Darren Herman

Google CEO Dr. Eric Schmidt Joins Apple's Board of Directors

Dont' know what to make of it just yet, but this is pretty big news.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/060829/sfth094.html?.v=50

MacroMyopia

I was listening to Mitch Kapor's keynote address at the 2nd Annual Second Life Community Convention in San Francisco today and he brought up the term, macromyopia.  I had never heard the term before, but as an entrepreneur, it resonates with me very well.

"Macromyopia is society's tendency to overestimate the short term results of a technology and to underestimate its long term results, because it takes a certain length of time (long enough for a sufficient number of people to die, actually) before a completely new technological paradigm can be assimilated." -- John Barlow, Author and Songwriter

At the Second Life convention, I am sitting around an extremely macromyopic room.  Everyone in the room is so entrenched on what we're building and contributing to within Second Life to fully understand the ramifications on what it will have on society and the virtual world in the long term.

Interesting Apple Story

I came across a fantastic story about a gentlemen who was coding for Apple on a calculator project and was officially canned (as many projects go into Skunkworks).  The story is about how he continued to work on the project without payment or permission and I'll let you finish the rest... it could be found here.

The Power of Virtual Worlds

I'm a huge proponent of virtual worlds and all of the different opportunities that lie within each world.  From BusinessWeek to Advertising Age and every magazine/newspaper in between, we're seeing some great integrations into the virtual world such as the BBC and MLB.  However, many people are not aware of the intricacies of planning an event or understanding how the "grid" system works within a virtual world, namely Linden Labs' Second Life.

The grid is the platform that Second Life runs on.  It's a combination of computing power, storage and software that allows Second Life to run and be usable by the hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.  Currently, there Second Life uses nearly 1,000 dual processor/dual- core systems and is growing at about 7% per month in terms of computing power.

In an article by Tom Gibbs, he explains the grid system in a bit more depth and how it relates to virtual worlds.  This is essential to understand if you want to learn how these worlds grow and what holds them back.

Tags: grid, Second Life, Linden Lab, computing

Google's Data Center Project

Something that's been hinted at in the press has finally surfaced in the NY Times today.  Google's top secret data center project has come into full view - however, anyone that knows anything about the project has been sworn to secrecy under strict NDAs (I don't blame them).  We know that Microsoft and Yahoo! have their own independent projects going on in the Pacific Northwest as well...

The article is located here.

Tags:  Google, data center

Google and the PC

Google and Dell have agreed to preinstall Web and desktop search software on the PC maker's computers announced Eric Schmidt (CEO) yesterday at the Goldman Sachs conference in Las Vegas.

I've been hearing about this deal for quite some time and it's finally out in the open.  Google is the number 1 search engine and is teaming up with the number 1 PC maker which gives each other a significant stronghold amongst competition.

Millions of Dell PCs will be pre-loaded with the Google toolbar for Web and PC search alogn with a co-branded home page before they are shipped to consumers.

Thoughts?

AOL Gets Aggressive

I was contacted today by a representative of AOL as they are releasing AIM Triton 1.5 Preview Edition today.  It is available for free download on AIM.com.

I generally get turned off when companies contact me to promote their product, but I am actually intrigued by the features available including but not limited to:

• AIM Phoneline & Phoneline Unlimited
• AOL Video Module
• AIM Pages
• AIM Location

I am extremely intrigued by AIM Location as it will allow users of AIM Triton 1.5 to find each other on a Mapquest Map.  I'd like to geographically see where my buddies are... nice use of a "mashup."

I use Trillian on my work computer as it allows me to log into multiple providers' accounts but will probably check out this new release from AOL shortly.  Will let you know how it is.

Phone on AIM?

AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) users will be able to make outgoing calls and receive incoming calls from any of the 50 states and over 30 countries by the end of the month according to a recent report on PaidContent.org.  This service is called AIM Phoneline and will be around $14.95 per month for unlimited calling.

AOL will be the first to roll out this type of service to its users.

Intel Mac Benchmarks

Most of my friends know that I'm an avid Mac fan but I'm equally comfortable using an Windows based PC.  The announcement of Apple utilizing Intel processors resonated greatly with me because I can now start to use Macs within the office environment as they will become much more compatible with our current setup.

I haven't really looked too much at the benchmarks to date about the Intel based Macs but this post on Macologist really sums it all up:  http://www.macologist.org/showthread.php?t=2602

NY Tech Meetup Event

Tonight, I went to the NY Tech Meetup held at NYU.  I've been a member of Meetup.com for quite a bit of time now, but I've never been in town or always been busy when prior meetups have been held.   This evening was my first experience of a NY Tech meetup and I am pleased to say that I had a great time.

There were apparently 202 people who RSVP'd that they'd attend the meeting and it was a 'sold out' event.  The majority (98%) of folks in attendance were males - so it was essentially one big sausage party.  I was pleasantly surprised that the CEO/Founder of Meetup.com was leading the NY Tech meetup and he was the moderator throughout the entire presentation program.

There were 5 presentations that lasted about 7 minutes each with questions coming at the end.  It was very similar to the "gong" show - if a company pitched too much, or wasn't crowd pleasing, the crowd certainly got restless.  The second speaker was almost "boo'ed" off stage, literally!  One of the technologies that I found interesting was that of the "soft search" as I call it.  When we query databases, we normally are searching for something 'hard' - such as a direct match.  What if you're looking for an apartment in New York between 2,000 square feet and 5,000 square feet.  If there are no apartments that exist, don't you want to see an apartment that may be 1,998 square feet?  Sure you do, but previously, in our database schema's, we do not account for that.  This now opens up a whole new way of database transactional search.

It was nice to see some old friends from FortuneCity.com, i33 Communications and other previous companies I'd worked with.  Looking forward to the next NY Tech Meetup!

Tags: meetup, NYU, technology, internet, transparancee, and entrepreneur