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Johann Höchtl

Data Startups Danger - 0 views

medium.com/...a-driven-startups-b6f475f11f5f

data startup datamarket danger

shared by Johann Höchtl on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Johann Höchtl on 11 Mar 15
     
    Of course, the radio stations were absolutely correct on all their points except one. Compared to the data about what the market wanted, the song was too long. It was too complex. It was too confusing, and it didn't fit into any best-selling genre. But even though it was a massive outlier compared to the data, somehow it worked. Bohemian Rhapsody went on to become the only song to reach number one in four different years. But even better than that fleeting data-point of success, it went on to change what popular music could be, and made countless people happy.
Johann Höchtl

Openness for Whom? and Openness for What? | Exploring the interactions among public opi... - 0 views

blogs.worldbank.org/...5954

openness worldbank accountability crowd sourcing

shared by Johann Höchtl on 20 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Johann Höchtl on 20 Apr 12
     
    Openness for Whom? and Openness for What?
thinkahol *

What YOU Can Do on May Day | OccupyWallSt.org - 0 views

occupywallst.org/...what-you-can-do-may-day

What YOU Can Do on May Day | OccupyWallSt.org

shared by thinkahol * on 24 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 24 Apr 12
     
    Several cities have organized in solidarity with this call to action
Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Yahoo Google Microsoft Facebook culture hackers innovation cubicle old

shared by Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
  • Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10
     
    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Johann Höchtl

Scott Adams Blog: Startup Country 07/27/2010 - 0 views

dilbert.com/...startup_country

blog scott adams state china hongkong virtual theoretical

shared by Johann Höchtl on 27 Jul 10 - Cached
  • My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country. The startup country, let's say the size of modern day Israel, would be designed from the ground up for efficiency.
  • The entire banking system would be automated. There would be no cash in the start-up country. You wouldn't need to "apply" for a loan because the virtual bank would always have a current notion of your credit-worthiness.
  • The tax code in the startup country would be simplified to the point where residents might forget it exists.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Most of what is scary about the government having power is the lack of transparency. The startup nation would have full transparency. Any citizen could log on to his computer and see what court orders had been issued for what videos and why.
  • Arguably, China accidentally performed a variant of this experiment with Hong Kong. Oversimplifying the history, Hong Kong was part of China and leased to the United Kingdom for 99 years, like a startup country within a country.
  • Judith Schossboeck on 29 Jul 10
     
    über das bin ich auch schon gestolpert. interesting!
thinkahol *

Glenn Greenwald: How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Arou... - 0 views

www.alternet.org/...ns_and_people_around_the_world

Glenn Greenwald: How the US Government Strikes Fear in Its Own Citizens and People Around World | Civil Liberties AlterNet

shared by thinkahol * on 24 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Everybody knows that if you torture people you don't get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and waterboarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would-be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistleblowing and this war on Wikileaks is about as well.
  • thinkahol * on 24 Mar 11
     
    Everybody knows that if you torture people you don't get good information. It was never about that. Disappearing people and putting them into orange jumpsuits, and into legal black holes and waterboarding them and freezing them and killing detainees was about signaling to the rest of world that you can not challenge or stand up to American power, because if you do, we will respond without constraints, and there is nothing anybody can or will do about it. It was about creating a climate of repression and fear to deter any would-be dissenters or challengers to American power. And that is what this war on whistleblowing and this war on Wikileaks is about as well.
thinkahol *

What is Debt? - An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber « nak... - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...hropologist-david-graeber.html

What is Debt? - An Interview with Economic Anthropologist David Graeber « naked capitalism

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Oct 11
     
    David Graeber currently holds the position of Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths University London. Prior to this he was an associate professor of anthropology at Yale University. He is the author of 'Debt: The First 5,000 Years' which is available from Amazon. Interview conducted by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer based in Dublin, Ireland.
thinkahol *

The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality - Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11
     
    What amazes me most whenever I write about this topic is recalling how terribly upset so many Democrats pretended to be when Bush claimed the power merely to detain or even just eavesdrop on American citizens without due process.  Remember all that?  Yet now, here's Obama claiming the power not to detain or eavesdrop on citizens without due process, but to kill them; marvel at how the hardest-core White House loyalists now celebrate this and uncritically accept the same justifying rationale used by Bush/Cheney (this is war! the President says he was a Terrorist!) without even a moment of acknowledgment of the profound inconsistency or the deeply troubling implications of having a President - even Barack Obama - vested with the power to target U.S. citizens for murder with no due process. Also, during the Bush years, civil libertarians who tried to convince conservatives to oppose that administration's radical excesses would often ask things like this: would you be comfortable having Hillary Clinton wield the power to spy on your calls or imprison you with no judicial reivew or oversight?  So for you good progressives out there justifying this, I would ask this:  how would the power to assassinate U.S. citizens without due process look to you in the hands of, say, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann?
thinkahol *

ACLU to Oakland Police: No Seriously, Hand Over the Info » Blog of Rights: Of... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...ce-no-seriously-hand-over-info

ACLU to Oakland Police: No Seriously Hand Over the Info » Blog of Rights: Official American Civil Liberties Union

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Nov 11
     
    The Oakland Police Department oversaw the use of excessive force against Occupy Oakland demonstrators, and now the department is refusing to hand over information about what really happened. The ACLU of Northern California and the National Lawyers' Guild sent a public records request about OPD's use of force on the night of October 25, 2011 on demonstrators supporting Occupy Oakland. The response we received is both infuriating and misguided.
thinkahol *

Things That Make Me Angry | Thinkahol's Blog - 0 views

thinkahol.wordpress.com/...things-that-make-me-angry

Things That Make Me Angry | Thinkahol's Blog

shared by thinkahol * on 12 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 12 Nov 11
     
    Wall Street Isn't Winning - It's Cheating The two-tiered justice system: an illustration 9/10/2001: Rumsfeld says $2.3 TRILLION Missing from Pentagon  The due-process-free assassination of U.S. citizens is now reality The Quiet Coup "the finance industry has effectively captured our government" What OWS is about + data behind the movement Data privacy is now extinct in the U.S. "The problem that confronts us is that every living system in the biosphere is in decline and the rate of decline is accelerating. There isn't one peer-reviewed scientific article that's been published in the last 20 years that contradicts that statement. Living systems are coral reefs. They're our climatic stability, forest cover, the oceans themselves, aquifers, water, the conditions of the soil, biodiversity. They go on and on as they get more specific. But the fact is, there isn't one living system that is stable or is improving. And those living systems provide the basis for all life." The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery? How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich: The inside story of how the Republicans abandoned the poor and the middle class to pursue their relentless agenda of tax cuts for the wealthiest one percent
thinkahol *

Ethan Nichtern: Radical Buddhism and the Paradox of Acceptance - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...radical-buddhism_b_671972.html

radical buddhism paradox acceptance

shared by thinkahol * on 22 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 22 Aug 10
     
    Practical transformation is what Buddhist practice is all about. To practice meditation consistently is to push back hard against the tidal wave of materialism that is quite literally killing the planet.
thinkahol *

Sullivan's defense of presidential assassinations - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Sullivan's defense of presidential assassinations - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 03 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 03 Oct 10
     
    The justifications for Obama's hit list reveal what is missing most from American political thought
Parycek

Perlstein's "Mendocracy" and Shock Doctrine Economics - 0 views

digbysblog.blogspot.com/...eins-mendocracy-and-shock.html

Obama democracy mendocracy

shared by Parycek on 09 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Parycek on 09 Nov 10
     
    Rick Perlstein wrote a fascinating article for The Daily Beast over the week-end about what he calls out "mendocracy" --- which means a society ruled by liars.
Parycek

Crowd-sourcing is not empowering enough - 0 views

www.deliberations.com.au/...-is-not-empowering-enough.html

deliberation Crowd-sourcing edem

shared by Parycek on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
    • Parycek
      Parycek on 20 Mar 10
       
      It invites individuals to foist and endorse (or not) ideas with no pressure to consider the full public consequences of them, including whether they can be sustained across ideological or partisan lines, or how practical they are, or how insulting of public officers. There is the published intention to attract a full range of public perspectives, but instead it tends to attract enclaves of people with committed strategies (eg. embarrass public officials) or perspectives (eg. technology is the answer). While national initiatives attract noise, in more local applications of such ideation, participation is often too thin to be meaningful. This all comes down the question of representativeness. If a governing body is going to legitimately use these ideas, and be compelled to do so, then there has to be good evidence that the contributors do actually form a descriptive representation of the public being governed. I think if you have a technical problem that requires particular expertise, then such ideation processes can find the needle in the haystack. Those of us who subscribe to technical forums know how well that works. I think some people feel that public policy ideation works the same way, but it doesn't because in a contested political environment, what "should be done" is claimed on normative rather than technical grounds. Another metaphor for the ranking in ideation is consumer selection, which many in political science would model as rational choice, privileging private over public interests. Should that be the motor for the selection of public policy? I write all this knowing full well that I risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I just think we can do better. Some ideation processes should invite people randomly, to ensure full demographic spread on relevant dimensions (eg. age, education, political leaning). Let's have multi-stage processes, where contributors do more than just introduce and rank ideas--to their credit, thi
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    I fear that ultimately crowd-sourcing is damaging the enterprise of dialogue and deliberation (D&D).
Parycek

Social Networking Now More Popular on Mobile than Desktop - 0 views

www.readwriteweb.com/...lar_on_mobile_than_desktop.php

social networking socialnetworks socialmedia study statistics

shared by Parycek on 20 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    A recent study from Ruder Finn revealed that Americans are spending nearly three hours per day on their mobile phones. And what are they doing there? Educating themselves, conducting business, managing finances, instant messaging, emailing? All of the above, as it turns out, and then some. But perhaps the most interesting finding from the new data is the fact that more people are using the mobile web to socialize (91%) compared to the 79% of desktop users who do the same. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-intent-behind-mobile-internet-use-84016487.html
Parycek

Open Government Data - 1 views

www.access-info.org/...open-government-data

opendata overview opengov

shared by Parycek on 20 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    There are currently a number of exciting initiatives to release government data in bulk, these include: ... What about civil society initiatives?* At the EU level ...
Parycek

What Do We Want? Our Data. When Do We Want It? Now! | Epicenter | Wired.com - 0 views

www.wired.com/...ur-data-when-do-we-want-it-now

wired opendata data socialmedia

shared by Parycek on 20 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    Predictions about the appeal of cloud computing were on the money. We increasingly share, communicate, socialize and entertain ourselves with software and media on remote servers rather than on our own computers. But a big catch prevents more of us from investing much time or money in ephemeral digital media or constantly-changing online services: It can be difficult, if not impossible, to grab your stuff and split.
Parycek

Learning in 3D - Immersive Environments in Training and Education - 0 views

sl.nmc.org/...ents-in-training-and-education

elearning 3d

shared by Parycek on 20 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    Can immersive environments replace traditional training and education? Is a 3D environment better than turning a page? What advantages does 3D have over a flat screen?
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