educational and otherwise) that use virtual currency, Zindagi will use real money. “The concept is really simple - instead of trying to make games more life-like, Zindagi makes use of the fact that real-life is already one big game.” As kids master concepts like budgeting and saving, they accrue financial rewards themselves. The ultimate goal of the game will be...
June 2010
1 post
“Having two OSes is confusing. You need coherence.”
– Steve Ballmer, criticizing Google’s Android and Chrome OSes. Balmer is the man behind Windows Starter, Windows Home Basic, Windows Home Premium, Windows Professional, Windows Enterprise, Windows Ultimate, Windows N Editions, Window Mobile Classic, Windows Mobile Standard, Windows Mobile...
May 2010
1 post
For your health
Last week, in what may be the biggest medical breakthrough of its kind in years, a group of scientists published results in The Lancet describing a completely new type of anti-viral treatment that appears to cure Ebola. They report a 100% success rate, although admittedly the test group was very small, just 4 rhesus monkeys.
This is a breakthrough not only because it may give us a cure for...
April 2010
3 posts
Noticed: The Privacy Arms Race
Charlotte Kaye, who went to the Brearley School in Manhattan, did not take any chances. To avoid detection, Ms. Kaye, now a freshman at Colorado College in Colorado Springs, said she and others began changing their names on Facebook beginning in their junior year of high school.
New spellings are standard: Amy is now Aim E, and Ms. Kaye became Charlotte K. A nickname will also do. At the Ramaz...
WTFID
I find it endlessly intriguing that Facebook, a company I think of as cautious and conservative in many respects, would choose RFID over the more obvious choices for its LBS technology.
Columbia University will soon offer a combined...
Columbia University will soon offer a combined engineering and journalism degree. It’s a unique program the Ivy League institution hopes will produce cross-disciplinary ninjas prepared to develop the newsrooms of the future.
The Columbia program, which will accept its first 15 students (tops) in the Fall of 2011, seeks to attack the barrier between journalists and the increasingly important...
March 2010
4 posts
For all the talk about the digital divide...
For all the talk about the digital divide, a lot of educators work hard to keep computers out of the classroom at an early age, to help kids develop skills without them.
This is a topic we think about a lot in my home. We have a 9-year-old son who uses his computer for all kinds of stuff — games and sport fantasy leagues, yes, but also reading the news and looking up whatever his brain latches...
Water Reminder (my first StickyBits app)
When I registered last week at SXSW, the most intriguing item I found in the customary goodie bag o’ shwag I was given was a postcard from a startup called StickyBits attached to a stack of barcode stickers.
Bar code scanning and object hyperlinking aren’t new ideas. Just as microblogging wasn’t by any measure a new idea when Twitter was created. But what instantly intrigued...
StalkBox Wins a Droid at the SXSW Google Hackathon...
StalkBox, my Startup Bus project with @broadcrawford, was a featured project at the SXSW Google Hackathon. The idea was simple enough, and relevant to the VIP-filled SXSW environment: real-time celebrity maps. If there’s a half dozen parties to choose from, see where the celebs are going to be before you make your choice.
I guess the Google judges liked our simple pitch, because we won...
Teachers counter education reform ideas on tests,... →
ericmortensen:
(via jacobjoaquin)
This is a big deal. Scholastic and The Gates Foundation surveyed a truly massive number of teachers. The resulting mass of data paints a picture that simply wasn’t possible to paint before.
•Only 10% say tenure — a kind of job-for-life security based on a few years of satisfactory job evaluations — is a “very accurate” indicator of teacher quality; •71% say...
February 2010
4 posts
Jesse Schell Describes The Future of Games
School is a game, right? You go, you get scores. You come out, there’s a leaderboard.
He (Lee Sheldon) doesn’t give out grades for each assignment. He gives out experience points. And you level up through the class. So class attendance is up. Class participation is up. Homework is turned in better. Because it’s a better structure. It’s a better system.
—...
Thoughts on RightSide Capital
MobileCrunch reports that David Lambert, Kevin Dick and John Lee are starting RightSide Capital, a new seed-stage fund that will make 100-200 investments per year
Entrepreneurs looking for funding won’t have to go the traditional route of begging for a meeting and then having a second meeting and then waiting 3 months for traction until finally closing a deal. Instead, they will fill out an...
One Person Profitable
Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder
— Paul Graham, How to Start a Startup
What Is One Person Profitable?
There’s a lot of single founders out...
The E-Book Pricing War Heats Up
Publishing is made out of pipes. Traditionally the supply chain ran: author -> publisher -> wholesaler -> bookstore -> consumer.
Then the internet came along, a communications medium the main effect of which is to disintermediate indirect relationships, for example by collapsing supply chains with lots of middle-men.
From the point of view of the public, to whom they sell, Amazon...
January 2010
6 posts
Metagaming
Achievements — system-level awards for certain gameplay goals — are explicit metagames. Many players find that they are substantially less rewarding than the metagames they create for themselves.
After all, part of the fun of a meta-game is not knowing if it’s even technically possible to accomplish your goal.
It’s “Jump the van over the river: 30 points” vs. “Can I get this beat-up van...
Rumors Of An Apple Affiliate Platform
I was pleased to hear the circulating rumor that Apple will announce a powerful affiliate platform on its January 27th press conference. Perhaps this platform will be not just for marketing, but also for selling items directly. And since these sales will likely lead to paid content downloads in a seamless real-time experience, it has the makings of yet another Cupertino game-changer.
Sure,...
4 tags
PR vs. CYA
Any organization in the business of certification runs into the problem of having to market the reliability of certification while also covering their bums.
Google’s Qualified Developer Directory
Google just released a new directory for its Qualified Developer program.
This program has been public since last year, but it’s only recently been marketed. A message marketing the...
Location Based Networks: Fighting Over the Same...
dbreunig:
One of these days, location based networks are going to wake up and realize their numbers and games are meaningless once Google or Facebook flips a switch. So far all of these companies keep targeting the early adopter, game-loving, geek crowd. People that will trade privacy for a mayorship.
Until these companies create a product that provides a real value to a niche, active...
The Google.cn Decision Is Not About IP
Journey To The West
Drewbot on Google & China
The excuse given for their previous censorship efforts was that Google plans to adhere to ‘local laws.’ This sidestepped the issue and ignored the big question: do these local laws harm or impede people or their rights.
Only now, when their own intellectual property is threatened, do they act. The fact that Google actively champions...
Clear Eyes, Full Hearts
I had the chance today to catch up on some reading I had queued up, and I found Tahdg Kelly’s thoughts on Zynga from a couple weeks ago to be a surprisingly validating read.
Zynga’s coffers are deep, as are Playdom and Playfish’s, but at the heart of their model are some deep weaknesses that are going to let a lot of the air out of their Fast Food business models. The audience...
December 2009
1 post
The Rules of the Game
A fantastic Rands in Repose post called Gaming the System published last week is all about making a game out of otherwise mundane jobs like bug tracking. But much of the advice given is also relevant to the design of actual games as well as applications intending to offer an incremental learning curve inspired by game design.
The entire post is well worth reading. One of my takeaways from it...
November 2009
2 posts
Coughing Up Phlegm
I got pretty sick last week. While the timing was not good - when is it ever a good time to get sick? - I found myself more willing than usual to do dirty work.
When I wasn’t coughing up chunks of lung and stomach tissue, I somehow found myself taking a strange glee in the unearthing of technical debt, the debugging of weird edge cases, the discovery of strange (or just downright rotten)...
October 2009
2 posts
One Lucky Winner
I was discussing my latest project the other day with a friend, who told me about something he heard about where you could win $10,000 in scholarship money, just by tweeting.
It turns out that he was talking about a CollegeScholarships.org offer to award students a little over $1000 in a Twitter-based raffle. (The $10,000 figure given in their press material is inconsistent with what the site...
Playing with Fwix and Twilio (and an App Engine...
This weekend, I had a chance to play with two platforms that have been on my “to-play-with” list: Twilio and Fwix.
The result is a simple app I’ve made called PhoneFwix. The workflow is simple. Call (415) 483-1286. Type in your zipcode. Listen to news. The Python code is only a couple hundred lines, including all of the geocoding, fetching, processing, and little utility...
September 2009
4 posts
A Chance to Be Good
In his essay on being good, Paul Graham first introduces two Y-Combinator principles of “Make Something People Want” and “don’t worry about the business model”, and considers at length the similarities (and differences) between why these principles, seemingly descriptive of a charity, also describe a successful startup.
The passage below is one that I find to be...
There's No Shame in Chopping Suey
Last week, I wrote about what I loved about Fwix:
Fwix doesn’t even bother with the pretense of asking its users for original content. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any places within the Fwix.com site where you can post stories.
There’s a good chance that Fwix actually will introduce tools to post original content, but why should they bother? Right now, you’re expected to post them on...
Why Your 'App Engine Sucks' Post Sucks
After reading another misinformed criticism of Google’s App Engine platform, I feel compelled to make a suggestion.
Try your performance tests again, but with a simple change.
Add a @conditionalCache decorator that will always serve a cached response unless the request is from a background task or cron job, in which case it forces a refresh.
You could use the memoize decorator I posted...
3 tags
How Fwix Sets an Example For the Future of...
Amidst all the exciting news related to the reboot of journalism - everything from the latest Medill projects to the Y-Combinator Request For Submissions on ‘The Future of Journalism’ to the GrowthSpur project being helmed by Mark Potts and helped by Jeff Jarvis, there’s one particular project that I think deserves some extra attention.
It’s Fwix. While the site has...
August 2009
1 post
Open Student Finance for the Guitar Hero...
I was fortunate enough to have been invited to speak at the OpenEd09 conference which took place last week in Vancouver. While my favorite part of attending the conference was meeting lots new people - many of whom I was already familiar with through their published work - I also enjoyed the chance to share my own ideas and get feedback.
The gist of my talk was simple: something magical...
July 2009
10 posts
Freerisk.org begins to take shape
While driving from San Diego to the East Bay today, I was listening to an audiobook of Stephen King’s insanely insane Dark Tower series and a certain passage (I can’t recall which) reminded me of Freerisk.org.
It turns out that the site has started to come together since I last looked, including a nascent API specification.
Here’s the specification for querying the risk...
What Data Am I Looking At?
A few days ago, I came across a post on Discernible Preferences where the blog’s author posted two search trend graphs, and removed the value of the search term. The spikes of search volume were slightly different between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Out of curiosity, I went back to the post today and followed a link in the comments to the Hacker News discussion...
4 tags
Yet Another GAE Memoize Decorator
When building a highly scalable website, one of the most important tools available is caching. While there are certainly times where you don’t want to cache a method, I’ve found that the I’m even starting to carve through my alloted free App Engine memcache quota.
I’ve used a variety of memcache utilities, and have never quite been pleased with any of them. I figured that...
Clean Up Your Administrative Debris! (Edward...
Now, I’m not exactly the prototypical Tufte fanboy, but this insanely incredible post on reinventing the desktop dropped a brilliant Tuftism that I had long forgotten: Administrative debris.
Administrative debris
Edward Tufte coined administrative debris to denote all of the elements of a UI not directly conveying the information the user really cares about. For instance, the menus and...
A Good Review of Obama's Latest Education...
A little late, but I wanted to reblog David Brooks’ editorial on Obama’s recently announced community college funding package.
Most people in government, think tanks and the news media didn’t go to community college, and they don’t send their children to them. It’s a blind spot in their consciousness. As a result, four-year colleges receive three times as much federal money per...
1 tag
The Consensus Widens on Customized Education
A fantastic post about disrupting education..
This passage was of particular interest:
American companies that own a popular online market for customized education can expect to increase profits dramatically by:
1. introducing a loan program for consumers of customized education
2. making the popularity of the company’s market and loan program mutually reinforcing, so a borrower who...
Leah Culver: Web Product Guidelines
Leah Culver published a tidy list of fantastic ideas about web product development:
- simple
- public over private
- personal vanity
- internet is global
- permalinks
- one important item per page
- don’t break the browser
- don’t wanker in technology
- a medium is not a grande
- break convention for your users
- no useless widgets
- nobody changes the defaults
- level up...
Introducing Base-In-A-Case
This last weekend, I visited the second Freebase Hack Day in San Francisco. There were a few demonstrations and talks, some information-packed sessions led by Alec Flett, Jason Douglas, and other Freebase developers.
And there was even some hacking - the afternoon of the Hack Day, I wrote a prototype of an app syncing topics between Google App Engine and Freebase. Since I like to develop on App...
4 tags
Chrome OS Will Not Be Anything Like Windows, OS X,...
Update: Gruber’s perspective. Lots of good insights. However, he misses the idea that Chrome OS is ubiquitous and therefore will be used in parallel with everything else.
In a WSJ article about how Google CEO Eric Schmidt resisted building a browser, I came across this telling quote about Chrome:
“I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way,” Mr. Page said.
And...
3 tags
Where's the Github for Government?
@maxwellterry left an incredibly thought-provoking comment on Hacker News the other day:
We just need the Constitution, U.S. Code, and state laws on a DVCS. It wouldn’t need to even be official; representatives would just essentially make the formal commit of publicly popular diffs, or lose reelection.
As I’ve been learning about some of the more advanced version control...
June 2009
5 posts
8 tags
Medill Ups Its Hacker Street Cred
Last week Medill’s WriteClick initiative announced some forward-looking projects that made me feel some pride in the progress my alma mater has made in the last few years.
The projects:
Tweedia, a widget that will allow readers to instantly see other relevant Twitter posts on news stories.
Machine Generated Sports Stories, a program that instantly “writes” stories about baseball games,...
Moving Past Textbooks
I feel compelled to reblog Seth’s Textbook Rant:
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice.
They are expensive. $50 is the low end, $200 is more typical. A textbook author in Toronto made enough money from his calculus textbook to afford a $20 million house. This is absurd on its face. There’s no serious insight or leap in...
Rethinking Emergency Services
Yesterday afternoon, I called 911. I observed an emergency unfolding, and figured it would be easy and fast to report on it.
I was wrong. The local 911 operator put me on hold for more than five minutes. I’m not sure how long I would have been on hold for, since I hung up.
And while muzak wasn’t playing, it might as well have been. In an emergency, every minute counts, and...
8 tags
One Protocol to Ping Them All
PubSubHubbub is a plug and play pubsub solution for App Engine deployment.
If you’re not even sure why you’d want pubsub over polling to begin with, the PubSubHubbub wiki has a page on Why Polling Sucks:
What’s wrong with feed updates every few minutes/hours/days?
It might be fine for reading your blogs (it’s obviously been fine for most people for years now), but...
Google Squared Is No Freebase-Killer
Now that the Google Squared site is public, it’s a little more clear that the site is comparable to a Freebase view.
Freebase has iteratively improved its View interface for a couple of years and super-classed it with the Bases feature, so it is generally more full-featured to Google Squared, although the responsive minimalism of Google Squared could make it a better interface for mobile...
May 2009
4 posts
5 tags
The View From Aileen Street
Between a SWAT team, several helicopters, K-9 Units, and a fleet of officers brought in from surrounding areas, the city likely spent as much as six-figures yesterday evening trying to find suspects fleeing from a homicide, and a resulting high speed chase and hit-and-run that happened on Aileen St and MLK in Oakland, a couple blocks from my house. My neighbors and I were asked to stay indoors...
Google Voice Fail
After setting up my Google Voice account and adding it to my About page, I got my first voicemail transcription e-mailed to me.
I’m not pulling any punches here, this is the exact message Google Voice transcribed:
at ourselves all day long well there’s there’s been a very from my sister checks big your but has been on thirty like what it’s ...
April 2009
7 posts
The Great CS Brain Teaser of 2009
“The Rise of URL Shorteners”
A common gripe among CS students is that the problems that they encounter in class aren’t relevant to the skills they’ll actually need to know to succeed. While many programs have done an admirable job keeping up with the rise of rapid prototyping, SAAS, and cloud computing, undergraduate level curriculum typically still leave much to be...