Various updates

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Its going to be an interesting week in the technology universe.

Wahooly is launching on Tuesday. More on them below. Then the Facebook IPO will apparently be happening on Wednesday, which could potentially start off another big round of startup frothiness.

The overall level of excitement in tech is as boisterous as I’ve seen it in a number of years. Whether it has “legs” remains to be seen, but there appears to be a definite shortage of qualified people to go around. Over the past few months, the number of resumes sent my way has slowly dropped, and instead I’ve been receiving calls from head hunters and startups (although typically they haven’t bothered actually checking what I actually DO). It will be interesting to see whether things actually pick up economically (or even just in the tech world) over the course of the year.

Wahooly is an interesting riff on startup incubators, crowd-funding and viral marketing. The amount of attention that they’ve achieved in the past couple of months is larger than anything I’ve personally encountered. The basic idea is that startups give them a small amount of equity, which they then “share” among their users, in exchange for which the users promote the startup. The amount of “equity” given to each user depends on how effective the users are in helping to market the company in question, according to some internal formula. To avoid market regulations, it looks like they’re giving some kind of virtual equity to the users, rather than actual shares, and the users will only profit directly if there is some kind of liquidity event. Remains to be seen whether it will work (and whether they can keep it on the right side of legality), but there’s already a large number of users who have registered, and approximately 50 to 60 startups to begin with. My approach is to view it as a combination of an interesting source to find out about new startups (i.e. pure entertainment value), a possible deal flow source, and maybe, just maybe a couple of bucks on the side, somewhere down the road. In the meantime, I’ve been chatting with other users on two groups (here and here) that have been started on Facebook, and its been fun.

I’ll be posting regular updates with regards to Wahooly (and particularly the startups that are launching via their system) over the next few months. Also, two startups I’ve been working with are gradually getting closer to Beta launch, and I will have more to say about them as that time approaches.

New Monthly Newsletter

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I’ve been thinking of doing a newsletter for the past three years.

Its time to finally do something about it (no use thinking about wasted time).

I will be including interesting posts that I’ve found elsewhere, plus some unique content that will only be available via the newsletter.

If you’re worried about subscription management, I will only be sending this out once per month, and the list will be managed via MailChimp, so you can always unsubscribe if it sucks!

Please feel free to subscribe via the form on the right hand side of the page (only if you’re interested).

Social Search

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Google is getting a lot of blowback for its efforts to integrate Google+ results into search.

Several people have asked me my opinion, so here goes.

1. I’ve made a habit of always logging out of Google services before searching. Not that I really care if they have a connection between an actual profile and my searched (after all, they have my IP address anyhow). I just think its none of their business, and as such I’m not going to make it easier for them. Based on what I’ve seen so far of the G+ modifications, I’m going to continue doing just that. The quality of the search results with G+ content included is poor. Google is either going to need to tweak this feature substantially in order to make it usable – or more likely they’ll quietly make it disappear in a few months. Continue reading →

All New and Improved

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I finally switched the appearance of the site. I was rapidly becoming tired of the old theme, which was too dark, overly imposing (which detracts from the content), and hard on the eyes.

The new theme, in case anybody is interested, is a heavily modified version of WordPress’ Twenty Eleven theme. It takes surprisingly little time to modify it to look completely different than it does out of the box.

I also used a number of typography cues from a web marketing site called Social Triggers. You can see the specific post here. The goal was to make the site easier to read, which I hope this accomplishes.

Why some people are intensely fascinating

Social Media 3 Comments
Image: Carlos Porto / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’ve had a number of conversations with people online in the past few weeks regarding the topic of why some people are so good at holding others attention online.

You already know the sort of people I’m talking about – they have tens or hundreds of thousands of follows on major social media sites, and people hang on their every word.

What we were discussing was the ability of people to grab our interest, not general influence (although in many cases these are one and the same people).

As I told somebody on Twitter, I think I have pieces of the answer. Not the whole answer, unfortunately. That would be worth its weight in various precious minerals. Continue reading →

Meta-squared Materials

Technology 1 Comment
Newton's Apple - Flickr Creative Commons - Ann Kempster

If I’m right about the following thought experiment, this could have a huge impact on humanities technological advancement.

As usual, I have no way of knowing if the following is original. I’ve placed links to whatever I can find that’s relevant.

A metamaterial is a man-made material that has attributes that aren’t normally found in naturally occuring minerals. Some of these materials have made the headlines in recent years (think “real” invisibility cloaks). Harry Potter aside, they’re pretty useful in a wide variety of areas, including telecommunications.

Now for the thought experiment:

Picture a metamaterial that creates (at some focal point) the simulated effect of a different metamaterial. In other words, we’re simulating a metamaterial using a different one. I’m not sure what to call this. Maybe a meta-metamaterial. Or a meta^2 material.

Building something like this is probably going to be difficult, but I don’t think it is impossible (See edit #1 below).

Why this is useful is that potentially we could use this approach to simulate metamaterials that cannot currently be built.

At the moment, the state of the art appears to be metamaterials that resonate at optical or near-infrared frequencies. That’s on the order of magnitude of  Terahertz (or THz), or 10^11 Hz, or looking at it from the perspective of wavelength, 0.1 millimeters.

Using a meta^2 material, we might be able to simulate something that resonates instead at a wavelength that approaches the Planck length.

What I think – and I have no way of proving that I’m correct right now – is that such materials will give us the ability to directly manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe. I’m not the first person to think along these lines. See this article which quotes a paper on ARXIV.

Some examples of what could be possible if we can do this:

  • Use the Strong Nuclear Force to build SF-style force-fields. Or industrial drill-bits that make diamonds look as soft as talc.
  • Create resonance with gravitational forces. This could allow us to make artificial gravity, or gravity cancellation devices.
  • Create extended areas of negative energy density. If Alcubierre is right, that could mean FTL.
  • Obviates the need to develop nanotechnology. Why bother building something at nanometer scale, when you can simulate the effect with much less effort, and make it any size necessary?

Edit #1: To clarify (based on some readers comments): what we’re talking about is using either optical or EM interference from a metamaterial to form a waveguide that produces the effect of the second-order metamaterial. In other words, creating a waveguide that doesn’t have solid walls, and then working backwards to create a metamaterial that generates such a condition.

Edit #2: Another relevant link.

Edit #3: I found one paper (horrible translation from Russian) that appears to cover the math behind virtual waveguides. There’s also a lot of work that has been done on plasma-based waveguides (a step in the right direction – not using solids!) over the past decade.

Edit #4: If it is possible to build virtual waveguides, then it probably follows that it is possible to use them to build something like a transistor – only at a sub-atomic scale.

Who wants to be a Trillionaire?

Business Strategy Technology Uncategorized 2 Comments
International Pile of Money - Flickr Creative Commons - epSos.de

One standard piece of advice given to startups is to pick an industry that will permit scale, so that it is at least feasible that somebody in that industry at some point in time could build a large company doing it.

I saw a video on Yahoo Finance a while back where somebody claimed that Apple will be the first trillion dollar company (barring a brief stint by Cisco during DotCom).

Obviously it is hard to tell right now whether that’s true or not, but an industry that can support a trillion dollar company sounds like a good place to start, doesn’t it?

We know that this is possible in consumer electronics then, but what other industries would make this feasible? The goal here is to list industries that are big enough to support large companies (possibly even trillion dollar ones), and yet are still at least somewhat feasible for startups (potentially requiring substantial – but not unfeasible – capital). Continue reading →

Is social media displacing creativity?

Social Media 7 Comments

This post originates out of a number of discussions I’ve had lately with people on Google Plus.

The underlying notion is that people have a limited amount of free time, and if they’re spending it using social media websites then that activity displaces other – potentially creative – activity. There’s already been a lot written on whether social media displaces actual friendships (answer is: maybe). Continue reading →

WordPress comments on home page

Technology World Wide Web No Comments

I recently built a modified version of WordPress’s Twenty Eleven theme for a graphic designer on behalf of their customer.

One of the things that the customer wanted was to put the “comments” form onto the bottom of each post on the home page of the blog.

That turned out to be pretty easy to do. In the index.php file inside the template, just add the following line of code under the part that outputs the post content:

 <?php comments_template( '', true ); ?>

The problem, as we discovered, is that when users replied to comments, the new comments were all appearing under the first post on the page.

My initial guess – which turned out to be wrong – was that there was some kind of bug in WordPress which had recently been introduced.

I dug a little deeper and looked at the stock comment-template.php file that comes with WordPress. When it builds the “reply-to” links, it creates a relative link based on the current page (i.e. normally that would be the blog post page itself), and then also adds in some javascript which keeps the user on the page and defaults the comment form correctly.

The problem was that the javascript necessary wasn’t included into the current page.

The fix consisted of adding the following line into the top of the index.php file:

wp_enqueue_script( 'comment-reply' );

That still leaves a side issue – what happens if a user has javascript disabled?

The correct fix would be to include a comments-template file into the theme, including a fix that includes the post id (when necessary) in the link url. The side issue with that (not really a big deal, but anyhow) is that you would then need to modify any other code in the theme that calls the comments template, to ensure it is calling the new one in the theme instead.

i.e. search for:

<?php comments_template( '', true ); ?>

and replace with:

<?php comments_template( '/newcomments-template.php'', true ); ?>

Not a big deal, but annoying.

Ideally though, this is something that WordPress should fix in their default code and/or something that theme developers should include by default.

The whole world is a user interface

Design No Comments
Flickr Creative Commons - Omad

Lately I’ve been working with two very talented user interface designers.

The problem with hanging around UI/UX folks on a regular basis, is that everything starts to look like a user interface.

I really do mean everything.

Driving around my neighbourhood, I find myself thinking that a turning lane in a particular spot would really do wonders to streamline the browsing, um I mean driving experience.

Waiting in line at the grocery store, I see the need for additional whitespace to accomodate the users shopping carts at the front of the store. Oh and the cashiers could benefit from a longer grocery input field so that they’re not left waiting from the customers to unload their shopping carts.

The ergonomics crowd have understood this sort of thing for decades. Complex machinery – think car dashboards – go through this process all the time. Its really only starting to trickle down to other kinds of products and experiences now though. Many have noted that we’re entering a golden age of design. I just hope that whoever is responsible for our road system gets on board.