Posted by mark.
Jul
29
Posted by mark.
Based on recent events I suspect an investment axiom might exist that says: The further an investor is abstracted away from the underlying asset they’re investing in, the greater the risk.
This has been shown recently to be true with Mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, the black box that is the hedge fund industry and even sovereign debt may qualify.
When you are shielded from your investment by layers of structure, marketing, repackaging and sales teams, you are too far away …
Jul
8
Posted by mark.
Take Twitter in a parallel universe. The team builds a great useful and viral product. They start growing like crazy and hit their first million members. The growth machine keeps pumping and everyone is watching the hot Alexa and Compete graphs cranking away.
They start getting their first acquisition offers. But the smart folks know the second differential of their graphs is still wildly positive (it’s curving up). They decide to hold off on a sale because they figure that even …
Jul
6
Posted by mark.
There’s a post on Hacker News today pointing to a few open source javascript libraries that Google is hosting on their content distribution network. ScriptSrc.net has a great UI that gives you an easy way to link to the libs from your web pages. Developers and companies can link to these scripts from their own websites and gain the following benefits:
Your visitor may have already cached the script on another website so your page will load faster
The script is hosted …
May
3
Posted by mark.
Facebook has over 400 million active users and members spend over 951 man-years on the site each month. Facebook is passing Google this year as the most visited site in the US and is going to earn somewhere between $710M and $1.1B in revenue this year.
Google on the other hand have a $27B revenue run rate for 2010 [based on Q1 2010 earnings]. With similar on-site traffic they are doing 25 times Facebook’s revenue. Google have had a long time to …
Apr
9
Posted by mark.
Being over 35 has it’s advantages. Us old(ish) timers have lived through Microsoft using their platform to beat the hell out of Novell, Netscape, Real Player and others. Watched Eric Schmidt’s ascension from platform victim to platform player. And learned that platforms are honey traps that give good honey but you might get caught.
Twitter Investor Fred Wilson wrote a much talked about post earlier this week that sparked a discussion about whether Twitter would implement critical apps themselves. Seesmic founder …
Apr
3
Posted by mark.
The video below is Perl’s development history since Larry Wall and a small team started out in January 1988. It’s visualized using gource. Notice how dev activity has continued to increase all the way to 2010.
Perl is a powerful language. It’s also fast and everything you need has already been implemented, debugged, refactored, reimplemented and made rock solid. If you ever have a problem, it’s already been solved by someone else. When I was in my 20’s I was …
Mar
31
Posted by mark.
Update: April fools courtesy of Arrington and I got taken in bigtime. Ugh! Leaving the original post up as an ode to my naivete.
52 years ago in August 1958 the United States was so confident in our ability to provide clean nuclear energy that we put one hundred and sixteen men in a tin can called the USS Nautilus and sent them along with a nuclear reactor under the North Pole. Many of the crew from that voyage …
Mar
16
Posted by mark.
In a press release from HitWise published on CNN Money a few minutes ago, Facebook.com just overtook Google.com as the most visited domain in the USA. This is possibly the most significant milestone in Facebook’s history as a large company. Here’s why:
Most of Google’s revenue comes from their Ad business. Half of it comes from their own properties and the other half from a distributed network of sites. (sounding familiar already I’m sure).
There is a lot of noise around Google’s …
Mar
4
Posted by mark.
This technique is great if you have no customers from countryX but are being targeted by a DoS, unwanted crawlers, bots, scrapers and other baddies. Please don’t use this to discriminate against less profitable countries. The web should be open for all. Thanks.
If you’re not already using Nginx, you should get it even if you already have a great web server. Put it in front and get it to act as a reverse proxy.
First grab this perl script which you …
Mar
3
Posted by mark.
Rolling Stone is running an article about the US pig farming industry. The opening paragraph is a beauty!
Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering. A slaughter-weight hog is fifty percent heavier than a person. The logistical challenge of processing that many pigs each year is roughly equivalent to butchering and boxing the entire human populations of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, …