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Labor Day: Right to an API Key (Algorithmic Organizing)
Albert Wenger – Sep 1, 2014
Today is Labor Day which is meant to celebrate the workers movement (as an aside, in Germany and much of the rest of the world this is held on May 1). That might be a good time to think about [...] Read more
Our Common Humanity: We Still Have a Lot to Build on the Internet
Albert Wenger – Aug 21, 2014
There have been a number of tweets in my timeline roughly saying: “Ferguson, Gaza, Syria, Ukraine — what is going on with the world?” I don’t know that these can all be reduced to a single underlying reason although the [...] Read more
Buzzfeed, Native Ads and Crowdfunding (Beacon Reader et al)
Albert Wenger – Aug 13, 2014
I will be the first to admit that I am a sucker for a good listicle. That’s probably a result of being overly prone to making lists myself. I am also not offended by native advertising per se. After all [...] Read more
Organizing Knowledge Around Basic Concepts
Albert Wenger – Aug 11, 2014
This summer I have been blogging less. That’s largely because I have been reading more and also been spending more time thinking about some of my favorite topics. All of this has me more convinced than ever that we need [...] Read more
Foursquare: Personalized Recommendations Unleashed
Albert Wenger – Aug 6, 2014
Today’s release of the latest version of Foursquare has me super excited. It puts together all of the data and capabilities the team there has built over the last five years to provide the best local recommendations: based on lots [...] Read more
It is OK to Worry about Work (& Doesn’t Make you a Luddite or Socialist)
Albert Wenger – Aug 4, 2014
In venture capital we come across startups all the time that are building something that has been tried in the past and failed. It would be very easy to dismiss these opportunities based on a naive “pattern matching” approach to [...] Read more
The Unbundling of Scale
Albert Wenger – Jul 30, 2014
During the industrial age, economies of scale were a major source of competitive advantage. Many production processes exhibited decreasing unit costs over a very large range of output. Steel was a classic example which resulted in a few very large [...] Read more
Strong AI: Employment Impact Doesn’t Depend on “How” Computers Think
Albert Wenger – Jul 28, 2014
There was a fun Twitter convo about strong AI between Patrick Collison and Marc Andreessen. I also love speculating about this topic but before I engage in that I want to point out that from an employment perspective this is [...] Read more
Is it 1880 or 1914?
Albert Wenger – Jul 23, 2014
I haven’t been posting much the last couple of weeks. There are a variety of reasons for that including spending extra time reading and learning new things but the main reason is that I am trying to understand better where [...] Read more