famolari's posterous

I’ve often argued that the data inside the carriers’ networks could become as valuable as the data they carry over their networks.  To date, carriers have been less aggressive/creative about analyzing and making this data available, mostly, and appropriately, due to privacy concerns.   Meanwhile, 3^rd parties like Sense Networks, and to a certain extent startups like foursquare, twitter, whrrl, brightkite, loopt, geodelic and geoapi, etc., find ways to go over the top to collect and profit from this data.

I expect to see more movement on the part of carriers to open up their data stores in secure fashions that ensure privacy (Vodaphone and VZW providing developer access to “network enablers” is a start).  Whether it’s advertising, traffic planning, social networking or any application that benefits from real-time and non real-time aggregated location information, the opportunity for carriers to be the authoritative, low-cost, secure and trusted provider of such information is too great.

“The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline.  This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.”

"No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else" -- Bill Joy

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

--Theodore Roosevelt

Build, Measure, Learn. The faster you execute through that cycle, the better.

Quick hit from Eric Ries on the lean startup. Succinct summary of what Lean is and is not. I’m a fan of this approach and of continually testing to challenge/confirm assumptions. Stop the faith-based initiatives and start doing stuff people want!

If this is indeed the new attitude at DARPA, color me impressed. Peter Lee was computer science chair at CMU and now runs the Transformational Convergence Technology Office (TCTO) at DARPA. This video gives an excellent sense of the new thinking and attitudes taking hold at DARPA in the wake of Dugan’s appointment and of the vision of the new TCTO.

The mission of the TCTO is to anticipate strategic surprises whose markers include technology democratization, exponential trends, pushing boundaries and open innovation, all of which is built on a platform of next-generation computing.

You can definitely see the thinking and influencers behind 10-41 around democratizing technology and encouraging edge innovation. The bits on the red dots and on Trapster changing the game from the traditional measure/count-measure in traffic speeding were resonant.

While long, there are a number of other good bits to this video and it’s worth watching.

Love the line that “DARPA/TCTO is just as much about new attitudes as it is about new technologies.” Listening to Peter, I get the sense that they just might mean it.

A very cool take on using technology, communications and physical devices to develop new ways to engage with information and explore spatial relationships.

This came out of MIT with NSF funding. Dave Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi then formed Sifteo to commercialize it, rasing $1m in A round funding from True Ventures. Today, they announced a $9m B round led by True and Foundry Group.

With this and the Six Sense project, MIT is doing some fantastic stuff in human-digital interaction.

The point of markets is to provide liquidity, transparency and a market-clearing price.  The fact that computers can execute and move 100s of thousands of shares in microseconds is not by itself the problem.  One problem may the lack of diversity among trading algorithms.  If every house follows one another using a narrow universe of strategies developed by a relatively small cohort of practitioners, then when market conditions deteriorate, there’s a clear herd effect that spirals downward.  

Regardless of fat fingers, machines gone wild, or even the specter of cyber-terrorism that one astute commentator raised, I do look forward to the increased press around high frequency trading and regulation/management in computationally intensive markets.   Need more sophisticated management systems, fault detection, circuit breakers, root-cause analysis etc.  Expect Reg NMS to enter the mainstream financial discussion.   

INVIDI offers addressable targeted ad solutions for TV. With their solutions, advertisers can expand ad delivery to meet different target segments within the same time slot. They have an impressive Advisory Board comprised of folks from SMG, GroupM, NBC Local, etc.

It's curious that they're funded by EnerTech , which I had thought was focused on the cleantech and energy spaces.