Fixing Venture Capital

February 14, 2005

A VC responds to Joel Spolsky’s ChangeThis Manifesto piece titled Fixing Venture Capital and looks at three criticisms of VCs: VCs only want 100 to 1 returns and are willing to risk everything to get them while entrepreneurs want a safe high probability bet. VCs are so inundated with business plans that they become focused […]

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How to Stop Spam: Charge for the Stamp

February 14, 2005

NYT has an article overviewing spam today and profiling the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group, an industry anti-spam group, and various anti-spam efforts including sender pays.

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Don’t Use Passwords!

February 14, 2005

Apropos of Bruce Schneier’s recent post on passwords, this post (and the comments below it) from Robert Hensing of Microsoft’s PSS Security Team on why passphrases are preferable to passwords (hint: it’s about key length). In a related post, David Fraser reminds us to change default passwords, and links to two sites that illustrate why […]

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Anthropology, Magic and Technology: Masthead Quote, Redux

February 13, 2005

Here’s another round in my exchange with my brother-in-law over the meaning of the masthead quote (first round here).  His comments are much more interesting than mine :) so the conversation will sound a little one-sided: Anthropology has had a fascination with magic since its earliest days. First thoughts included an evolutionary scheme where magic […]

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Optical Scanner in a Celphone

February 13, 2005

"The Xerox Research Centre Europe in Grenoble, France, has perfected technology that lets any cell phone camera with at least a 1 megapixel resolution scan documents." Wow.  Endless implications.  Lock up your documents; it’s an industrial espionage bonanza … Via jkOnTheRun.

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Rating Lawyers Online, Redux

February 13, 2005

I wrote about this recently, and in the past few days have noticed several posts elsewhere also exploring the issue.  But you have to wonder, what incentive there will be for people to contribute their opinions, and how can contributions be authenticated and tested for accuracy?  Those most motivated to review would seem to be […]

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The Curse of the Secret Question

February 13, 2005

Bruce Schneier writes about the ubiquitous "secret question" and answer one must often provide to e-commerce sites in order to authenticate identity if a password is lost.  Conclusion: Passwords have reached the end of their useful life. Today, they only work for low-security applications. The secret question is just one manifestation of that fact. Generally, […]

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Horizontal vs Vertical Integration

February 13, 2005

Tom Evslin writes about the death of vertical integration, apropos of considering the SBC / AT&T merger: Vertical integration is probably the most important reason why AT&T failed. SBC’s planned acquisition of AT&T is a mistake, I believe, because it is a step toward vertical reintegration at a time when horizontal, not vertical, excellence is […]

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Musings on the Masthead Quote

February 12, 2005

Blogging by its nature opens up interesting conversations everywhere.  It’s one of the great effects of the technology – it creates connections. An example happened yesterday when my brother-in-law Tad, who is an anthropologist and a pretty smart guy, came by to visit the page and fastened on the masthead Benford quote – here’s what […]

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Skype Announces Cel/VoIP Phone

February 12, 2005

Skype and i-mate have announced the release in March of two GSM / WiFI-enabled PDAs that will come preloaded with Skype software. The two i-mate models that will initially carry the Skype software are the PDA2K and the PDA2 handsets. All models use Windows Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition, and some models utilize Intel’s Xscale […]

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Toronto Subway Button Map

February 12, 2005

For fans of Toronto, a cool map of the subway made from subway station buttons. Via BoingBoing.

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Why Bloglines Sold, And the Future of RSS Readers

February 12, 2005

Jason Calacanis has some exceptional content up this week – this one a post on why Bloglines sold to Ask Jeeves, and what he thinks will happen to the RSS reader market.

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