Blog Posts

Who sets the price for Über rides?

I’ve used the now-famous internetty car service Über a couple of times. The prices for the two rides I took were about 20-25% more expensive than taxis. Which made me **wonder about how th...

Everyone should know how to program

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU1xS07N-FA&w=560&h=315]

Sage on the e-stage?

There are fascinating shifts going on in higher education today, from MOOCs to the ‘flipped classroom’. A lot of action. I think we are looking at another text-book “Innovator’s Dilemma” scenario playing out: The established players (traditional universities), aware of a new way of delivering their...

It’s very hard to know what’s true about government spending

I saw this in the Boston Globe this morning and I jotted it down because yet again a bit of totally counterintuitive and confusing info:  > “It is not like we have Soviet tank divisions at the German border poised to launch a sneak ­attack,” said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an indep...

LinkedIn invites are flooding in?!

I don’t know what’s going on, am I suddenly famous? LinkedIn invites are picking up. I think it’s more likely that LinkedIn has come up with a clever way to encourage people to link to others. I don’t know, but I am receiving LinkedIn invites, from people I never heard of before, and from other cities and even countries. Whatever, first I was feeling important, now I am starting to feel a little besieged!

US Politics don’t have a left?

An interesting international perspective on politics: > “…So, believe me, US politics don’t have a Left. Looking at the presidential candidates, I am frankly appalled. None of them would be a viable politician in Sweden. They all support the death penalty, none advocates strict gun control and all make frequent mention of their religious beliefs in public. These are extremist stances. Not even the tiny Christian Democrat party mentions God publicly in Sweden, for fear of alienating the pragmatic rationalist majority….” (from Aardvarchaeology)

Aaron Swartz: continuing developments

In the continuing stories around Aaron Swartz and events that led to his tragic suicide recently: > “Many people speculated throughout the whole ordeal that this was a political prosecution, motivated by anything/everything from Aaron’s effective campaigning against SOPA to his run-ins with the FB...

Yay! Coffee is good for me (again)

Well these stories appear from time to time, either saying it’s good or bad for you. What’s an addict to do? > “Coffee isn’t just warm and energizing, it may also be extremely good for you. In recent years, scientists have studied the effects of coffee on  various aspects of health and their results have been nothing short of amazing.” (from Lifehacker)

I love sriracha sauce, do you?

Just tonight I squirted a few shots of Sriracha on my multi-layered-grilled-vegetable parmigiana. And now there’s an article about Sriracha in Business Week! “…Like ketchup, sri...

Negotiating your startup offer

Pretty good review of a broad topic: Negotiating Your Startup Offer

Kluge: Is that an obsolete term?

I was amazed today when in a group of 25 undergraduate engineering students, only three had heard the word kluge. When I explained what it was, it still did not ring a bell. When I asked how they refer to an ugly, clunky, scotch-taped solution, inelegant and embarrassing, but which basically works, they came up with “hack”. Query: Is the word “kluge” becoming obsolete among the geek community?

“The Lean Startup” doesn’t have the word “market” in its index

I am a really big fan of the book The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. So much so that I am using it as a “textbook” for the Entrepreneurship course I am teaching at Olin College. Oddly enough, I couldn’t find the word “market” in the index.

Galapagos article from one my my fellow travelers

Last year we went with National Geographic to the Galapagos islands for an amazing journey of discovery. The Galapagos are a set of islands, part of Ecuador, that I had heard about all my life, but never thought of as somewhere I could actually visit. Well, you can. We could. It was a wonderful trip. Here is an article about that trip to the Galapagos was written for the Sidney Morning Herald by one of our co-travelers.

Are smartphone apps “applications” or “features”?

Andy Payne wrote an interesting analysis about the future of the “software industry” or whatever we should call it nowadays (e.g. is Amazon a software company?) Not long ago a classic “put down” of a business idea was: ...

Looking for eRoom

Long time ago I worked at a company called eRoom Technology where we developed a product called… eRoom. It was pretty successful and it was bought by a company called Documentum, that in turn was bought by a company called [EMC](http://www.emc.com/i...

How to be a star engineer!

We all want to be star engineers, right? Here’s an intriguing article from about ten years ago engineers from top companies helped to [dispel the myths about star performers and uncover the surprising secrets of stellar achievement for engineers.](http://vlsicad.ucsd.edu/Research/Advice/star_enginee...

Did someone actually have to invent that?

A really charming article about John Karlin who was one of the first UX guys...

Patents: Innovation Nation

An interesting view on patents from Judge Posner: > “In Posner’s view, many patents are unnecessary. Patents, he believes, are important for drug companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars bringing a new dr...

Loomio: Collaborative Decision Making

Loomio is a new app looks quite cool and worth checking out: > “Loomio is a collaborative decision-making tool. Loomio reduces the cost of participation in decision-making, making it easy for any group to translate online communication into real-world collective action….C...

Awesome: Big Blizzard Coming