Canada
Why The Biggest Tech Companies Are Not In Canada
Mayo0615 Reblog from July 22, 2013 It dawned on me that my blog post from…
existentialism
How Successful People Make Themselves Luckier
This article has resonated with me, and my own personal epiphany. It came to me as a university student, sitting on the grass in the university common area. I suddenly realized that I was my own boss, and I no longer cared much what other people thought of me. As the author says here, it was a sense of calm, and a moment that not everyone achieves. It is a variation on my own tag line…”The harder I work, the luckier I get.” Once again, I find that the key factor is people skills.
Canada
Strategic Inflection Point: iTunes University Transforming The Ivory Tower Whether We Like It Or Not
Much noise is being made about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOC’s), and the rise of organizations like The Khan Academy and Silicon Valley startup Coursera. Universities, including this one, are scrambling to develop strategies to respond. While institutions like M.I.T. and Harvard have already embraced open, free education, smaller institutions see a catastrophe on their horizons. IMHO, broader and deeper disruptive change is already occurring in all education, not only higher education.
Argumentation & Debate
How to Listen When The Speaker Is Ranting and Rambling
One of my biggest personal challenges, is listening to a speaker who is ranting and/or…
Silicon Valley Culture
Time To Thin Out Ineffective Startup Accelerators
If properly managed and matched to local economic need, resources and capabilities, local accelerators can be a significant local economic asset. However, the problem with so many of these “everywhere else” accelerators, is highly unrealistic expectations to be “the next Silicon Valley”, failure to connect with local economic needs, excessive focus on any and every new Web app, and most importantly, poor management. It is also apparent to me that many of these more remote smaller communities are so distant from the mainstream economy, that many of the “great ideas” that come out of them, are embarrassingly late.
Supercomputers
Larry Ellison's Extremely High Tech 2013 America's Cup Defense on SF Bay
This year’s America’s Cup Defense is a Tour de Force of technological innovation both on and off the water, Read on and I will explain. The America’s Cup events are hosted by the St. Francis Yacht Club on San Francisco Bay, and the defending team BMC Oracle, led by none other than Larry Ellison, Chairman and founder of Oracle in Silicon Valley. The qualifying races on Marina Green and San Francisco Bay. Every aspect of this has been planned in advance to showcase bleeding edge technology, and to turn the yacht races themselves into the spectator event The America’s Cup has never been,
Canada
Why The Biggest Tech Companies Are Not In Canada
Mayo0615 Reblog from July 22, 2013 It dawned on me that my blog post from…
Globalization
God Speed Edward Snowden: An Ethical Dilemma of Global Proportions
We are all now hearing and reading about Edward Snowden, who is now at the center of a global political firestorm, caused by Snowden’s decision to reveal the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program, and its increasing encroachment of personal privacy. Snowden’s revelations have now also entangled the UK’s GCHQ, the secret intelligence gathering arm of MI6 in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire which has also been sharing similar snooping with the NSA. A former U.S. National Security Administration contractor, Snowden was actually employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, a global management consultancy firm. Snowden’s situation should give us all pause to consider the Brave New World we have entered with zettabytes (1 Million Terabytes) of Big Data, and the uses of it.
Mobile OS
Silicon Valley's Misguided Love Affair With An "App" For Everything
The knee jerk joke of “There’s an app for that!” isn’t really that funny. Many experienced Silicon Valley veterans have complained loudly about the current malaise of misplaced infatuation with mobile apps, as the apparent end all and be all of Silicon Valley. Vinod Khosla, Marc Andreeson, Max Marmer and a laundry list of others have asked rhetorically how Silicon Valley could have lost its way so badly? Silicon Valley was founded on Big Ideas.
UBC
Red Herring "Awards": An Ironic Double Entendre
This morning TechCrunch posted an interesting article on the strange odyssey of Red Herring (the brand), and its current owner, Frenchman Alex Vieux (pictured above), since RH was sold to Vieux by Tony Perkins, back in 2003. Tony Perkins and Red Herring were Silicon Valley phenoms back in the 1990’s, so the blog post caught my eye. This story has a local angle. A startup here that was recently “parked,” also apparently won a Red Herring award a few years back. I was intrigued at that time, because I was intimately familiar with Red Herring from its founder, Tony Perkins, and its heyday in Silicon Valley in the 1990’s.
