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Identity: A Huge Business Opportunity
Albert Wenger – Apr 30, 2012
Companies across our portfolio are spending a lot of resources on suppressing various types of undesirable behavior ranging from comment spam to outright financial fraud. Much of this could be avoided through a probabilistic identity system. I have written about [...] Read more
Looking at Publishing
Andy Weissman – Apr 30, 2012
Just read a wonderful essay in the New York Review of Books from Jason Epstein - "How Books Will Survive Publishing." Mr. Epstein looks at the current conflict between Amazon and books publishers and Apple, over the prices of e-books, [...] Read more
CISPA: Asking for a Fight
Albert Wenger – Apr 27, 2012
I don’t know whether to be upset or happy about the machinations that went on yesterday and resulted in the House passing CISPA with a 248-168 vote. There were critical last minute changes to the bill that vastly enhance the [...] Read more
Hacking Society Follow-up
Albert Wenger – Apr 26, 2012
On Tuesday we held a wonderful one day event at the USV offices with the title: Hacking Society. The basic premise was relatively simple. Networks are a emerging on the Internet that are disrupting existing hierarchical institutions. Starting from that [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: Programming Languages
Albert Wenger – Apr 24, 2012
This is the first post in the Tech Tuesday cycle on programming. Let’s begin with a simple observation: even though various human languages are quite different from each other they cover much of the same territory – the human experience. [...] Read more
The Bubble and (Misunderstood) Network Effects
Albert Wenger – Apr 23, 2012
Dave Winer last Thursday had a post called “It’s definitely a bubble.” OK, so it was more of a rant than a post but I share the sentiment of his title. The biggest issue that I see in the venture [...] Read more
The Learning Revolution Will Not Be Televised
Albert Wenger – Apr 19, 2012
I was on a panel for the wonderful iMentor organization earlier this week talking about the future of education. Every time I do that these days I emphasize that instead of talking about education we should focus on learning. Because [...] Read more
Media: What’s Past is Prologue
Andy Weissman – Apr 19, 2012
Information does not want to be free; instead it wants to be distributed friction free. What that means is that information - content - wants to be in as many places as possible, with many options for access, and with [...] Read more
Tech Tuesday: Programming (Overview)
Albert Wenger – Apr 17, 2012
The purpose of Tech Tuesdays is to provide non-technical employees or founders of startups with background on how technology works so that they can better communicate with engineers and also better understand technological constraints and opportunities. With that in mind [...] Read more