Archive: January 8, 2014

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about me

Wednesday,  01/08/14  09:13 AM

This morning I updated the About Me page of this blog, for the first time in two years.  I have a new job now and so my business history needed updating, and the picture there was about six years old, and so I changed that too.  The old one is shown at right; it was taken while I was riding the Solvang Century, in Ballard Canyon; I like the picture and I think I mostly still look like that, but... The About Me page is the oldest post on the whole site, dated January 1, 2003, and what's interesting is how little has changed about me in the past eleven years.  My teachers and guides and the things I like and dislike haven't changed at all. Of course the world has changed more than I have, back then we barely had blogs, and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter were off in the future.  Google was not yet the dominant search engine, Yahoo was, and while Amazon existed eBay was the biggest Internet shopping site.  Windows was king, threatened by Linux, and Macs were curiosities.  iPods and iPhones and Kindles and iPads were yet to be invented.  Tesla was about to be founded but was a long way from making practical electric cars a reality, and SpaceX existed but few would have believed they'd end up as America's only way to resupply the ISS. If I had known back in 2003 that ten years later I would start a Visual Search company and be CTO of a mobile payments startup, I probably wouldn't have been surprised.  Actually I would have been quite pleased :)  But it sure is difficult to peer into the future and see what I might be doing ten years from now.  Maybe working for a spaceflight startup and visiting Titan?  Or a virtual reality company and visiting Titan that way?  We'll see. Onward!

 

Wednesday,  01/08/14  11:01 PM

A day of coding ... and Nest-ing ... yes, I have a new toy.  Pretty soon everything will be WiFi-connected, the Internet of things will be real.  And we'll have wearable computing to control it all :) So, Google Glass is a borg mullet.  So be it.  Let's just hope it is a useful borg mullet, and not just a dancing bear.  Little known fact about me, I actually wore a mullet, somewhat, in between my white-afro and big beard stages. News from CES: 3D Systems announce a full-color 3D printer for under $5,000 (lust!), a delicious candy printer (yum!), a "haptic mouse" (for scanning 3D objects), and ... a cool 3D scanner for iPads.  Wow, I want one of each.  Maybe someday soon I can print them on a 3D Systems printer :)  (Don't care for the name though ... iSense = non-sense :) More news from CES ... or is it?  Can you tell the difference between actual CES product and thing we made up?  Heh.  Tim Bray nails it: Software in 2014.  "Our tools are good, our server developers are happy, but when it comes to building client-side software, we really don’t know where we're going or how to get there."  I'm struggling with this at two different companies, every client side UI has to be developed [at least] twice, with two [or three] sets of tools, etc.  Huh, this looks interesting: Jelly, Biz Stone’s New Q&A Platform, Uses Images To Find Answers.  But it doesn't use visual search the way eyesFinder will, instead it uses crowdsourcing, where the crowd is your friends.  Will be interesting to try and equally interesting to see how much traction it gets...  Meanwhile: The Bing Dilemma: What To Do With The Little Search Engine That Can't.  "The challenge that Microsoft faces in the online search landscape could be a business school case study: how to capture market share from a competitor whose very brand (“Google”) has become synonymous with the act of searching online."  Of course, Google themselves faced this situation when they started; Alta Vista and Yahoo already existed, and were already famous and heavily used. How did they win? By being obviously better. The challenge for Bing is to be obviously better when Google is already so good.  Proving once again that once you think you've seen it all, you haven't; here we have the art of bull skating.  Yep.

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