Anand Rajaraman, who is teaching a data mining class at Stanford, wrote up a great example of the power of a superior data asset. Anand instructed his data mining students to break into teams and create entries for the Netflix prize. Here’s what happened:
Different student teams in my class adopted different approaches to the [...]

I think my mixtape (on Muxtape) is done… I say that hesitantly because I know I’ll fuss over it some more over the next few days, but I think it’s generally in its final resting place right now. Enjoy!

Photo Credit: Lee Jordan

Albert Wenger writes about the structural changes in both the firm and in web services that make a B2B marketplace more viable today than in the original dot-com boom. It’s a thoughtful piece that’s worth a careful read, and I want to add my $0.02 here:
Albert surfaces some remarkably interesting facts about how [...]

Here’s an interesting comment on software licensing from a recent article in Wired regarding the business of open source software:
“I think the software-license business model is archaic,” says Kevin Harvey, a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, which recently cashed in on its investments in MySQL and the open source mail-client firm Zimbra, which Yahoo picked [...]

@msg went around and did short video interviews at SXSW asking people a simple question: WTF is Twitter? As one might expect (considering how amorphous Twitter is), the responses are all over the map. Go check out the project and @msg’s breakdown of each contribution for a deeper dive.
My favorite responses are @innonate’s [...]

A simple open question: what web services do you pay for online?
My answers are:
- Flickr: I have a pro account… $24.95/year.
- eBay: I have sold items on eBay, thus I pay them listing fees and a % of final sale. This has only been a couple dollars over many years of eBay usage.
- Akismet: This [...]

In this episode of MobLogic.tv one of the interviewees says that due process in the law should take a backseat to “going out to find bad guys and kill them.”
This is a small example that represents why I dislike the phrase “the bad guys” when used in a logical (often political) argument. “The [...]

I had an interesting conversation recently with an analyst candidate at USV about the transport of bits (ie zeros and ones, coded information) vs atoms (ie physical goods, people, objects). It seems that the transfer of bits is largely a solved problem. But, we’re still figuring out the transfer of atoms…
Some big companies [...]

After an attempt to use Intense Debate on this blog, I reverted back to the original comment system with my blog. But, recently, I’ve been getting some complaints about the AJAX in my comment submission system breaking. So, now I’m trying out Disqus. Let me know if you have a notable (positive [...]