Disqus - Latest Comments for dlweinreb

Re: the institute of hybernautics

Dan Weinreb — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:30:07 -0000

So did you do this with or without the "hue" slider (http://www.xkcd.com/648/)? :)

Re: the institute of hybernautics

Dan Weinreb — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 06:29:50 -0000

Re: Building Successful Long Term Relationships

Dan Weinreb — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:55:27 -0000

My advice about the secret to a happy marriage: You're going to have arguments; there's no way to avoid that. The important thing is to learn how to resolve them. "Making up" is necessary but not sufficient; you have to get to the bottom of the issue. What did you disagree about? What's a reasonable and fair solution? Why did it turn into a fight instead of a discussion? How can you work together in the future to minimize fights? Of course you have to do this after you have both cooled off, but it's great if you can do it that very day, and never go to sleep with an unresolved argument hanging over your heads. In 23 years we have managed to do that, with only one or two times that we waited a day to resolve the problem. It's work, but an investment very well worth making.

Re: The "Watch Later" Project

Dan Weinreb — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 08:08:06 -0000

Check out the "Read It Later" Firefox add-on. It has many, many features
and options, but basically it just bookmarks the thing so you can go
back to it later. It's that on steroids.

http://www.ideashower.com/s...

-- Dan Weinreb

Re: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/08/is-geek-tech-go.html

Dan Weinreb — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 07:29:50 -0000

We had the same problem recently with a company hoping to get funding from us at Common Angels. Talking to the beta sites showed that the only people who liked the product were people who just enjoyed the cool technology, not the ones that the company was really trying to get. I was sad since two of the three co-founders are personal friends of mine. They're still trying, including re-targeting their cool technology to other market opportunities. But the "it's only for geeks" thing is a real problem sometimes.

Re Jack Hammer's comment above, I think he's exaggerating a bit but his overall point is important. Too many of my own friends are geeks for me to accurately judge the public, sometimes. This is one reason that it's so crucial for product/interaction designers to NOT be the programmers. See the great book "The Inmate are Running the Asylum" and you'll know what I mean, and probably be persuaded yourself. Your designer, obviously, must NOT be a geek.

One never knows what will cross over. My wife used to work at a software company (Software Arts) and is quite comfortable with PC's as far as editing and spreadsheets and browsing the web, but she usually hate gadgetsamnd definitely is not a geek (hey, some of my best friends are girl-geeks; they're great, etc.) However, we just got an Amazon Kindle and she has fallen in love with it!

Another commentator above is right that much technology that HAS gone mainstream was pioneered by geeks. But it does not work the other way; plenty of stuff is uptaken by geeks and never goes mainstream. The old "Crossing the Chasm" book (only a pretty-good book) has a lot of good stuff to say about this.

And I'm a total geek but still cannot see why I would ever want to use Twitter. Well, I'm 49, maybe I'm just too old to "get it". :) I do have a blog!

Re: Peer Producing A Web 2.0 Keynote

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 11:08:34 -0000

I tried clicking through to the Wiki page at http://usv.jot.com/, and my Haute Secure plugin told that they had detected malware at the site and I should not proceed to the page. I have no idea what this is about, but I thought you would want to know. :(

Re: A VC: The Death Trap

Dan Weinreb — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 08:10:08 -0000

Sure, Facebook did not kill MySpace, and so on. And Google didn't kill Alta Vista; Alta Vista's death was self-inflicted. But the company that explicitly attempts to kill other companies is Microsoft. Netscape may have managed to sell out for a lot of money, but Microsoft's attempt to "suck the oxygen" out of Netscape's browser was largely successful; they still have overwhelming market share today for their browser. It's very hard to compete with Microsoft on their home turf, namely PC applications and operating systems. Intuit, with Quicken, is one of the rare exceptions in a large market. Now that the rules are changing with the Web being a major platform, other companies have more of a chance. But for decades, whenever starting up a new software company, it was necessary to ask how you would prevent Microsoft from squashing you. Usual answer: our target market is too small for them to notice. The big markets were left to Microsoft.

Re: When Will A Comment Be Treated Like A Post On Techmeme?

Dan Weinreb — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:46:43 -0000

I did read David Hornik's reply, and I'm very glad I did, but I had to go through a lot of other (interesting, but long) stuff to reach it. So I think you're right; there needs to be a way to make this easier. It's interesting that Scoble's reply to Hornik was, essentially, "Isn't it great that with the web, it's possible for you to make this kind of rebuttal?", rather than actually making a counter-rebuttal (at least, that's the impression I got). It's true that it's great but, as you point out, it could be better.

Re: 10Gen

Dan Weinreb — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 09:48:44 -0000

Hurray for object-oriented database systems! It's still a good idea, and I'm glad to see these guys using it. -- Dan Weinreb, co-founder of Object Design, which was the leading provider of OODBMS's in its day.

Re: Accessibility

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:31:21 -0000

I went to the Boston "Open Coffee" meeting the week before last and it was lots of fun. People talked about their business ideas, and also just the usual technology stuff (Have you used X software, and does it work well?, etc.) The guys were sharp and friendly. There were only two investors there, one VC guy who apparently shows up frequently, and myself (Common Angels). Anyone looking for seed-stage investments could do a lot worse than show up at one of these meetings.

Re: Twitter Acquires Summize

Dan Weinreb — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 06:27:29 -0000

How to succeed in business: First, acquire companies. Second, think of a business model.

Re: Interview In A Cab

Dan Weinreb — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 06:39:34 -0000

32 pitches in fewer than 32 hours? Over how many days? After having read your writing for so long, it is good to see what you look and sound like; thanks for putting up the video. Investing in companies in another country must be tricky, the legal and accounting rules, not to mention customs and expectations, presumably being different. But it must have been a lot of fun to hear from and meet all of them! I've met many software engineers from Germany who are extremely talented.

Re: Has The Cafe Moved Online?

Dan Weinreb — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:22:50 -0000

Paris is SO overrated. There are some important museums there, but otherwise I have not found it interesting or even that pretty. Commonwealth Avenue in Boston beats the Champs Elyssee any day, and I'm not just saying that because I live near Boston. There are so many fascinating and cool cities to visit in the world! I would not recommend Paris to someone who wants to see the world. Now, Tokyo, that's another story!!

Re: The Laptop: TV You Can Take With You

Dan Weinreb — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 08:06:13 -0000

Our family will be going to the Galapagos late this summer. We've been told that there'll be significant downtime on the boat. But I don't expect any Internet connectivity. Also, on this trip we have to pack very lightly, rather than bringing our usual pile of books. So I just bought an Amazon Kindle. We're going to all try it out over the next week or two, and if we like it, we might buy another (so that more than one of us can be reading at the same time).

At home, most of our TV watching is done from the TiVo. You can't quite get anything you want online yet; often only two or three episodes of a show are made available. But it looks like we're moving in the right direction.

Re: 100 Comments or Bust

Dan Weinreb — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 08:37:07 -0000

I agree. Having a lot of comments is a moderately useful proxy for how interesting the post is, and how many people are going to be interested in following a link to it. Perhaps you can persuade technorati to list the number of comments, if there's a technical way for them to determine it efficiently.

Re: Losing A Phone - A Social Media Security Breach?

Dan Weinreb — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:22:40 -0000

I just heard a talk from a guy who has developed a forensics package for the iPhone. It is stunning how much info you can recover if you obtain someone's iPhone. Consider that flash-memory file systems go to lots of trouble to allocate new files in empty spaces, rather then overwriting old files, due to the write limitations of flash technology, for example. If you get tired of your iPhone, don't give it away or sell it; apply a shotgun to it.

Re: Zakaria Quote Of The Day

Dan Weinreb — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 08:20:27 -0000

When I think about globalization, I think of what's discussed in the book "The Elephant and the Dragon" by Robyn Meredith, about the economic rise of India and China. It's really all about the supply chain, and Adam Smith's point about doing each manufacturing step in the place where it is most efficient.

Re: Zakaria Quote Of The Day

Dan Weinreb — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:00:42 -0000

Not PC, and not right, either. Obama, you may have noticed, wants to become president, and it would help him a lot to not alienate Jewish voters. There's a big overlap between American Jews and supporters of Israel (though not all Jews support Israel and not all supporters of Israel are Jewish). Israel is a very special country, allowing normal life for an ethnic group that has been persecuted terribly for many hundreds of years. (I hope that a Kurdistan comes into existence, and it sure would be great if the Roma ("Gypsies") got their own country although it's hard to imagine how that would happen.)

Israel is the only democracy in the area. They have been valuable allies in the areas of intelligence (in the sense of the CIA), military technology, etc. I hope you don't think that we should be lavishing this kind of attention on, say, Bolivia. Geographical proximity matters less and less these days.

Your statement "maybe they do control the money" reeks of anti-Semitism.

Re: Zakaria Quote Of The Day

Dan Weinreb — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:55:20 -0000

I agree completely about how great they are, and I'm very happy to see that the poverty problem is finally moving in the right direction, at least for a few of them. Now that the Cold War nonsense is over, I hope the USA does form a closer relationship with India. But the relationships with Britain and with Israel are very, very deep and rooted in extremely strong emotions and history. I can't see India, or any country at all, forming that kind of bond.

Re: Managing "Unproductive" Meetings

Dan Weinreb — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:05:13 -0000

I think 30 minutes as a limit is not a universal rule. It depends a lot on what the meeting is for. At Common Angels, we always allow a company more time than that to explain what they're doing, even at our first meeting with them. It takes a while for the salient points to come out, and you want to get a feel for the people. Also, the executive director of Common Angels and I recently met a partner from a local VC firm, and we spent two hour in a fascinating discussion comparing how we do business and getting to know each other. In my day job at ITA Software, meetings that I go to are usually to have detailed discussion of a technical area, or go over schedules for our project, and those meetings are usually one hour. I agree that there should be a hard time limit. (Many of us have such limits because we have other schedule activites, anyway.) So 30 minutes is appropriate for some kinds of meetings but not necessarily for others. I agree with the rest of your points.

Re: Elevator Pitches

Dan Weinreb — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 07:14:44 -0000

What's the benefit of being listed on CrunchBase? I wonder if I should recommend any of our (Common Angels) portfolio companies to list on it, but I think they'd probably first want to know about the costs (I nkow it's free; I mean downsides if any) and benefits. In any case, it looks interesting; thank you for pointing it out.

Re: Do Loose Lips Sink Ships?

Dan Weinreb — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 08:26:40 -0000

With a startup, there's usually some point in staying stealthy for a certain amount of time, but once that's over, I completely agree. Tell everyone. If your idea is novel, it'll be very hard to explain to people what it's for and what it is. The more time you spend getting the word out, the better.

When we started Object Design, we were stealthy for a while, partly as a "teaser" to get attention, but once Release 1.0 was out, we spread the word far and wide. What we were doing was so novel, and was applicable to a medium-sized market rather than a mass market, so we were not worried that a large company would copy us. We even went to Microsoft and told them all about it. We needed a new feature in Windows, and my boss met with Bill Gates, who told Dave Cutler to add the feature for us. Microsoft is notorious for stealing ideas, and at various times people from Microsoft told us that they were "thinking of" making a competing product, but we knew they never would, and they never did.

We did do one patent. It's my only patent. The management "made me" do it. I think some of the investors felt better about it. But, as I expected, we never actually used it for anything. (It was a waste of my time, too; I could have been developing software...)

"If your ideas are good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." Well, not always. There was a startup called "Sideways" that, in the early days of Lotus 1-2-3, made a product so that you could print out your spreadsheets sideways. Well, Lotus added that as a feature; no more startup. Some ideas are obviously good when you first see them, and are not that hard to copy. My favorite was the idea of mice and windows. In the summer of 1977 (+ or - 1, I'm not sure), our ex-MIT friends at Xerox PARC smuggled us into the lab and showed us the mice, windows, and Ethernet. It was SO obvious that this was the right thing that we started designing our own implementation while we were on the plane back to Boston. Symbolics was one of the first companies to have that technology on the market. (People would see our demos and want to see windows and mice, when we were trying to tell them about what our product was really about... But it sure got attention.) But, in general, I agree with the quote for many circumstance, a lot more than most people think. (Oh, unless and until you start to make Big Bucks; then they take your idea seriously. Hopefully by then you've established a beachhead and barriers to entry.)

Re: Doriot Quote Of The Day

Dan Weinreb — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:38:24 -0000

You continue to hope? Well, yes, but you also give them assistance and help them hire people who can do the things that they're not so good at.

I got a copy of the book as a little prize at the Nantucket Conference and am looking forward to reading it. My first startup, Symbolics Inc, actually was funded by AR&D (among others) (Jean de Valpine was our board member).

Re: A Commenter’s Rights

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 31 May 2008 08:54:37 -0000

When I write a comment on a blog, I assume that anybody has the right to pick up that text and do whatever they want with it.

Letting people retroactively edit their own comments could lead to tremendous confusion, making conversational threads very hard to follow. A Wiki would allow for that, and at least the reader of a Wiki knows that he should not make strong assumptions about who said what, in what order.

On the other hand, having the ability to delete one's own comments is worth thinking about. (The more I think about it, the harder this problem is! What an interesting issue!)

It would be really unfortunate if it were too easy to make it look like someone (say, me) said a certain thing, whereas he never did say it. Having some way that I can protect my own name and reputation is important to me. I don't want someone to make a bogus comment that appears to be from me but says something of which I would not approve.

When people put comments on my blogs, I like to have the ability to make tiny copy edit fixes, such as changing "It's" to "Its" and that kind of thing, to make it easier for everybody else to read. If I had to lose this ability in order to support some greater goal involving integrity and authorship, though, I'd be willing to.

I definitely need the ability to decide to accept or reject comments that appear on my blog. I reject comments that are spam, utterly irrelevant, or highly offensive; everything else I approve, even if I disagree and even if it's kind of nasty. I often put in my own comments in answer to other comments.

One thing's for sure: the rules of the game should be well-defined and easy for anyone to look up. Transparency is not a cure-all but it's the first step.

Kudos for thinking about this. I hope you'll eventually look over this whole discussion and create a paper, or blog posting, or something, that summarizes the interesting ideas herein.

Re: More True Today Than 2 1/2 Years Ago When I Wrote This

Dan Weinreb — Sat, 17 May 2008 10:01:26 -0000

I'm quite impressed how you manage to find something interesting to say every day! I have a blog, but the entries consist of long essays, and I try to turn out one every two weeks or so. It's probably not the best way to get lots of followers, but that's what I have to say that I think might interest other people. The whole blog phenomenon is so fascinating. It's young, and perhaps it will evolve in directions that we can't think of right now. It'll be fun to see how it goes.