Marshall Kirkpatrick
MartinGreat Designers vs Data Specialists: Which is Harder to Hire?
Data geek Soren Macbeth (now at Yieldbot) and I met over tea several months ago and he said something to me that I have thought of many times since. He said that though data science is getting all the hype, great designers might be even harder to hire. I was just thinking about that again this morning and thought I’d ask on the Twitter. Below you’ll find the interesting conversation that emerged in response. I’d love to know what your thoughts on this are. Of course the best of both worlds...
Marshall Kirkpatri...marshallk - posted on 4/5/2012
Cinch Feed For mar...Delicious Founder Creates New People Search Engine, Skills.to
Joshua Schachter and his team of star developers at TastyLabs have begun work on a second project, an endorsement and people search engine called Skills.to. The site lets you endorse people for their skills in various fields, see what the people you know have been endorsed for and search for people with particular skills. The site is just beginning. "We have a lot to do, lots of ideas here and lots of places we can go next," Schachter told me by Twitter DM today. What's the core idea...
Marshall Kirkpatri...Things I wish were easier to do with RSS
I’m having a rough day with RSS feeds today, but there’s SO much potential there still. We should all give thanks every day to Dave Winer and the other geeks who helped build RSS into what it is today. I just wish I could do more with it. I met with one of the biggest tech companies in the world last week and they too said they live on RSS feeds and love them. These are the things that I’m crying about today and have found myself upset about again and again. Programatically look at a list...
Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps?
How do machines understand what place you're talking about when you say the name of a city, a street or a neighborhood? With geocoding technology, that's how. Every location-based service available uses a geocoder to translate the name of a place into a location on a map. But there isn't a really good, big, stable, public domain geocoder available on the market. Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just...
How Two Startups Use Games to Beat the Developer Crunch
"You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes." Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems - so why not this one too? Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their developer shortage problems are travel photo network Jetpac and app search startup Quixey. Both used contests and games to overcome their challenges and...
When Bots Go Mad
There may or may not be robots that are truly "good" someday, but there will probably be bad robots, if there aren't already. If not bad robots, then bad robot situations. You can catch a taste of the feeling of what might go wrong in the robot pricing wars that elevate the cost of certain used books on Amazon into millions of dollars. For example, you can't buy a used copy of Lee Betteridge's book "How to Survive Personal Bankruptcy" on Amazon today for less than $2.3 million. (Unless you...
Amazon Launches Cloud-Based Business Process Automation Service
Amazon just announced the availability of a new service called Simple Workflow Service (SWF), which allows developers to define a series of complex steps in carrying out a business process, then implements and monitors those steps all together, as a service. "This new service gives you the ability to build and run distributed, fault-tolerant applications that span multiple systems (cloud-based, on-premise, or both)," writes Amazon's Jeff Barr. SWF can also work across mobile devices. The...
Pixar Engineers Leave to Build Real World Living Toys
Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri. Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. It appears that's what San Francisco startup ToyTalk is building, based on conversations and information available online. The company is putting together a powerful team of technologists and creatives from Pixar and SRI...
Why Talent Management Tech is Super Hot and Bound to Get Hotter
Skill building, tracking and optimization, knowledge retention and measurement of workplace effectiveness - those are the aims of some of the software industry's hottest companies. SuccessFactors got bought last year for $3.4 billion by SAP. Taleo got bought by Oracle for $1.9 billion last week. Salesforce bought Rypple and Workday is one of the hottest companies in the world. Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal...
How Big Data From Connected Machines Gets Used
"Big Data" is a hot topic these days, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about the specifics of what will most likely be one of the biggest sources of data: newly web-connected devices in the home and workplace. I spoke this week with Bill Zujewski, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy & Marketing at M2M (machine to machine) platform company Axeda. Axeda is one of the most successful companies to date in the early M2M market and whenever I get a chance to speak with...
$1m in 1 Day: Meet Double Fine, the New Kings of Kickstarter
Late last night Jane McGonigal, the most respected authority in the world of gamification, Tweeted that she'd pitched in to support the creation of a new point and click adventure game from respected game development shop Double Fine. That was the first trickle I saw of what quickly became a flood of support for the Double Fine Adventure project on Kickstarter. Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and...
LinkedIn Eats Rapportive: Let's Hope the Magic Lives On
Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are...
What Feminists Are Saying About the Facebook IPO
Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry's biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world's biggest social technology company? They've raised a number of interesting questions so far. It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions...
How YouTube is Part of a Global Economic Transformation
The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed...
Amazon S3 Reports Staggering Growth in 2011
Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year. "As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. "This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in...
Twitter's Censorship Policy: Three Unanswered Questions
In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access by its citizens to Twitter, Flickr and a number of other US-based websites. Social media being already widespread throughout the country, perhaps the Chinese government feared the possibility of events like unfolded elsewhere 18 months later, in what became known as the Arab Spring. Two and a half years later, Twitter remains blocked in China, though many people find...
Data Privacy: What Bill Gates Said 10 Years Ago
Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data. The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's...
iTunes U 2.0: Not Perfect, Just Awesome
iTunes U has been around for a long time, but its expansion last week onto iPhones and iPads, as well as into new content like K-12 curriculum, has truly made this a 2.0 release. And it's very, very good. The iTunes U website carries the bold title "Learn anything, anywhere, anytime." That's an overstatement for sure, with 500,000 assets it's more like learn something about many things. But it's great either way. I spent the weekend neglecting other duties to play with iTunes U and below...
Google Shut-Downs & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn't able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was. Back when there was hope for Needlebase, the Social Graph API and for Postrank,...
Why Apple, Why Does it Have to Be Like This? The Cold Cynicism of the iBook EULA
It's hard to wrap my brain around the cold cynicism of Apple's releasing a new tool to democratize the publishing of eBooks today, only to include in the tool's terms and conditions a prohibition against selling those books anywhere but through Apple's own bookstore. There's just something so achingly awful about it. Portland, Oregon iOS developer Dan Wineman calls it unprecidented audacity. Writer Ed Bott calls it "mind-bogglingly greedy and evil." I just find it very, very sad. ...
Can Codecademy Teach Poor Black & Brown Kids to Code?
Unemployment among youth of color is widespread & complex; can a tech education startup change things? The White House announced new participation in a jobs initiative yesterday from fast-growing technical education website Codecademy, as well as some venerable social justice oriented organizations Level Playing Field Institute and College Bound Brotherhood, a group dedicated to increasing the number of young African American men prepared for college. Called Summer Jobs +, the program...
Troubling Google Contractor Allegedly Caught Vandalizing Open Street Map (Updated)
The official blog of Open Street Map reports tonight that someone at a range of Google IP addresses in India has been editing the collaboratively made map of the world in some very unhelpful ways, like moving and deleting information and reversing the direction of one-way streets on the map. Update: Google sent the following statement to ReadWriteWeb on Tuesday morning. "The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are...
Let’s Talk Tech on Facebook
After years of resistance, I have decided to take the time to create a Facebook Page. It’s here. If you are interested in all things about the future of the Internet, and you use Facebook, I hope you’ll join me for conversation there. I’ve had a lot of issues with Facebook over the years, I wrote a big critique of the company’s data sharing partnerships last week, but I also have a lot of admiration for Facebook. I can’t go into great detail about that now because I’ve got a lot of work to...
The Next Era of Tech Blogging: 3 Things That Could Make it Better
Leading tech and marketing analyst Jeremiah Owyang wrote a blog post today that has inspired some interesting conversation; he argues that with the recent departure of a number of the key big names in tech blogging from their posts, the Golden Age of Tech Blogging has passed and it’s a new era. He cites my leaving RWW among others, though I haven’t entirely left. (I’m just focused on building killer research mega-tool PlexusEngine.) Many people believe that no such change is happening,...
What I Learned from a Night Editing Wikipedia
This Friday evening I stayed in, not feeling well, and spent my night doing more editing of Wikipedia than I’ve ever done before. After reading Danny Sullivan’s frustrated blog post about his recent experience being shot down on Wikipedia, I thought it would be good to share a different experience. I think Wikipedia is super important and I love it, but editing it is not easy to do. Not because of the technical requirements, those are pretty simple, but because of the way the community there...
After Four Years as ReadWriteWeb’s Lead Writer, Here’s My Next Adventure
It’s with both excitement and sadness that today I announce I am stepping back from my full time position at ReadWriteWeb to build a product and a company. I’ll be continuing to post at RWW regularly, but I’ve got some big new things up my sleeve as well. (Update: I haven’t announced this yet but as of May, 2012 I’m actually done with that too and am 100% all-in on Plexus.) After years of writing about startup companies, I’m now building one myself. Specifically, I’m building a company that’s...
Social Media is Not Ruining Journalism
I found myself responding to a Google+ thread this morning wherein a respected technology leader said “copying and pasting from social networking sites is not journalism.” Apparently he’d been seeing random Tweets referenced on TV and thought it was lazy, pointless and a sign that journalism is going down the tubes. I’ll leave his name out of it because I’ve totally copied and pasted things he’s posted online before as the basis for acts of journalism myself! I do take issue with the idea that...
Corporate Social Strategist List Now Doubled in Size
Back in January I did some fun hacking together of a Twitter list and some stats about corporate social strategists on Twitter, based on a great list of people in charge of social technology strategy at companies around the world compiled by Jeremiah Owyang. Jeremiah kept adding to his list, though, and I quickly fell behind in trying to find each new addition to his list on Twitter and adding them to my Twitter list. Last month I finally figured out a way to get myself caught up and a list...
Why Klout is Really and Truly Valuable
Social media scoring system Klout did a big refresh tonight and it is clearly broken because it said I am less influential than it said I was before. But is it worthless? Is this a meaningless arbitrary number that deserves nothing but mockery? No. Alexia Tsotsis posted a funny video and a harsh critique at TechCrunch tonight and she said, essentially: Klout is worth nothing, nobody cares. I disagree. I’ve certainly got critiques of Klout, but I think the service’s value is important to...
Sharing Secrets With Strangers in Startups
From the conclusion to an email I just sent an entrepreneur and incubator seeking coverage. Seems like a really cool startup and I’m not going to be mean about it this time – but I don’t think I’m being unfair to say this isn’t really how it works. Startup emails me all the details about what they are doing and then says “oh by the way, this is embargoed until Monday.” Nice to meet you, too! Fwiw, this is the 2nd [unnamed incubator] startup in the past few weeks who has written to us and...
Google News Strikes Blow Against Cynicism, Will Drive Pageviews to Quality Content
In a Saturday morning blog post the Google News team just announced a new HTML tag they will be scanning for in the headers of news articles: standout. Publishers can call out their own content when they publish particularly good stuff or they can highlight someone else’s content that inspired their own. You can call your own stuff “standout” up to 7 times in a week – any more and the tags will be ignored. But you can highlight other peoples’ content as much as you want. Google seems to...
New Google Plus People Search is Not Very Good
Google Plus released a search function this week, months after the search giant’s social network went live. The People search part at least is remarkably un-useful. I think there are huge opportunities in discovery of people but apparently Google thinks not so much, so far at least. People search searches the About pages of peoples’ Google Plus profiles as a full-text search. There doesn’t appear to be any relevance ranking in the People Search results pages, either. So you get a lot of...
Google Plus Just Gave Me Thousands of Dollars
Google’s new social network Plus released a suggested users list today and I’m on it. Here is Alex Howard’s post detailing all the people listed. We will all now get tens of thousands if not millions of new subscribers to our updates on the network. We will have all the more incentive to keep posting to Plus and to say nice things about it. Those of us who make money doing these sorts of things, as I do when people click my links and view the ads on ReadWriteWeb or consider my consulting...
marshallk - posted on 8/19/2011
My favorite writing read aloud: The real-time vision behind BankSimple
Let’s Test a New App Together & You Can Give Me Advice
Dear Friends, I would like to test out a new app called Qidiq, which will let me send you push notifications and emails when I have a question I’d like to survey you about. I’d like to ask people about tech news coverage questions. I can’t imagine I’d send a push notification more than 3 or 4 times a week max – it should be fun. I hope you’ll try it out with me; then I’ll review the app on ReadWriteWeb. Thanks for your help! Loading…