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Network Effects And Scale Economies (aka Spolsky vs. Heinemeier)
Albert Wenger – Nov 5, 2009
David Heinemeier at 37signals published a post titled “Bug tracking isn’t a network-effect business” in response to a piece by Joel Spolsky in Inc. asking “Does Slow Growth Equal Death?" Heinemeier’s post is a possibly intentional misreading of Spolky’s so [...] Read more
ad:tech Panel On State of Digital Economy
Albert Wenger – Nov 4, 2009
I will be participating in an ad:tech panel this afternoon with the title “Digital Economy 2010: A Robust Recovery or Another Year of Trench Warfare?" I have to admit that I am not entirely sure what that means, but in [...] Read more
Unemployment and Structural Change
Albert Wenger – Nov 3, 2009
It is likely that the unemployment rate is going to hit 10 percent when the next monthly report comes out on Friday. That is 1 in 10 people without a job (in fact it is worse because the official statistics [...] Read more
Programmer-Archeologists Needed
Albert Wenger – Nov 2, 2009
I love Vernor Vinge’s concept of a “programmer-archeologist” (A Deepness In the Sky, he also coined “programmer-at-arms”) as someone who digs through the layers of existing systems to understand why and how stuff works. I was reminded of this over [...] Read more
One Truth About Technology Architecture: Loose Coupling
Albert Wenger – Oct 30, 2009
One of the great things about being focused on investing in web services is that the technical challenges faced by almost all of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio tend to be the same. The solutions on the [...] Read more
More (Too Much?) Free from Google: Turn-By-Turn
Albert Wenger – Oct 29, 2009
Yesterday, Google announced something stunning: free turn-by-turn directions for Android 2.0 to be first available shortly on the Droid phones. It is stunning because the previously cheapest software only alternatives were apps such as Navigon ($89.99) and TomTom ($99.99) for [...] Read more
We Must Research Geo-Engineering
Albert Wenger – Oct 27, 2009
If you either follow the Freakonomics blog or any of the global warming / CO2 coverage, you will have by now encountered the tiff over the “climate chapter” (Chapter 5) of Superfreakonomics. If not, you can read Levitt’s most recent [...] Read more
Newspapers and EReaders (My Kindle Experience)
Albert Wenger – Oct 26, 2009
I am late to the Kindle show. Having grown up in Europe and going back there for vacation a fair bit (and reading books mostly on vacation and otherwise via DailyLit), I did not want to buy a US-only device. [...] Read more
Everything You Wanted To Know about MongoDB (But Were Afraid to Ask)
Albert Wenger – Oct 23, 2009
The NoSQL movement has been gathering a lot of steam lately (despite some folks misgivings about the name). There have been meetups in major cities around the world – most recently in Berlin – and there is a big conference [...] Read more