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 […]
July 8, 2010 | Startups | No comments
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 […]
July 6, 2010 | networks, Startups, Technology | No comments
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 […]
May 3, 2010 | Business, Social Advertising, Technology | No comments
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 […]
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 […]
April 3, 2010 | perl | No comments
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 […]
March 31, 2010 | Tech News | No comments
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 […]
March 16, 2010 | Business | 2 comments
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 […]
March 4, 2010 | Scaling, Technology | 1 comment
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 […]
March 3, 2010 | Writing | No comments
Having coffee at 4am after an all-nighter with my co-founder and wife a few days ago we came up with a rather obvious but interesting concept. I’ll call it The Sleep Test. Unless your business earns revenue while you are sleeping, it won’t scale. If you’re an I.T. consultant or lawyer selling your own time, […]
March 1, 2010 | Startups | No comments