This past Saturday, a group of fans and aspiring creatives of all kinds gathered together in the basement level of Silicon Valley Comic Con. Outside this room, the convention bustles noisily with costumed characters, video games, and the murmur of human voices. Inside it is a rather drab and gray setting for one of the […]
Encrypting Your Life is Easy
“If you bother locking your doors at night, you should use encryption”, says Quincy Larson of FreeCodeCamp. Earlier this week Quincy Larson wrote an article on Medium called “How to Encrypt Your Life in Less Than an Hour”, in which he provides a guide that is accessible to technology laypersons for encrypting their most valuable […]
Are Developers Coming Back to Microsoft?
Developer interest in C# has declined sharply since its peak in 2012 according to data from the TIOBE index. As one former .NET developer wrote back in 2015, this precipitous decline in due to the rise of cloud-native application frameworks and mobile platforms where Microsoft developers are not first-class citizens. The reach of Microsoft’s developer ecosystem has declined […]
Private Cloud is Undead
As I was reading the recent article by preeminent cloud expert Bernard Golden predicting the long, slow demise of private cloud, I was reminded of the “Bring out your dead” scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. In that scene, the old man who is still very much alive objects to being placed on the death […]
Upwork Makes a Bold and Desperate Play as Hordes of Competitors Descend on the Low End Market
Building marketplaces is hard, just ask Bill Gurley of Benchmark about the complexity of identifying good opportunities for marketplaces in the Internet economy. This was further evidenced today when I received a little email hand grenade from the CEO of Upwork, a leading online marketplace for freelancing. In the wake of the ODesk-Elance merger, Upwork […]
Startup Entities: Choose Wisely, Founder, for Complexity Will Bring You Stress
When I first started my business in the fall of 2008, I was faced with a classic founders dilemma. What type of entity should I incorporate, LLC, C-Corp, S-Corp? There are hundreds and thousands of articles with mediocre advice regarding the various tradeoffs of these entities. In this article I will share some real world […]
How Digital Advertisers Destroyed Themselves
It’s one of those weird things. I can remember the exact moment when I stopped using Yahoo forever. It was many years ago on the day that Yahoo placed a new and intrusive advertisement on its home page. This particular ad was at the time beyond anything I had ever experienced before. A few seconds […]
Silicon Valley Ageism Versus the Productivity of Famous Inventors
A few weeks ago I was having lunch with a friend who half-jokingly asked me if I was ready to retire yet. I half-jokingly quipped that I was well past the age of “fundable” established by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and would therefore be relocating to Puerto Rico in the near future. Jokes aside, ageism […]
Your Startup Can Succeed With Offshore Development Teams
A headline reads “We gave all of our most boring and tedious work to people we never met, and here is what happened next”. Let me guess: a total failure? Recently there have been a few rather nasty articles deriding offshore development teams. As an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley I want to set the record […]
2015 Year of the Whale and Other Disruptive Trends in IT
The year 2014 was as a very exciting period in cloud computing as several emerging technologies and trends began to shape the future of IT. In late 2014 the overarching trend disrupting technology and industries everywhere is still the growth of software. Software is now nearly ubiquitous due to the proliferation of general purpose processing […]