Sean Parker of Founder’s fund provides some thoughts on the importance of network effects and why he thinks companies like Twitter and Facebook succeed but not Ad-serving companies like Google.
Interesting… but it is not clear how these companies make money (if that’s what he means by success). Serving Ads ?
From their website. Also see the post on ReadWriteWeb
“We are a gang of serial entrepreneurs and around 40 startup founders and growing. We believe that India’s startups are coming of age and will have a significant impact on economy in 5 years from now“
“Via Morphues Venture Partners (MVP) we are trying to make a small contribution towards “India’s startup revolution”. We engage with startups in the most crucial phase of their existence, the first 12-18 months, the phase that is also known as valley of death. MVP runs a Business Acceleration Program (BAP) for talented, progressive and young startups designed to guide startups through this treacherous phase.“
btw, did you notice the recent surge of Internet and mobile startups in India? I see lot more young generation (in the age group of 25 to 35) keen on becoming enterpreneur. This is a good sign. Would we see more product companies, with products conceived and built out of India in the next 5 years ?
While catching up with some old blog posts, this post on WebFinger by Dare Obasanjo caught my attention. WebFinger is a very cool project. It reminded me of the initial RSS days where we were trying to extract all the blogs (blogroll) a user follows.
WebFinger would serve as the anchor point to discover all the social network of a user. As Dare points out, this makes certain workflows in social applications easy. I think, if they can put some “discoverable” (like Atom) structure around this, it would lead to much better search results. Remember “Wolfram|Alpha” ? Today, given my email id, no one can find out whether I have facebook account and what is the Id as there is no correlation (most of the time). A service like WebFinger can bridge this gap.
Haven’t looked at the spec, but looks like we can approach this in two ways:
Came across this blog post by Michael Stonebraker on ACM communications site. He is predicting that we are reaching an era where traditional relational DBMS systems will perish unless they adopt to the challenges ahead. He says, today:
and so on…
Few years back, there were not many applications that dealt with giga bytes of data and thousands of users. “Web search” was the only application that one can easily recall where probably RDBMS was not used (or didn’t fit the bill). And that was the period we saw dozens of new open source/commercial RDBMS implementations.
But today, we see lot more:
I am sure there are thousands of applications for which RDBMS is still the best choice, but there are sure signs that a big pie from RDBMS market will go away…
(updated)
Blogosphere is amazing… couple of related links I found:
Relational Databases: Are they obsolete ?
RDBMS: going the way of the mainframe?
Pioneer calls RDBMS technology obsolete (another one by Stonebraker 2 years back)
Are RDBMS obsolete?
Alan Turing gets an apology from British Government. We are living in times when even country like India is going soft on “gay” marriages. Unfortunately for Alan Turing, “being gay” was illegal in Britain at that point and the society forced him to commit suicide at the age of 41. Here is the link for petition where 4000+ british citizens signed up.
The "Present" I live in 