weblog

  • Matt Mullenweg: The Four Freedoms

    I believe that software, and in fact entire companies, should be run in a way that assumes that the sum of the talent of people outside your walls is greater than the sum of the few you have inside. None of us are as smart as all of us. Given…

  • Thousands of industrial internet devices found to be vulnerable

    Moore’s census involved regularly sending simple, automated messages to each one of the 3.7 billion IP addresses assigned to devices connected to the Internet around the world (Google, in contrast, collects information offered publicly by websites). Many of the two terabytes (2,000 gigabytes) worth of replies Moore received from 310…

  • The corroding value of the internet cookie, and an opportunity to shape a new market

    Several years ago, I first heard Doc Searls make an amusing comment about one of the basic elements of the internet universe, the browser cookie.  With full credit to Phil Windley, Doc’s historical summary of ecommerce (and much of the modern internet) went like this: A brief history of ecommerce…

  • Google’s take on the customer journey

    These days, the customer journey has grown more complex. Before making an online purchase decision, a customer may engage with your brand through many different media channels over several days. This tool helps you explore and understand the customer journey to improve your marketing programs. via The Customer Journey to…

  • Real progress in artifical intelligence

      Finally, however, in the last decade ­Hinton and other researchers made some fundamental conceptual breakthroughs. In 2006, Hinton developed a more efficient way to teach individual layers of neurons. The first layer learns primitive features, like an edge in an image or the tiniest unit of speech sound. It…

  • One interesting theory on the origin of life

    As life has evolved, its complexity has increased exponentially, just like Moore’s law. Now geneticists have extrapolated this trend backwards and found that by this measure, life is older than the Earth itself. via Moore’s Law and the Origin of Life | MIT Technology Review.

  • A primer on probabilistic computing

    Inference, particularly with large data sets, and disparate solution criteria, is one of the tougher challenges of current computing models.  Probabilistic computing may unlock an alternative approach to tackling complex problems by enabling systems to infer solutions that lie outside the current linear computational models: Probabilistic programming languages are in…

  • Phil Windley on understanding the architecture of Personal Clouds

    Just under the radar, there’s been a lot of activity in the ProjectVRM space of late.  Various clusters of work are underway in the VRM space, including identity research and personal data store development.  On the latter, Phil Windley has an excellent post explaining the framework in which personal clouds…

  • Applying a data lens to India

    Conducting a census of India is a monumental task.  The last such undertaking happened in 2011 [wikipedia].  While the raw data reveal, well, raw statistics, delving deeper into census data is a fascinating exercise.  On that note, I recently wandered upon a new weblog that is devoted to extracting insights from India’s…