Biography
Blog
April 30 2008
One year ago, we published an issue of Release 2.0 entitled "When Markets Collide" (download a PDF), in which we considered what Wall Street and Web 2.0 might have to teach one another. Quite a bit, it turned out: the key parallels we uncovered include latency (both have to do… read moreSpongeBob SquarePants Supports O'Reilly Research Finding
April 08 2008
In O'Reilly Radar's recent reseach report, Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, we contend that virtual worlds will go mainstream. The most powerful data point supporting our argument is that the most active and popular virtual worlds nowadays tend to be those populated by children. The next generation is growing up… read moreMarch 24 2008
I love The New York Times. I've read it almost every day of my life since I was in high school. For all its recent flaws -- the weirdo profiles of the major presidential candidates are the most high-profile --... read moreCommentary on Penguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity
March 22 2008
Extra features won't make ebooks mainstream. read moreDan Roam's "The Back of the Napkin"
March 21 2008
I can't draw. Really. I'm a competent interaction designer, but my graphic design skills are those of a plankton. I can't draw on the right side or the left side of my brain. Yet, like everyone else in business and... read morePenguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity
March 19 2008
Extra features won't make ebooks mainstream. read moreJill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk
March 18 2008
At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted: Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I... read morePenguin's Missed Ebook Opportunity
March 18 2008
I've seen several softball pieces (such as this one) praising Penguin's decision to release, on Amazon's Kindle and Sony's Reader, some classics of English literature, starting with Jane Austen, with certain extras, in multiple ebook formats. Austen's Pride and Prejudice,... read moreNew O'Reilly Radar Report: a Business Guide to Virtual Worlds
March 07 2008
Virtual worlds, particularly Second Life, have generated much excitement -- and much skepticism. In Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide, the newest O'Reilly Radar report, Ben Lorica, Roger Magoulas, and the O'Reilly Radar team get past the hype (and the anti-hype),... read more@ETech: Wednesday Morning Keynotes
March 07 2008
Another day, another set of expansive keynotes. John McCarthy, father of LISP, a giant in artificial intelligence, gave a sit-down high-level talk about Elephant 2000, a proposed programming language intended for transaction processing and electronic data interchange. He described Elephant... read moreMarch 07 2008
Most of the Yahoo news these days is about its possible absorption by Microsoft, but there are still new projects coming out of the company. Right now Tom Coates is onstage at ETech, launching fire eagle, an open location information-brokering... read more@ETech: Tuesday Morning Keynotes
March 07 2008
Saul Griffith started the day with a sober, but ultimately hopeful, talk about energy literacy. The subtitle of the talk was "know what you can do, do what you can," and the core of his talk (we'll point to the... read moreExploring the Facebook Application Ecosystem: A New O'Reilly Radar Report
March 07 2008
After we published our Facebook Application Platform report, we heard from a lot of people. One of them was Shelly Farnham. And like Victor Kiam, the entrepreneur who liked that razor so much he bought the company, we liked Farnham's... read moreO'Reilly School of Technology + Mathematica: What Do They Add Up To?
March 07 2008
Last month, the O'Reilly School of Technology and Wolfram Research announced that the school was licensing Wolfram's flagship math program Mathematica to create a web-based version of the system. Right after the announcement, we ran an interview with Scott Gray,... read moreEverything I Knew About Metcalfe's Law Turns Out To Be Wrong
March 07 2008
In the recent Release 2.0, which covers the next generation of CRM, I invoke Metcalfe's Law, which I've always understood to state that "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users on... read more
