I thought of my own daughter, and how she and her brother and Karen and I all look so different, and dress differently, and how she likes to meow at me and paw at me as if she was a cat, sometimes even when we are out in public, even though she is already 12. It’s a habit that has annoyed me for too long, even though I know what it means: She’s showing affection, and she wants a hug, and her love of cats helps her express an emotional need she can’t express directly. But it’s unique, and it’s her, and I love her for it, annoying as it can sometimes be. Plus, she doesn’t speak with question marks at the end of every phrase.

And then it hit me, right there, with the force of a long-forgotten memory, that normalcy is overrated. That’s how I felt growing up, and it’s how I feel now. At some point along the way I had forgotten how boring conformity can be. Thankfully, my daughter came along to help remind me.

I went home that evening and gave my kids big hugs. “Meow,” my daughter said, looking up into my face and smiling her squinty-happy-cat smile.

The post Normalcy is overrated appeared first on dylan tweney.

I laughed, and I wept a bit for the outright enthusiasm that Taco Bell’s CEO expressed over his company’s innovation. Or, should I say, “innovation.” But, as they say, welcome to America!

Also, those locos tacos actually taste pretty good. Though they don’t sit too well inside.

Deep Inside Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Taco

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I am not yet sure that this is a truly widespread or irreversible trend. But I do feel skeptical about the rush to replace mobile websites with native mobile apps. This piece explains why.

For three decades, HTTP (which Paul Ford called “the Web’s operating system”) and HTML have proven to be resilient, flexible tools for interconnecting people and machines, facilitating communication in the most decentralized way imaginable. Anyone can publish a web page to a server on the Internet, and within seconds it is readable by anyone in the world who has the address and a browser capable of rendering HTML.

What’s more, anyone can link to any page on the Web without having to ask permission and without having to worry about what hardware or software delivers that page. All you need is a URL — another widely accepted, well-defined standard for interconnecting information.

Now, however, there’s a threat to this openness. It’s called the app store.

Technically, it’s not just the store: It’s the entire ecosystem of apps, content, hardware, and software. Apple perfected the model, and it has transformed the company into one of the most profitable corporations in the world. Even though its share price has plummeted in recent months, Apple is still in a very strong position thanks to the leverage that this ecosystem gives it. Indeed, that position is so strong that Apple continues to generate profits even though its market share among mobile devices is shrinking.

…

But here’s the problem: Apps are difficult to connect to one another. There’s no universally accepted way to link to a specific page or location within an app. (Many apps don’t even have pages.) To connect with an app, you need to use its application programming interface (API), assuming it has one, or the API of the device it’s running on. Naturally, that API differs from device to device. Making app-to-app connections is far more difficult than linking to a URL because you need to be a programmer to do it.

Read more: How apps are chipping away at the open web

I’d like to hear what you think.

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Here’s what I think gun control people need to do, if they’re serious:

• Start a “National Gun Safety Association.” 
• Make the debate about “gun safety” not “gun control.” Focus first on how limiting crazy people’s access to guns is a safety issue, not a control issue.
• If that shows some success, expand the safety discussion to limiting magazine size and assault weapons bans — also safety issues, not rights issues.
• Pair the above efforts with an extensive gun safety training outreach. Offer training so people who own guns can learn how to use them safely — and how to store them safely.
• Make the spokesmen people like Gabby Giffords, who are gun owners, not liberals like Mike Bloomberg, who are not — and make it clear that the organization has no opposition to safe gun ownership. 
• Make it a membership-based organization that not only raises funds, but can also mobilize its members to write letters and call senators/congressman. Throw parties. Have events. Make people feel like they belong to something.
• Throw money at strategic congressional and senatorial races to aggressively punish politicians who vote counter to the organization’s goals.

If there’s an organization out there like this, I want to join it, and I will contribute.

Update: Sunlight Foundation has stats on how much money various organizations on both sides of the gun debate have contributed since 1989. Detailed stats here. Notably, the NRA doesn’t even show up on the list of top contributors to the last election cycle.

Update 2: I found an organization matching many of the above points. It’s Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by Gabrielle Giffords and Marc Kelly. I gave them $50.

Discussion on Facebook

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After I posted this note on Facebook, I got asked: Are we afraid to cover this story because we’re afraid of blowback from the accused guy? And would we treat this story differently if it had to do with a true Silicon Valley bigwig, like Apple CEO Tim Cook?

I can answer with some concrete examples. Keith Rabois, COO at Square, left his company after accusations that he sexually harassed an employee. We covered that, because A, he really left the company, and B, he wrote a post about it. We also covered a sexual harassment case at VC firm CMEA, and last year, we covered the sexual harassment case at Kleiner Perkins.

VentureBeat has been one of the few (if not the only) tech blogs to cover all three big sexual harassment cases in Silicon Valley in the past year. In all three cases, we didn’t hesitate to take on a story about someone powerful and/or friendly with us. (Rabois has been a speaker at VentureBeat conferences, for instance, and KP is obviously hugely powerful in the valley). In all three cases, we stuck to reportable facts but didn’t pull any punches.

So to answer the question: Say Tim Cook gets accused of harassment. We’d cover immediately if there was a civil or criminal action. But suppose it’s all rumors and hearsay, and thanks to mob mentality all the other tech blogs start covering it. In that case we’d probably weigh in with a post saying “Here’s the rumor that everyone is talking about, but there is no evidence for it at all.” Because at that point, the chatter itself is newsworthy, and the absence of evidence would be the most salient, reportable fact.

Back to our competing blog founder: We’re staying away from the story because of lack of evidence, not fear. But also we have a special reason to be reticent, which is that he founded a competing site. I know from experience that we care more about our competitors than our readers do. Readers really aren’t looking to VentureBeat for stories about our competition, and they get annoyed when we get sucked into blog wars. So we have a special reluctance to cover competitors for that reason.

We’ll override that reluctance if there’s anything material to talk about. But for now, I see no reason to publish anything.

The post My stance on covering the latest Silicon Valley rumor fest appeared first on dylan tweney.

- Roger Ebert

via Susan Barnett

Ebert obituary from the Chicago Sun Times

Ebert’s last tweet

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I think I’ve isolated the source of the problem: It’s something to do with HTC’s approach to contact syncing and, in particular, the Contacts Storage app. I have about 3,000 contacts in one Google account and 700+ in the other, so I might represent a minority case, but it seems to me that this isn’t an inordinate number of contacts. Somehow it gets incredibly bloated on the phone, though: 62.7MB at the moment. I’ve tried deleting the data file and letting it re-sync, and it quickly zooms back up to the same gigantic number.

By contrast, when I export my contacts to a CSV for backup, both sets combined take less than 3MB of storage. So HTC is somehow increasing the storage needed for my contacts by 20X.

This causes a huge performance hit. Any app that needs to access contacts gets incredibly slow to open. Just opening the phone dialer can sometimes leave me staring at a blank screen for 30 seconds. Mail is the same story. I can get notifications about incoming text messages, but tapping on the notification to actually open the message itself will put the phone into a wait state that lasts two or three minutes.

It seems to be worst if the phone is actually syncing data (indicated by the “sync” icon in notifications). Over a 3G network, this sometimes takes ages — even when there are no significant changes to my contacts.

On top of that, a previous HTC phone littered my contacts’ notes fields with strange HTC codes. It’s as if some HTC engineers decided that people never use their notes fields, so they might as well just throw sync tokens in there. It’s disconcerting and rude behavior.

But rudest of all is the notion that the phone, when it’s syncing, is too busy to respond to me. That’s a fundamentally broken UI. Computers should always be immediately responsive to humans, and should always be interruptible. There is no reason a sync operation could not be stopped so I could make a freaking phone call.

The post What is wrong with HTC’s Android sync service? appeared first on dylan tweney.

Hot nude action, medieval style. Painting of “Adam and Eve” by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1533.

Personally I don’t mind the gratuitous boobage in Game of Thrones. Any shape or size: I am a fan. But if those boobs are accompanied by a complete absence of relevance or character, it starts to feel a bit empty.

Throw in loads of violence — especially when that violence seems to have no point other than its own empty shock value — and it becomes disturbing.

Layer on top of that the most retrograde stereotypes of what women’s roles are; make the women conform to the most Hollywood-esque stereotypes of beauty; add ridiculously outdated and patently coded stereotypes for Irish people, Italians, Danes, and Mongols; and complement that with 47 different finely-shaded subtle variations on English accent sub-types; then completely remove all Jews or Moors from the medieval context, and what you have is … I don’t know what to call it. It bugs me though.

In short: Good god this show is bad. The acting is bad, the plotting is bad, the sex is bad (it’s nearly all rape or prostititution), and it is one of the most sadistic shows I’ve ever seen. Also, I might add, it feels racist as hell. (Is it any coincidence that the Mongol horde is led by a gorgeous blonde Targ-Aryan?)

I had to stop reading the book series for the same reason: The author clearly cares far less about developing his characters or making you care about them than he does about imagining new and horrible ways to make them suffer and off them. I was sucked right into the first book and loved it. The second book, a little bit less so. By the time I got a third of the way through the third book, I was completely nauseated by the endless raping and pillaging. It didn’t help that around the same time as I was reading about heads being put on pikes — a classic trope of medieval fantasy literature — I was reading about schoolkids in Texas who needed special counseling because, when they were living in Mexico, they had to go to school past actual heads stuck on actual sticks. People still kill each other this way, and they still put heads on pikes. It seemed irresponsible to be using this as an offhand trope for “mans brutality against man” in a fantasy epic without at least some recognition that this is also still a reality.

Anyway, that’s really the only inventive thing about the series: How cleverly it imagines death and torture.

It also is very clever in how it uses the old “interwoven multiple narratives” trick to keep pulling you forward through the story, through one cliffhanger after another.

So: Well executed, George R. R. Martin and HBO, you cynical bastards. I watched every single episode of seasons 1 and 2 on Amazon; I couldn’t stop, really. But I’m really looking forward to taking a break now.

The post Why I’m fed up with Game of Thrones appeared first on dylan tweney.

Photo credit: Sam Howzit/Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/aloha75/8304864237/

My latest column for VentureBeat started off as an attempt to describe how I’ve replaced Google Reader, with a custom-rigged PHP-based RSS news river of my own, supplemented by some IFTTT recipes and a minimalist RSS reader called Skimr.

But it turned into a meditation on impermanence and change. Here’s an excerpt:

With the passing of Reader, I’ve had to build my own alternatives from what’s available. I use IFTTT.com to email VentureBeat’s stories, as they’re published, to my mailbox. For now, Gmail works fine for reading these stories, and it has the offline capabilities I need for my commute. I’ve had some problems with IFTTT’s reliability (and it’s too slow to be a real-time notification tool), but for catching up on essential reading, this works well.

I’m experimenting with a minimalist RSS reader, Skimr, to scan news stories. It’s fast and easy. I’ve also rebuilt my own RSS news dashboard on my personal website (using a PHP-based RSS parser called SimplePie, along with some custom PHP I wrote and a stylesheet I borrowed from Readability a long time ago, back when it was just an Arc90 project) so I can scan my personal “river of news” as it breaks.

And I’ve honed some Twitter lists that I use to give me a real-time heads-up display of the news in Tweetdeck.

I’m cautiously pessimistic about all of these solutions. RSS is an open standard and it’s widely used, but I’m nervous that with Reader’s passing, websites will have less and less incentive to maintain their RSS feeds. Twitter lists are functional, but they’re entirely dependent on Twitter continuing to support and maintain them, and they’re certainly not based on any open standards. Skimr is still in alpha testing. PHP is tricky and error-prone.

So none of these solutions is perfect, and they probably won’t last more than a year or two before I have to replace them or substantially rebuild them.

That’s the price of living on the Internet: Everything changes, nothing remains still. As the philosopher Heraclitus supposedly said, some 2,500 years before the Web, you cannot step into the same river twice.

Read the full story at http://venturebeat.com/2013/03/21/somehow-were-all-stumbling-along-without-google-reader/

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I went to Austin, and I came back with an excellent orange beanie. I also spent a lot of time talking to interesting people and — when I wasn’t busy producing content for VentureBeat — drinking a bit too much. (And I made a brief appearance on NPR, which made my mom really proud.)

I’m tired and happy to be home now. But I’m also feeling kind of inspired by the whole event. From the guy in the bar who is making an app to help people commit “random acts of kindness,” to Amanda Palmer’s challenge (at a session about startup communities) for more awareness of the way crowdfunding builds a sense of shared responsibility, to the huge, world-changing ambitions of the Founders Fund partners, there was one common thread for me at SXSW this year (my first): Changing the world.

Here’s an excerpt from my latest column.

AUSTIN, Texas — At South by Southwest, every party had long lines of people waiting to get in, sometimes stretching the length of a block.

Every party except one, that is. I walked down the street last night past a Microsoft Windows event, which not only had no line, it was so empty that a staffer was standing on the sidewalk urging us to come inside.

Maybe Microsoft needed to hire a more exciting band. Half a block further down, and the sidewalk was crowded with young folks hoping to get into a party sponsored by some technology company. I’m pretty sure the headliner wasn’t Robert Scoble.

SXSW is an interesting mashup of a music festival, a film festival, and a geek fest. This was my first year attending, and I was a bit nervous, given that everything I’d heard about it made it sound crowded, noisy, and uncomfortable. But I’m leaving impressed.

Short version: Yes, SXSW is crowded and in many ways a dysfunctional event. No, there’s no real news. But it’s a great experience.

Read more about SXSW, startup communities, Tony Hsieh, and Amanda Palmer in my latest Dylan’s Desk column: How I learned to stop worrying and love SXSW.

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Dylan Tweney, the executive editor at VentureBeat, said Evernote, the popular note-taking and archiving service, is his go-to productivity tool. “I use Evernote to collect everything I might possibly need to save for later, with the exception of emails–Gmail is fine for that. I store all of my important documents–from notes to interviews–in Evernote. I also use Evernote tags as a kind of to-do list: I have a set of tags that I can use to prioritize things that need to happen immediately or that Im waiting for someone else to finish: “1-next,” “2-soon,” “3-later,” “4-someday,” and “5-waiting”. When I get an email that I need to act on but cant respond to immediately, I forward it to my private Evernote address and then prioritize it,” said Tweney. “Finally, I use Instapaper liberally to save articles that I run across during the day, but dont have time to read during the busy hours. It sends stories to my Kindle automatically, so I always have something interesting to read on the train ride home or in the evening. That helps keep me focused on work, even when people are sharing fascinating things on Twitter and Facebook all day.”

via How CEOs Stay So Productive | Fast Company.

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Last year, Courtney Stanton organized a conference for game developers whose 12-person speaker roster was half women, and half men.

And she did it without considering the gender of applicants.

In the world of tech conferences, that gender ratio is almost unheard of — let alone getting there without actively saying yes to certain applicants just because you know they’re female.

Stanton is a product manager for a video game publisher. She wanted to put together a conference for game developers, make it accessible — and get onstage speakers more diverse than, as she put it, “the same four straight white men agree(ing) with each other on some panel.”

How did she do it? By actively recruiting women through every possible channel. She attended events and spoke to women. She encouraged women she knew to submit speaking proposals. She recruited online. She met people for coffee and promised to mentor them, review their slide decks, help them brainstorm — whatever it took to get women to apply.

…

Read the original story at http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/30/what-you-need-to-do-to-get-more-women-at-your-conference-or-company/

Photo credit: Stephen Brashear/Flickr

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Felony, originally uploaded by dtweney.

This is on the box for the Daily News, one of San Mateo’s free newspapers. Free, but only for up to 3 copies. After that it’ll cost you up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $7,500.

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“We want to create a smarter, wiser planet,” co-founder Don Thorson told me in an interview recently. “It’s like the Borg Collective, with a more compassionate bent.”

The combination depends on an ambitious play: Getting people to share updates with their friends that include a unique 11-point rating, from -5 to +5, through Swipp’s iOS app and website, both of which launch today.

So, for example, you might use Swipp to post an update about the 49ers winning the game last weekend. Like Twitter, there’s a place to put a short note (up to about 250 words long), and you can attach a photo.

But unlike Twitter, the last thing you do before “Swipping” something is give it an emotional rating with a slider at the bottom of the screen. There’s a cute cartoon face that animates from sad/angry to happy as you slide the scale left and right.

…

Originally published on VentureBeat: Swipp hopes to make your status updates into collective, global knowledge | VentureBeat.

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Published on VentureBeat

When IBM bought Lotus for $3.5 billion in 1995, it looked as though the venerable computing giant was just about to lock up the software industry and coast to unstoppable profits.

Eighteen years later, Lotus looks more like a millstone around IBM’s neck than a flywheel giving it extra speed.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, in advance of IBM’s Q4 earnings release today, Lotus was the weakest performer in IBM’s software portfolio, shedding 6.4 percent of its sales volume in the first nine months of 2012.

It probably accounts for about $1 billion in annual revenue, according to estimates sourced by the WSJ, or one-sixth to one-fifth of IBM’s overall software business.

Ironically, Lotus once led the way toward today’s hottest enterprise technologies, the collaborative software that helps teams communicate and work together on projects. One of the success stories of that niche is Yammer, which Microsoft acquired last year for $1.2 billion. So, why is IBM sitting at the back of the pack instead of leading from the front?

…

Read the full story at: http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/22/lotus-notes-history/

Photo credit: Andrew Mason via photopin cc

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I spent much of the past few days thinking about Aaron Swartz and what a loss we suffered when he took his own life last week.

His passing breaks my heart. I didn’t know him, though he was in my circle: I know many people who knew him well. But he made my life better, and every day I use technologies that he contributed to. Whether that was working on an early version of the RSS spec, laying out the Python framework for web applications known as web.py (used by many sites now, including Reddit), or working with Larry Lessig on the launch of Creative Commons, he had a knack for finding useful projects where his considerable talents could make a real difference to millions of people. I use the fruits of those projects constantly.

That, in a nutshell, is the focus of what I look for and try to write about: technologies that have the potential to make a difference to millions.

Unfortunately, most of what tech journalists wind up writing about instead are technologies that have the potential to make millions (but only for a few people).

…

Read the rest of the story: We need more people like Aaron Swartz.

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via The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime” « Unhandled Exception.

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Some guy squinting into the future at the Canon booth at CES 2011. Photo by Dylan Tweney

After a two-week holiday break, my VentureBeat column is back. This week: why CES still matters.

Coincidentally, this morning NPR ran a similar story on Morning Edition. The reporter points out that, while big companies like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon don’t have booths at CES, they still send many executives and other people to scout out technology and make deals. And, for many companies, CES can actually lead to unparalleled press coverage — especially if you have something that photographs well.

Here’s my piece on VentureBeat.

Tech journalism’s annual festival of self-loathing is in full swing. I refer, of course, to CES, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will draw, this year, over 150,000 visitors and nearly as many blog posts complaining about how irrelevant and miserable it is.

I won’t argue about the miserable part. When you take people from all over the world, many of whom were just visiting with family members a week ago, and cram them into a single, shared space with industrial ventilation systems, you’ve got one of the most efficient systems for transferring pathogens ever invented. It’s crowded, the lines for cabs and coffee are long, and it takes forever to get anywhere, whether that’s from Caesar’s Palace to Mandalay Bay or merely from one side of the Las Vegas Convention Center to the other.

…

And yet, CES is still, for all its failings, one of the most important single events in the technology industry.

It’s not important as a press event, but it’s critical as a meeting place for manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of consumer electronics. I think of it as a temporary bazaar or souk on a grand scale: a huge marketplace where vendors compete to draw the attention of buyers, who flock up and down the aisles looking for a good deal, an angle, or merely an interesting distraction.

…

CES is also a barometer for where the hardware industry is going. Yes, hardware as we know it is dying. Software is more important than ever, and there hasn’t been a world-changing product unveiling at CES for years. The action has shifted to apps and cloud services, and it’s arguable that those are all more important than the hardware used to deliver them to consumers. But the pendulum may be starting to swing back, and CES 2013 shows the first signs of it.

Read the full story: Why CES still matters, even if you hate it

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4 Jan 2013

the binoculars reveal distant waves
crawling slowly across the horizon

5 Jan 2013

Sunlight breaks through the sky over Capitola, surrounding the surfers with a silvery glare. Along the horizon, a thin bright line underscores the massed grey clouds.

6 Jan 2013

The day after
the sky’s pink and orange haze
matches my own

7 Jan 2013

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