Open Web

Date: 05-18-13 Host: John B. Wells Guests: Tom Shadyac John B. Wells was joined by one of the most prolific comedy directors in Hollywood, Tom Shadyac, who has worked with some of the biggest names in the business on such huge hits such as Liar Liar, The Nutty Professor, and Bruce Almighty. He discussed his latest work, asking the not so funny questions, what's wrong with our world, and what can we do about it? Website(s): iamthedoc.com Book(s): Life's Operating Manual" Digital URL:   http://goo.gl/5F1dl http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/138190455?access_key=key-1d2qt10wgvmxe4bxjo7h

One of the most prolific comedy directors in Hollywood, Tom Shadyac, has worked with some of the biggest names in the business on such huge hits such as Liar Liar, The Nutty Professor, and Bruce Almighty. In his latest work, "Life's Operating Manual", he is asking the not so funny questions, what's wrong with our world, and what can we do about it?

Very interesting graphic and the numbers are stunning.  One of the cornerstones of "Productivity" is Office and Business Process Automation.  Here they use the term "Automation of knowledge work".  The impact of improvements in this sector between 2013 and 2025 is estimated to be $5.2 to $6.7 TRILLION.   "McKinsey's Global Institute discusses this in its latest report, Disruptive Technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy. It came up with a list of 12 technologies that could have a potential economic impact between $14 trillion and $33 trillion a year in 2025. The authors write that "some of this economic potential will end up as consumer surplus; a substantial portion of this economic potential will translate into new revenue that companies will capture and that will contribute to GDP growth. Other effects could include shifts in profit pools between companies and industries." The 12 disruptive technologies include: mobile Internet, automation of knowledge and work, Internet of things, cloud technology, advanced robotics, autonomous and near-autonomous vehicles, next-generation genomics, energy storage, 3D printing, advanced materials, advanced oil and gas exploration and recovery, renewable energy."

On "Internet of Things," see e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=yp8AjMBG87g

"Free themes are a great way to get a blog or website off the ground. You might want to start writing about a topic but don't want to invest the money in a custom site design on top of hosting and a domain. And once your site is up and running, there's nothing to stop you dissecting them, building on top of them and learning from them. In this article we've selected some of the very best WordPress themes for you to use in your projects. Each is not only free to use and open to the public but also offers something special and unique. For all our WordPress articles, click here"

Excellent list of books on Writing, with great commentaries. "It's entirely possible that the title of this post is completely off. I mean, what I've really compiled is a list of the books on writing that I love the best. photo credit: PhillipWest via photopin cc But isn't that the thing about great writing - it allows us, compels us perhaps, to see the world through the eyes of a great sentence and not necessarily through any sort of actual truths. In fact, I paraphrase from the words of the great Obi-Wan - "Luke, you will find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." And with that I present my list of the best books in the world on writing and invite you to add you own."

"Google's Cloud Platform has long featured Cloud SQL, a zero-maintenance MySQL database that's hosted on Google's cloud platform. What it didn't offer was an API to easily manage these databases without having to use Google's admin interface. Today, however, Google is launching the Cloud SQL API. This new REST API will allow developers to programmatically manage their database instances and open a number of new use cases for Cloud SQL. The API, which Google still deems to be experimental, will allow developers to create their own workflows to easily create and delete instances, restart them and restore them from backup. They will also be able to use it to important and export their databases to and from Google Cloud Storage. For developers, this means using Google's cloud database is now quite a bit easier, especially if they need to regularly manage multiple databases for their customers. Google's launch partner for this API is OrangeScape, which uses it to power parts of KiSSFLOW, its Google Apps workflow SaaS service. "

Must read for every entrepreneur!  When your product and service can command these kind of terms, for sure your company is worth investing in. "A founder-friendly term sheet When I invest (outside of YC) I make offers with the following term sheet.  I've tried to make the terms reflect what I wanted when I was a founder.  A few people have asked me if I'd share it, so here it is.  I think it's pretty founder-friendly. If you believe the upside risk theory, then it makes sense to offer compelling terms and forgo some downside protection to get the best companies to want to work with you. What's most important is what's not in it: *No option pool.  Taking the option pool out of the pre-money valuation (ie, diluting only founders and not investors for future hires) is just a way to artificially manipulate valuation.  New hires benefit everyone and should dilute everyone. *The company doesn't have to pay any of my legal fees.  Requiring the company to pay investors' legal fees always struck me as particularly egregious-the company can probably make better use of the money than investors can, so I'll pay my own legal fees for the round (in a simple deal with no back and forth they always end up super low anyway). *No expiration.  I got burned once by an exploding offer and haven't forgotten it; the founders can take as much time as they want to think about it.  In practice, people usually decide pretty quickly. *No confidentiality.  Founder/investor relationships are long and important.  The founders should talk to whomever they want, and if they want to tell people what I offered them, I don't really care.  Investors certainly tell each other what they offer companies. (Once we shake hands on a deal, of course, I expect the founders to honor it.) *No participating preferred, non-standard liquidation preference, etc.  There is a 1x liquidation preference, but I'm willing to forgo even that and buy common shares (and sometimes

Incredible project exploring new methods of story telling that make full use of an emerging interactive, graphical and multimedia rich, extraordinarily visual Web platform.  Awesome use of Web technology and a great story to boot!   While the Snow Fall Project is hardly the first Visual Document, it's truly a landmark effort.  Hopefully the business process and systems editing tools for Web based Visual Productivity will not be far behind simple Visual Web publication tools. Marbux viewed the source code and pointed out the great efforts that the NY Times had gone to to provide cross browser compatibility.  That in turn reminded me just how close the world came to having Microsoft seize the Web and take control of its future.  A very close call if ever there was one.  Many thanks to Marc Andresssen and the Netscape investors for their heroic efforts to stop Bill Gates and his Microsoft monopoly.

Quick review of a new crop of Web Development - JavaScript tools.  Includes ICE Coder! "The crop of new development tools this month is rich and varied. Taking in web-based IDEs, testing tools, programming paradigms and more, there's enough raw material here to entertain a keen mind for months. If you wanted to be selective you could just study and apply new approaches like lazy loading, or reactive programming. Or maybe you'd prefer to tighten cross-platform consistency with GhostLab. And, if you're feeling particularly clever, you could explore the possibilities of deploying a Bunny 'darknet' from your coffee shop armchair."

Excellent and well worth the time to read! Founder of DropBox tells his story and it's full of insight, wisdom and naked truth. excerpt: "I was going to say work on what you love, but that's not really it. It's so easy to convince yourself that you love what you're doing - who wants to admit that they don't? When I think about it, the happiest and most successful people I know don't just love what they do, they're obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them. They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball: their eyes go a little crazy, the leash snaps and they go bounding off, plowing through whatever gets in the way. I have some other friends who also work hard and get paid well in their jobs, but they complain as if they were shackled to a desk. The problem is a lot of people don't find their tennis ball right away. Don't get me wrong - I love a good standardized test as much as the next guy, but being king of SAT prep wasn't going to be mine. What scares me is that both the poker bot and Dropbox started out as distractions. That little voice in my head was telling me where to go, and the whole time I was telling it to shut up so I could get back to work. Sometimes that little voice knows best. It took me a while to get it, but the hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun. So after today, it's not about pushing yourself; it's about finding your tennis ball, the thing that pulls you. It might take a while, but until you find it, keep listening for that little voice. "

A book detailing years and years of Microsoft's misdeeds.

"GroupDocs Viewer is an online document viewer that lets you read documents in your browser, regardless of whether you have the software that they were created in. You can view many types to word processing documents (DOC, DOCX, TXT, RTF, ODT), presentations (PPT, PPTX), spreadsheets (XLS, XLSX), portable files (PDF), and image files (JPG, BMP, GIF, TIFF). For each file, you get a high-fidelity rendering, showing the document just as it would if you opened it in the software it was created in. Layout and formatting is retained and you see an exact copy of the original. GroupDocs Viewer lets you really read the document. You can search text documents, copy text and even embed the document - GroupDocs Viewer and all - in a web page. You can print or download the file from GroupDocs Viewer if you need to work with it offline."

Comments on the latest SVN article mulling the effects of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's anti trust ruling and proposed break up of Microsoft. comment: "Chinese Wall" Ummm, there was a Chinese Wall between Microsoft Os and the MS Applciations layer. At least that's what Chairman Bill promised developers at a 1990 OS/2-Windows Conference I attended. It was a developers luncheon, hosted by Microsoft, with Chairman Bill speaking to about 40 developers with applications designed to run on the then soon to be released Windows 3.0. In his remarks, the Chairman described his vision of commoditizing the personal computer market through an open hardware-reference platform on the one side of the Windows OS, and provisioning an open application developers layer on the other using open and totally transparent API's. Of course the question came up concerning the obvious advantage Microsoft applications would have. Chairman Bill answered the question by describing the Chinese Wall that existed between Microsoft's OS and Apps develop departments. He promised that OS API's would be developed privately and separate from the Apps department, and publicly disclosed to ALL developers at the same time. Oh yeah. There was lots of anti IBM - evil empire stuff too :) Of course we now know this was a line of crap. Microsoft Apps was discovered to have been using undocumented and secret Window API's. http://goo.gl/0UGe8. Microsoft Apps had a distinct advantage over the competition, and eventually the entire Windows Productivity Platform became dependent on the MSOffice core. The company I worked for back then, Pyramid Data, had the first Contact Management application for Windows; PowerLeads. Every Friday night we would release bug fixes and improvements using Wildcat BBS. By Monday morning we would be slammed with calls from users complaining that they had downloaded the Friday night patch, and now some other application would not load or function properly. Eventually we tracked th

"One of the strangest things about Stripe - or perhaps, one of the strangest things about Paypal - is the list of people who are funding Stripe. Three of its biggest individual backers are people who played a key role in making PayPal a success: cofounders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, along with Elon Musk, who joined PayPal through an acquisition. Why would Thiel, Levchin, and Musk fund a machine built destroy their baby? Probably because, in Silicon Valley, PayPal is viewed as a lost cause. We've heard a lot of complaints about how awful and hard it is to implement. " Stripe isn't the only well-funded startup going after what it views as a decrepit, disrupt-ble incumbent. Jack Dorsey's Square is too, and it's now worth billions of dollars. Another heavily funded startup, Braintree, owns the technology millions of people use to pay for things inside apps like Uber. Finally, some of eBay's bigger rivals such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are gunning for PayPal too.

"Opt out of PRISM, the NSA's global data surveillance program. Stop reporting your online activities to the American government with these free alternatives to proprietary software." A designer named Peng Zhong is so strongly opposed to PRISM, the NSA's domestic spying program, that he created a site to educate people on how to "opt out" of it. According to the original report that brought PRISM to public attention, the nine companies that "participate knowingly" with the NSA are Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Zhong's approach is to replace your workflow with open-source tools that aren't attached to these companies, since they easily stay off the government's radar. If you want to drop totally off the map, it'll take quite a commitment.   Are you ready to give up your operating system?  The NSA tracks everything on Windows, OSX and Google Chrome.  You will need to switch to Debian or some other brand of GNU Linux!  Like Mint!!!!! Personally I have switched from Google Chrome Browser to Mozilla Firefox using the TOR Browser Bundle - Private mode.

Cookie Clearinghouse. Overseen by a six-person panel, it will determine a list of undesirable cookies and then block those.

Another HTML5 Application Platform for Cloud Computing.  Provides secure data connections to existing business systems and workflows.  Not an Open Web Platform. summary: Mobile Helix is an enterprise application and data security platform provider focused on enabling unrestricted enterprise productivity. We are redefining endpoint computing by evolving and extending existing IT infrastructure and standards rather than reinventing them. At our core are three fundamental principles that are at the center of everything that we do: 1) we are application- and data-centric - we embrace the blurring lines between phones, tablets and laptops, permitting IT to relinquish control of the endpoint device entirely and embrace a bring-your-own-anything policy; 2) we provide unmatched yet unobtrusive security for sensitive corporate data by intelligently securing the data rather than the devices; and 3) simplicity is embedded into the DNA of our products, our designs and our communications. Our solution, Mobile Helix Link, is the industry's first pure HTML5 platform that combines unparalleled data security, a unique HTML5 application development and delivery platform, and breakthrough patent-pending performance enhancement technology. 

Note that an unofficial translation of the parliamentary motion is linked from the article. This adds substantially to the pressure internationally to end software patents because Germany has been the strongest defender of software patents in Europe. The same legal grounds would not apply in the U.S. The strongest argument for the non-patentability in the U.S., in my opinion, is that software patents embody embody both prior art and obviousness. A general purpose computer can accomplish nothing unforeseen by the prior art of the computing device. And it is impossible for software to do more than cause different sequences of bit register states to be executed. This is the province of "skilled artisans" using known methods to produce predictable results. There is a long line of Supreme Court decisions holding that an "invention" with such traits is non-patentable. I have summarized that argument with citations at .