June 2008 Archives

Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist -- she "got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions -- motion, speech, self-awareness -- shut down one by one. An astonishing story."

Here is the video of her TED talk: Jill Bolte Taylor's powerful stroke of insight | Video on TED.com.

The video is currently number one on the list of all time top ten TED talks.

"In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix's recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal."

Because of a past life in algorithmic problem solving I was and have stayed interested in the Netflix prize.  In fact it's more than that -- I honestly think their idea on letting others contribute and improve the algorithm was brilliant.

This Wired article is interesting, entertaining, and informative.  Read the full article at This Psychologist Might Outsmart the Math Brains Competing for the Netflix Prize.

"At a hardware BOM and manufacturing cost of $173, the new iPhone is significantly less expensive to produce than the first-generation product, despite major improvements in the product's functionality and unique usability, due to the addition of 3G communications... The original 8Gbyte iPhone carried a cost of $226 after component price reductions, giving the new product a 23 percent hardware cost reduction due to component price declines."

Read the full article at iSuppli's Preliminary Study.  The image shows the BOM from the iSuppli article. Click on the image for larger version.

Running on less than 300 servers, Wikipedia boasts some huge numbers:

• 50,000 http requests per second
• 80,000 SQL queries per second
• 7 million registered users
• 18 million page objects in the English version
• 250 million page links # 220 million revisions
• 1.5 terabytes of compressed data

Read the full article at A Look Inside Wikipedia's Infrastructure - Data Center Knowledge.

The biggest news today is that Nokia is buying the rest of Symbian and releasing it as open source under Symbian Foundation.  Nokia is also planning on a big application ecosystem around symbian focusing on bringing web-based services to the handsets.  So things are getting interesting.  We now have:

• Google/Android/Open Handset Alliance with massive developer support and well, Google's weight behind it, but no handsets yet
• Apple/iPhone with impressive and proven "next generation" user experience, fully connected with 3G and GPS coming, a very fast growing user base but not "open"
• Nokia/Symbian, not as sexy as Android and certainly iPhone but with a huge huge user base, now going the open route
• And LIMO, promising a fully open Linux for mobile platform, but with pretty young anyway you look at it without the carisma of a Steve Jobs that would pull a zero-to-dominate-the-market-in-sixty-seconds.

So the market is interestingly shifting, and obviously regardless of what Android delivers in the end it looks like its existance has caused some really interesting changes in the mobile landscape.  Without Android I don't think Nokia would be doing this.

I'm planning to contemplate some more on how this new picture will change the market...  UPDATE:  Read Om Malik's commentary on the subject.  It's good.

Since my university days I have always had very high respect for Donald Knuth.  Reading his classic books on algorithms widened my view of programming as I was studying the fundamentals of programming.  Communications of ACM has published the first part of an interview with him from March 2007: Communications - July 2008.

The Wall Street Journal names some interesting blogs, including Craig Newmark's, in Independent Street : 15 Entrepreneur Blogs Worth Reading.

"Early Facebook executive Matt Cohler announced his departure today to join top tier venture fund Benchmark Capital."

TechCrunch has interviewed him and they have talked on a number of topics, from Facebook to Benchmark.

Read the full article at The Matt Cohler Exit Interview.

"John Osher has developed hundreds of consumer products, including an electric toothbrush that became America's best-selling toothbrush in just 15 months. He also started several successful companies, including Cap Toys. He built sales to $125 million per year and then sold the company to Hasbro Inc. in 1997. But his most lasting contribution to the business world just may be a list of screw-ups he jotted on the back of a piece of paper. "

Read the full list of the screw-ups at 17 Mistakes Start-Ups Make.

Some pretty interesting statistics about the mindset of teenagers when it comes to shopping and online life:

• They prefer to shop in a store (82%) to shop online (18%)
• They prefer to IM a friend (54%) over calling (46%)
• They would rather get their locker vandalized (63%) than their homepage (37%)

There is a generation of us that gets high by seeing a command line interface.  Now the effect of that is doubled if one sees screenshots of a root shell on iPhone, let alone attaching to a process and debugging it...  Love ya baby!

Biggest news today was the new funding for LinkedIn, well, not the funding itself, but the valuation.  LinkedIn is now officially worth more than $1 Billion - yes, that's with a B.

Also the folks at Reddit released the reddit,com source code as open source.  Aside from some spam control code that they have kept proprietary the rest can be used by anybody to create a post-news-and-let-people-vote service.  Thanks guys!

I found "I never know Google was THIS massive" very amusing...  The author pulls a Feynman by giving readers a tangible measure of how much data Google is processing per day.

Imagine one grain of rice.  If represent a byte of data, how much rice would Google be dealing with on a daily basis?  I don't want to spoil the story...  It's good and it comes with pictures, so read on!

This brilliant cartoon caught my eyes in a blog post wine as commodity:


Poetic, mystical, and at the same time very true about the world of business. My friends know my motto (which is shamelessly stolen from the title of a book): Differentiate or Die!

Ok... The keynote is over. This picture (thanks to Engadget) summarizes the key announcements about iPhone:



The new iPhone - iPhone 3G - will be out on July 11. It has 3G and also GPS (A-GPS), so location based services have a nice platform with location tracking and data connectivity. A lot of enterprise features such as remote wipe, centralized addressbook, etc are built into the device. And the price is $199 for the 8G model - definitely more affordable.

iPhone 3G will be launched in some 70 countries.

Oh, and Apple is replaceing .mac with "me" - with a nice and tight integration of email, calendar, address book, and pictures between iPhone, web browsers, and desktop apps such as Outlook.

So far there has been only one really interesting "news" coming out of Apple WWDC keynote:

"Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone, where a 3rd party server can ping Apple's notification service to your device. It can push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts (like how SMSs look)."

This is to avoid running background processes on the device listening for async notifications, which takes away CPU cycles and drains the battery faster.

So Apple is doing a radically different approach: They will maintain a "push" server infrastructure which stays connected to each cell phone. Applications send notification to this server infrastructure which will in turn push it to the device. The connection will stay on, both over wifi and cellular.

A number of blogs are covering the Steve Jobs keynote live. While I'm an avid TechCrunch reader, I have found Engadget's coverage more comprehensive than Michael Arrington's:

Steve Jobs keynote live from WWDC 2008 - Engadget

Also the Engadget page loads faster than TechCrunch's. It looks like the live video feeds are slowing TechCrunch.

An interesting account on how getting featured on Yahoo! home page can consume your web site resources:

Lukas Biewald » Scaling Fast

It's not easy to be prepared for cases like this - This is one of the key areas where cloud computing shines.

I have written before about the problems of building and growing mobile apps in the US, specially because of the way carriers handle data plans and downloads.

Here's a very interesting account:

So, you want to deploy a J2ME app in the US?

Ofier Leitner has done a great job of documenting, in detail, what issues he has run into whilte trying to streamline the download of his J2ME application to mobile phones in US, and how each carrier has its own issues. I feel for him - it's really an uphill battle.

Smashing Magazin has an article about places to get inspired for design:

10 Places For Design Inspiration

The photos are amazing... I don't care if it's for design inspiration or otherwise - these are places to see!

Kevin Fox User Experience Design

Kevin Fox has been involved with both Gmail and FriendsFeed, so it's interesting to listen to what he has to say on user experience design.