Last week I came across (via Mashable) an interesting new entrant in the emerging category of Personal Relationship Management software: SocialMinder. They describe themselves as “an online assistant that helps you maintain relationships with your LinkedIn network,” and at the moment it’s a reasonably accurate description, but I think it understates the real potential of continue…
I’ve always been big believer in background processing, the idea that the subconscious brain is always working to solve problems whether we’re aware of it or not. So I was delighted to stumble across a recent New Yorker article describing a group of neuroscientists who had actually mapped and isolated the mechanisms by which this continue…
I’ve been putting off writing this post in the faint hope that I’d come up the learning curve and all would be well, but I can’t put it off any longer. In my last post, Embracing the Cloud, I described my decision to wander off the operating system reservation and pick up an Asus Eee continue…
As Andy mentioned, our office (in fact, our entire building) was broken into on Monday night. The burglars were laptop specialists, leaving behind all but one desktop (a brand new Mac tower) and more than a dozen flat-panel displays. My laptop was among those stolen, giving me an opportunity to reflect on my personal computing continue…
I’m a big fan of Neal Stephenson’s brand of “realistic” science fiction (Snow Crash is one of my all-time favorites), so this TechCrunch headline caught my eye: “Neal Stephenson’s New Novel Makes Me Want to Kill the Internet“. The headlined post is a review of Stephenson’s new novel, Anathem, and in it the reviewer describes continue…
I’ve been messing around with email/communications ideas for a little while now, and one of the threads I’ve been tugging on lately is the concept of “ambient” social interactions, exchanges that take place in the context of other online activities (as opposed to in the inbox / IM window). There are lots of interesting ideas continue…
No matter what business they’re in, the first and hardest problem for any early-stage Web company is distribution. Everything else about doing business online gets cheaper and easier every day, but with an ever-accelerating proliferation of new sites and services, it only becomes more difficult for each new offering to acquire an audience of loyal continue…
I had lunch with a friend yesterday who’s become a big fan of Twitter, and he asked me if my views of it had changed since I set up an account. My response was that, if anything, I’m even more of a skeptic than I was before, but that my reasons are really more personal continue…
Om Malik had a great quote yesterday in his post titled “Can Serendipity Make you Rich?“: “If someone can become the Dolby of the web — remove the noise and give us clear sound — then they are going to make a lot of money. And when I say sound, I mean data that is continue…
I thought I was paying attention to the latest developments in data portability and messaging, but Skydeck is one I missed (thanks Mashable for bringing it to my attention). These guys are taking personal cellphone call records (one of the personal data silos I mentioned back in December as a target for portability) and turning continue…