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Thinking About Employment
Albert Wenger – Oct 27, 2012
One of the truly depressing things about listening to the presidential debates was that both sides seem to be disregarding a fundamental factor in the economy: the displacement of humans by “machines” (in quotes because these days the machines in [...] Read more
Surface and iPad Mini
Albert Wenger – Oct 24, 2012
It seems as if Microsoft can’t catch a break any more. On the day that all the Surface reviews come out, Apple hogs the news with the iPad Mini launch. Then again, given that the reviews for the Surface are [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: Algorithms (Introduction)
Albert Wenger – Oct 23, 2012
We have covered a lot of ground in the previous Tech Tuesday posts on programming. Now it is time to return to the original definition that I provided in the introductory post, where I wrote that programming is “telling a [...] Read more
Self Publishing My Thesis
Albert Wenger – Oct 22, 2012
In 1999, which now feels like a very long time ago, I finished my PhD thesis at MIT. I had started working on it following my general exams in 1996 but promptly got very busy co-founding a company (the now [...] Read more
Feature Friday: The Logged Out Experience
Albert Wenger – Oct 19, 2012
Most startups spend all their time on optimizing the experience for registered and logged in users. But what about those who come to a site through a link? Or right to the home page by either typing the company’s URL [...] Read more
Shapeways: Manufacturing 2.0 in New York City
Albert Wenger – Oct 18, 2012
A couple of years ago Shapeways was a tiny company based in the Netherlands with a big idea: providing 3D printing as an on demand service and marketplace. Following an investment from Union Square Ventures and Index Ventures the company [...] Read more
Hiring Too Fast / Too Slow
Albert Wenger – Oct 17, 2012
This is the second post in my Scylla and Charybdis series on why startups are quite so hard. Up today: hiring. Here you can go wrong by hiring too fast but also by hiring too slow. The first problem of [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: Data Structures (Lists, Trees, Graphs)
Albert Wenger – Oct 16, 2012
As previously promised, this will be the last Tech Tuesday post on Data Structures for a while and starting next week we will return to other aspects of programming. Much of what we have seen in the previous data structure [...] Read more
Do Not Track (Continued)
Albert Wenger – Oct 12, 2012
Yesterday I posted about how the current Do Not Track debate is muddling the underlying issues. I got a great reply from Mike Yang on Twitter that rightly pointed out at P3P had been a mess in part because Microsoft [...] Read more