NYC CTO

Dr. Doom & Black Swan: You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet

2009-02-10T20:06:00.000-08:00

CNBC anchors asking the stupidest questions imaginable in the following interview w/ Roubini (my former boss @ RGE Monitor) & Taleb (the author of Black Swan):

Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Taleb are widely credited with predicting the current financial crisis, and both told CNBC they see more rough waters ahead.

Even if we play our cards right, said Roubini, chairman of RGEMonitor.com, it will take at least 12 months to get out of this recession.

“If you don’t do everything right, and I think there’s a large probability that’s going to happen, then we may end up in a multi-year stagnation or near depression like the one that Japan had,” he added.

Roubini said there is still a 20 percent downside risk to U.S. global equities, and he advises investors to stay in cash until there is a real bottom.

“Officially the write-downs have been about $1 trillion; I see another $2.6 (trillion) coming up,” he said. “…Losses are mounting and this severe recession is going to get only bigger.”

Nassim Taleb, advisor to Universal Investments and author of The Black Swan, is not as bearish as Roubini but also sees more trouble ahead.

“If I follow my logic to the end, what I thought would happen was anything fragile…would break, namely the banks and people who have a lot of debt and private equity," he said. "This is just happening. It’s not finished yet; it hasn’t probably started."

Paul Krugman's Take:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nouriel-roubini-and-nassim-taleb-on-cnbc/

TAKKLE bought by Alloy Media (NASDAQ:ALOY)

2009-02-04T07:03:00.000-08:00

Some GREAT acquisition news on my previous start-up Takkle.com:

Alloy Media and Marketing, the NYC-based public (NASDAQ:ALOY) online youth-focused company, has acquired Takkle.com, a high school sports recruitment website also based in NYC. Takkle will become part of the Teen.com Network, Alloy's content and ad network, the companies said, though the site will remain separate for now. Teen.com's network includes its flagship Alloy.com, Gurl.com (which Alloy bought from iVillage, Teen.com, and Channelone.com. No financial details were released, but Alloy has bought More to come?

Takkle, founded in 2006, had raised about $12 million in two rounds, and was backed by Time Inc's Sports Illustrated, the New York City Investment Fund, WMG Investments, the investment arm of Wasserman Media Group, Greycroft Partners (our previous investors), IJ Smith Enterprises, and Jack Schneider, Managing Director at Allen & Co.

PRESS RELEASE:

#1 Teen Web Community Expands Audience Reach With Addition of Leading Online Resource and Recruitment Website for High School Athletes and Coaches

NEW YORK, Feb. 4, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Alloy Media + Marketing (ALOY), a leading provider of youth-focused innovative media, today announced it has acquired TAKKLE.com (www.takkle.com), a prominent online resource and college recruitment website for high school sports. Effective immediately, TAKKLE.com joins the TEEN.com Network, Alloy's youth focused distributed media content and advertising network that ranks as the #1 community for teens, according to comScore's MediaMetrix audience report(1).

"Alloy's TEEN.com Network delivers extensive reach into the youth audience, with the advantage of targeting by gender and by top consumer category channels," commented Matt Diamond, Co-founder and CEO of Alloy Media + Marketing.

"The acquisition of TAKKLE, together with our recent purchase of teen girl community, gURL.com, demonstrates Alloy's ongoing commitment to developing youth-focused digital media assets that offer teens superior content, while also providing marketers with a high quality and highly populated environment to engage this consumer segment. gURL.com solidifies our network's unparalleled concentration of influential teen girls and with TAKKLE, we also secure a dynamic share of the millennial male market."

TAKKLE, the largest online resource focused on high school athletics, provides a platform and tools for high school athletes to create player and team profiles, share videos and photos, track and view statistics, and allows students to connect with team coaches and college sports recruiters for advancement opportunities. The site has drawn a monthly audience of close to one million athletes(2), both male and female, and has attracted an impressive array of advertisers, including Procter & Gamble's Tampax brand, Gatorade, and Spalding.

TAKKLE Founder David Birnbaum commented, "We are thrilled to join Alloy, a company that has clearly distinguished itself as a leader in the youth market. We look forward to leveraging the many opportunities that being a part of the Alloy family offers, and to continuing to develop TAKKLE with their management team."

Mr. Diamond added, "TAKKLE has built an impressive community that not only embodies the spirit and passion of young athletes, but offers them important and unique utilities to showcase their talents and leverage opportunities to further their careers. It is a superb complement to other properties in the TEEN.com Network."

In connection with the acquisition, Alloy assumed substantially all assets involved with the operation of TAKKLE.com.

Alloy Media + Marketing's TEEN.com Network now reaches a total audience of over 20 million(3). The network includes popular youth- targeted web properties; www.alloy.com, www.gurl.com, www.teen.com, www.channelone.com and www.takkle.com, among other well known youth focused brands that offer appealing content and social utilities, along with dedicated fashion, health and beauty, sports and entertainment channels. Current TEEN.com Network clients span a wide range of product categories, and include advertisers such as Sears Holdings, Paramount Pictures, Pentel and LG Mobile.

About Alloy

Alloy Media + Marketing (AM+M) (ALOY) is one of the country's largest providers of media and marketing programs reaching targeted consumer segments. Alloy manages a diverse array of assets and services in interactive, display, direct mail, content production and educational programming. Alloy works with over 1,500 companies including half of the Fortune 200. For further information regarding Alloy, please visit our corporate website at www.alloymarketing.com.

The Future of C# (4.0)

2009-01-31T19:21:00.000-08:00

I've recently ran into PDC2008 video of Anders Hejlsberg, the Chief Architect of the C# Language @ Microsoft, talking about the future of C#. One of my development teams uses C# extensively at work so this was relevant and actually turned out to be a very interesting talk.

First, here's the evolution of C# over the last 10 or so years:

- C# 1.0 (1998) Managed Code
First Release -- Just be happy that it works!

- C# 2.0 Generics
Similar to C++ Templates but w/ dynamic specialization, etc.

- C# 3.0 Language Integrated Query (LINQ)
Object-relational mapping (ORM)

- C# 4.0 (2009) Dynamic Programming
Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) that runs on top of the Common Language Runtime (CLR)

Given the rise of dynamically typed languages i.e. Python, Ruby, JavaScript, PHP(also loosely typed), it's no surprise that Hejlsberg re-evaluated the static-programming-only spiel that he's been preaching for years. Dynamic Programming is actually really neat and allows for a wide range of interoperability with other languages e.g. Python & Ruby:

"Strong typing is just like the little wheels you put on the side of a child's bike. They're reassuring, but once you know how to balance the bike, they get in the way and prevent you from gaining speed."

Dynamically Typed Objects:

Dynamic typing allows C# to dispatch JavaScript, Silverlight, Python, Ruby and COM code all from within C#. This is really neat

Other Improvements
- optional params to C# 4.0, which has been in place since .NET 2.0 w/ VB.
- named parameters (we can now shuffle parameter order)
- improved COM Interoperability (Just dynamic types & optional params alone are huge time savers when dealing w/ COM now)
- Co- and Contra-variance on Interface & delegate types

The Media Transformation -- Goodbye Print.

2009-01-30T19:03:00.000-08:00

We all know that print media had recently near flat lined & is now pretty much dead i.e. in a recently released report, boutique investment bank Jordan, Edmiston Group estimates that between 88 percent of the publishing and advertising industry’s revenue growth over the next few years will come from four sectors: Database & Information, B2B Online Media, Consumer Online Media, and Interactive Marketing Services. In other words, it will be coming mostly from the Web.

1981: TV Report On Birth Of Internet News

"Imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to see the day’s newspaper. Well, it’s not as far-fetched as it may seem."

"This is only the first step in newspapers by computers. Engineers now predict the day will come when we get all our newspapers and magazines by home computer, but that’s a few years off."

2009: Ballmer Tells the Washington Post That Print is Toast

"There will be no media consumption left in ten years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form."

Sample Nikon D300 Photos

2009-01-18T12:39:00.000-08:00

My CES 2009 Favorite: Palm Pre

2009-01-11T16:05:00.000-08:00

The market is certainly reacting to Palm's CES announcement -- their stock has doubled in the last couple of days and is now trading close to $6.

My prediction: If Palm delivers on the Developer Network front then we'll see them carve out a large share of the smartphone market over the next 12 months.

Things I love about the new Palm Pre:

1. Contact & Calendar Sync: a pretty awesome way to sync data from multiple sources

2. Search: Great job on making things more intuitive.

3. Multitasking: The cards interface and dashboards are awesome. I never understood why Apple has never allowed multitasking.

4. Wireless Charging: Wireless charging via inductive technology.

5. A Physical Qwerty Keyboard: Looks great -- need to see if it feel as good as a RIM device. They've also got copy/paste unlike iPhone. Finally, a what looks like an awesome smartphone with power email users in mind.

6. Battery: It'll last you just as long as an iPhone and you can replace it.

Uncertainties:

1. Connectivity: Sprint's going to be the first carrier to sell the device and they are supposed to have the biggest 3G network (x3 times AT&T's size supposedly).

2. Apps/Developer Network: Palm has got to ensure that they have a large developer network to succeed. Most of these smart phones are now going to be only as good as the apps that are available for them. Pandora claims that it took them just 3 days vs. months on iPhone to get their application up and running on this platform -- this is a very positive sign. Palm claims that the applications are built using just JS/HTML. Time will tell what this really means (I really hope that it really is going to be that easy though!).

One more thing to note -- just like iPhone, Palm Pre runs a WebKit-based browser.

I'll most likely be trading my iPhone in for a Pre if Palm's developer network takes off.

Sermo's Flu Monitor is Down

2009-01-07T18:20:00.000-08:00

While being down with a flu after a recent trip to London, I've been poking around the flu trends online, came across Google's Flu Trends and thought that it was a pretty interesting service. I then also recalled that I had learned about this service from a recent announcement made about a similar service that was recently launched by Sermo.com and wanted to check out their services.

Sermo's PR machine has been on a roll lately with a lot of announcements which generated quite a bit of buzz about the company. One of such announcements was the following: Sermo, Taking a Page from Google, Creates Flu Tracker

In any case, an MD friend of mine had sent me a screenshot of what what Sermo's Flu tracker looks like for a Google comparison:

This made it apparent that Sermo is obviously still struggling with some technical challenges. Sermo had raised close to $40M to date and can obviously afford to hire a good development team and some quality assurance people. The fact that they've got their PR machine to announce this feature makes one think that they would ensure that things are running smoothly but go figure. Additionally, Sermo has a very small (but obviously very targeted) amount of website traffic so it not likely to be a scalability issue:

Hope the folks @ Sermo work out the bugs. It must be pretty embarrassing for them to shout about a new future at the top of their lungs and then have it crash on their users.

*cough*

Salesforce.com goes down for 40 minutes, no big deal.

2009-01-06T23:02:00.000-08:00

3:40PM EST Jan 6, 2009 - Saleforce.com suffers a 40 minute outage.

Thousands of businesses were left without access to their applications Tuesday after Salesforce.com's servers suffered a service disruption. The problem affected all of the software-as-a-service vendor's data centers for at least 40 minutes.

According to a Salesforce.com, a core network device failed, stopping all data from being processed in Japan, Europe, and North America. When the system failed to trigger a failover to redundant systems, Salesforce.com staff had to carry out a manual recovery.

"While we are confident the root cause has been addressed by the work-around," the company said, "the Salesforce.com technology team will continue to work with hardware vendors to fully detail the root cause and identify if further patching or fixes will be needed."

No surprise there -- this type of stuff happens all the time, even to the big boys. The CRM stock did take a 5% dive but it'll surely recover.

Meetup.com - Usability Issues

2009-01-05T21:42:00.000-08:00

Meetup.com has improved their website user experience significantly over the last few years and I really enjoy using their website. However, there are still some serious usability issues that Meetup has to address. One such example is their "Update Your Credit Card" screen. It's really frustrating that they

a) do not mark fields as required when they are

b) do not preserve form data meaning that you have to start all over again with about 12 fields if you make an error, which is very easy to make in light of problem a). It's fine to not preserve CC# for security reasons but why not just simply preserve billing address information, etc to make it easier on people to make payments?

One would think that they spend more time on usability testing for the revenue-generating interfaces. This is very odd, especially given that preserving form data is considered to be a usability standard across the web.

LinkedIn - Search Errors

2008-11-25T19:18:00.001-08:00

Have been getting "Search is currently unavailable" error for several hours on LinkedIn today.

Netflix on Xbox 360 Live

2008-11-22T22:50:00.000-08:00

A small Xbox live gold membership fee aside, Netflix on Xbox is a great service. Finally, Netflix on TV w/o additional appliances!

The way things are right now, you have to jump back to your Netflix account in a regular browser to manage your queue before you can view movies on the Xbox. Netflix should offer a queue management API to allow for a tighter integration with Xbox, TiVo and other consoles/DVRs.

New favorite iPhone App -- Chess with Friends

2008-11-16T17:44:00.000-08:00

I've tried several iPhone chess apps so far and they all seem decent. However, Chess with Friends kicks it up a notch by allowing players to take as much time as they want to make a move and to keep multiple games open. You can play with friends or random people.

It would be great if they could add SMS support for move notifications to keep the usage up.

The Black Swan

2008-11-16T13:03:00.000-08:00

Having read The Black Swan earlier this year, it was interesting to see the author of the book, Nassem Taleb, talking about the economy on CNBC recently. However, it was a shame that Nassem wasn't able to express himself as eloquently about the recent Black Swan events as he has in his book.

Loopt Jumps Ahead Of Facebook And MySpace On iPhone

2008-11-11T19:30:00.000-08:00

Downloads metrics are misleading. Most apps in this category are not actively used. The geo-aware app fun factor wears off rather quickly for ONE reason:
Apple's iPhone apps cannot run in the background! You have to manually launch all the apps and manually make updates... one app at a time.

90% of all the social iPhone apps, especially the geo-aware social apps, are USELESS until the iPhone can run them in the background & let the user multitask.

Imagine an iPhone alerting you when your geo-aware social network buddies are in your area w/o you having to log in to check anything -- NOW THAT'S A REAL APP (privacy & battery issues aside).

This is not Loopt's fault of course but things could be so much more interesting if the iPhone supported multitasking & background apps out of the box. The way things are right now, you can't even listen to your own music while running the apps -- what a mess.

Now RIM's BBs & Loopt that's another story...

'08 Election Day

2008-11-04T08:20:00.000-08:00

--
Sent from my iPhone

Salesforce Automation (SFA): My beef with SugarCRM

2008-10-21T19:38:00.000-07:00

Over the years, I've done several Salesforce automation vendor evaluations. So, when it was time to do this for my current company, I've quickly rounded up the usual SFA suspects, narrowed down the options, ran a pilot with the sales team in-house and settled on a vendor. Cake, right? Sure, but here's something that I've realized in the process about SugarCRM, one the the vendors.

There has been a lot of buzz around SugarCRM in the recent years. They have open-source roots, low per seat licensing fees when compared to other competitors i.e. Salesforce, and robust functionality with pretty dashboards & sales pipelines that are sure to dazzle most executives.

The following are some of the issues that had made an impact on the decision making process for SugarCRM:

1. SugarCRM evaluation server is a shared environment. Things were slow most of the time with frequent timeouts. Times are tough but if sugar is trying to win over business they can't let the server performance get in the way.

2. SugarCRM's recent releases are unpolished and not fully QA'd. We've tried to import contact records and either got SQL errors or blank screens. SugarCRM's sales engineers have told us that there is "a problem with the data" and didn't have a good explanation for why their software doesn't handle errors gracefully.

3. Technically, SugarCRM Open Source edition is free but we really needed to use the on-demand version to avoid hosting yet another system. SugarCRM's on-demand hosting pricing model is too rigid for most SMBs due to a one year contract lock in where a business has to commit to thousands of dollars.

Using virtualization, it shouldn't cost SugarCRM much to maintain on-demand hosting profiles for customers with month-to-month pricing which would open the doors for a much bigger number of customers who don't want to commit for the whole year. The important thing is that once customers import data and build on that by generating extra data they are usually hooked and will renew their contracts. Again, SugarCRM could just outsource hosting altogether by putting the whole thing into a could which shouldn't cost them much.

SugarCRM needs to be more more competitive, especially in this market. Hope they'll catch on before it's too late.

Last Presidential Debate

2008-10-17T22:55:00.000-07:00

Don't recall seeing this during the last debate but apparently this is an unaltered still photo, go figure : )

Your Tax Money Paid to Investment Banks and Hedge Funds via AIG

2008-10-17T22:39:00.000-07:00

Apparently, AIG is using the federal bailout loans to pay the investment banks. From the tax-payer pockets straight to the invetment banks and hedge funds -- that's rich. My better half doubled her money a few weeks ago by day trading AIG in a volatile market -- pure luck & good timing.

Odd former boss news coverage

2008-10-16T20:20:00.000-07:00

Recent news coverage on two of my former bosses...

ONE:

Capsule carrying US space tourist docks with ISS
Richard spent $30M on 10days @ IIS (hope they have enough to fix the IIS toilet now)

TWO:

The Secret Pleasures of Dr. Doom
Apparently, people are surprised to learn that Nouriel has a fun side.

Ten years later, Yahoo Finally updates its Calendar

2008-10-08T20:06:00.000-07:00

The Outlook look-alike is based on Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo last year) and features the following:

Drag & drop interface.
Layering (view multiple calendars in different colors or subscribe to someone else’s calendar)
Zoom in when adding an event or appointment
Integration with Flickr
Can set email, IM or SMS reminders.
To-Do list.

The stock is trading low, employees are jumping ship but I must admit that it's good to see Yahoo trying to outdo Google Calendar. You can sign up for Yahoo Calendar beta @ http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com/m/landing.php

Now if they could just give the rest of the site a face lift i.e. see the 1990's style http://dir.yahoo.com and get their ad technology to work properly.

The Market

2008-10-08T19:24:00.000-07:00

My former boss, Nouriel Roubini a.k.a. Dr Doom says that Dow will hit 7000 before the economy rebounds.

The tech stocks are dropping faster than Dow and are now at or near their 52 week lows: GOOG -51% YTD, AAPL - 50% YTD, and just forget about poor YHOO (trading @ $13!)

Google Analytics Acting Up

2008-03-12T00:35:00.000-07:00

Google Analytics is falling behind on data processing, reports came in over 12 hours late and no data is available for today.

Blogging Redux - What I was blogging about ten years ago

2008-02-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

It's been over a decade since I've made my last blog post. Back in 1998, I ran an MMO community site (before joining NcSoft), which eventually generated over a million uniques. Apparently, this was before the term "blog" was coined.

In 1998, the Internet was still in it's infancy so things, as you recall (or can imagine), were quite different:

Google in 1998:

Yahoo in 1998:

My Blog in 1998 (dug up from the WayBack machine):

The purpose of this blog is to keep track of my tech-related ramblings. Let's see what the next decade of blogging will bring.