Joe

submitted 13 Dec 2007

Google's following a truly insane strategy here: we have Google Search, which is one size fits all, and we have Google News, which is customized for you personally, and we have absolutely nothing in between.

Imagine yourself confronted by an electronic Web page that is eager to read you. Once it learns who you are and how much you have to offer, it make a ferocious effort to convince you that the money game is more...

In about 50% of instances where an early stage company actually succeeds in raising venture capital, the founder CEO is fired within the first year and kisses most of his or her equity good-bye.

Yahoo Finance Google finance etc all their postings in the forums are nothing more than short twitter messages. I don’t see why twitter doesn’t enter this space and own it. The CPM’s are among the highest paying on the internet more...

“I wrote a "social" site but I'm having a hard time attracting users. What your experiences with promoting your site? Have you successfully started a forum before, and if so, how?”

We present a new class of statistical de-anonymization attacks against high-dimensional micro-data, such as individual preferences, recommendations, transaction records and so on. Our techniques are robust to perturbation in the data and tolerate some mistakes in the adversary's background knowledge. more...

The website was launched in 2005. Here's how it evolved.

the system can be modelled using some function for which we have a fixed number of unknown parameters (though there will be some amount of random noise which can't be modelled). We have some form of (fairly uninformative) prior belief more...

What if you could file-share someone's consciousness? Would it be a violation, or the ultimate communication therapy? A short story by Cory Doctorow.

"next big thing" is social search: the idea of adding user annotations or other metadata to the process.

“recommended products and services, individual and anonymized aggregate analytics and personalized goal setting and alert services, all based on their banking activities.”

People Matching "free porn"

When making a claim about your startup, ask yourself if anyone would ever claim anything different -- or even better, claim the opposite. If the answer is a clear "no", your description is probably empty. Examples: Which startups are not more...