June 7th, 2012 § Comments Off on Gender In Tech: No Longer A Silent Issue § permalink
this has been resonating recently, and righteously so. enough with the old boys’ clubs and forever-pubescent mentalities!
English: Maps of laws and executive orders banning employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity in the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Ellen Pao‘s lawsuit allows our community to discuss these “women in tech” issues as real problems. By Cristina Cordova (Business Development, Pulse) TechCrunch reported that Kleiner Perkins Partner Ellen Pao sued her firm for gender and sexual discrimination.
via: www.women2.com
in a related article, i saw this: “The tech community in general is probably 20 years behind most when it comes to gender issues, and needs every reminder that it’s still got a ways to go.” (gawker)
May 12th, 2012 § § permalink
Information explosion (Photo credit: Emilie Ogez)
Sanebox, this is a startup i really like, because they make my inbox managable. they are for email, what evernote is for notes. they just get it.
Calling email overload “a crisis in communication”, TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington issued a challenge back in 2008: “Someone needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.
via: techcrunch.com
basically, it’s just a ‘priority inbox’ that actually works – they classify less important emails correctly, and they send me a summary at the end of the day. it turns out, most of unimportant stuff is just spam, or automated reminders that I can just glance over and forget.
simple concept, that makes all of us a bit more productive – how much does the planet gain, if we all save 30 mins each day?
April 1st, 2012 § Comments Off on SeedTable – finally a decent overview of startups § permalink
I love projects that make large datasets usable. This one took way to long to be done, but finally – now we can stop wasting clicks and get an executive summary of our city’s startups. 🙂
Also, I will take this opportunity to invite you all for a sneak peek at East Start Map – please let me know what we’re missing.
I have a love/hate relationship with CrunchBase. On the one hand it has great information about startup tech companies. On the other hand, it relies on a wiki-like structure which means it is sometime not updated as frequently or as accurately as old-style databases which used to employ people go over the data regularly.
via: techcrunch.com
March 27th, 2012 § Comments Off on Disconnect: another service to protect our privacy? § permalink
A heart-shaped cookie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Privacy is a funny thing.
Online, we want search engines to show us best possible results, Facebook to amuse us with most intriguing stories from our friends, and yet we are afraid that they are ‘stealing’ our data with cookies.
I guess this disconnect of expectations happens because we are intimately convinced, that the world revolves around us, and that the ‘most relevant result’ has nothing to do with me as an individual, so why would they possibly need MY data, don’t they have enough from everyone else already?
TechCrunch :: In the age of endless sharing, super cookies, social search results, and that ever-present social graph, it’s comforting to know that there are some who are still prioritizing privacy. (And a few of them are former Googlers no less!
via: www.nextlevelofnews.com
Supposedly in Netherlands, people don’t use shades on windows, because “windows are for looking out, not in”, and in NY, it’s sometimes considered rude to use shades that prevent neighbors use their binoculars.
March 2nd, 2012 § Comments Off on great debate on how & why linking from media § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
there is a really interesting discussion going on this week, whether online journalists should cite other online “journalists” who “broke” the stories. it’s actually pretty complex question and this article sums it up greatly. it actually touches some points I wrote about a few days ago – the new, self proclaimed “tech journalists” have no idea how the real media ethics works, yet they demand same credit and awe.
Why Journalists Need to Link | Epicenter | Wired.com
If it was Siegler’s article that caused Vascellaro to call Apple, then Siegler certainly counts as an online resource used in writing the WSJ story, and should therefore, by Stray’s formulation, be fully linked and credited. On the other hand, if Stray agrees with Siegler, that doesn’t mean that Siegler agrees with Stray. Siegler cited no source at all, named or anonymous, for his scoop that Apple had bought Chomp: He simply asserted the fact. “Apple has bought the app search and discovery platform Chomp, we’ve learned.†If every statement in news writing needs to be attributed, then Siegler just failed that test.
www.wired.com
it’s great to see journalists are starting to be aware of the need to link outside their own domain.
February 27th, 2012 § § permalink
the guardians...... (Photo credit: simada2009)
Roughly a year ago, we had an incident with neighbors in the co-working space in NY. They were two writers for an online magazine, fairly young, geeky, caffeinated.
Now, in this co-working space, the only thing separating the offices is a one-layer glass, so you can hear the other people if they talk a bit louder. During one of our skype meetings, when we had bad wifi reception, so our VP Sales tried talking louder to get the message trough, those two writers got annoyed and started tweeting confidential information about our clients. I learned about it when a friend from an ad agency sent me an email with screenshot from his FB wall.
It took some more shouting to resolve it and get the tweets removed, but the damage has been done already.
I’d like to believe that well-bred old-school professional journalist would never do that. Because my generation thinks that internet changed the world so significantly, they do not learn from previous generations and are reinventing the wheels. those two kids probably call themselves journalists, but in reality they are just reckless kids, who will need another decade or so to grow up and start behaving responsibly.
this article brilliantly talks about similar situation with tech bloggers:
A blogger or a journalist? Debate over the power and influence of tech writers This article was published on guardian.co.uk at 20.37 GMT on Sunday 26 February 2012 . A version appeared on p28 of the Main section section of the Guardian on Dan Lyons used his personal blog to attack Michael Arrington and MG Siegler.
via: www.guardian.co.uk
… I wholeheartedly agree with his points, but unfortunately there is no way back. the geeks rule the internet, for better or worse. and media is not the only part of the old world order that is deteriorating, all other industries that are being ‘disrupted’ are bound to this same ignorance – disruption brings more efficiency to the market, at the cost of ignoring inherent value system.
actually, i believe that the ‘gain’ of disruption is just temporary and the cost of building out value system is simply deferred for later stage of the cycle.
