PalmPilot

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The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

The digital IOUs would be stored until the user docked their PalmPilot to a computer, at which point the payments would clear. Essentially, Confinity had created primitive digital checks, marrying handheld devices and finance. But as with the earlier ideas, PalmPilot-based IOUs didn’t represent a stop-the-presses breakthrough. That is, until the team tweaked the product yet again. For its 1998 generation of Palm IIIs, Palm tucked a half-inch sliver of red plastic into the corner. Palm pitched this infrared (IR) port as a way for PalmPilot users to beam information, but even as IR-bearing PalmPilots shipped, it wasn’t exactly clear what users would beam.

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The check arrives, and the onerous task of dividing up the bill begins. One diner reminds the group that they have PalmPilots, which include a calculator and Confinity’s money-beaming software. Presto: debts beamed, tab divided. Confinity would reorient the company, its software, and its pitch around beaming money from PalmPilot to PalmPilot. This idea had two virtues. First, it leveraged the thousands of lines of cryptographic handheld device code they’d already written. Second, it was a new thing in the world. To date, no one had made much use of the PalmPilot IR ports, other than swapping notes or sinking battleships. In beaming money, Confinity had an IR port use case.

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But his grandson, while intrigued by his friend Thiel’s company, thought the PalmPilot idea a dud. He came west for an interview nonetheless—which was not a success. “Sacks definitely didn’t pass the aura test,” one early Confinity team member said. The team objected, in part, to Sacks’s total dismissal of the PalmPilot product. “It was a dumb idea,” Sacks remembered. “There were two problems: one is that there are only five million Palm users, so unless you’re with somebody who also had a PalmPilot, the app is useless. And then there’s the other problem: even if you’re with somebody who’s got a PalmPilot, what would you use it for? Nobody could really come up with anything better than splitting dinner tabs.”

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

behavioural economics, billion-dollar mistake, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Great Leap Forward, hindsight bias, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, job satisfaction, Kevin Kelly, loss aversion, Max Levchin, medical residency, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, young professional

Rather, it made security software for handheld devices. In college, Levchin had grown fascinated with software and cryptography, and purely as a hobby, he had created some security software for PalmPilots, making it available for free download. After thousands of people downloaded the software, it occurred to him that he might have a business on his hands. Levchin’s freeware had solved an incredibly complex problem. Implementing cryptographic algorithms on a PalmPilot, with its hamster-league 16 MHz processor, was kind of like restocking a large warehouse using men on unicycles—conceptually possible, certainly, but difficult to do elegantly (much less quickly).

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On the day their first venture-capital deal was due to close, the PayPal team met its investors at a restaurant called Buck’s, and the $4.5 million investment was transferred, live, from one PalmPilot to another. Millions of dollars were sailing around the restaurant on infrared beams. The future had come to Buck’s. (Levchin had coded around the clock for five straight days to allow the “beaming at Buck’s” to take place. After the successful transfer of funds, he fell asleep at the table and woke up hours later next to his partially eaten omelet. Everyone else had left, figuring he could use the rest.) PayPal’s application for PalmPilots became popular, attracting about 300 users a day. To boost interest, Levchin’s team built a Web site that showcased a demo version of the handheld product.

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Implementing cryptographic algorithms on a PalmPilot, with its hamster-league 16 MHz processor, was kind of like restocking a large warehouse using men on unicycles—conceptually possible, certainly, but difficult to do elegantly (much less quickly). Levchin and his cofounder, Peter Thiel, brainstormed about ways to turn Levchin’s innovations into a commercial product, and eventually they hit upon the idea of developing software that allowed people to store money on their PalmPilots and exchange it wirelessly. Financial transactions clearly needed the kind of security that Levchin’s code provided. When Thiel and Levchin began to talk up their idea, their peers in Silicon Valley loved it. Levchin said, in an interview with Jessica Livingston in her book Founders at Work, “The geek crowd was like, ‘Wow. This is the future.

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

When Jeff and I were discussing strategy on the first day, at one point the prices were $90 per share for 3Com and $110 per share for PalmPilot. Buying 135 shares of PalmPilot outright cost $14,850, but if we paid $9,000 for 100 shares of 3Com we got both 135 shares of PalmPilot and 100 shares of the 3Com “stub” company. (Think of each 100 shares in 3Com as a ticket having two parts, one labeled 135 SHARES OF PALMPILOT and the other piece or stub labeled 100 SHARES OF 3COM POST-SPIN-OFF.) If you buy the hundred shares of 3Com you pay $9,000 and get $14,850 worth of PalmPilot and a 3Com stub with a current estimated value of between $1,500 and $2,500. Sell this for, say, $2,000 and the 135 PalmPilot shares only have a net cost of $7,000.

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Not possible? It happens often. For instance, in the next example the $9,000 Ford plus a $2,000 rebate is like 100 shares of 3Com and the identical Ford for $14,850 is like 135 shares of PalmPilot. Now for the details. Famous for its PalmPilot handheld personal organizer, the company 3Com, with stock market ticker COMS, announced that it was spinning off its PalmPilot division as a separate company. Some 6 percent of PalmPilot, ticker PALM, was offered to the public in an initial public offering at a price of $38 per share on Thursday, March 2, 2000. By the end of the day the 23 million shares that had been issued changed hands more than one and a half times, for a one-day trading volume of 37.9 million shares.

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The price peaked at $165 before closing at $95. The portion of PalmPilot sold in the IPO was deliberately set well below demand and led to a buying frenzy and price spurt typical at the time for tech stock IPOs. So far, this just repeated what we had often seen during the previous eighteen months of the tech stock boom. Now for the market inefficiency. At Thursday’s closing the market priced PalmPilot at $53.4 billion, yet it valued 3Com, which still owned 94 percent of PalmPilot, at “only” $28 billion. But that means the market valued 3Com’s 94 percent of PalmPilot at $50 billion, so it valued the rest of 3Com at negative $22 billion!

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

At least PayPal had a suitably grand mission—the kind that post-bubble skeptics would later describe as grandiose: we wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar. Our first product let people beam money from one PalmPilot to another. However, nobody had any use for that product except the journalists who voted it one of the 10 worst business ideas of 1999. PalmPilots were still too exotic then, but email was already commonplace, so we decided to create a way to send and receive payments over email. By the fall of ’99, our email payment product worked well—anyone could log in to our website and easily transfer money.

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The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is. Small doesn’t mean nonexistent. We made this mistake early on at PayPal. Our first product let people beam money to each other via PalmPilots. It was interesting technology and no one else was doing it. However, the world’s millions of PalmPilot users weren’t concentrated in a particular place, they had little in common, and they used their devices only episodically. Nobody needed our product, so we had no customers. With that lesson learned, we set our sights on eBay auctions, where we found our first success.

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Every entrepreneur envies a recognizable ad campaign, but startups should resist the temptation to compete with bigger companies in the endless contest to put on the most memorable TV spots or the most elaborate PR stunts. I know this from experience. At PayPal we hired James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, to be our official spokesman. When we released our first software for the PalmPilot, we invited journalists to an event where they could hear James recite this immortal line: “I’ve been beaming people up my whole career, but this is the first time I’ve ever been able to beam money!” It flopped—the few who actually came to cover the event weren’t impressed. We were all nerds, so we had thought Scotty the Chief Engineer could speak with more authority than, say, Captain Kirk.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

Starting at the end of 1998, Levchin and Thiel began experimenting with the idea of using the same technology to send an IOU, which could then be linked to a bank account once the PalmPilots were connected to a dock. They renamed the PalmPilot software company Confinity, a neologism Levchin came up with for “infinite confidence,” and made Thiel CEO. Levchin’s technology was almost absurdly narrow—only super-nerds owned PalmPilots at the time—but Thiel continued to see the basic idea as potentially disruptive. Levchin hadn’t invented a new kind of IOU; he’d invented a new currency. Once you had Confinity’s payments app on your PalmPilot, which could be downloaded by zapping it from your friend’s handheld, you could then use digital IOUs instead of dollars to buy stuff.

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“We should meet for breakfast,” Thiel said, before they parted. Sure, Levchin responded. “How about tomorrow?” Thiel asked. They met the following morning at a diner just south of the Stanford campus. As Thiel sipped a berry-and-banana smoothie, Levchin spoke about his fascination with PalmPilots, the handheld computers that had a certain cache among geeks. He’d taught himself to program on the digital planners, which, like proto-iPhones, had apps that let users write memos, keep track of appointments, and—wonder of wonders—send messages remotely. The process was clumsy: You had to buy a special modem that snapped onto the end of the device, plug the entire waffle-iron-sized appliance into a phone jack, and then suffer through the noisy, slow process of transferring data by dial-up modem.

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The process was clumsy: You had to buy a special modem that snapped onto the end of the device, plug the entire waffle-iron-sized appliance into a phone jack, and then suffer through the noisy, slow process of transferring data by dial-up modem. But Levchin thought it was awesome. “One day,” he told Thiel, “everyone is going to use these at work.” The one problem, Levchin said, was that PalmPilots didn’t have any security built in, making them effectively useless for businesses. As a cryptographer, he figured the answer was to build an encrypted network that would allow the handheld computers to communicate with the mainframe systems run by big companies. Thiel looked at Levchin intensely.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend

1960s counterculture, 4chan, A Pattern Language, Adam Curtis, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, anti-communist, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, bike sharing, Boeing 747, Burning Man, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, charter city, chief data officer, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, company town, computer age, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital map, Donald Davies, East Village, Edward Glaeser, Evgeny Morozov, food desert, game design, garden city movement, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, Haight Ashbury, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, jitney, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, load shedding, lolcat, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, messenger bag, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, off grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), openstreetmap, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, patent troll, Pearl River Delta, place-making, planetary scale, popular electronics, power law, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social software, social web, SpaceShipOne, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, undersea cable, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, working poor, working-age population, X Prize, Y2K, zero day, Zipcar

Crowley moved on to a new job at Vindigo, a start-up whose Palm Pilot app was one of the first city guides for a mobile device. Before do-it-all smartphones, PalmPilots—wireless-less handheld computers known as “personal digital assistants”—stood in as digital replacements for paper-based daily planners. This was before 3G, and Wi-Fi was just coming to market, and just beginning its infectious spread. The PalmPilot didn’t feature a wireless connection of any kind. Each time you returned to your PC, you snapped the thing into its cradle and hit a button, syncing data across a serial cable. Like other PalmPilot apps, Vindigo used the daily sync as a way of keeping the guide content on your device up to date.

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Innovations, 245 NYCwireless, 126–34, 174–75 O’Bryant, Richard, 174 Occupy Wall Street, 133, 226 Odendaal, Nancy, 178 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 288 O’Hagan, John, 80 Olivetti, 137 Olympic Games: Summer 1996, 66 Summer 2016, 66 O’Malley, Martin, 211 O’Neill, Tip, 212 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), 177, 188, 190 open-data legislation, 228 Open Plans, 158, 228, 307 open source: advocates of, 126–34, 209, 223, 237, 241, 291 in computer language, 124 for empowerment of poor, 186–89 model transparency in, 296 systems using, 156, 158–59, 293 OpenStreetMap, 187 operational planning, 67 Opower, 41–42 Web 2.0 conference of, 237 O’Reilly, Tim, 237, 241 “government as a platform” idea of, 241–42 O’Reilly Media, 237 Orwell, George, 275–76 Osgood, Chris, 213–16 Osorio, Carlos Roberto, 67–68 O’Sullivan, Dan, 136 Ouroussoff, Nicolai, 106 outside.in, 155 Owen, David, 278 Paes, Eduardo, 66–68, 223–24 Pahlka, Jennifer, 237–43, 291 Pakistan, 233 Palmisano, Sam, 62–63, 68, 223–24 PalmPilot, 121–22 Panasonic, 127 Panopticon, 13 Paris, bicycle sharing in, 11 ParkNOW!, 244–45 patents, 60–61 Path Intelligence, 271 Pattern Language, A (Alexander), 144, 285–86 Paulos, Eric, 41 Paxton, Joseph, 19 Convensia homage to, 23 design challenges of, 28 PBS, talk show of, 4 peer-to-peer systems, 163 Percifield, Leif, 139 “perpetual architect program,” 21 Perrow, Charles, 256–57 personal computer, 62 Personal Locker, 293 Peterson, Steven, 292 Philadelphia, Pa., 194–99, 287 Wireless Philadelphia in, 194–99 Philadelphia Magazine, 195 Philippines, conflict in, 12 PhoundIt, 319 PHP, 124 Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers (O’Sullivan and Igoe), 136 Pittsburgh, Pa., 79, 81, 83 PlaNYC sustainability initiative, 201 “platform play,” 149 Plato, 173 Plow Tracker, 208 Poindexter, John, 270 Point About, 200 Portland, Oreg., 82–85, 88–89 Tri-Met transit authority of, 204, 235 Posco, 30 Pradas, Juan, 219, 222–23 Price, Cedric, 20–22 PriceStats, 183 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 313 psychohistory, 79, 88, 315 public access cable television, 117–19, 164–65 punch cards, 59–62 Qiang, Christine Zhen-Wei, 178 R, 209 radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), 23–24, 28 RadioShack, 138 railroads, 61, 63 Rainert, Alex, 123–25, 134, 146 RAND, 79–81, 259, 277 Ratti, Carlo, 220, 231, 291 Real-Time Rome, 161 Regional Plan Association of New York, 105, 309 Regional Planning Association of America, 95–96 Reims, Andrea, 190 RelayRides, 163 Republic, The, 173 Return of the Whole Number of Persons Within the Several Districts of the United States (1793), 58 Rheingold, Howard, 34–35, 303 Ricci, Dom, 295 Rio de Janeiro, 65–69, 223–24 Intelligent Operations Center of, 66, 68, 82, 90–92, 224 Projeto Morrinho, 91–92 RJR Nabisco, 62 Roadify, 202 Roberts, Lawrence, 259–60 Rockefeller Foundation, 173–74 ROI (return on investment), 68 Rojas, Francisca, 204 Romer, Paul, 284 Rose, Charlie, 4 Roush, Wade, 258 Routesy, 292 Royal Academy of Engineering, 265 Royal Ordnance Survey (U.K.), 186 Royal Sappers and Miners, 20 Rozin, Daniel, 136 Rudofksy, Bernard, 111 rural telecottage or telecenter, 175–76 Russell, Bertrand, 251 Rutan, Burt, 203 SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment), 63–64 SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), 63, 76 St.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

A higher-fidelity prototype is closer to the envisioned final product in terms of its functionality, its “look and feel,” or both. A low-fidelity prototype can be as simple as a series of sketches that depict the flow of screens along a software program’s navigation path. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot, famously started designing the device by carving a block of wood into its shape, and then trimming a chopstick that he used as a stylus. To get a feel for whether and how he might use a PalmPilot, he carried the prototype for weeks, pulling it out every time he needed to schedule a meeting or access contact information. Early in the solution development process, an entrepreneur is likely to create both “works like” and “looks like” prototypes.

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If a startup is not on track, those leading it should ask regularly whether pivoting to a new business model makes sense. Pivoting, in and of itself, is not a harbinger of failure. In fact, many prominent ventures were products of a pivot. For example, PayPal began as a way to beam funds between PalmPilots. When this market proved too narrow, the team introduced fund transfers via email—just as eBay was taking off. Likewise, YouTube started as a service that allowed online daters to upload video profiles. Successful pivots like these often have one thing in common, however: They happen early in the venture’s development.

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., Observing the User Experience, Ch. 17; and Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Carmel, IN: Sams-Pearson Education, 2004). Also known as structured ideation: For best practices when brainstorming, see Scott Berkun, “How to Run a Brainstorming Session,” Scott Berkun blog; and Tina Seelig, “Brainstorming—Why It Doesn’t (Always) Work,” Medium, Jan. 8, 2017. Jeff Hawkins, inventor: Alberto Savoia, “The Palm Pilot Story,” Medium, Mar. 2, 2019. Early in the solution development process: The distinction between “works like” vs. “looks like” prototypes is a widely accepted principle in design. For a good explanation of the distinction—and why designers should use both types—see Ben Einstein, “The Illustrated Guide to Product Development (Part 2: Design),” Bolt website, Oct. 20, 2015.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Stross Copyright The Cast The Benchmark Partners Dave Beirne previously, founder of Ramsey Beirne Associates, an executive search firm in Ossining, New York Bruce Dunlevie previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Bill Gurley previously, general partner at Hummer Winblad, a venture capital firm in San Francisco, California; joined Benchmark in 1999 Kevin Harvey previously, founder of Approach Software, in Redwood City, California Bob Kagle previously, general partner at Technology Venture Investors (TVI), a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Andy Rachleff previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Selected Individuals Mentioned Bill Atalla son of TriStrata founder John Atalla John Atalla founder, TriStrata Louis Borders founder and CEO, Webvan Eric Greenberg founder, Scient Bob Howe CEO, Scient Jerry Kaplan CEO, Onsale Bill Lederer CEO, artuframe/Art.com Burt McMurtry general partner, Technology Venture Investors Pete Mountanos CEO, Charitableway Pierre Omidyar founder and chairman, eBay Tom Perkins retired general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Danny Shader Benchmark entrepreneur in residence; founder and CEO, Accept.com Rob Shaw founder, Newwatch/Ashford.com Jeff Skoll cofounder and vice president, eBay Paul Wahl CEO, TriStrata Jay Walker chairman, Priceline Steve Westly vice president, marketing, eBay James Whitcomb president, Newwatch/Ashford.com Meg Whitman president and CEO, eBay Selected Companies Mentioned (Partner representing Benchmark) Accept.com (Bruce Dunlevie) payment systems for electronic commerce Ariba (Bob Kagle) online ordering of materials and supplies for businesses Art.com [originally named artuframe] (Bob Kagle) posters and frames sold via the Web Ashford.com [originally named Newwatch] (Kevin Harvey) watches, pens, leather bags, and other luxury goods sold via the Web Charitableway (Andy Rachleff) online for-profit solicitor for nonprofit organizations Critical Path (Kevin Harvey) hosts e-mail services for large organizations eBay (Bob Kagle) online person-to-person auctions via the Web ePhysician (Dave Beirne) prescription ordering for doctors via a PalmPilot Juniper Networks (Andy Rachleff) manufacturer of high-speed routers for the Internet Newwatch [renamed Ashford.com; see above] Priceline (Dave Beirne) online bidding for airline tickets and hotel rooms Red Hat (Kevin Harvey) distributor of Linux, an alternative operating system to Windows Scient (Dave Beirne) technical consulting services to e-tailers Toysrus.com (Bruce Dunlevie) aborted joint venture to sell toys via the Web; to have been cofunded by, but organizationally separate from, Toys “R” Us TriStrata (Dave Beirne) security software for data networks within large corporations Webvan (Dave Beirne) groceries sold via the Web and delivered to the home Introduction When eBay, a small Internet auction company based in San Jose, California, sought venture capital, it had to pass an informal test administered by the venture guys before they would consider making an investment: Was there a reasonably good likelihood that the investors could make ten times their money within three years?

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It was Dunlevie who had helped arrange a way for Ink, which had evolved into another company, eShop, to do something that few pen-computing companies in the early 1990s were able to accomplish: make money. EShop was sold to Microsoft. (Dunlevie was 3 for 3 in his pen-computing investments; another company that he backed was Palm, whose PalmPilot several years later would be a broadly recognized brand but had not yet become the franchise it would be later for 3Com.) After eShop’s sale, Omidyar had periodically phoned Dunlevie, telling him of progress in his newest venture. “I’ve got this e-commerce site called eBay. It’s gathering steam,” Omidyar had said when he called in late 1996.

…

From one million SKUs, to 500,000, 200,000, 100,000, 50,000, then down to 30,000, only 50 percent more items than a huge Safeway carried. Each Monday morning the Benchmark partners held a free-form partners’ meeting. No one held a particular place around the table, but what each partner typically brought with him to the meeting revealed some differences in personality. As the venture guy behind the PalmPilot, Bruce Dunlevie not surprisingly used a Pilot to make appointments and look up phone numbers for other partners during the meeting, but he also brought along a tall messy stack of legal pads, each reserved for a separate pending deal, with many pages filled in and the top pages folded over; interspersed were clippings from the computer-industry trade press, which he would pull out and send flying across the table, like paper Frisbees, to the partner who may have missed the item.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius by Arika Okrent

British Empire, centre right, global village, Johannes Kepler, PalmPilot, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, slashdot, software patent, Stephen Hawking

On the first afternoon of the conference, I stepped timidly into the over-air-conditioned lobby of the hotel with Mark Shoulson. He and I had spent the long flight to Phoenix going over the finer points of Klingon colloquialisms, but I wasn't sure I was ready to put them to use. I saw a small group gathered around a table, PalmPilots in hand. They were conversing in Klingon, haltingly, and with much use of their PalmPilot dictionaries, but nonetheless getting their points across. No one was in costume. Mark introduced me to the group, and I smiled and waved weakly, not sure what to say or how to say it. I sat and listened for a while. I was privately pleased when I understood my first spoken Klingon sentence: “Ha'DIbaH vISopbe'” (Animal I-it-eat-not)—“I'm a vegetarian.”

…

But because people were out of practice and the group was of mixed skill level, this particular conversation wasn't the best display of Klingon-speaking potential. I saw that later, as we walked over radiating sidewalks to a Mexican restaurant for the opening banquet, when I witnessed Captain Krankor and his girlfriend holding hands and chatting in Klingon, sans PalmPilots. Captain Krankor (also known as Qanqor) is a software engineer and musician from Massachusetts known as Rich when he's in regular clothes. When he wears his Klingon costume, he is Krankor, and he only speaks Klingon. In both of his personas he is round and compact, with a large, appreciative laugh that shows off his dimples.

…

He said he was having a great time so far, and he was really hoping Marc Okrand would make an appearance, as he sometimes does at the qep'a's. “I'm starstruck,” he said with a wide smile. “I brought a new copy of The Klingon Dictionary for him to sign.” The second morning, when I greeted Scott by the coffee machine, he would only speak to me in Klingon, having taken the vow for that day. Luckily, someone had beamed me a PalmPilot dictionary at lunch the previous day, so I had the means to understand him in a painfully pause-filled kind of way. As the rest of the group came down from their rooms, he gained more game conversational partners and I gained some interpreters, the most skilled of whom was my guide, Mark, who through the rest of the weekend made it a point to keep me included with unobtrusive simultaneous translation in a low, gentle voice.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

When Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek founded PayPal (then known as Confinity) in December 1998, Confinity was intended to be a mobile phone encryption company using Max’s highly efficient encryption technology. From there, the company pivoted first to mobile phone cash (pivot #1) and then to PalmPilot payments via infrared beaming (pivot #2). Unfortunately, the network of PalmPilot users who wanted to beam money to each other simply wasn’t that robust, so we pivoted again and added e-mail payments (pivot #3). By the end of the year, we saw an emerging market in settling eBay transactions and pivoted our product development efforts to serve that market (pivot #4).

…

Even if you do manage to hire the people you want, you’ll often have to scramble their roles and job titles as the organization changes in response to market feedback. At PayPal, we thought we were a mobile encryption product, and we hired accordingly. Then we shifted rapidly in turn to cash on mobile phones, then cash on PalmPilots, then payments between PalmPilots, and finally payments via e-mail. We couldn’t have done so if our people were tied to neat and tidy jobs like “mobile encryption engineer.” Take Jamie Templeton, one of our key early employees at PayPal. We hired Jamie to work on the product, but over the course of just three years, he shifted from product to engineering to systems to policy, depending on what the company needed.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

The next steps—to embed the technology invisibly in a piece of glass, to make it smart enough to display a virtual keyboard with auto-correct, and to make it sophisticated enough to reliably manipulate content such as photos or web pages on that screen—made it hugely expensive even to produce a working prototype. Few production lines even had experience manufacturing multitouch screens. There were touchscreens in consumer electronics, but over the years these had typically been pressure-sensitive touchscreen devices on which users pushed on-screen buttons with a finger or a stylus. The PalmPilot and its successors such as the Palm Treo were popular implementations of this technology. Even if multitouch iPhone screens had been easy to make, it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, such as onscreen keyboards and “tap to zoom,” were enhancements that consumers wanted.

…

He became one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC. The first Macintosh and later Microsoft Windows were rooted in Kay’s work. Apple prototyped something it called the Bashful in 1983 but never released it. The first tablet to get any consumer traction came from Jeff Hawkins, the entrepreneur behind the PalmPilot in the late 1990s. He built the GRiDPad from Tandy, which was released in 1989. It worked with a stylus, weighed about five pounds, and cost about $2,500. Bookkeepers in the U.S. army used it to fill out electronic forms and keep better track of inventory. It was shortly followed by competitors such as the NCR 3125.

…

Its battery life was terrible, and its most hyped feature, handwriting recognition, didn’t work well. It was, fittingly, one of the first projects Jobs killed when he returned in 1997. By then, if you wanted computing power that was portable, you could buy a laptop. Everything else involved too much compromise. Indeed, the PalmPilot and devices like it became so popular for the next half decade because they didn’t try to do too much. They were small, inexpensive, and ran for a long time on AAA batteries. But they were really electronic calendars and address books, not tablet computers. The most recent effort in tablets had been made by Bill Gates and Microsoft in 2002.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, book value, BRICs, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, framing effect, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, The Myth of the Rational Market, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

HOW EVEN THE LEADING NEW ECONOMY STOCKS RUINED INVESTORS Stock High 2000 Low 2001–2002 Percentage Decline Amazon.com 75.25 5.51 98.7 Cisco Systems 82.00 11.04 86.5 Corning 113.33 2.80 99.0 JDS Uniphase 297.34 2.24 99.5 Lucent Technologies 74.93 1.36 98.3 Nortel Networks 143.62 .76 99.7 Priceline.com 165.00 1.80 99.4 Yahoo.com 238.00 8.02 96.4 PalmPilot, the maker of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), is an example of the insanity that went well beyond irrational exuberance. Palm was owned by a company called 3Com, which decided to spin it off to its shareholders. Since PDAs were touted as a sine qua non of the digital revolution, it was assumed that PalmPilot would be a particularly exciting stock. Little did 3Com know how strongly the market would react. In early 2000, 3Com sold 5 percent of its shares in Palm in an initial public offering and announced its intention to spin off all the remaining shares to the 3Com shareholders.

…

Recall the illustration of 3Com spinning off 5 percent of the shares of PalmPilot stock it owned, announcing its intention to spin off the remaining 95 percent later. Irrational exuberance pushed the price of Palm’s stock so high that if you bought 3Com, which still owned 95 percent of Palm, you could have effectively bought Palm stock for less than the price at which it was selling in the market. The 95 percent of Palm that 3Com owned was worth $25 billion more than the total market capitalization of 3Com at going market prices. Here was an obvious case of mispricing and an apparently profitable arbitrage opportunity. The clear arbitrage (borrow PalmPilot stock and sell it short and buy 3Com) could not be undertaken.

…

Palm took off so fast that its market capitalization became twice as large as that of 3Com. It turned out that the market value of the 95 percent of Palm owned by 3Com was almost $25 billion greater than the total market capitalization of 3Com itself. It was as if all of 3Com’s other assets had been worth a negative $25 billion. If you wanted to buy PalmPilot, you could have bought 3Com and owned the rest of 3Com’s business for minus $61 per share. In its mindless search for riches, the market created anomalies that were even stranger than the fraudulent accounting practices that were soon to be revealed. Yet Another New-Issue Craze In the first quarter of 2000, 916 venture capital firms invested $15.7 billion in 1,009 startup Internet companies.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

He’d been writing ingenious encryption that ran on the weak chips of handheld PDAs like the PalmPilot, the hot tech of the day. They hit on the idea of creating software to let people transfer money digitally—from one PalmPilot to another, or even online: PayPal. At school, Levchin had developed a reputation for being a ferocious font of code, working in relentless, multi-day-long jags. So it was with the origins of PayPal: He’d already written scads of crypto emulators, so he was able to crank out the prototype of PayPal’s initial PalmPilot software by himself. When PayPal secured $4.5 million in financing, for a PR stunt he and Thiel decided to have the investors beam $3 million of it in digital money from one PalmPilot to another.

…

When PayPal secured $4.5 million in financing, for a PR stunt he and Thiel decided to have the investors beam $3 million of it in digital money from one PalmPilot to another. They pondered doing a fake mock-up, one that just pretended to send the money. But Levchin was “disgusted” with the idea, as he later recalled in the book Founders at Work. “What if it crashes?” he thought. “I’ll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment.” Instead, he and the two other programmers they’d hired by then hunkered down and coded almost nonstop for five straight days. In Founders, Levchin recalled not sleeping at all during that period: “It was just this insane marathon.”

…

In Founders, Levchin recalled not sleeping at all during that period: “It was just this insane marathon.” They finished their work barely one hour before the demo was set to begin. At a local restaurant called Buck’s, with reporters crowded around a pair of PalmPilots, the $3 million was successfully transferred from one device to another. Levchin ordered an omelet for breakfast but fell asleep before he could eat it. “The next thing I remember,” he said, “I woke up, and I was on the side of my own omelet, and there was no one at Buck’s. Everyone was gone. They just let me sleep.” As PayPal took off, he kept up those empyrean feats of coderly productivity.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

Sometimes features are needed to reach goals, but more often than not, they merely confuse users and get in the way of allowing them to get their work done. Ineffective features make users feel stupid. Borrowing from a previous example, the successful PalmPilot has far fewer features than did General Magic's failed Magic Link computer, Apple's failed Newton, or the failed PenPoint computer. The PalmPilot owes its success to its designers' single-minded focus on its target user and the objectives that user wanted to achieve. About the only good thing I can say about features is that they are quantifiable. And that quality of being countable imbues them with an aura of value that they simply don't have.

…

In 1992, when the PenPoint crashed and burned, the Apple Newton inherited the promise of the handheld revolution. When the Newton failed to excite people, General Magic's Magic Link computer became the new hope for handhelds. That was in 1994. When the Magic Link failed to sell, the handheld market appeared dead. Venture capitalists declared it a dry hole. Then, out of nowhere, in 1996, the PalmPilot arrived to universal acclaim. It seized the handheld no-man's-land six years late. Markets are always ready for good products that deliver value and satisfy users. Of course, companies with a long history of making hardware-only products now make hybrid versions containing chips and software. They tend to underestimate the influence of software and subordinate it to the already-established completion cycles of hardware.

…

Most of the examples in Chapter 1 , "Riddles for the Information Age," make this clear. As more and more products are hybrids of hardware and software, the need for a Goal-Directed design increases, because it is agnostic regarding the implementation medium. 3Com Corporation—original maker of the PalmPilot—is a good example of a hybrid-product company where design created a smooth integration between hardware and software. A single tap of the screen and the machine awakens instantly in the exact state it was in when it was last shut down. When hardware is instantaneously responsive to users' actions, it is a clear indicator that the hardware design incorporated the needs of the software.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger

Apollo 11, assortative mating, barriers to entry, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, double helix, driverless car, fixed-gear, flying shuttle, Google Glasses, job satisfaction, messenger bag, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, Ronald Reagan, six sigma, spinning jenny, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies, white flight, Yogi Berra

Such visual cues not only make novel technology feel more familiar, they also shape the reference category used to evaluate the device. Apple’s Newton was an early predecessor to today’s smartphone. It was designed and viewed as a computer, and ultimately evaluated as an underperforming one. The PalmPilot was introduced only a few years later, but because it fit in a pocket and resembled a daily agenda book, that, instead of a computer, became the standard of comparison. And seen as an improvement over the standard agenda book, the PalmPilot became quite successful. 5. Come On Baby, Light My Fire Kara sat quietly in the dark waiting for the race to begin. It would be a sprint. Nothing complicated, just a straight track.

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See also Social comparison; Social facilitation Moving to Opportunity, 225–28, 232 Music website experiment, 46–49, 52–53 Names, 14, 150–56, 161 hurricanes’ influence on choice of, 16, 153, 154–55, 156, 170–71 last, 169 phonemes in, 152–53 prebirth secrecy about, 59n National Assessment of Educational Progress, 118 National Industrial Recovery Act, 223 NBA teams, 15, 207–8 NCAA teams, 208n Negotiation, 36–41 Neighborhood effects, 226–28 Newton (Apple), 184n Nike, 180 1984 (Orwell), 78n Nixon, Richard, 163 Nobel Prize winners, 66 Nolan, Jessica, 200 North Face, 103, 109–10 Note-taking, 195 Nouveau riche, 130–31 Novelty, 16, 164–71 benefits of, 164–65 Chinese characters experiment, 157–60 Goldilocks effect and, 166–71, 230 Obama, Barack, 141, 220 Occupation and social class, 92n Ogbu, John, 118–19 Oops! . . . I Did It Again (album), 43 Opower, 202–3, 209, 216n, 219–20, 232 Opportunity costs, 126 Optimal distinction, 16, 171–81, 230 automobile selection and, 177–79 in eating club members, 173–76 Orwell, George, 78n PalmPilot, 184n Pantone, 148, 149 Pantoneview, 148 Parakeets, social facilitation and, 190 Parallel parking, 16, 195 Parking parallel, 16, 195 preferences, 49–52, 53 Pasarell, Charlie, 212–14 Phonemes, 152–53 Physical appearance similiarity, 30–32 Physical attraction, 6–11, 230–31 Pierce, Paul, 207 Plato, 6–7 Point of light experiment, 21–23, 28, 47, 74 Politics, social comparison in, 220 Polizzi, Nicole (“Snooki”), 99–101, 180 Pope, Devin, 207 Prada, 129 Premotor cortex, 33–35 Presley, Elvis, 45 Princeton University, 3, 46, 171–76 Privacy, 59–60 Pronin, Emily, 3 Public Works Administration, 223 Quitting, 217–19 Race, academic performance and, 16, 117–20, 141–42 Rand, Ayn, 78n Rand, Lindsay, 141 Rats, social facilitation/comparison and, 189, 215 Reagan, Ronald, 162 Relative performance.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

We have these handheld devices that we all believe are going to be everywhere one day, but right now only a couple of million people have them. Reid was the progenitor of the original idea. He said, “You know, the thing that you can secure is money.” There was not really a good reason why your PalmPilot or your desktop computer can’t be a wallet. You just need a way to put money in and take money out while it’s secure. And that’s basically the evolution of PayPal—where it went from PalmPilot money transfer to web and online money transfer. At PayPal, we created an entirely new market for something that did not exist before the internet and before eBay. Pre-eBay, if you wanted to buy something from Alabama and you lived in Wisconsin, you had to physically go there and buy it. eBay fundamentally enabled the idea of cross-border commerce, which just was not a thing before.

…

And so I realized that around me were all kinds of system administrators that carried around these various little physical password generators. For every new machine that people had to log into, they needed to generate a onetime password. A system administrator would literally have twenty-five of these hanging off their belt. I wanted to reverse engineer all the algorithms and put them into a single PalmPilot emulator. It became kind of an obsession. I started distributing it on the internet, which in 1995 was a very small place, and shockingly people were willing to pay me money for support. Then I pitched this to Peter Thiel, and it eventually became PayPal. I did lots of other startups before PayPal.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition) by Burton G. Malkiel

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, book value, butter production in bangladesh, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, compound rate of return, correlation coefficient, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Edward Thorp, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental subject, feminist movement, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, framing effect, George Santayana, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Japanese asset price bubble, John Bogle, junk bonds, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, money market fund, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Own Your Own Home, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, sugar pill, survivorship bias, Teledyne, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

In the market decline that followed, shares in these companies became worthless. As the following table shows, investors suffered punishing losses even in the leading Internet companies. PalmPilot, the maker of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), is an example of the insanity that went well beyond irrational exuberance. Palm was owned by a company called 3Com, which decided to spin it off to its shareholders. Since PDAs were touted as a sine qua non of the digital revolution, it was assumed that PalmPilot would be a particularly exciting stock. Little did 3Com know how strongly the market would react. In early 2000, 3Com sold 5 percent of its shares in Palm in an initial public offering and announced its intention to spin off all the remaining shares to the 3Com shareholders.

…

Palm took off so fast that its market capitalization became twice as large as that of 3Com. It turned out that the market value of the 95 percent of Palm owned by 3Com was almost $25 billion greater than the total market capitalization of 3Com itself. It was as if all of 3Com’s other assets had been worth a negative $25 billion. If you wanted to buy PalmPilot, you could have bought 3Com and owned the rest of 3Com’s business for minus $61 per share. In its mindless search for riches, the market created anomalies that were even stranger than the fraudulent accounting practices that were soon to be revealed. Yet Another New-Issue Craze In the first quarter of 2000, 916 venture capital firms invested $15.7 billion in 1,009 startup Internet companies.

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Standard & Poor’s 500, 179, 181 see also specific funds Nagel, Stefan, 250 NASDAQ, 80–81, 82, 109, 128, 254 National Cash Register, 48, 53 national income changes, as element in systematic risk, 224 National Student Marketing (NSM), 67–68, 69 “naughties,” 344, 411 New Economy, 241, 249 accounting fraud in, 93–95 Internet-driven, 79–97, 104–5 New Economy stocks, 172, 177 New England Patriots, 148 new investment technology, 26, 31, 189–228 alpha in, 219 beta in, see beta CAPM in, see capital-asset pricing model MPT in, see modern portfolio theory risk in, 190 new issues, 257, 318 caution with, 75 of Internet stocks, 84–87 of 1959–62, 57–59 of 1980s, 70–75 Newsweek, 57 Newton, Isaac, 47 New Yorker, 88 New York Post, 89 New York State Teachers Association, 384 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 56, 109, 144, 151, 397 Babson Break in, 51–52 speculation in, 48–55 New York Times, 91, 393 Nifty Fifty, 36, 68–70 NINJA loans, 101 Nobel Prize, 35, 183, 197, 209 No-Brainer Step, 379, 380–82 NO-DOC loans, 101 no-equity loans, 100 Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Lo and MacKinlay), 139 Nortel Networks, 83, 90, 161, 166 NSM, see National Student Marketing NTT Corporation, 76 nucleus theory of growth, 64 NYSE, see New York Stock Exchange odd-lot theory, 149 Odean, Terrance, 93, 234, 246, 256 O’Higgins, Michael, 150 Once in Golconda (Brooks), 49 “one-decision” stocks, 69 online brokers, Internet bubble aided by, 91–92 online investment advisers, 408 OPEC, 337 open-end funds, 402 operating expenses, 402 option premiums, 39 O’Shaughnessy, James, 150 Outlook (S&P), 393 overconfidence, 231, 232–35 overtrading, 234, 255–56 PalmPilot, 83 Paternot, Stephen, 86 P/BV ratios, see price-to-book value ratios P/E effect, 263 P/E multiples, see price-earnings multiples pension funds, 167, 182, 184, 303–4 P/E ratios, see price-earnings multiples performance, 65–68 of buy-and-hold strategy, 158 of common stocks (1970s), 340 of concept stocks, 65–68 of mutual funds, 66, 174–82, 398–400 vs. future results in mutual funds, 399, 401 Performance Systems, 68, 69 Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), 83 Peters, Thomas J., 233 Pets.com, 84 Philadelphia 76ers, 145 Phillips, Don, 400 Phoenix, University of, 169 Pittsburgh Steelers, 148 Polaroid, 68, 69, 161 Ponzi schemes: Internet investment as, 80, 242 of Madoff, 258–59 ZZZZ Best as, 74 portfolio management, 66, 160–61, 164, 170, 174–84, 261, 349–50, 351, 361–62, 366–67, 389, 398 see also “smart beta” Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 197 portfolio theory, see modern portfolio theory positive feedback loops, 80 Pound, John, 253 PowerShares, 270, 281 Prechter, Robert, 151–52 present value, 32, 125n price-dividend multiples, 330, 340, 341, 343 price-earnings (P/E) multiples, 57, 64, 65, 126, 264, 274, 336, 344, 346–47, 394–95 of blue-chip stocks, 68 crash in (1970s), 340 cyclically adjusted (CAPE), 347, 387 of growth stocks, 121–23, 130–33, 406 of high-tech stocks, 81 inflation of, 64 performance and, 263, 396 see also performance, of common stocks (1970s); performance, of concept stocks Priceline.com, 83 price stability, 54 price-to-book value (P/BV) ratios, of stocks, 264, 270, 274 price-volume systems, 143–44 Price Waterhouse, 153 Princeton University, 161 probability judgments, 233–34, 238 Producers, The, 166 product asset valuation, 72 professional investors: limitations of, 162–63 profit-maximizing behavior, as argument against technical analysis, 116–17 profits, 339 in inflation, 339 measurement of, 339 profit-sharing plans, 304 Prohibition, 52 property taxes, 314 prospect theory, 243–45 prospectuses, warnings on, 59 PSI Net, 90 psychological factors in stock valuation, see castle-in-the-air theory; technical analysis Puckle Machine Company, 45 Puerto Rico, 404 purchasing power, effects of inflation on, 28–29, 125n, 307, 315 Purdue University, 82 Quandt, Richard, 140 quant, defined, 221n Quinn, Jane Bryant, 91 Qwest, 166 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 48, 53 railroad industry, 91, 96 RAND Corporation, 197 Randell, Cortes W., 66–68 random events, forecasting influenced by, 164–65, 176 random walk: defined, 26–28, 139, 140 difficult acceptance of, 145–46 fundamental conclusion of, 154 summarized, 35–36 random-walk theory, 105–6, 266–67 assumptions of, 190, 229, 230 fundamental analysis and, 182–84 guide for, 291 and housing bubble, 105–6 index funds and, 379–80 role of arbitrage in, 248–49 semi-strong form of EMH, 26, 182–84 strong (broad) form of EMH, 26, 182–84 technical analysis and, 137–41, 154–57 weak (narrow) form of EMH, 26, 140, 183 Raptor, 94 rate of return: after inflation, 338 for bonds, 194–96, 307, 315–21, 342–43, 344, 345 in CAPM, 213–19 for common stocks, 194–96, 307 compounded, 351 diversification and, 198–200 expected, see expected rate of return future events and, 30, 343–48 high, for bearing greater risk, 194–96, 212–13, 350, 408 investment objectives and, 306–13 negative, 196 for real estate, 313 rebalancing to, 360 risk-free, 215–18 “small caps” vs.

Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software by Michael Schwarz, Jeremy Anderson, Peter Curtis

business process, Debian, defense in depth, Free Software Foundation, GnuPG, index card, indoor plumbing, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, publish or perish, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, seminal paper, SETI@home, slashdot, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, two and twenty, web application

Use Your Palm-Connected Organizer Difficult-o-Meter: 3 (moderate Linux skill required) Covers: pilot-link http://sourceforge.net/projects/pilot-link pilot-manager http://www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr/ kpilot url http://www.kde.org/ jpilot http://jpilot.org/ malsync http://www.tomw.org/malsync/ Question: Doesn't switching to Linux mean that I will have to give up my Palm computing device (or PalmPilot as most humans still call them)? Answer: Absolutely not! You have an embarassment of options for linking your Palm, Sony Clie, or Handspring Visor to Linux. Which one of the host of choices you select will depend on your needs, your desktop choice, and your personal tastes. Heck, I actually use more than one of the packages every single day. It is a lot of fun! Introduction PalmOS devices, including the PalmPilot, the Palms III, IIIx, V, Vx, VIIx, m100, and now m500, etc., the Handspring line of personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Sony Clie, and so on are the most widely used type of PDA in the market, recent inroads by the so-called PocketPC notwithstanding.

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Those of you who have PalmOS devices already know what we are talking about here. What you want is some guidance to help you choose the tool that's right for you. Seeing how these packages do their work is the only way to make that choice, hence all the pretty pictures (so perhaps this is a bit of an apology after all). One more note: We will use the terms palm, Palm, pilot, and PDA interchangeably throughout this chapter. In every case we mean one of the PalmOS-based personal digital assistants, without regard to a particular model or manufacturer. The Handspring Visor: A Brief Digression I recently bought a Handspring Visor Deluxe when I accidentally ran over my long-used and much-loved Palm V.

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Program Description addresses This program will read your addressbook database and write it to standard output in a fairly useful format. pilot-addresses This will export and import your addressbook. read-todos This will output the to-do lists in your palm to a text format. install-todos The function complementary to the read-todos program. This will take a text file of to-do items and store them in your palm. pilot-schlep This will turn your palm into a one-file file system. You can save any disk file (that will fit in your palm's free memory) on your palm and then use this program to extract it again. Very James Bond. pilot-mail This will read mail from a POP3 account into your palm's mail application and will send any mail coming from your palm using the sendmail program.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

He hadn’t actually gone to London, of course, especially after being arrested and deported from Prague for protesting there. Instead he had assisted with May Day from the comfort of a cubicle at Palm, Inc., the maker of the PalmPilot, where he was freelancing, using the company’s servers and computers (without his supervisors’ knowledge, of course) to cause havoc for the bankers, who used, well, PalmPilots. Story time was interrupted when Ev showed up. He slid over a chair and sat quietly watching Noah, who became self-conscious and straightened his back. Ev interjected a few times with questions about Rabble’s coding skills and work habits.

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The big question Ev, Noah, Jeremy, and Tim were unable to answer in those discussions was what these groups of people would actually want to share with one another. This was where Jack’s status idea fit perfectly. When Biz heard the concept, it reminded him of an idea he had been obsessed with at Google. He had owned a phone called a Treo at the time, which had a crude black-and-white screen and was half PalmPilot, half cell phone. He had started suggesting to coworkers that Google should build its own “Phone-ternet.” “What the hell is a Phone-ternet?” people would reply. “It’s like an Internet, but for your phone!” Biz told those who would listen. “Get it? Phone plus Internet. Phone-ternet?” People just rolled their eyes.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, availability heuristic, backtesting, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, commoditize, complexity theory, corporate governance, corporate raider, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, endowment effect, equity premium, financial engineering, fixed income, global village, hedonic treadmill, hindsight bias, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, mental accounting, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Paul Samuelson, power law, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, selection bias, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, survivorship bias, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, Yogi Berra

NERO TULIP Hit by Lightning Temporary Sanity Modus Operandi No Work Ethics There Are Always Secrets JOHN THE HIGH-YIELD TRADER An Overpaid Hick THE RED-HOT SUMMER Serotonin and Randomness YOUR DENTIST IS RICH, VERY RICH Two A BIZARRE ACCOUNTING METHOD ALTERNATIVE HISTORY Russian Roulette Possible Worlds An Even More Vicious Roulette SMOOTH PEER RELATIONS Salvation via Aeroflot Solon Visits Regine’s Nightclub GEORGE WILL IS NO SOLON: ON COUNTERINTUITIVE TRUTHS Humiliated in Debates A Different Kind of Earthquake Proverbs Galore Risk Managers Epiphenomena Three A MATHEMATICAL MEDITATION ON HISTORY Europlayboy Mathematics The Tools Monte Carlo Mathematics FUN IN MY ATTIC Making History Zorglubs Crowding the Attic Denigration of History The Stove Is Hot Skills in Predicting Past History My Solon DISTILLED THINKING ON YOUR PALMPILOT Breaking News Shiller Redux Gerontocracy PHILOSTRATUS IN MONTE CARLO : ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NOISE AND INFORMATION Four RANDOMNESS, NONSENSE, AND THE SCIENTIFIC INTELLECTUAL RANDOMNESS AND THE VERB Reverse Turing Test The Father of All Pseudothinkers MONTE CARLO POETRY Five SURVIVAL OF THE LEAST FIT–CAN EVOLUTION BE FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS?

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Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties. DISTILLED THINKING ON YOUR PALMPILOT Breaking News The journalist, my bête noire, entered this book with George Will dealing with random outcomes. In the next step I will show how my Monte Carlo toy taught me to favor distilled thinking, by which I mean the thinking based on information around us that is stripped of meaningless but diverting clutter.

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Because of a psychological bias; people who surrounded me in my career were too focused on memorizing section 2 of The Wall Street Journal during their train ride to reflect properly on the attributes of random events. Or perhaps they watched too many gurus on television. Or perhaps they spent too much time upgrading their PalmPilot. Even some experienced trading veterans do not seem to get the point that frequencies do not matter. Jim Rogers, a “legendary” investor, made the following statement: I don’t buy options. Buying options is another way to go to the poorhouse. Someone did a study for the SEC and discovered that 90 percent of all options expire as losses.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

“What could I do?” was also the defence of another patient, Mike, who pocketed my PalmPilot one day when I left him sitting in my office for no more than twenty seconds. It was during my early days at the Portland; I’d stepped into the next room to pick up a prescription pad. I naïvely believed that this man, who once made me a finely worked wood carving to express his gratitude, could be trusted. Perhaps he could be trusted, but his addiction could not. Five minutes after he left I noticed the empty space on my desk where the PalmPilot had been. I shut the office, reassured the waiting patients that I’d be back shortly and hurried down the block to Mike’s hotel.

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It took a few sharp knocks before he opened the door. “I want it back,” I said. “What?” he replied. “Look, Mike, you have two options: you return my PalmPilot immediately or immediately I call the police.” Mike slumped on his bed, a defeated look on his face. “Okay, first thing tomorrow.” “No, first thing right now.” “I don’t have it,” Mike said. “Then find it.” We walked down the stairs of the Sunrise Hotel together and entered the pawnshop around the corner. “I need that PalmPilot back,” Mike announced to the owner. “It belongs to this guy.” The pawnbroker feigned shock. “What you mean?” he cried. Quite obviously, or so his body language implied, this was the first time ever that here, on the East Hastings drug and crime strip, anyone had tried to pass stolen goods at his establishment.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

And even though you’re no longer coaching our team, we’re going to do our best to keep making you proud.” Claris continued as an Apple subsidiary until 1998. Bill became the CEO of a startup named GO Corporation, which attempted to create the world’s first pen-based handheld computer (a precursor to the PalmPilot and today’s smartphones). It was an ambitious vision but ahead of its time, and the company shut down in 1994. “GO didn’t go,” Bill was fond of saying. Around that time, Intuit cofounder and CEO Scott Cook, along with his board of directors, was looking to replace himself as CEO. John Doerr, a Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist,* introduced Bill to Scott.

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Plus, your mom still disapproves. *If not before the first company! As Peter Drucker astutely pointed out, the greatest manager of all time was probably “the fellow who managed the building of the first pyramid in Egypt some 4,500 years ago.” *After Donna left Claris, she became CEO of Palm, makers of the PalmPilot. Later she was CEO of Handspring and lead trustee for Yale University, and she is currently the CEO of Numenta, a machine intelligence company. *You can read more about Google’s “Project Oxygen” study in a December 2013 Harvard Business Review article by David Garvin, “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management.”

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

, and web browsers did not support encryption or authentication anyway (Green 2018). It looked as if no person-to-person solution would gain traction. Then along came PayPal. PayPal The company was established in 1998 (under the name Confinity) to develop security software for hand-held devices such as the PalmPilot. PayPal itself was a money-transfer service developed within Confinity and, as The Economist observed at the time, was ‘more like real digital money, because it allow[ed] consumers to pay each other as well as merchants’ (Economist 2000). As an aside, I must note that there were plenty of email payment services springing up around that time too.

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History has repeatedly gone through this cyclic coevolution of technology, business and regulation to end up with something pervasive and fundamental to the way society operates, which is why I think it is useful to make this comparison. Benoît Cœuré, chair of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (BIS), and Jacqueline Loh, chair of the Markets Committee (BIS), made this point, saying that ‘while Bitcoin and its cousins are something of a mirage, they might be an early sign of change, just as PalmPilots paved the way for today’s smartphones’24 (Cœuré and Loh 2018). This, I think, is the narrative that I find most plausible. But what are Bitcoin and its ilk paving the way for? I think it is new kinds of markets that trade in digital assets with no separate settlement: cryptocurrencies with an institutional link to real-world assets.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Dalzell pointed out that there was already something like this under way inside the company and told Bezos about a young engineer named Rob Frederick whose mobile commerce startup, Convergence, Amazon had acquired in 1999. Frederick’s group was working on APIs that would allow non-PC mobile devices like phones and PalmPilots to access the Amazon store. After that meeting, Bezos invited O’Reilly to speak to a group of engineers, and later at an Amazon all-hands meeting, about lessons from computer history and the importance of becoming a platform. Bezos added Frederick’s team to the Associates group under Colin Bryar and tasked them with creating a new set of APIs to let developers plug into the Amazon website.

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Finally, after years of setbacks and internal rancor, Amazon was unquestionably a technology company, what Bezos had always imagined it to be. CHAPTER 8 Fiona Back in the Paleozoic era of the Internet, around the year 1997, an entrepreneur named Martin Eberhard was sitting in a Palo Alto coffee shop with his friend Marc Tarpenning, sipping a latte and pondering the inevitably bright future of mobile computing. The PalmPilot, the pioneering personal digital assistant, had just been introduced, and cell phones were evolving quickly into sleek devices that slid easily into a jacket pocket. Eberhard and Tarpenning worked for a disk-drive manufacturer and had just returned from a conference called DiskCon. In other words, they were bored out of their skulls and looking for something more interesting to do.

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It was meant to disappear in the reader’s hands, yet it sported a wedge-shaped body with a jumble of angular buttons, an attempt to make a bold design statement while allowing for the easy entry of text. Bezos wanted a device that did one thing extremely well. But the former Palm engineers at Lab126 had watched the PalmPilot get overtaken by more versatile gadgets, so at the last moment they packed the Kindle with other features, like a Web browser and an MP3 player, which were quarantined in an unusual “experimental” section of the device. In retrospect, the first Kindle provided an exultant answer to Bezos’s question.

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins, Sandra Blakeslee

airport security, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Jeff Hawkins, Johannes Kepler, Necker cube, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Turing test

The Future of Intelligence Epilogue Appendix: Testable Predictions Bibliography Acknowledgments On Intelligence Prologue This book and my life are animated by two passions. For twenty-five years I have been passionate about mobile computing. In the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, I am known for starting two companies, Palm Computing and Handspring, and as the architect of many handheld computers and cell phones such as the PalmPilot and the Treo. But I have a second passion that predates my interest in computers— one I view as more important. I am crazy about brains. I want to understand how the brain works, not just from a philosophical perspective, not just in a general way, but in a detailed nuts and bolts engineering way.

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I went home that night, thought about the problem, and in two days had designed a handwriting recognizer that was fast, small, and flexible. My solution didn't use a neural network and it didn't work at all like a brain. Although that conference sparked my interest in designing computers with a stylus interface (eventually leading to the PalmPilot ten years later), it also convinced me that neural networks were not much of an improvement over traditional methods. The handwriting recognizer I created ultimately became the basis for the text entry system, called Graffiti, used in the first series of Palm products. I think Nestor went out of business.

Heads I Win, Tails I Win by Spencer Jakab

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversification, dividend-yielding stocks, dogs of the Dow, Elliott wave, equity risk premium, estate planning, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fear index, fixed income, geopolitical risk, government statistician, index fund, Isaac Newton, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, price anchoring, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, Savings and loan crisis, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, survivorship bias, technology bubble, transaction costs, two and twenty, VA Linux, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Beyond the pitiful performance of speculative new offerings as a group, though, it seems that it’s the true believers who sometimes don’t get something very basic—addition and subtraction. The most famous case of an utterly nonsensical price occurred the month that the technology boom peaked, March 2000, when Palm had its initial public offering. Remember PalmPilots? Before iPhones and even BlackBerrys, the personal digital assistants were hot stuff, and so was their maker, 3Com. The company had other businesses too, but it spun off a 5 percent stake in Palm to investors. In an upcoming tax-free deal each share of 3Com would entitle its owner to receive 1.5 shares of Palm.

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See also subprime mortgage loans mutual funds, 32, 69, 102, 112, 137, 149, 221 actively managed, 79, 149–57, 159–60, 174 and “Dogs of the Dow,” 192 and hedge funds, 170, 173–75, 235 and high fees, 149–50, 153, 155–56, 174, 188 high-performing, 111, 151–52, 154 lag the market, 26, 126, 159 losses in, 33, 115, 152 low-cost, 82 origins of, 156–57 passive, 151–53 poor performing, 13, 154–55, 159, 175 ranking of, 150–52 and stock purchases/sales, 60–61, 115–16 successful managers of, 99, 111 See also Vanguard Group MyPlanIQ, 79–80, 83 Nasdaq Composite, 37, 46 National Bureau of Economic Research, 49–50 Ned Davis Research, 89, 226–27 Nenner, Charles, 121–23, 143 Neuberger Berman, 233 Neuberger, Roy, 233 New Century Financial, 198–200 New York Stock Exchange, 182, 233 New York Times, 29, 154 Newsweek, 237 Newton, Isaac, 41 Niederhoffer, Victor, 168–69 Ninja Trading Service, 211 notes, 204–7. See also United States: Treasury notes NPR, 233 Odean, Terrance, 22–23, 209 oil, 50, 100, 104, 109, 121, 166, 200–201, 205–6 Openfolio, 23, 195 options trading, 164–65, 192, 206, 208, 213–14 O’Shaughnessy, James P., 219–20, 229 Pagel, Michaela, 217 PalmPilots, 185 Parness, Michael, 210–13, 215 passive investing, 23, 41, 56, 115, 158–60, 166, 180, 219–20, 256–57 Paulson, John, 235 pension funds, 158, 174, 187–88 Pentagon, 145–46 pharmaceutical companies, 85–87, 89, 188 Philip Morris, 189–89 Phillips, Don, 152 portfolios, 12, 22–23, 56, 96, 191, 195 advice on, 27, 52–53, 62–64, 81–84 and cash, 50, 52, 63, 117 diversification of, 81–84, 95 equal-weighted, 136, 224–25 growth of, 38, 63–64, 76, 83 and market decline, 50, 52–54, 76 monitoring of, 217–18, 229 “monkey,” 106–9, 112, 225 randomly picked, 108, 225–26 rebalancing of, 38, 62–64, 74, 78–79, 82, 94–95, 249–50, 257 and risk taking, 74, 76, 156, 257 “robo,” 250 volatility of, 62–63, 81, 220 PowerShares FTSE RAFI US 1000, 223–24 Prechter, Robert, 124–25, 128, 143 price-to-book value, 193, 195 price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, 89–95, 139–40, 145, 193, 219–20.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Rather than focus on clinical studies or theoretical work Boyden’s team is focused on building tools that a generation of brain scientists can use to jump-start our nascent understanding of our nervous system. Such a mission would never succeed without utilizing expertise from well outside the field of neurobiology. The Media Lab has been successful at adapting to changes that have crushed many businesses (remember the Palm-Pilot?), or, for that matter, research labs (Xerox famously neglected many of the best innovations to emerge from Xerox PARC).42 The Lab owes its adaptability to the strong core values and principles that Negroponte and others put in place when it was established; while the world and the Lab have changed in many substantive ways, the core principles remain solid.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro

3D printing, 4chan, active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, availability heuristic, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business logic, call centre, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cyber-physical system, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, Dennis Ritchie, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, evil maid attack, facts on the ground, false flag, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, gig economy, Hacker News, independent contractor, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Linda problem, loss aversion, macro virus, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Morris worm, Multics, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pirate software, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, SQL injection, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological solutionism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the new new thing, the payments system, Turing machine, Turing test, Unsafe at Any Speed, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero day, éminence grise

Corporate types used Motorola two-way pagers, which had a keyboard for fast communication, or the more expensive BlackBerry, which also had a keyboard and could send and receive emails. Personal data, such as calendars and notes, were stored in PDAs (personal digital assistants), such as the PalmPilot. The PalmPilot did not have a keyboard, so users had to learn a new way of writing with a stylus (known as Graffiti). Danger, the company that developed the Sidekick, set out to change how people used their cell phones. The first model—which they called the Hiptop, because it was chunky and surprisingly heavy, and therefore designed to be worn on the hip— not only had a QWERTY keyboard, but also a large screen that slid out to reveal a keyboard that could pivot 180 degrees.

…

As for apps, the Hiptop came with a notepad, to-do list, address book, and calendar. It came loaded with a web browser, instant messaging for multiple platforms (AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft), and, of course, texting. The most revolutionary aspect of the Hiptop was that it was always connected. As soon as data was entered into the phone, it was backed up to the cloud. PalmPilots, by contrast, had to be manually synced to desktop computers (first using cables, later infrared transmitter). Conversely, when new data hit a remote server, it was pushed down to the phone. New emails would arrive on the Sidekick as soon as the email server received them. If you had multiple devices, all of them would sync up as well.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

These were the first words Selfridge delivered at a symposium in late 1958, held at the very same National Physical Laboratory from which Turing had escaped a decade before. Selfridge’s presentation had the memorable title “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” and while it had little impact outside the nascent computer-science community, the ideas Selfridge outlined that day would eventually become part of our everyday life—each time we enter a name in our PalmPilots or use voice-recognition software to ask for information over the phone. Pandemonium, as Selfridge outlined it in his talk, was not so much a specific piece of software as it was a way of approaching a problem. The problem was an ambitious one, given the limited computational resources of the day: how to teach a computer to recognize patterns that were ill-defined or erratic, like the sound waves that comprise spoken language.

…

., 38, 52, 65, 117–23, 154, 169, 179, 218–20, 226, 237n global vs. local, 39–40, 74–80, 82, 86, 90, 93, 108–9, 218–19, 224 see also control Organic Art, 182 “organic clocks,” 20 organization: global, 224–26 goal-directed, 118 hierarchical, 15, 98, 132, 136, 145, 148–49, 153, 208, 223, 225, 263n–64n political, 67, 225–26 self-, see self-organization size limitations of, 259n–60n social, 9, 27, 33–41, 92–94, 97–100, 109, 204, 252n–54n see also systems OSS code, 175 Out of Control (Kelly), 168–69 pacemaker cells, 14–15, 16, 17, 23, 40, 64, 67, 164 PalmPilots, 54 “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning” (Selfridge), 54 Pandemonium model, 53–57, 65, 169, 231 Papert, Seymour, 65, 164, 166 paradigm shift, 48–49, 64 Paradise Lost (Milton), 53–54 Pattern on the Stone, The (Hillis), 173 patterns: of behavior, see behavior development of, 49, 184–85, 246n feedback on, 40–41 of heredity, 46 hub-and-spoke, 119 letter, 54–57, 65 mathematical, 42 of movement, 18–20, 41, 168 musical, 45 recognition of, 18, 21, 22, 44–45, 52, 54–57, 65, 103–4, 123–24, 126–29, 199, 206, 220, 221, 226, 231, 233 social, 18, 36–40, 41, 49–50, 52, 91, 95, 137, 185 spatial, 20, 27, 48, 90–91, 159, 223 speech, 44–45 spontaneous, 180 temporal, 20, 27, 48, 91, 104–5 urban, 40–41, 90–91, 146, 147, 159, 223 “Perceptrons” (Minsky and Papert), 65 phase transitions, 111–12 phenotypes, 58, 59 pheromone, 52, 60–63, 64, 74, 75–76, 78, 79, 84–85, 98, 115, 167, 206, 226, 228–29, 243n–44n Phillips Interactive, 178 physics, 21, 105 Picasso, Pablo, 23 Pinker, Steven, 118 planets, rotation of, 46 “platform agonistic,” 139–40 Pleistocene era, 202, 262n plow, wheeled, 112 politics, 39–40, 67, 94–95, 161, 224–26, 264n population growth, 34, 99, 110–11, 112, 116, 164–65, 252n–53n pornography, 208 post-structuralism, 65 power law, 119 Powers of Ten, 231–32 predictions, 9, 47 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 39 pricing, 155–56 Prigogine, Ilya, 43, 52, 64–65 prioritization, 78 probability theory, 46–47 problem-solving, 74, 79–80, 120, 126–27, 227–29, 251n–52n product placement, 214 programs, computer: artificial-life, 59–63, 65 branching paths in, 58 codes in, 169, 170–71, 173–74, 175, 180, 205–6 evolution of, 57–59, 60, 205–6 mini-, 170–74 number-sorting, 170–74, 209, 231 predator, 172–73 see also software proteins, 85 Proverbs, Book of, 71 “pseudo events,” 145 purchase circles, 221–22 Quake, 182, 183, 208–9 quality management, 67 racial diversity, 89, 95, 247n randomness, 19, 62, 77, 78–79, 87, 121, 163, 171, 220, 222–23, 244n, 247n recognition systems, 103 redwood forests, 258n reentry, neural, 256 reflexes, 38–39 Reliable Sources, 135 Renaissance, 101–2, 147 Replay, 211 “Residence in London” (Wordsworth), 27 Resnick, Mitch, 16–17, 23, 64, 76, 163–69, 180, 189, 260n Restak, Richard, 133–34 retina, 201 Rheingold, Howard, 148 Ridley, Matt, 82, 86 Rizzollati, Giaccamo, 198–99 Rockefeller Foundation, 46, 50 Roman Empire, 33, 109–10 Rosenstiel, Tom, 135 rules, 19, 180–81, 226 St.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

They also aid in price discovery, stopping bubbles from forming as easily. At times when it is too hard or too expensive to bet against a stock, prices can be wrong, harming the least informed investors. The most famous case was in March 2000 when, just weeks before the tech bubble burst, the networking company 3Com sold 5 percent of its stake in Palm, maker of PalmPilot personal digital assistants—the iPhones of their day. The company planned to spin off the rest to shareholders in a tax-free transaction later that year. Given the number of Palm shares they were to receive and the market price of Palm after it started to trade, a share of 3Com should have been worth at least $145 but instead was $82.

…

., 179 Klarman, Seth, 184 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 Kruger, Justin, 28 Kynikos Associates, 77 L Ladies’ Home Journal, 150 Lamberton, Cait, 54, 62 Lamont, Owen, 80 Langer, Ellen, 27 Langlois, Shawn, 45 Laufer, Henry, 237 Lay, Kenneth, 85 Lebed, Jonathan, 163 Leder, Michelle, 239 Ledger, Heath, 138 Left, Andrew, 39, 116–26, 148, 191, 214, 217 GameStop and, 120–24, 129, 130, 133, 146 harassment of, 122 WallStreetBets and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 Lehman Brothers, 80, 117 Lending Tree, 162 Levie, Aaron, 26 Lewis, Michael, 16, 88 Lindzon, Howard, 24, 49, 176 LinkedIn, 239 Livermore, Jesse, 78–79 locating a borrow, 72–73, 80 Loeb, Dan, 111 Lombardi, Vince, 8 Long-Term Capital Management, 260 Loop Capital, 128 Los Angeles Times, 215 loss aversion, myopic, 236 lotteries, 62, 239, 241, 242 Lowenstein, Roger, 260 Lucid Motors, 164 M Mad Money, 254 Madoff, Bernie, 117, 206 MagnifyMoney, 162 Mahoney, Seth, 19, 31, 176–77 Malaysia, 75 Malkiel, Burton, 253 Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger), 179 Manning, Peyton, 64 Man Who Solved the Market, The (Zuckerman), 237 Maplelane Capital, 217 March Madness, 57 Marcus, 257 margin calls, 203–5 margin debt, 58–59, 62, 67, 138, 188 Markets Insider, 103 MarketWatch, 45, 180 MassMutual, 87, 131, 171 Mavrck, 142 Mayday, 48–50, 66 McCabe, Caitlin, 128–29 McCormick, Packy, 23, 35, 104, 202 McDonald, Larry, 99 McDonald’s, 154 McHenry, Patrick, 239 McLean, Bethany, 85 Medallion Fund, 237 MedBox, 117 Melvin Capital Management, 6–8, 56, 72, 94–96, 110–12, 114, 119, 121, 123, 128–30, 132, 135, 136, 146, 189, 190, 202, 205, 217, 218, 222, 227 meme stocks, xii–xiv, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 22, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 40, 47, 54, 63, 67, 72, 73, 76, 100, 108, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132–33, 135, 137–40, 146, 147, 153–55, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191, 193, 194, 198–99, 204–5, 208, 219, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238, 240, 246 AMC, 39, 93, 125, 127, 132, 169, 188, 220–21, 224–26 Bed Bath & Beyond, 115, 133, 188 BlackBerry, 93, 115, 133, 169, 178, 188, 224 bot activity and, 165, 166 GameStop, see GameStop, GameStop short squeeze insiders of, 224 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 margin debt and, 58 Naked, 132, 188 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 payment for order flow and, 207 Robinhood’s trading restrictions on, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206 Merton, Robert, 101, 102, 108 Microsoft, 46, 93 Mihm, Stephen, 48 millennials, 21, 26, 27, 56, 71, 88, 142, 143, 148, 162, 242, 246, 255 Minnis, Chad, 126, 157, 242 MoneyWatch, 59 monthly subscription services, 32 Morgan Stanley, 28, 55, 178, 219 Morningstar, 216, 244, 245, 254, 255 Motherboard, 131–32 Motter, John, 215–17, 226 Mudrick, Jason, 220–21 Mudrick Capital Management, 220 Mulligan, Finley, 230 Mulligan, Quinn, 142, 214 Munger, Charlie, 183–84, 241 Murphy, Paul, 78 Musk, Elon, 19, 75, 82–83, 92, 124, 143, 149, 152–53, 155–57, 160, 161, 167, 212, 216 tweets of, x, 60, 82, 83, 124, 144, 152–54, 161, 170 Must Asset Management, 221 mutual funds, 139, 151, 221, 234, 244, 245, 254–56 myopic loss aversion, 236 N Naked Brand, 132, 188 Nasdaq, 60, 92, 98, 104 Nasdaq Whale, 98, 104–6, 108, 109, 227 Nathan, Dan, 192 National Council on Problem Gambling, 31, 57 National Futures Association, 118 Nations, Scott, 99 Nations Indexes, 99 NCAA Basketball, 57 Netflix, x–xi, 15, 50, 98, 133, 208 Netscape, 24 Neumann, Adam, 105 New Yorker, 143 New York Mets, 8, 161 New York Post, 124, 172 New York Stock Exchange, 49 New York University, 20, 82, 177 Nikola, 64 NIO, 120 Nobel Prize, 101, 260 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 nudges, 31–32, 235–36 Nvidia, 98 O Obama, Barack, 13, 38 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 160, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 12, 125 Odean, Terrance, 235, 238, 243 Odey, Crispin, 126 Ohanian, Alexis, 12, 37–38, 125 O’Mara, Margaret, 38, 156, 157 Omega Family Office, 191 O’Neal, Shaquille, 64 Oppenheimer, Robert, 83 options, 34–35, 99–107, 217 call, see call options delta and, 107, 108 losses and quick approval processes for, 103 put, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Robinhood and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 Options Clearing Corporation, 102 P Pagel, Michaela, 235 Palantir Technologies, 120 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 143, 144, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 160, 164, 212, 234, 246, 253 Palm, 84 PalmPilot, 84 Pao, Ellen, 38 Paperwork Crisis, 49 Parker, Sean, 38 payment for order flow, 10, 33, 153, 196, 206–9 Penn National, 57 penny stocks, 60, 120, 133, 166, 167 Permit Capital, 223 Pershing Square Holdings, 56 Pets.com, 90 PetSmart, 89 Pew Research, 71 Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, The (Hirst), 7 Piggly Wiggly, 78–79 PiiQ Media, 166 PIMCO, 216 Plotkin, Gabriel, 41, 56, 67, 73, 80, 85, 86, 95–96, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 140, 146, 148, 157, 158, 161, 191, 197, 213–14, 217, 218, 227, 240, 246, 250, 253 at congressional hearing, 6–11 Porsche, 77 Portnoy, Dave, 57, 152–55, 158–59, 161, 181, 188–89, 212 Povilanskas, Kaspar, 195 Pruzan, Jonathan, 219 Psaki, Jen, 192 Public.com, 196, 207, 209 pump and dump, 163 put options, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Q Qualcomm, 46 R RagingBull, 163 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 253 Raskob, John J., 150–52, 154, 156 Raytheon, 153–54 RC Ventures LLC, 114 Reagan, Ronald, 156, 234 Reddit, xi, xii, 11–12, 19, 22, 23, 25, 36–39, 41, 42, 107, 122, 125, 162, 164, 199 founding of, 37–38 Gill’s influence on, 141–42; see also Gill, Keith; WallStreetBets karma on, 47, 141–42 mechanics and demographics of, and GameStop, 37 offensive subreddits on, 38 r/ClassActionRobinHood, 196 r/GMEbagholders, 140 r/investing, ix, 46 r/wallstreetbets, see WallStreetBets Super Bowl ad of, 12 Volkswagen squeeze and, 78 Reddit Revolution, xv, 41, 42, 75, 99, 152, 170, 192, 206, 211, 219, 220, 230, 246, 261 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze; WallStreetBets rehypothecation, 80, 92 reinforcement learning, 35 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre), 78 Renaissance Technologies, 237 retail trading, xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 7, 9–14, 49, 56–59, 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 98, 140–41, 143, 169–70, 178, 181, 183, 186, 194, 218, 237, 238, 244, 247 retirement accounts and pension funds, 5, 13, 27, 31–32, 41, 69, 76, 77, 81, 171, 182, 234, 235, 245, 252, 255, 256 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 135–36 RiskReversal Advisors, 192 Ritter, Jay, 63, 65 Roaring Kitty (Gill’s YouTube persona), 2, 18, 45, 48–49, 92, 130, 133, 144, 171, 174–75, 191, 211, 213 Roaring Kitty LLC, 171 Robinhood, xi, xiii, xv, 4–6, 13–14, 19, 22–35, 41–42, 50, 53, 55, 57, 61, 66, 70, 81, 98, 139, 141, 153, 154, 157, 158, 161, 176, 178, 183, 184, 187–90, 193, 194, 195–210, 212–13, 219, 237–38, 243, 245, 246, 259 account transfer fees of, 54 average revenue per user of, 66–67 Buffett on, 240–41 call options and, 97–98 Citadel and, 10, 11 clearinghouse of, 187 commissions and, 49, 50 customer loan write-offs of, 205 daily average revenue trades of, 59 daily deposit requirement of, 205 former regulators hired by, 239–40 founding of, 3, 23–25, 90 funding crisis of, 187–88, 193, 198, 203, 205–6 gamification and, 29–31 Gold accounts, 32, 58, 97, 202 growth of, 25–26, 50 herding events and, 238 Hertz and, 61 hyperactive traders and, 193, 202, 207, 236 initial public offering of, 200–201, 219 Instant accounts, 32 Kearns and, 103–4 lawsuits against, 196 margin loans of, 58–59, 205 median account balances with, 50, 54 options and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 payment for order flow and, 10, 33, 196, 206–9 revenue from securities lending, 73 risky behavior encouraged by, 202–3 Robintrack and, 53, 61 SPACs and, 64 stimulus checks and, 56 Super Bowl ad of, 28, 30, 200 technical snafus by, 53–54 Top 100 Fund and, 61 trading restricted by, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206, 209 valuation of, 49 WallStreetBets and, 22–23 wholesalers and, 33–35, 49, 104, 106 Robin Hood (charitable foundation), 196–97 robo-advisers, xv, 27, 257–58 Betterment, 27, 54, 183, 193, 242, 257, 258, 261 SoFi, 27, 56, 57, 158 Rockefeller, John D., 9 Rodriguez, Alex, 64 Rogers, Will, 163 Rogozinski, Jaime, 23, 39, 46, 50, 53, 55, 70–71, 97, 122, 138, 144, 190, 231 Roper, Barbara, 29–30, 35, 54, 185, 241 Rozanski, Jeffrey, 46 Rukeyser, Louis, 156 Russell 2000 Value Index, 125, 191 S S3 Partners, 76, 81, 130, 133, 170, 217 SAC Capital Advisors, 7, 110 Sanders, Bernie, 65–66, 198 S&P (Standard & Poor’s), 83 S&P Dow Jones Indices, 70, 254 S&P 500, 76 Sanford C.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Paper may be used less, but where it is growing, paper is worth more. No product better captures this niche than the Moleskine notebook and the company behind it. It is the defining paper object and brand of the Internet age, growing parallel to the digital technology that was supposed to supplant notebooks (the PalmPilot digital planner came out the same year as Moleskine’s first notebook). Not only did the Moleskine notebook succeed in the face of disruptive digital competition, it situated itself as the ideal companion to smartphones, tablets, virtual note management services, and digital illustration software.

…

See virtual schools online selection, 130 online selling, 129 online shoppers, 134 Onorati, Christine, 140 Ooey Gooey, 182 Oppenheimer, Todd, 187 Orchard, Rob, 106, 107 Ordanini, Andrea, 39 Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, 184–185 Organized Mind, The (Levitin), 37 Orpilla, Primo, 211, 212, 213, 220 outsourcing, 154, 156, 165, 192 OYE, 16 Pagni, Mark, 52, 56–59, 62, 63–64, 65–66, 69, 73–74 PalmPilot, 31 Panasonic, 54 Pandemic, 85, 91 Pando Daily (website), 112 Pandora, 20 Pane, Jess, 130 Panis, Jacques, 167 paper appeal of, 31, 35, 37–38, 105, 111, 114, 143, 188, 189, 222, 229, 238, 240 digital challenge to, unique, 30, 31 disadvantages of, 143 in education, 181, 188, 189, 192, 197, 198 making games out of, 95, 96 market for, 44–45 See also books; card games; cards/invitations; magazines; newspapers; notebooks/journals; stationery Paper FiftyThree, 47 paperless office, 30–31, 46 Paperless Post, 44–45 Paradox of Choice, The (Schwartz), 130 Park, Rosa, 103–104 Partners & Spade, 138 Patek Philippe, 168 PayPal, 211 Paz and Associates, 127 Pearson, 185, 186 Peebles, Benjamin, 187–188, 203–204 pencils, 44, 138, 208, 212 pens, xiv, xvii, 29, 35, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 126, 150–151, 192, 197, 208, 221, 222, 227, 228, 238 Percolate, 219–220 Perrot, Clèment, 70–71 Pescovitz, David, 213–214 Pew Research Center, 142 phones.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

She jetted to Paris for a yearlong sabbatical and took up painting, contemplating ways to contribute to a bigger mission. When she met an entrepreneur named Jeff Hawkins, she decided that his startup, Palm Computing, was the next big wave of technology, and accepted a position as CEO. Under Dubinsky’s leadership, the startup developed the PalmPilot, the first runaway success in the fledgling market for personal digital devices. The PalmPilot was released in 1996 and, within a year and a half, sold over a million units. But in 1997, when Palm was acquired by 3Com, Dubinsky did not agree with some strategic decisions. For example, when the finance group wanted to require all departments to cut budgets by 10 percent, Dubinsky spoke up in protest, urging the company to invest in areas that were succeeding and apply cuts to those that weren’t.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

He took over as the CEO of Confinity and brought along as many of his buddies from the Stanford Review as could fit in the Palo Alto office. The group included his coauthor, Sacks, and a half dozen others.xv Having found his people at Stanford, Thiel was not going to let them go. The rest of the guys were very lucky he felt that way. Unfortunately, Confinity was ahead of its time: Few people had PalmPilots, and even fewer had a bunch of PalmPilot friends with whom they regularly exchanged money. It was a great invention for a Silicon Valley libertarian boys’ club but of limited use to the rest of the country. Confinity was also not the only digital-payments company around. It wasn’t even the only digital-payments company in its office building.

…

Webvan’s strategy, he wrote, was to offer “the quality and selection of Whole Foods, the pricing of Safeway, and the convenience of home delivery.”59 But according to Relan, the company shouldn’t have invested in so much infrastructure. Webvan built high-tech distribution systems from scratch: giant networks of new algorithms, miles of conveyor belts, fleets of custom trucks with PalmPilot-wielding delivery drivers. At its short peak, Webvan had a billion-dollar contract with Bechtel to build new distribution facilities around the country. This was the utopian vision of e-commerce, one in which the web’s efficiencies generated gains for everyone involved: investors, workers, and customers alike.

…

Like Jim Clark, Thiel invested in young graduates from the University of Illinois, products of the government’s campus supercomputer center. One of those U of I kids was a twenty-three-year-old named Max Levchin, who in 1998 was hanging around Stanford with a couple of ideas. Handheld computers were just reemerging as a viable technology, and the potential of PalmPilots enraptured the Valley’s nerds. Levchin’s start-up Fieldlink (later Confinity) began, by the fast-acting grace of Thiel Capital Management, as a mobile encryption software firm for business that allowed workers to communicate securely from the field. When Palm debuted infrared communications ports on the new Pilots, Confinity shifted to the specific function of payments between users.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream by Nicholas Lemann

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, buy and hold, capital controls, Carl Icahn, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, index fund, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, public intellectual, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Richard Thaler, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snow Crash, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, War on Poverty, white flight, working poor

PayPal became enduringly important in the lore of Silicon Valley because it launched several important careers—not just Hoffman’s and Thiel’s, but also that of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX—and helped establish a set of guiding principles for the Internet generation of technology companies. One of these principles was extreme adaptability. PayPal began as a security system for PalmPilot, a short-lived handheld device, and evolved into a system for processing transactions on eBay, the world’s first successful online marketplace. Another principle was that speed and aggressiveness, at a level beyond what the rest of the world thinks of as normal, are essential to success. (Silicon Valley’s favorite motto is, “It is better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”)

…

NBC Neal, Ann Collier Neal, Richard Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago net neutrality Netscape networks; academic study of; as alternative to institutions and transactions; as disruptive; human need and; inequality maintained by; political application of; pre-digital; users vs. income of New Century New Deal; dismantling of; repudiation of New Democracy, The (Weyl) New Freedom New Nationalism New Republic, The New York New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nicklaus, Jack NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act) Nissan Nixon, Richard Nobel laureates in economics Nonzero (Wright) normative, as economic term Nortel North American Free Trade Agreement nouveau riche Nudge (Thaler) Obama, Michelle Obama administration; auto industry and; donors to; during 2008 crisis; tech industry and Obamacare Obama Foundation Oberlin College Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oil prices old money O’Neill, Eugene online dating ontology “Open Letter on the Digital Economy” open marriage options market Orange County, CA O’Reilly, Tim Organization Man; rebellion against; replaced by network model; replaced by transaction model; see also corporations; General Motors; institutions Organization Man, The (Whyte) “Organization Study” (Sloan) OTC market; see also derivatives overnight lending systems Packard, David Page, Larry Painter, Patrick Palmer, Arnold PalmPilot Panetta, Leon paradigm shifts; in economics Park Forest, IL Partnoy, Frank Patil, DJ Patriot Act Paulson, Henry PayPal Pearl Harbor Pecora hearings Peltz, Nelson Penn Central Railroad pension funds; economy changed by; 401(k)s vs.; investing of; maintained by corporations Perot, Ross Perrin, Steve Peterson, Rafi Petito, Frank Pfleger, Michael phenomenology Phibro Pickens, T.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

If each owner were willing to share a bit of the surplus energy stored in their cars with their neighbours, it might cover the whole country’s needs.11 Simon Daniel is an inventor whose work reveals the power of these newly localised storage systems. His first success was a folding keyboard he designed in the 1990s, just as the PalmPilot, an early pocket-sized tablet computer, was taking off. His latest adventure is to string together thousands of batteries to make a gigantic virtual power plant. For Moixa, his company, to buy the batteries itself, it would need large amounts of capital, perhaps running into the tens of millions of dollars.

…

.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!

That Used to Be Us by Thomas L. Friedman, Michael Mandelbaum

addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Andy Kessler, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bretton Woods, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, drop ship, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, full employment, Google Earth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job automation, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Lean Startup, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, oil shock, PalmPilot, pension reform, precautionary principle, proprietary trading, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

By contrast, the communist countries were discredited by their dismal record in achieving economic growth. So they embraced free markets and globalization. Likewise, the IT revolution was started in the United States. The transistor, communications satellites, the personal computer, the cell phone, and the Internet, not to mention the PalmPilot, the iPad, the iPhone, and the Kindle, were all invented in the United States and then were brought to the world market by American-based companies. That gave more people than ever the tool kit to compete with us and remove the barriers erected by their own governments. Similarly, the American government has been able to borrow several trillion dollars because of confidence, both at home and abroad, in the American economy and because of the special international role of the dollar, which dates from the days of American global economic supremacy.

…

Nazis Nelakanti, Raman Venkat Nepal Netflix Netscape Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) Nevada New Deal New Haven (Connecticut) public schools New Jersey New Leaders for New Schools New York City; JFK Airport; Penn Station; public schools New Yorker, The New York Mets baseball team New York State New York Stock Exchange New York Times New York Times–Discovery Channel New York Yankees baseball team New Zealand Nike Nixon, Richard Nixon Peabody law firm Nobel Prize No Child Left Behind Act (2002) Noida (India) Nordhaus, William North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA; 1994) North Carolina Northport (Alabama) Northwestern University NPR nuclear power Nuclear Regulatory Commission nuclear weapons Nueva School (Hillsborough, California) O Oakwood Medical Investors Obama, Barack; budget and deficit under; Clinton appointed secretary of state by; education encouraged by; energy policy and; health-care plan of; inauguration of; overseas travel of; review of regulations ordered by O’Connell, Jerry O’Connor, Carroll Ohio Old Lyme (Connecticut) Middle School Olson, Mancur Olympic Games O’Neill, Paul One Percent Doctrine, The (Suskind) OODA loop Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Otellini, Paul Out of Our Minds (Robinson) outsourcing; climate change and; of customer service; immigration policies versus; of parts of business processes P Pacific Railway Acts (1862; 1864) Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, Shah of Iran Pakistan Palmeiro, Rafael Palmisano, Samuel PalmPilot Parks, Rosa Partners for Livable Communities Pasteur, Louis Patent Act (1790) Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Paul, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Vivek PCs, see personal computers Peace Corps Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on Pearlstein, Steven Peking University Pell Grants Pence, Mike Pentagon; terrorist attack on, see September 11 People magazine People of Plenty (Potter) People’s Daily Perez, Raul Perino, Dana Perkins Pancake House (Minneapolis) Perot, H.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno by Nancy Jo Sales

Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, digital divide, Donald Trump, double helix, East Village, emotional labour, fake news, feminist movement, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, global pandemic, helicopter parent, Jaron Lanier, Jeffrey Epstein, labor-force participation, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, moral panic, New Urbanism, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, post-work, Robert Durst, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TikTok, women in the workforce, young professional

“You would call each other up and go to the movies. People would actually say, ‘This is my boyfriend. This is my girlfriend.’ It was like, we’re gonna hold hands a little bit and then enter the world of sex together. It’s crazy to me that kids will never have that again,” she added. “Everything has changed. As soon as I got a PalmPilot, guys were asking me for nudes.” Which, she said, she did enjoy sending and receiving, sometimes, though never unsolicited. “A nude is like a vampire; it has to be invited in,” she joked. Amy said that she had initially embraced the changes brought about by technology, believing it would all lead to more sexual freedom and happy experimentation in relationships, but now she wasn’t so sure.

…

I had moved away from him emotionally, for a moment, and he could feel it, though he didn’t know why, and it worried and excited him. Which was maybe what made him want to flatter me. He smoothed his rough hand down my hip, whispering, “You’re gonna have to send me some pictures.” Which just made my heart ache. * * * Nudes. They were another game changer in dating, uncommon before PalmPilots and phones. Now, so normalized that kids are sending them in middle school before they’ve ever held hands with someone or had a first kiss. It’s hard not to see a connection between porn and the normalization of nudes. It’s as if we’ve all become our own personal pornographers; we’re all Hugh Hefner.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

8-hour work day, airport security, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Brexit referendum, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, death from overwork, disruptive innovation, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, game design, gig economy, Henri Poincaré, IKEA effect, iterative process, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Johannes Kepler, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, means of production, neurotypical, PalmPilot, performance metric, race to the bottom, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, zero-sum game

No matter how you organize it, the design thinking process is always “open-ended, open-minded, and iterative,” as Tim Brown put it in his book Change by Design. Design thinking has driven the creation of some of the world’s most familiar products. Apple’s computer mouse was designed by a young team that went on to form IDEO, now the world’s foremost design thinking studio. IDEO has played a role in designing products ranging from the PalmPilot, to the Swiffer, to the coaster bike. Today, design thinking reaches beyond the physical. “In Korea, we have the term ‘design management,’ or ‘design gyeong-yeong’ in Konglish,” Jin Ryu, Woowa Brothers’ vice president of public relations, explains. “It means adopting design thinking to management.”

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Thiel had already drained a red, white, and blue smoothie. “You’re here,” Thiel said, sounding pleased. He ordered another smoothie. Levchin chose egg whites. Levchin stumbled through an explanation of his notional new company. Using the techniques of elliptical curve cryptography, he would turn the PalmPilot, a popular handheld device of the late 1990s, into a digital safe box for business information. Companies would purchase the encryption tool for employees because they wouldn’t want their corporate secrets to be stolen. Thiel took a second and a half to respond. Though only thirty years old, he had a grave, deliberate manner.

…

., 172 “open-loop,” 62 OpenTable, 350–53, 358 Oppenheimer family, 341 Oracle, 265 O’Reilly, Tim, 386–87 “organization man,” 22 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 22 origin story, 17–21 ownable network effects, 164 P Page, Larry, 173–76, 178–91, 290. See also Google Palantir, 208–9, 403 Palevsky, Max, 48–50, 56, 423n PalmPilot, 200 Pao, Ellen, 269–71 Pareto, Vilfredo, 209 Pareto principle. See 80/20 rule Parker, Sean Facebook, 194–98, 254, 256, 257–61, 380 Founders Fund, 208, 212 Plaxo, 196–98, 199, 207 Partovi, Ali and Hadi, 455n Pasteur, Louis, 128 patents, 398–99 path dependency, 261, 263, 272, 299, 377, 379, 460n “pattern recognition,” 309 Patterson, Arthur, 128–32.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World by Bruce Schneier

Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bletchley Park, business process, butterfly effect, cashless society, Columbine, defense in depth, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, fault tolerance, game design, IFF: identification friend or foe, information security, John Gilmore, John von Neumann, knapsack problem, macro virus, Mary Meeker, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Morris worm, Multics, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, PalmPilot, pez dispenser, pirate software, profit motive, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Russell Brand, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, slashdot, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, systems thinking, the payments system, Timothy McVeigh, Y2K, Yogi Berra

By any PKI rules, no one should do business with this site. The certificate received is not from the same company that sells the software. This is exactly what a man-in-themiddle attack looks like, and exactly what PKI is supposed to prevent. Example two: I visited www.palm.com to purchase something for my PalmPilot. When I went to the online checkout, I was redirected to https://palmorder.modusmedia.com/asp/store.asp. The SSL certificate was registered to Modus Media International; clearly a flagrant attempt to defraud Web customers, which I deftly uncovered because I carefully checked the SSL certificate.

…

Eventually, people will realize that it doesn’t make sense to write laws that are specific to a technology. Fraud is fraud, whether it takes place over the U.S. mail, the telephone, or the Internet. A crime is no more or less of a crime if cryptography is involved. (The New York sales clerk who, in 1999, used a Palm Pilot to copy customers’ credit card numbers would be no less guilty if he used a pen and paper.) And extortion is no better or worse if carried out using computer viruses or old-fashioned compromising photos. Good laws are written to be independent of technology. In a world where technology advances much faster than congressional sessions, this is what can work today.

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

The two most popular operating systems, iPhone and Android, have captured so much of the market that they’ve become almost self-perpetuating. In the process, they have displaced earlier popular Internet phone operating systems, notably the BlackBerry, which in turn had replaced non-Internet phones and non-phone digital assistants such as the PalmPilot. Notice how markets interact with one another. Amazon couldn’t have become the marketplace it is without the Internet, which couldn’t have become a marketplace without first computers and then smartphones. And smartphones couldn’t have become marketplaces without a way to pay for purchases over the phone.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

AI winter, Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, carbon-based life, clean water, cloud computing, deep learning, different worldview, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, estate planning, Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Hawkins, PalmPilot, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Silicon Valley, superintelligent machines, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, Turing test

So, I went back to working on personal computers in Silicon Valley. I started having success as an entrepreneur. From 1988 to 1992, I created one of the first tablet computers, the GridPad. Then in 1992, I founded Palm Computing, beginning a ten-year span when I designed some of the first handheld computers and smartphones such as the PalmPilot and the Treo. Everyone who worked with me at Palm knew that my heart was in neuroscience, that I viewed my work in mobile computing as temporary. Designing some of the first handheld computers and smartphones was exciting work. I knew that billions of people would ultimately rely on these devices, but I felt that understanding the brain was even more important.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans

4chan, Ada Lovelace, air gap, Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, crowdsourcing, D. B. Cooper, dark matter, dematerialisation, Doomsday Book, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, East Village, Edward Charles Pickering, game design, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Haight Ashbury, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Network effects, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, PalmPilot, pets.com, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, semantic web, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Soul of a New Machine, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K

He thrusts a container of the company’s “secret sauce” into her face: it’s “Blowfish’s own pioneering broadband solution-oriented end-to-end flavor enhancement to spice up the Internet,” he says. But CyberSlacker sees that the emperor is naked. Her retort: “It looks like a jar of salsa on top of an old PalmPilot.” She smashes the secret sauce and goes on an anti-capitalist tirade. For the early true believers, the Alley obsession with making money was beginning to feel offensive on a spiritual level. After Jaime’s own hot flash of entrepreneurial fever, she learned not to trust anyone who chose a quick buck over interesting work.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril by Satyajit Das

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collaborative economy, colonial exploitation, computer age, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, Emanuel Derman, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial repression, forward guidance, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, geopolitical risk, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, margin call, market design, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, open economy, PalmPilot, passive income, peak oil, peer-to-peer lending, pension reform, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satyajit Das, savings glut, secular stagnation, seigniorage, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Fry, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the market place, the payments system, The Spirit Level, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Recent innovations have focused on marketing and distributing existing goods and services, rather than on creating entirely new industries. Smartphones and tablets have cannibalized desktop and laptop computers. Apple's iPhones have replaced BlackBerrys, portable music players such as Sony's CD Walkman, and personal digital assistants like the once ubiquitous PalmPilot. Google and blogs divert revenue from newspapers, publishing, and libraries. Digital advertising diverts revenue from newspaper, magazine, and TV advertising. Technological innovation increasingly relies on lowering costs, which is achieved by reducing the quality of the product as well using untrained individuals or personal assets.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

PayPal’s Charity Robot Paypal—payments platform Long before Airbnb had figured out how to tap into Craigslist’s network, PayPal had a similar challenge. In 1999, PayPal faced intense competition from better-funded rivals like X.com and dotBank. Who would win the market for online payments was anyone’s guess. After failing with its initial idea of a peer-to-peer payments system for PalmPilots, a handheld PC device (also called a PDA) popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, PayPal pivoted to facilitating payments for online auctions. This strategy meant going after sellers on eBay, the leading auction-based product marketplace on the Web. Luke Nosek, a cofounder of PayPal who served as its VP of marketing and strategy, had an idea.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic by John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas H Naylor, David Horsey

Abraham Maslow, big-box store, carbon tax, classic study, Community Supported Agriculture, Corrections Corporation of America, Dennis Tito, disinformation, Donald Trump, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, God and Mammon, greed is good, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Shuttleworth, McMansion, medical malpractice, new economy, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Calthorpe, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, space junk, SpaceShipOne, systems thinking, The Great Good Place, trade route, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra, young professional

It takes a lot of energy to run all this stuff. There always seems to be a “better” model that we’ve just gotta have. Writing in 2000 about Compaq’s then-new iPaq 3600 Pocket PC, Seattle Times technology reporter Paul Andrews warned that the iPaq, with its “sleek Porsche-like case and striking color screen,” cost $500 more than an ordinary PalmPilot. “But without the color display, music, and photos of the iPaq, life seems pretty dull,” he lamented.10 And take travel. We drive twice as much per capita as we did a half century ago, and fly an amazing twenty-five times as much.11 Middle-income Americans seldom ventured more than a few hundred miles from home then, even during two-week summer vacations.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

Each pattern recognition module could recognize a linear sequence of patterns from a lower conceptual level. Each input had parameters for importance, size, and variability of size. There were “downward” signals indicating that a lower-level pattern was expected. I discuss this research in more detail in chapter 7. In 2003 and 2004, PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George developed a hierarchical cortical model called hierarchical temporal memory. With science writer Sandra Blakeslee, Hawkins described this model eloquently in their book On Intelligence. Hawkins provides a strong case for the uniformity of the cortical algorithm and its hierarchical and list-based organization.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, business cycle, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, David Brooks, deindustrialization, East Village, eat what you kill, fixed income, forensic accounting, full employment, game design, greed is good, high batting average, housing crisis, illegal immigration, income inequality, job satisfaction, junk bonds, mandatory minimum, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, PalmPilot, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent stabilization, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, World Values Survey, young professional, zero-sum game

Lompoc is an hour away from Santa Barbara and has perfect weather year-round. There is a baseball diamond and a volleyball court. The population of inmates at Lompoc has gotten rougher in recent years, but it's still a great place to catch some sun and get in shape, although ultimately, like any of the prison camps, "it's jail, not Yale." No cell phones, no PalmPilots, no toupees, and no day trading from a laptop in your cell. Also, the food stinks.29 Whether they go to prison or not, convicted white-collar criminals nearly always face fines and settlement penalties. These are impressive only to the untrained eye. The federal government's dismal record of collecting fines assessed in white-collar crime cases illustrates another way that wealthy felons evade serious consequences.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture by Harold Goldberg

activist lawyer, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, Apple II, cellular automata, Columbine, Conway's Game of Life, Fairchild Semiconductor, G4S, game design, Ian Bogost, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, PalmPilot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Oldenburg, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Great Good Place, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning

Their philosophy of life wasn’t too complex: They didn’t need to get rich quick; they just wanted to live life their way, on their own terms. Yet inside they knew that the $12,000 to $15,000 a month they were bringing in from Microsoft and Yahoo wasn’t enough to run a company, at least not for very long. Then Howard Tomlinson, an executive at Astraware who was converting the game for use on the PalmPilot portable digital assistant device, suggested that they put up a shareware version of Bejeweled on the Web. Tomlinson told Kapulka to sell the full version for $19.99. Kapulka called Vechey and Fiete explaining that Tomlinson had a theory that essentially held that if it isn’t expensive enough, people will think it’s a crappy game that’s not even worth the cheap price.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

But to my brother, it was the future of computing. “This means that in a few years, it will be possible to create a handheld device that holds all your personal information,” he said. He told me this in 1978. The Apple II had been introduced only a year earlier. The IBM PC was nearly three years in the future. The PalmPilot was more than eighteen years away. But my brother saw the future, and I took it to heart. I went back to college as a history major but was determined to take enough electrical engineering courses that I could design the first personal organizer. I soon discovered that electrical engineering requires calculus, and I had never taken calculus.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World by Cade Metz

AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, carbon-based life, cloud computing, company town, computer age, computer vision, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital map, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Frank Gehry, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jeff Hawkins, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Markoff, life extension, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, move 37, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, new economy, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, tech worker, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, Turing test, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

But in pitching the idea to Larry Page, he gave it an extra flourish. As much as he was shaped by the work of Geoff Hinton, he was also the product of a 2004 book titled On Intelligence, written by a Silicon Valley engineer, entrepreneur, and self-taught neuroscientist named Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins invented the PalmPilot, a forerunner of the iPhone from the 1990s, but what he really wanted to do was study the brain. In his book he argued that the whole of the neocortex—the part of the brain that handled sight, hearing, speech, and reason—is driven by a single biological algorithm. If scientists could re-create this algorithm, he said, they could re-create the brain.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“You can change the world, you can redesign it.”3 The department pounded a kind of practical idealism into the students’ heads; during one field trip, they were taken in buses to the city dump and driven through the caverns of trash so they could see where wasted effort ended up. Chesky and Gebbia teamed up one summer to work on a project for the hair-dryer maker Conair and on another idea that bodybuilder Chesky dubbed the Chesky Solution. He had a notion to use PalmPilots and other mobile gadgets, along with body sensors, to track people’s health. Neither project went anywhere, but the duo solidified their friendship during long creative brainstorming sessions. “Everything for me came together because we had such a fun time working on that project,” says Gebbia, who was always on the lookout for a business partner.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

PayPal had been founded back in 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, among others. Thiel was an avid libertarian, who had wanted to use Levchin’s cryptographic expertise to fulfill the Cypherpunks’ dream of sending money through encrypted channels, between private individuals and in particular between mobile devices like the PalmPilots of that time. In early staff meetings, Thiel gave speeches that could almost have come from the Cypherpunk mailing list. “PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” he said. PayPal grew quickly, but in 2001, as the company readied for an initial public offering, it hit roadblock after roadblock from lawmakers concerned about the possibilities for money laundering and other illegal activities.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

It attracted a diverse cult following with its switchblade-style slide-out keyboard, downloadable software, email, and backups of personal information in “the cloud.” While most businesspeople were still chained to their BlackBerrys, the Sidekick found popularity among young people and hipsters, many of whom switched from PalmPilots. Rubin was a member of a unique “Band of Brothers” who passed through Apple Computer in the 1980s, a generation of young computer engineers who came of age in Silicon Valley as disciples of Steve Jobs. Captivated by Jobs’s charisma and his dedication to using good design and computing technology as levers to “change the world,” they set out independently on their own technology quests.

Hedgehogging by Barton Biggs

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, backtesting, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, diversification, diversified portfolio, eat what you kill, Elliott wave, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, global macro, hiring and firing, index fund, Isaac Newton, job satisfaction, junk bonds, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, risk free rate, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, transaction costs, upwardly mobile, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are all Keynesians now, zero-sum game, éminence grise

Getting your performance on a daily basis doesn’t mean that you are going to be dominated by it.) Most investors think they are rational, but in fact they are prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture from short-term performance swings.Taleb says:“When I see an investor monitoring his portfolio with live prices on his cellular telephone or his PalmPilot, I smile and smile.” In other words, turn off the Bloomberg.When an investor focuses on short-time increments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns—in short, being “fooled by randomness.” Our emotions are not designed to understand this key point, but as investors, we need to come to grips with our emotional liabilities.

Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

affirmative action, Brownian motion, Burning Man, carbon-based life, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, dark matter, PalmPilot, phenotype

It was the foreign ones that seemed to upset the man in the suit most. The man had not bothered to introduce himself but the fact two officers from NYPD's Sixth Precinct stood up when he came in told Bill Hagsteen all he needed to know. The thickset officer had carried away Bill's iMac, his PowerBook, his PalmPilot, his digital recorder, his camera and his MP3, while the young one, the Hispanic kid with the cheekbones, had fastened the door to Bill's brownstone with a plastic seal the size of the Pope's fist and run a length of police tape across the bottom of his stoop. After this, they ran him down to the Sixth and there he'd stayed.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster by Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, constrained optimization, data science, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, frictionless market, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, inventory management, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, Network effects, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, place-making, platform as a service, power law, price elasticity of demand, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social software, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, web application, Y Combinator

Your initial target market can be very small, hyper-focused on the smallest subset of users that you think will generate meaningful results. Ultimately, you need to prove two things before you can move on to the Virality stage: Are people using the product as you expected? If they aren’t, maybe you should switch to that new use case or market, as PayPal did when it changed from PalmPilot to web-based payment or when Autodesk stopped making desktop automation and instead focused on design tools. Are people getting enough value out of it? They may like it, but if they won’t pay, click ads, or invite their friends, you may not have a business. Don’t drive new traffic until you know you can turn that extra attention into engagement.

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

The Federal Circuit Court Opinion in this case can be found at http://www.ll. georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/opinions/00opinions/00-1464.html (accessed February 24, 2008). 16. For the views of the Justice Department on the relation between antitrust and intellectual property see Klein (1997). Also in 1997, Xerox sued 3Com, maker of the PalmPilot, over the “graffiti” handwriting recognition system. The Xerox patent covered the “idea” of using a variation on the Latin alphabet to aid the computer in recognizing the difference between different letters. Needless to say, Xerox never put the idea to any good use, and the Xerox “invention” does not seem to have assisted 3Com in any material way in designing a useful working system. 17.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Later, Dunlevie spotted a day where his calendar was free, and booked a red-eye flight to New York. Dunlevie was riding into the sunset of his venture capital career when he hopped aboard the plane. One of the four original partners at Benchmark, the mild-mannered investor was known for being an early backer of Palm, creator of the 1990s hit PalmPilot handheld device. Before that, he had been quarterback of his high school football team and gone on to get an MBA at Stanford. Slim, tall, and balding, Dunlevie was far more intellectual than a standard VC. He read books voraciously and avoided publicity—the opposite of many of the modern-day VCs who spend endless hours consuming and dispensing ideas on Twitter.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination by Mark Bergen

23andMe, 4chan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cloud computing, Columbine, company town, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, game design, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Golden age of television, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, growth hacking, Haight Ashbury, immigration reform, James Bridle, John Perry Barlow, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kinder Surprise, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Minecraft, mirror neurons, moral panic, move fast and break things, non-fungible token, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, tech bro, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Walter Mischel, WikiLeaks, work culture

After college, a small school in Pennsylvania where he took odd jobs cobbling together websites, Hurley had moved back in with his parents. He was aimless and a little bored. One day he was leafing through an issue of Wired magazine and came upon an article on Confinity, a California company trying to move currency through early handheld computers called PalmPilots. Confinity needed a designer. On a whim Hurley sent a résumé. He heard back the next day. Could he come for an interview tomorrow? This was 1999, when Silicon Valley was flush with cash and desperate for warm bodies. Confinity asked Hurley to design a logo for their new payments service, PayPal, and hired him quickly.

Peer-to-Peer by Andy Oram

AltaVista, big-box store, c2.com, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, dark matter, Dennis Ritchie, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, independent contractor, information retrieval, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, Marc Andreessen, moral hazard, Network effects, P = NP, P vs NP, p-value, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, power law, radical decentralization, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, semantic web, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, slashdot, statistical model, Tragedy of the Commons, UUNET, Vernor Vinge, web application, web of trust, Zimmermann PGP

Such a policy might control the following: The required length, complexity, and change frequency of the account passphrase Whether a user’s PC can memorize the account passphrase Whether users are required to authenticate one another, and if so, how Whether everyone, or only designated shared-space administrators, can invite and uninvite members Who, outside of the enterprise, can join a group, and on what terms The Groove product was designed to be as easy to use as a PalmPilot, because Ozzie’s prior experience with Notes showed that the vast majority of security leaks were caused by human (that is, user and administrative) error. The goal was therefore to create a product that delivers high-grade security by default, requiring as little of the user (or administrator) as possible.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

In the new arrangement, Google hired some top engineers from Mozilla, including Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher. While their employer would be Google, their job would be the same: making improvements in Firefox. Another hiring coup came with Linus Upson, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer with browser experience from Netscape, Steve Jobs’s company NeXT, and Palm, where he created the browser for the PalmPilot. “This was very clever on Larry and Sergey’s part,” says Schmidt, “because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser.” The Mozilla refugees worked in what was known at Google as the Product Client Group. This group covered all of Google’s applications that were not web-based but hewed to the more traditional model, where a user installs the program on a computer and thereafter runs it on that machine.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

It was of course hard to predict in 1997 that Amazon, then a fledgling company with an untested business model, would do so well. And one should not forget that for every Amazon that yields such an extraordinary return there are many companies that might have seemed even better prospects but flamed out or went bankrupt—remember Palm (the maker of the once popular PalmPilot) or WorldCom? Is there a way to manage risk without sacrificing returns? Diversifying one’s investment portfolio is one way of reducing its riskiness. The volatility of an index such as the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 that covers a broad range of firms in multiple industries is generally lower than the volatility of any individual stock included in that index.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P. W. Singer

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atahualpa, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, cuban missile crisis, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, friendly fire, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, Google Earth, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, junk bonds, Law of Accelerating Returns, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Neal Stephenson, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, no-fly zone, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, private military company, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wisdom of Crowds, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra

McCoy’s sick bay “revolutionized the way we think about patient care.” Inspired by Bones’s medical tricorder (actually just a tricked-out salt shaker), Adler revolutionized the medical field by inventing the cyber knife, which does surgery by sending a beam into cancer tumors. Rob Hatani, who was equally inspired by the tricorder to invent the PalmPilot PDA, explains that this degree of influence is to be expected, given the popularity of the show among scientists. “In Silicon Valley, everyone’s a Star Trek fan. It’s like football in Green Bay.” The franchise and its influence was reborn again in the 1980s with Star Trek: The Next Generation. The successor series differed in often focusing on the darker side of technology (such as its introduction of the Borg, the new adversary species, whose robotic technology had eradicated all empathy), but it too had a major influence on scientists.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy by Eric O'Neill

active measures, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, computer age, cryptocurrency, deep learning, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, fear of failure, full text search, index card, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, PalmPilot, ransomware, rent control, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Skype, thinkpad, Timothy McVeigh, web application, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, young professional

So small it could fit into your palm. I used a small radio control to—” An alarm beeped. Hanssen dragged his Palm Pilot out of his back pocket. He checked it and smiled. “Ah, the Novena.” “The what?” He frowned. “I thought you were Catholic? Didn’t those Jesuits at Gonzaga teach you to pray?” “More like Sister Rose at de Chantal, but yeah.” Hanssen stood up. “Then you should know that novena is Latin for ‘nine.’ Nine days of prayer. I pray to Mary every day at one p.m.” He snapped his Palm Pilot shut and returned it to his left back pocket. “Come with me.” The gloom of his office made kneeling down before a small triptych feel oddly like being in church.

…

Hanssen had little respect for those he saw above him in the chain of command. It wouldn’t break the case, but it might be useful. I filed it away for later. As Kielman showed us around, Hanssen muttered to himself or tapped on his Palm Pilot. He only perked up when Dr. Kielman mentioned ACS. “I have grave concerns about the ACS system,” Hanssen said, tapping his Palm Pilot against his leg with one hand and spinning the stylus through the fingers of the other. “The system is flawed,” he continued. “All it takes is one bad bureau person to invalidate all the security.” We stopped at a computer displaying the ACS terminal, with its green monochrome screen.

…

“My office.” He paused. “Bring the rowing machine.” I followed Hanssen from the bright halogen lights of the main pit area of the SCIF into his gloomy cave. He paused before slumping into the executive chair to pull a thick gray device from his back pocket. My eyes tracked his hand. “It’s a Palm Pilot.” He froze, watching me watching him. I stared at the thick digital assistant and caught the label on the back. A Palm IIIx. “I have a pager,” I said through a mouth dried out by my pathetic joke. He slipped the Palm into the blue canvas bag beside his desk. “And that’s why you’ll always be a worthless clerk.”

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth by Eric M. Jackson

bank run, business process, call centre, creative destruction, disintermediation, Elon Musk, index fund, Internet Archive, iterative process, Joseph Schumpeter, market design, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, moral hazard, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, telemarketer, The Chicago School, the new new thing, Turing test

See also PayPal logos; PayPal tools PayPlace, 85, 177 ‘pay to surf’ programs, 58 AllAdvantage, 105 PDA (personal digital assistant) devices. See Palm Pilot person-to-person payments C2it, 176–177 eBay monopoly, 187–188 technology deficit, 9 policing mechanism on Internet, 51 political donation with company funds, 110 pornography industry market, 215–217 PowerPoint presentations, 297 pre-IPO shares, 238 press conferences Confinity Palm Pilot demo, 10 with FBI, 201 press releases FDIC ruling on PayPal, 254 PayPal 5 million users, 182 sale of PayPal to eBay, 280–281 X.com (PayPal), 81 Priceline, 30 priorities short-run vs. long-term, 50 X.com (PayPal) infrastructure vs. growth, 105 .

…

After selling NetMeridian to Microsoft, Max moved to Silicon Valley on the lookout for his next startup idea. Peter and Max hit it off. After several lunchtime discussions over the following weeks, the pair decided to launch a company with a security focus allowing users to store encrypted information on Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistant (PDA) devices. They settled on the name Fieldlink, since Palm devices use infrared ports to link up and beam information to each other. Peter initially agreed to help finance the venture with seed money from his fund, but with additional persuasion from Max he consented to becoming the company’s full-time CEO.

…

Without exact cash on hand, a consumer’s only option was to write a check, a cumbersome form of payment that required a trip to the bank and a wait of several days before the check cleared and the recipient could take possession of the funds. Peter and Max surmised that technology had yet to offer a viable alternative to cash for person-to-person payments. Fieldlink, they reasoned, could be positioned to develop a solution. Palm Pilots, designed to travel with their owners, would be an ideal platform for a digital wallet. The convenience of such an invention could earn Fieldlink’s product the status of killer application, especially if the software behind it could be beamed through infrared ports from one Palm user to the next.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

Even though it’s not rocket science to reverse-engineer this stuff, no one else had done it before me, so there’s some complexity involved. The real difficult thing actually was getting an implementation of a cryptographic algorithm on a Palm Pilot, because Palm Pilots are very low power, and, back then, they were really low power—like a 16 MHz processor. So, to do an encryption of a public key operation on a Palm Pilot was really expensive. There is some art involved in how you speed it up—both from the user interface perspective and the math perspective. In math, you have to see how much you can squeeze out of it, and in the user interface, you have to make it feel like it’s not taking that long, even though it really is taking like 2 seconds, which is a really long time.

…

It was one of these things where the software wasn’t perfect, but the security path where the money changed hands was definitely provably secure. The danger was that the Palm Pilots might crash, but the transaction was perfectly safe. I could have bet my own life on the transaction. The thing that was not safe was just the software was not really perfect. It was clunky; I was worried that it might crash. So we had stacks and stacks of Palm Pilots preloaded with the same software. Obviously, money could only reside in one of them, but the plan was that, if I see that any one of them is crashing, I’m going to make a fresh pair, because we needed two Palm Pilots, one for the receiving and one for the sending. I was fully prepared.

…

Livingston: What did you do first after you got this new funding? Levchin: As soon as we got funding, we started hiring aggressively, and we built this app for the Palm Pilot, which was getting pretty good growth. We were getting 300 users a day. Then we built a demo for the website, which was functional, so you could do everything on the website that you could do on a Palm Pilot, except the website was unsexy and we didn’t really care. It was like, “Go to the website and download the Palm Pilot version. It’s really cool.” Livingston: Three hundred people were downloading it per day? For fun? Levchin: Well, there are lots of geeks.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, availability heuristic, Barry Marshall: ulcers, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, desegregation, Helicobacter pylori, Jeff Hawkins, low cost airline, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Pepto Bismol, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, telemarketer

In this way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other types of technologies—are featured to death. The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists.

…

It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates. CHAPTER 1 SIMPLE Commander’s Intent. THE low-fare airline. Burying the lead and the inverted pyramid. It’s the economy, stupid. Decision paralysis. Clinic: Sun exposure. Names, names, and names. Simple = core + compact. Proverbs. The Palm Pilot wood block. Using what’s there. The pomelo schema. High concept: Jaws on a spaceship. Generative analogies: Disney’s “cast members.” CHAPTER 2 UNEXPECTED The successful flight safety announcement. The surprise brow. Gimmicky surprise and “postdictability.” Breaking the guessing machine. “The Nordie who …” “No school next Thursday.”

…

But when you know that your organization thrives on names—i.e., the specific actions taken by specific members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations. Palm Pilot and the Visual Proverb Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices. Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use?

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, corporate governance, diversified portfolio, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Jeff Hawkins, junk bonds, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, PalmPilot, patent troll, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the new new thing

One company had more success creating a portable office aide: RIM nemesis U.S. Robotics. Its Palm Pilot 1000, launched in 1996, the year after U.S. Robotics bought California startup Palm computing, was a sleek device storing calendar, contact, and other information that could be synchronized with users’ computers. Promoted as a personal digital assistant, the Palm was an instant hit with professionals. You didn’t need an engineering degree to operate the machine. And unlike Newton’s faulty handwriting, the Palm came with a digital keyboard that was easily operated with a stylus. No more “egg freckles.” Missing from the Palm Pilot, however, was a wireless connection.

…

RIM managers were influenced by management guru Geoffrey Moore, who argued in his influential book Inside the Tornado that innovative technologies had a better chance of success if sold within a proven product category.1 The most popular handheld device going in 1998 was the Palm Pilot, sold as a personal digital assistant, or PDA. Palm Pilot was a huge hit because it allowed busy professionals to easily store and update calendar and contact information on a pocket-sized device. If the e-mail-enabled Leapfrog came with calendar and contact applications, Castell urged Lazaridis, then RIM could position its product as the most comprehensive PDA on the market.

…

Missing from the Palm Pilot, however, was a wireless connection. Fans would have to wait until 1999 for a new Palm Pilot to be linked wirelessly to the Internet and e-mail. RIM was quietly putting the finishing touches on its own handheld communicator in the spring of 1996. Its conquer-the-world strategy was audacious for a company with fewer than one hundred employees, but RIM’s low profile had its advantages: bigger global companies didn’t take the small Waterloo company seriously. “We seem to be doing quite well without anyone knowing,” Lazaridis told the Globe and Mail in one of his first mainstream media interviews. Working in the shadows, Lazaridis’s team had accumulated eight years of experience helping Sweden’s Ericsson, Toronto’s Rogers, and New Jersey’s RAM Mobile Data, the small wireless data arm of BellSouth, transform Mobitex into a working radio network with better coverage across the continent than its main rival, ARDIS, the data network that was created by Motorola for IBM and sold to American Mobile Satellite in early 1998.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Atul Gawande, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate social responsibility, en.wikipedia.org, fundamental attribution error, impulse control, Jeff Hawkins, Libby Zion, longitudinal study, medical residency, PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Piper Alpha, placebo effect, publish or perish, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs

In this way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other types of technologies—are featured to death. The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists.

…

But when you know that your organization thrives on names — i.e., the specific actions taken by specific members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations. Palm Pilot and the Visual Proverb Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices. Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use?

…

It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm. Trae Vassallo, a member of the Palm V design team, says, “The block was dumb, which resonated with the simple technological goals of the product, but it was also small, which made the product elegant and different.” Hawkins would pull out the wooden block to “take notes” during a meeting or “check his calendar” in the hallway. Whenever someone suggested another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would fit.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

In 1998 programmer Max Levchin teamed with derivatives trader Peter Thiel to create a “digital wallet”—an encryption platform that allowed you to store cash and information securely on your mobile phone. That soon evolved to software that allowed you to send and receive digital cash wirelessly and securely via a Palm Pilot (the first of several iterations) so that two friends could split a dinner tab using their PDAs. It was a neat idea that leveraged Max’s and Peter’s technology and finance backgrounds, respectively (complementary assets that gave them a competitive edge as founders). Max and Peter named the company Confinity—a mix of confidence and infinity. But the Palm Pilot wasn’t catching on. So Max and Peter iterated again. They developed an online payment transfer service that didn’t require a Palm or any other mobile phone application.

…

To make the service, which they dubbed PayPal, even more useful to businesses, they added credit card processing. No merchant accounts needed to process a credit card payment: just a simple, universal online interface. Confinity signed up early adopters for peer-to-peer money transfers on both the Palm Pilot application and the PayPal online payment transfer service, although not as quickly as expected for the Palm Pilot. The company struggled to find and articulate a mass-market use case; the general public was not accustomed to electronically and wirelessly sending cash to one another. In short, PayPal’s Plan A had played out. There were no more iterations to make, no more small bets to take.

…

(Remember, PayPal’s first focus was on mobile payments.) That quickly turned into “Ooh—maybe those people are our customers!” Which in turn led to a realization that the company should pivot to Plan B: offer the eBay community an easy way to pay for the items they bought in online auctions. In 1999 PayPal ditched the Palm Pilot app (the original Plan A) and focused on eBay. Plan B wasn’t something random, like an online chat application. It stayed true to PayPal’s initial encryption roots while shifting to capitalize on what appeared to be the real market need. As it happened, my career Plan B intersected with PayPal’s Plan B.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

Though it was the only really innovative thing Sculley achieved under his tenure, Jobs had many reasons to end the Newton’s brief life. Most executives would have thought twice about killing a well-loved product, and Newton lovers flooded Infinite Loop’s parking lots with placards and loudspeakers. (“I give a fig for the Newton,” one sign read.) PDAs were on the rise, thanks to the success of handhelds like the Palm Pilot, but to Jobs, the Newton was a distraction. He wanted Apple to concentrate on computers, its core product. Jobs aimed at making innovative products again, but he didn’t want to compete in the broader market for personal computers, which was dominated by companies making generic machines for Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

…

“He showed us on-screen rotating and zooming—and I was really surprised that we could do that stuff.” That morning was the first time the team had even heard of multi-touch. Today it doesn’t seem exceptional, but back then, touch interfaces were pretty primitive. Most touch devices, such as Palm Pilots and Windows tablets, used a pen or stylus. Screens that were sensitive to fingers, not pens, like ATM screens, were restricted to single presses. There was no pinching or zooming, no swiping up and down or left and right. Kerr explained to his colleagues that the new technology would allow people to use two or three fingers instead of just one, and that it would afford much more sophisticated interfaces than simple single-finger button presses.

…

“Honestly, we can do better, guys,” he told the team. Fadell was loath to admit defeat. “The multi-touch approach was riskier because no one had tried it and because they weren’t sure they could fit all the necessary hardware into it,” he said. And Fadell had been skeptical of touch screens from the start, based on experience of devices like Palm Pilots, which were clunky and awkward. “We all know this is the one we want to do” Jobs said, referring to the P2. “So let’s make it work.”9 Two years later, during the iPhone introduction at Macworld, Jobs jokingly flashed an image of an iPod with a rotary dial pad on its screen. This was how not to build a new phone, Jobs said, as the audience laughed.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

By 1998, he was ready to apply his genius for crafting secure forms of computerized communications to the world of business. Thiel and Levchin (along with a third partner, John Bernard Powers, who soon departed) launched Confinity, a startup aimed at enabling money transfers on Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistants (PDAs) equipped with infrared ports. At the time, the Palm Pilot was an exceptionally popular mobile device whose adoption rate was expected to grow, and launching a payment system on a mobile device that people carried with them everywhere made sense. The business logic behind Confinity seemed indisputable.

…

Despite these efforts, Billpoint failed to get traction among eBay users, partly because of its belated launch, partly because of ill-advised business moves by eBay—for example, the decision to squelch deals that would have promoted Billpoint’s use by non-eBay merchants. PayPal continued to grow. By the time Confinity shut down its Palm Pilot business in late 2000, its offspring PayPal had already garnered three million accounts—three hundred times the number achieved by its parent company. Not since the launch of the first credit card, Diners Club, has the world seen such rapid global adoption of a new payment instrument. In February 2002, PayPal went public.

…

., 126 news feeds, 121, 168, 251–52 newspapers, 63, 144–45, 264, 287 New York City, 61, 113, 123, 229–30, 231, 258–59 New York State, 69–70, 274 New York Stock Exchange, 55, 171 New York Times, 205 NeXT, 53 Nigeria, 247 Nike, 4, 74–76, 78, 205, 271 9/11 attacks, 113 99designs, 66, 106 Nintendo, 94, 211, 240 noise, 28, 114, 120, 199, 200 Nokia, 49–50, 64, 131, 226 Novel Writing Month, 4–5 NTT, 89 oDesk, 201 oil and gas industry, 225, 235, 259, 263, 272 OkCupid, xi, 26–28, 30, 195–96 oligopolies, 209, 238 on-boarding effect, 90–91, 97 online courses, 96, 111, 265–68, 289 Open Data, 282 “open in” vs. “open out” websites, 144 open source, 57, 172–73, 254–55 OpenTable, 17, 90, 95, 101, 103, 194, 262 operating system (OS), 6–7, 52–53, 152–53, 211, 222, 226, 240 Palm Pilots, 80, 83 Parker, Geoffrey G., ix, 23–24, 69, 110, 130, 241, 242 parking, 62, 233, 234 partner-against-partner competition, 211, 212, 227 patents, 109, 157, 174–75, 241 payments systems, 8, 56, 79–83, 85, 137, 142, 145, 155, 222, 274–78, 285 PayPal, 17, 21, 23, 24, 37, 79–83, 85, 91, 93, 94, 111, 275 PDF, 29–30, 92–93 peer-to-peer lending, 170, 275–76 percentage of active users, 190, 192, 193 Percival, Sean, 125–26 peripheral applications, 52–57 peripheral hardware, 178–79 personal computers (PCs), 58, 140, 152–53, 178–79, 200 personal digital assistants (PDAs), 80 pharmaceuticals industry, 225 photo-editing tools, 47, 104 photo-sharing sites, 6, 37, 47, 66, 100–103, 104, 118, 142, 167–69, 172, 173, 193, 198, 217, 226, 299 piggyback strategy, 91–92, 105, 184 Pinterest, 3, 168–69 platform-against-partner competition, 211–12, 227 platform-against-platform competition, 211, 227 Platform Leadership (Gawer and Cusumano), 178–79 platforms: adjacent, 222–23, 295, 296, 298 architecture of, 47–48, 164–65, 170–73, 182, 221 assets of, 9, 68–71, 160, 180, 181, 209, 212, 220–21, 238, 260 authors’ research on, ix–xi, 23–24 as business model, vii, 35, 60–62, 64, 66–67, 73–77, 163, 184–86, 188, 258 capitalization of, 9, 16–18, 82, 109, 145, 278 compatibility of, 53, 213–14, 240, 260 competition in, viii, 17–18, 33, 60–62, 68, 73–77, 83, 86, 87–88, 96–97, 131–34, 152–54, 155, 156, 157–58, 174–75, 181, 185–86, 189, 199–200, 203, 207–27, 234–35, 240–43, 256–60, 264, 287, 299 consumers and customers of, viii, 6–8, 26, 29, 31–49, 60–67, 71–74, 78–82, 86–97, 107, 108–21, 125, 134, 135, 145–47, 157–58, 176–78, 180, 187–92, 197–205, 210–23, 240–43, 251–54, 263, 272–78, 295–99 controversial aspects of, 129–30, 149–50, 192–93, 213–14, 229–30 core interaction of, 38–44, 49–59, 119, 134, 141–42, 180, 187, 189–90, 195, 199–200, 201, 202, 295 costs for, 9–10, 25, 37–38, 63, 82, 152–53, 184, 186, 209–10, 224–25, 228, 234, 265, 286, 296, 299 curation and governance of, 12, 14, 26–28, 32, 33, 34, 42, 47, 49, 51, 67–68, 72, 77, 78, 87–88, 111, 121–22, 123, 157–82, 187, 191, 192–93, 295–96, 297, 298 decision-making in, 73, 127, 139–40, 156, 169, 180, 187–88, 253–56 design of, 35–59, 90, 101, 111, 125–28, 134–35, 144, 154–56, 163, 164–65, 170–73, 179–80, 181, 182, 219, 221, 223–24, 228, 283–84, 285, 295 developers or programmers for, 6–7, 21, 30, 92, 106–7, 124, 131–32, 135, 141–49, 156, 157, 166, 173–74, 199–200 disruption caused by, vii, viii, 3, 4, 14, 60–78, 204, 231, 261–89, 296 economic impact of, vii–xi, 3, 12, 14, 60–62, 66, 72, 78, 159–61, 230, 231, 234–35, 237, 246–48, 261–89, 298–99 ecosystem of, 12, 33, 57, 64, 65, 72, 75, 77, 78, 101, 107, 132, 134–35, 152–53, 154, 158–59, 163, 165, 166, 178, 179, 182, 187, 193, 200, 212, 216, 219, 225, 262, 272, 275, 278 efficiencies of, 7–8, 10, 17, 18–20, 47–48, 60, 63, 69, 71, 72–73, 139–40, 181, 186–87, 191–92, 208, 257, 263–64, 269, 284–85, 286 externalities of, 33, 162, 163, 164, 181, 182, 229–34, 242, 257, 260, 287 fees charged by, 9, 10, 37–38, 73, 82, 106–8, 110, 113–27, 169–70, 194, 225–26, 244, 262–63, 296, 299 financial valuation of, 16–18, 33, 60–61, 79, 126 funding of, ix, 16–18, 23, 40, 51, 52–53, 92, 96, 102, 106, 111, 184–86, 276–77 future trends in, 261–89 global impact of, 104, 111, 205, 246–48, 261, 272–74 glossary for, 295–300 growth of, viii, 3–4, 14, 15, 20, 22–24, 34, 59, 76, 81–86, 97, 99–109, 145, 174, 175, 187–88, 195–99, 203–5, 230, 239–53, 259–60, 297 infrastructure of, 64, 73, 134–35, 141–46, 205, 209–10, 298 intermediation of, 68–69, 71–72, 78, 161–62, 170–71, 298 inversion by, 11–12, 15, 32–33, 211 launching of, vii, viii, 11–14, 58–59, 79–105, 88–99, 112–15, 298 layered interactions of, 49–51, 53, 54, 59, 71–72, 144–45, 169 leadership in, 33, 106–7, 189, 201, 220–21, 235, 259–60, 286–89 leverage by, 103, 206–7, 228, 263–64 management of, 10–18, 24–25, 79–109, 118–19, 121, 126–28, 134–47, 136, 152–59, 164–67, 176–203, 211, 212, 222–23, 296, 298 marketing of, 14, 19, 25, 52–53, 72, 73–74, 84–85, 100, 101, 105, 183–84, 186, 209–10, 267 match function in, 44, 47–49, 59, 187, 189–92, 193, 194–95, 202, 223, 297, 298 as nation-states, 158–61 network effects in, 16–34, 44–51, 65, 68, 78, 90–91, 108–23, 126, 128, 151, 186, 188, 196, 202, 206, 210–18, 224–34, 247–48, 257, 260, 287, 295–300 off-platform interactions and, 87, 116, 117–18, 213–15, 223–28, 250–51, 256, 297, 299, 300 outside contributors to, 10–11, 14, 74, 91–92, 103–4, 111, 119, 127, 130–33, 133, 148–49, 154–56, 173–75, 178, 189, 199–200, 206–10, 216, 219, 221, 227, 228, 240–41, 295, 296 pipelines vs., 6–10, 35, 42, 45, 46, 58, 63–68, 73–77, 89, 101, 105, 110, 123, 183–87, 220–21, 231, 258, 264, 297, 298 producers in, viii, 6, 7, 12, 19, 25–51, 60–66, 71, 87, 90–94, 101, 107–21, 125, 134, 135, 149–52, 187–92, 196–98, 203, 209–10, 212, 218–20, 223, 275, 285, 295–99 profit margins of, ix, 33, 61, 130–31, 138–41, 143, 148, 188, 197, 208–9, 215, 220, 225, 231, 233, 242, 259–60, 284, 285, 287, 296 pull-based process in, 44, 45–49, 59, 84, 86, 89, 99–100, 105, 187, 189, 223, 299 push-based process in, 84, 85, 97, 105 re-architecting of, 57–58 regulation of, 166, 199, 225, 227, 229–60, 239, 263, 274, 281–83, 287, 289 revenues of, 3, 16–18, 81–82, 83, 87, 102, 106–27, 138–41, 143, 144, 157–58, 184–88, 194, 215, 225, 285, 287 revolution in, 5, 6–15, 261–89 risk assessment and management in, 77, 117, 154–56, 162, 165–66, 170, 175–76, 180, 182, 192–93, 232–33, 237–38, 299 sales volume of, 25, 42–44, 82–83, 115–16, 157, 163, 169–70, 183–84, 186, 196, 218 scalability of, 7–8, 18–20, 24–26, 29, 34, 35, 65, 68, 71, 74, 85, 167, 206, 247–48, 262, 298 social impact of, 163, 164–65, 169, 174, 229–60, 239, 280–81, 286–89 strategies for, 204–28 transparency of, 121, 164, 166, 176–79, 182, 243, 253–56, 260 user base of, 58–59, 81–85, 86, 89–99, 118–19, 145–46, 165, 184–86, 190, 203, 215, 218–19, 222–23, 224, 295, 299 PlayStation, 94, 139, 178, 211 PlayStation 3, 139 PlayStation Portable (PSP), 178, 211 PlayStation PSP-2000, 211 “popular in your network,” 197 pornography, 67, 88, 133–34, 152, 164, 167 Porter, Michael, 207–8, 210, 213, 219 positive cross-side effects, 30, 34, 295 positive externalities, 163, 233, 287 positive feedback, 21, 82–83 positive network effects, 17, 20, 26, 28, 29–30, 32–33, 65, 78, 187, 196, 202, 225, 287, 298 positive same-side effects, 29–30, 34, 298 premium listings, 120–21 pre-roll advertisements, 223 prices, pricing: agricultural, 42–44, 60 effects of, 22, 23, 34, 298 fixing of, 169–70, 227, 240–43, 251, 252–53 free (freemium), viii, 22, 108–10, 111, 125–27, 254–55, 258 levels of, 163, 208, 232, 260, 262, 272–73, 286 predatory, 241–43, 258 strategies for, viii, 60, 69–71, 109–10, 115, 208 surge, 252–53 variable, 272–73 printing, 66, 109, 284 privacy and security issues, 79–80, 146, 159, 163, 171–73, 230, 243–48, 260, 285 privacy laws, 247–48 privatization, 232–33, 238 production: costs of, 224–25 efficiencies of, 18–19 evangelism strategy for, 96–97, 105 fraud in, 196–97 openness of, 149–52 products: design and development of, 219–20 distribution of, 19, 64, 186, 209–10 launches of, 52–53 lines of, 178–79 name spelling of, 161–62, 170–71 optimization of, 12, 254 services substitutions for, 207, 208 professional services, 8, 39, 50, 51, 73, 96, 103–4, 111, 117–18, 184–86, 190, 209–10, 218–19, 279–81, 289 Project Homeless Connect, 282 property ownership, 70–71, 124 property rentals, 1–2, 8–9, 10, 12, 64, 67, 101, 111, 142–43, 198, 224, 229–33, 236, 253, 287 proprietary model, 136, 137–39, 140, 146–49, 154–56, 240–43 prostitution, 165, 231 public good, 163, 169, 174, 230, 256–60, 280–81 public relations, 85, 105, 229–30 publishing industry, 7, 10, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71–72, 204, 208, 210, 231, 242–43, 244, 251, 262 QQ social network, 217 Quirky, 47 Quora, 30, 36, 68, 71–72, 93, 103 railroads, 209, 225 random access memory (RAM), 56, 57, 58 Rangaswami, J.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

As we mentioned in chapter 6, one approach to attaining the critical mass necessary for a viable matchmaker is to start out as a single-sided enterprise. Palm was essentially a single-sided company when it launched the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA).5 It avoided the problem of attracting app developers to a pioneering device by developing and installing a suite of apps itself. When the Palm Pilot became successful, Palm was able to become a multisided platform by attracting third-party app developers and hardware manufacturers. In retailing, single-sided firms clearly have more control over their customers’ experience, but they pay for it by having to raise more capital and incur higher operating costs.

…

See also critical mass; ignition money side of the platform, 33–34, 93–94 Monster, 50, 124 Motorola, 113, 116 M-PESA, 164, 167–181, 205 additional services in, 178–180 critical mass for, 170–171 economic development and, 180–181 how it works, 170 ignition at, 174–178 pricing in, 173 M-Shwari, 178–179 MSN, 82 multi-homing, 28 multisided platforms building, 35–37 challenges of, 9 communication and trust in, 58–61 as communities, 137 critical issues to address in, 36–37 critical mass for, 9–12, 14, 68, 69–83 definition of, 8 designing, 35–37 differentiation in, 28 discovery of/research on, 14–17 economic influence of, 205–206 economic rules and, 1–2, 12–14 evaluating new/potential, 149–164 examples of, 17–18 foundational, 40 friction reduction by, 55–68 future of, 197–206 governance of, 135–148 groups connected by, 1 growth/prominence of, 37–51 history of, 2–3, 12–14, 39–40, 198, 199–201 how many sides to have in, 109–110 identifying, 18–19 ignition of, 35–37, 68–83 pioneering, 37 pricing in, 85–100 retail transformed by, 183–196 technology in turbocharging, 19–20, 39–51 thick markets and, 30 traditional economic rules and, 1–2 value creation and division in, 57–58 MySpace, 28, 74, 138 governance of, 146–148 Video, 82 near-field communication (NFC) chips, 158, 159, 160–161, 162, 163 Netflix, 105, 191, 192 network effects, 21–31 behavioral externalities and, 136–140 creative destruction and, 49 definition of, 21 demand interdependency and, 32–33 direct, 22–25, 29, 137 first-mover advantages and, 23–24 indirect, 25–30, 136–137, 203 mastering, 27–30 number of platform sides and, 109–110 positive and negative, 22–23, 29 pricing and, 32 on shopping malls, 193 value creation/division and, 57–58 newspapers advertising in, 200–201 creative destruction and, 50 pricing, 94, 96, 99–100 pricing of, 32 New York Times, 184, 192–193 Nokia, 111, 112, 118 omnichannel retailing, 194–196 Open Handset Alliance (OHA), 115–116 open source licensing, 115–116 OpenTable, 7–8, 9–14 creative destruction and, 50 critical mass for, 9–12 ecosystem for, 103–104 fee structure of, 10, 13–14, 82, 90, 95 friction solved by, 57, 152 ignition strategy at, 79, 80, 82, 155 network effects at, 21, 25 no-show policy, 144 table management system, 10 thickness of market, 30 time to reach ignition, 164 two-sided platform of, 16–17 operating systems. See computer operating systems opportunistic behavior, 139 Orange, 112 Owings Mills Mall, 184, 192–193 Page, Larry, 114 Palm Pilot, 104 participants Apple Pay, 157–164 attracting, 155–156 getting the right ones, 30, 124–125 governing interaction among, 37, 135–148 in M-PESA, 172–173 payment systems. See credit/payment cards fleet cards, 86–92, 98–99 mobile, 58, 149–150, 156–164 M-PESA, 164, 167–181 PayPal, 80–81 PayPal, 80–82 personal computers, 19, 35 microchips, 40–41 operating systems, 43–44 pioneering platforms, 37 checklist for, 150–155 retail creative destruction and, 181–196 “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets” (Rochet & Tirole), 15 platforms, 16–17 foundational, 40 multi-homing with, 28 reseller, 107–108 sizing, 124–126 vertically integrated, 106–107 PriceGrabber, 186 price levels, 91–93 Priceline, 12 price structures, 91–93 pricing, 19, 30–35, 36, 85–100 access charges/usage fees, 94–95 assessment for, 151, 153–154 in B2B exchanges, 66 balancing interests in, 31–32, 35, 87–89 at Diners Club, 13 free, 93–94 ignition and, 82 maintaining optimal, 98–100 money side, 33–34, 93–94 new rules for, 96–98 at OpenTable, 10, 13–14 price level vs. price structure in, 91–93 sensitivity to, 96 single-sided vs. multisided, 89–91 subsidy side, 33–34, 93–94 traditional economics on, 15 printing press, 200–201 procurement, 67–68 profit, 57–58, 76.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Levchin’s cryptography idea was a little vague, but Thiel, who soon joined the company as its CEO, refined it: Confinity would store money—essentially in the form of digital IOU notes—on devices like the Palm Pilot, which seemed to be on the verge of taking over the world. With the necessary password, the infrared of one Palm Pilot could beam the note, linked to a credit card or bank account, to another Palm Pilot, using a software application called PayPal. It was a cumbersome and perhaps pointless service, but at a time when venture capitalists were pouring money into kibu.com, an online community for teenage girls, and DigiScents, which tried to transmit smells through the Web, the idea’s weirdness made it seem innovative and therefore attractive.

…

Levchin and his engineers stayed up coding for five nights to get ready for the announcement, which took place in front of a dozen journalists at Buck’s, a restaurant in Woodside that was already a legendary site of big Silicon Valley deals. As the TV cameras rolled, venture capitalists from Nokia successfully beamed their preloaded millions from one Palm Pilot to another. “Every one of your friends will become like a virtual, miniature ATM,” Thiel told the press. His strategy was to scale up as quickly as possible, in the belief that the key to beating competitors on the Internet was viral growth. Each new customer was given ten dollars for signing up and another ten dollars for every referral.

…

Confinity kept track of users via a counter linked to its database that the company called the World Domination Index—every few minutes, a pop-up box on company computers would refresh the number with the sound of a ding—and by November 1999, just a few weeks after its launch, it was growing by 7 percent a day. But it became clear that setting up an account on the PayPal website, which enabled transactions with anyone who had an e-mail address, was a far more popular way to send money than trying to get Palm Pilots to mate on a restaurant table (the mobile Internet was in its earliest, glitch-ridden stage). The e-mail idea seemed so simple that it would be only a matter of time before competitors figured it out. The pace grew even more frantic, with hundred-hour workweeks. The most dangerous competitor, X.com, founded by a South African immigrant named Elon Musk, was located just four blocks up University Avenue.

The Pleasure of My Company by Steve Martin

AOL-Time Warner, PalmPilot, Socratic dialogue

Clarissa the shrink-in-training clinked three times on my door with her Coke can. The knock of someone whose hands are full. The door opened on its own, and I remembered not hearing it latch when I entered earlier with my small sack of earplugs. Clarissa, balancing a cell phone, briefcase, sweater (pointless in today’s weather), Palm Pilot, soda can, and wrapped baby gift (she hadn’t wanted to leave it in the car), closed the door and made a purse-induced leathery squeak as she crossed the room. I liked her outfit: a maroon skirt topped by a white blouse with a stiffly starched front piece that was vaguely heart-shaped, giving her the appearance of an Armani-clad nurse.

…

He even worked in the numbers 15 and 14, which is the year the print was made, 1514. I showed the etching to Clarissa and she seemed spellbound; she touched the page, lightly moving her fingers across it as if she were reading Braille. While her hand remained in place she raised her eyes to the wall where I had tacked up my square. She then went to her Filofax and pulled out a Palm Pilot, tapping in the numbers, checking my math. I knew that magic squares were not to be grasped with calculators; it is their mystery and symmetry that thrill. But I didn’t say anything, choosing to let her remain in the mathematical world. Satisfied that it all worked out, she stuck the instrument back into its leatherette case and turned to me.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

The need for context means that present-day software can be programmed to recognize only relatively straightforward patterns—patterns that do not present serious perceptual problems or require vast amounts of contextual knowledge in order to be identified. ImageChecker is neural net software that scans digitized mammograms for patterns associ- WHY PEOPLE STILL MATTER City Time Los Angeles Wed 6:00 am New York Wed 9:00 am 27 Sydney 11:00pm London Wed 2:00 pm Paris Wed 3:00 pm Alphabetic Characters Numeric Characters Figure 2.1. The Palm Pilot. ated with cancer. As with all neural networks, ImageChecker must first be trained on previously analyzed mammograms to “learn” which visual patterns to flag.16 Once trained, the software provides an effective complement to the radiologist’s work. As one clinician describes it, ‘The current [computer-aided detection] algorithms are extremely good at detecting suspicious calcium deposits, which is one of the signs of breast cancer, but they are not as good at detecting subtle masses.

…

If we take a step back from aircraft production, we see how the BoeingCATIA story illustrates a final computer-supported strategy—the creation of new, information-intensive products including CATIA itself, an important revenue source for Dassault Systèmes. CATIA, CDs, cell phones, DVDs, geo-positioning devices, the modern echocardiograph machine, the Eurex Trading network, complex financial derivatives, and the Palm Pilot are all successful products that computers have made possible. WHY JOBS CHANGE As the Boeing-CATIA example illustrates, computers change work through a three-step process. The first step occurred when Boeing purchased CATIA to pursue particular competitive strategies that were impractical without computers.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The first “machinery of freedom” Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Noseck designed was PayPal. In his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Thiel notes proudly, “Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.” Originally called Confinity, the company was started in December of 1998 as a payment system for the Palm Pilot handheld computer. The ambitious philosophy of PayPal is clearly stated in early remarks from Thiel: “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means,” he once told his staff, “because if they try the people will switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

…

Thiel says, “It’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market.” He wanted to invest in monopolies, not competitive businesses. 2. Build businesses that have “network effects.” Thiel’s first two major investments, PayPal and Facebook, both benefit from having millions of users who want to connect with each other. When PayPal was just a payment system for Palm Pilot, it was a failure. As soon as it became the standard payment system for eBay, it got the network-effect wind at its back. 3. Economies of scale are critical. Google is pretty much unassailable in search-engine advertising because it has huge economies of scale. This leads to the conclusion that there will be very few winners in each sector of tech.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

In late 1997, Paul Jacobs, who later succeeded his father as CEO, had a brainstorm. One day he came into a staff meeting in San Diego, took a Qualcomm cell phone and taped it together with a Palm Pilot, and told his team: “This is what we’re going to do.” The idea was to try to create a device that combined the Palm Pilot—at that time basically a combination calendar, Filofax, address book, and day planner, with note-taking capabilities and a wireless Web-based text browser—with a 3G cell phone. That way when you called up a phone number in the Palm Pilot address book, you could just click on it and the cell phone would dial it. And with the same device you could surf the Internet.

…

Norman, Greg Norman, Jeff North American Free Trade Agreement North Korea; nuclear program of Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) Noyce, Robert nuclear testing moratorium nuclear weapons Nutch (search engine) Obama, Barack; foreign policy of; gay marriage and Obama, Michelle Obama, Sasha and Malia obesity Occupy Central movement oceans, acidification of Odanabi.com oil prices Olin College of Engineering 1G wireless networks 123D Catch ONOS (Open Network Operating System) On the Origin of Species (Darwin) open-source community open-source software OpenStack opinion writing, craft of Opportunity@Work Oracle SQL Orenstein, Peggy Origin of Wealth, The (Beinhocker) Ornstein, Norm Oromo people Osofsky, Justin Ottoman Empire outsourcing ownership; political innovation and; resilience and ozone layer Packard, Wayne Pakistan Palantir Technologies Paleolithic era Palestine Palestine Liberation Organization Palmer, Arnold Palm Pilot Paprocki, Loren Parenti, Christian Paris climate agreement (2016) Park Nicollet Health Services passwords patents, technological change and patience pausing, importance of Pawlenty, Tim PayPal; Working Capital of Peace Corps, expansion of Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on peer-to-peer payment system Periscope (app) Perry, Matthew Persian Gulf personal drones Personal Genetics Program pesticides, overuse of Peter Hobart Elementary School Petritsch, Wolfgang phase changes, supernova and Philippines Phillips, Richard phosphorus “Physics in Finance: Trading at the Speed of Light” (Nature) “ping” command PINs Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley (Clodd) Pires, Clint Placed Inc.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

Alan Greenspan, business process, full employment, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, McMansion, PalmPilot, place-making, post-work, sexual politics, telemarketer, union organizing, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero day

The ideal case—and I've read that the technology for this is just around the corner—would be the consumer whose Palm Pilot displays the menu and prices for every restaurant or store he or she passes. Even without such technological assistance, affluent job hunters expect to study the salary-benefit packages offered by their potential employers, watch the financial news to find out if these packages are in line with those being offered in other regions or fields, and probably do a little bargaining before taking a job. But there are no Palm Pilots, cable channels, or Web sites to advise the low-wage job seeker. She has only the help-wanted signs and the want ads to go on, and most of these coyly refrain from mentioning numbers.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

The output of “black box” artificial intelligence tools can’t ever be predicted. So they can never be truly and verifiably “safe.” * * * But they’ll likely play a big role in AGI systems. Many researchers today believe pattern recognition—what Rosenblatt’s Perceptron aimed for—is our brain’s chief tool for intelligence. The inventor of the Palm Pilot and Handspring Treo, Jeff Hawkins, pioneered handwriting recognition with ANNs. His company, Numenta, aims to crack AGI with pattern recognition technology. Dileep George, once Numenta’s Chief Technology Officer, now heads up Vicarious Systems, whose corporate ambition is stated in their slogan: We’re Building Software that Thinks and Learns Like a Human.

…

Well, with some notable exceptions, that’s more or less the state of affairs right now, and even so, AGI research is moving steadily ahead. Consider how Goertzel’s OpenCog stays afloat. Parts of its architecture are up and running, and busily analyzing biological data and solving power grid problems, for a fee. Profits go back into research-and-development for OpenCog. Numenta, Inc., brainchild of Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot and Treo, earns its living by working inside electrical power supplies to anticipate failures. For about a decade, Peter Voss developed his AGI company, Adaptive AI, in “stealth” mode, widely lecturing about AGI but not revealing how he planned to tackle it. Then in 2007 he launched Smart Action, a company that uses Adaptive AI’s technology to empower Virtual Agents.

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter by Dr. Dan Ariely, Jeff Kreisler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Burning Man, collateralized debt obligation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, endowment effect, experimental economics, hedonic treadmill, IKEA effect, impact investing, invisible hand, loss aversion, mental accounting, mobile money, PalmPilot, placebo effect, price anchoring, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, the payments system, Uber for X, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

Instead, we compare things in the same category—cars to cars, phones to phones, computers to computers, widgets to widgets. Imagine we bought the first iPhone, which was the only smartphone at the time. There was no similar product to compare it to, so what would we compare it to? (Yes, Palm Pilot and BlackBerry were around back then, but the iPhone was so far ahead as to be a completely different category of product. Also, Palm Pilot? No thanks, Grandpa). How would we figure out if it was worth the cost? When Apple first introduced the iPhone, the price was $600. A few weeks later, the company reduced the price to $400. That created a new category to which to compare the iPhone—the first iPhone, which was, in fact, the identical iPhone at a different price.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It by Kelly McGonigal

banking crisis, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, delayed gratification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Easter island, game design, impulse control, lifelogging, loss aversion, low interest rates, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, PalmPilot, phenotype, Richard Thaler, social contagion, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Tragedy of the Commons, Walter Mischel

If the world doesn’t end without you watching every private and global crisis unfold (prediction: It won’t), consider cutting out mindless consumption of these media. THE WHAT - THE - HELL EFFECT: WHY GUILT DOESN’T WORK Before he ordered a Guinness from the bartender, a forty-year-old man pulled out his Palm Pilot. First beer, 9:04 p.m. His intention to drink? Two beers, tops. Several miles away, a young woman arrived at a fraternity house. Ten minutes later, she typed into her Palm Pilot: One shot of vodka. The party was just starting! These drinkers were part of a study by psychologists and addiction researchers at the State University of New York and the University of Pittsburgh. A group of 144 adults, ages eighteen to fifty, had been given handheld personal computers to keep track of their drinking.

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica by Nicholas Johnson

Apollo 13, Easter island, intentional community, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Milgram experiment, Neil Armstrong, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, post-work, Ronald Reagan, telerobotics, trade route, young professional

A few days earlier our manager had emailed us reminding us to talk with him first before bringing up anything new at the meeting. Chairs were brought for them from the office, we introduced ourselves one by one, and said where we were from and how long we had been in The Program. Erick Chiang took notes on a pad of paper, and Tom Yelvington used a Palm Pilot. Erick asked what we thought would improve the Waste Operation. Suggestions abounded, most of them involving the replacement or improvement of capital equipment, which would probably be the proposal of many departments; budgets must be met, and none of us expected that Waste would take priority, since our equipment was adequate for the most part.

…

He said that a thirdparty consultant had been hired, and their task was to make sure that wages were the same as market wages in CONUS for equivalent job descriptions. Someone asked him, “Will they take into account that we work a 54-hour week instead of a 40-hour week?” “Now that’s a good question. To tell you the truth—I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. And I’m going to get back to you on that.” He scribbled on his Palm Pilot. About a year later, when the “compensation structure” review was completed, we received an email from Tom Yelvington in Denver saying that no significant changes to wages were needed in order to attract and retain talented employees. I sent a query up the chain of command asking again whether the compensation structure survey was based on a 40- or 54-hour workweek.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics by William R. Easterly

Andrei Shleifer, business climate, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, endogenous growth, financial repression, foreign exchange controls, Gini coefficient, government statistician, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, large denomination, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Money creation, Network effects, New Urbanism, open economy, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

I can also access the Internet, another new technology, and read thousands of economics papers and check other information web sites. I did a lot of research for this book over the web. I can get the e-mail addresses and telephone numbers of other economists from the web. I store those addresses and phone numbers on a Sharp electronic organizer that is today nearly obsolete compared to the Palm Pilot but did not exist at all a few years ago. Thecoffee I guzzle as I work is Starbucks’ high-quality coffee, another product unavailable a few years ago. I used tobe limited in my supply of good coffee to what I could get on occasional trips to Bogoti, Colombia; otherwise I was stuck with the horrors of the grocery store brand.

…

Demonstrators at the Prague2000 annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to express their disenchantment with globaleconomic growth. The most obvious vested interest that has an incentive to oppose creatively destructivegrowthisthe groupworkingwiththeold technologies. I resist the new Palm Pilot palmtop computer because I have all my telephone numbers in the now obsolete Sharp Wizard electronic organizer. More generally, there will bea coalition of workers and corporations in the old industries pleading for protection against the new technology. When the newtechnology is coming from abroad, this often translates into protection against competing imports made with the new, moreefficient technology.

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals by Daniel R. Solin

Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, buy and hold, corporate governance, diversification, diversified portfolio, index fund, John Bogle, market fundamentalism, money market fund, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, prediction markets, prudent man rule, random walk, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, transaction costs, Vanguard fund, zero-sum game

I give some examples of this erroneous advice in the next chapter, which is aptly entitled "Financial Pornography," because that is what this "advice" is. Even if you find the financial media entertaining, you should ignore everything you read in the magazines and news~ papers, everything you see and hear on the television and everything that you pay to have pumped into your Palm Pilot or BlackBerry that purportS to tell you where the markets are headed or whether or not a particular stock or fund should be bought or sold. The financial media (with rare exceptions, such as Canadian economic journalist Jonathan Chevreau, The Wall Street jQumafs Jonathan Clements, and well~respec t ed American economic journalist Jane Bryant Quinn) are part of the problem.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age by Duncan J. Watts

AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, business process, corporate governance, Drosophila, Erdős number, experimental subject, fixed income, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, independent contractor, industrial cluster, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, Milgram experiment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, power law, public intellectual, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social distancing, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Y2K

Networks of social information, moreover, are important not just because they help us make better individual decisions but also because they allow things that have caught on in one setting to spill over into another. Since this kind of spillover is critical to the dynamics of a cascade, social networks are central to the notion of a little thing becoming big. When 3Com released its first version of the Palm Pilot, only the most radical aficionados of technology bought them. This small group of people, mostly engineers and technology workers in Silicon Valley and the encompassing Bay Area of northern California, didn’t need anyone else’s say-so in order to have the newest new thing. What they really cared about was the innovation itself—they just had to have it, regardless of what anyone else thought.

…

And the presence of these multiple active influences is sufficient to exceed the thresholds of even quite stable nodes, so they start to activate as well. This event, when it happens, is what the business consultant and writer Geoffrey Moore calls crossing the chasm, referring to the leap a successful innovation (like our example of Palm Pilots from before) needs to make from its initial community of early adopters to the much larger general population. At the lower boundary, there is no such chasm to be crossed, just early adopting clusters of different sizes. Only at the upper boundary is it important not only that the innovator find the early adopters but that the early adopters be in a position to exert their collective influence on the early and late majorities.

The Future of Technology by Tom Standage

air freight, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, creative destruction, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, double helix, experimental economics, financial engineering, Ford Model T, full employment, hydrogen economy, hype cycle, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, interchangeable parts, job satisfaction, labour market flexibility, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, railway mania, rent-seeking, RFID, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart grid, software as a service, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jurvetson, technological determinism, technology bubble, telemarketer, transcontinental railway, vertical integration, Y2K

Being chained to your desktop is out: mobility is in. The titan of the computer industry has set its sights on an entirely new market. It is not alone. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other computer-makers have diversified into handheld computers, which increasingly have wireless connectivity and even full-fledged mobile telephony built in. The Palm Pilot, originally an electronic organiser, has metamorphosed into the Treo, a far more elaborate device which also incorporates a mobile phone, e-mail and wireless internet access. As the computer industry tries to cram pcs into pocket-sized devices, the mobile-phone industry has arrived at the same point – but from the opposite direction.

…

O’Neil, David 73 O’Neil, John 28, 30 OneSaf 197 online banks 37 online shopping viii, 37 open standards 7, 10, 22–7, 31, 38, 43, 85–7, 115, 118–19, 152 operating systems 9, 10, 23–5, 31, 38, 85, 101, 109 operators, mobile phones 157–61, 162–9 Opsware 8, 15 optical-character recognition 121 Oracle 5, 20–2, 33, 38, 39–40, 46, 56, 62, 86, 243 Orange 157–8 organic IT 13–16, 88 original design manufacturers (ODMs), mobile phones 156–7 O’Roarke, Brian 192 O’Roarke, John 96 Orr, Scott 187 orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) 212–13, 215–17 INDEX Otellini, Paul 11, 95 outshored developments, software 38, 115, 138–9 outsourcing viii, 9, 19–20, 22, 38, 68–9, 71, 72, 88–92, 112–46, 158–60 see also globalisation barriers 121–2, 143 concepts 112–46 costs 112–24, 131–5, 140–3 cultural issues 122, 142 Europe 140–6 historical background 119–20, 125–6, 133 India 38, 109, 112–15, 119–22, 125–35, 137–8, 140–6 legal agreements 121–4 mobile phones 155–6, 158–60 opportunities 144–6 protectionists 140–6 reasons 123–4, 143 services 113–30 social outsourcing 143 “overshoot” stage, industries 9, 10–11, 109 overview vii–x, 6–7 Ovi, Alessandro 275–6 Oxford GlycoSciences 243 P Pacific Cycle 140 Page, Larry 9 Pait, Rob 207 Palladium 74, 76 Palm Pilot 150 Palmisano, Samuel 22 Paltrow, Gwyneth 173 Panasonic 156 Papadopoulos, Greg 14, 78–9, 83–4, 91 Papadopoulos, Stelios 237 Parker, Andrew 143 Parks Associates 96, 203 Parr, Doug 319 particulate filters 296–7 passwords 53, 58–61, 67, 96–7 patents, nanotechnology 321–6, 329 Patriot Act, America 35 PCs 9–16, 78–81, 82–110, 151, 171–3, 202–18 see also digital homes; hardware commoditisation issues 9–16, 132–5, 203 complexity issues 78–81, 82–110 screen sizes 100–1 UWB 214–18 Wi-Fi 209–18 PDAs see personal digital assistants Peck, Art 203 PentaSafe Security 60 Pentium chips 199–200 PeopleSoft 39, 86, 119, 126, 132 Perez, Carlota 5–6, 134 performance issues see also processing power; returns cars 291–8 Cell chips 198–200 cost links 29–30 Perlegen 244 personal digital assistants (PDAs) 151, 277, 279 see also handheld computers personal video recorders (PVRs) 203, 205–6 perverse incentives, security issues 61–2 Pescatore, John 55 Pfizer 69, 240, 247, 312, 315 pharmaceutical companies 239–40, 241–50, 312 PHAs 260 Philippines 130 Philips 120, 217 “phishing” 76, 89 phonograph 82, 84 photo-voltaic cells 280 photos ix, 78, 95, 101, 179–83 Physiome 248 Picardi, Tony 79 Pick, Adam 156 Pink Floyd 225 Piper, H. 292 Pittsburgh convention centre 304 Pivotal 187 plasma screens 230–2 plastics 238–9, 259–64 PlayStation 191–2, 199–200, 206–7 plug-and-play devices 78 plug-in hybrid cars 295–6 Poland 120 police involvement, security breaches 72 polio 265 politics 32–5 see also governments Pollard, John 157 pollution 275, 296–7, 299–304, 319 Pop Idol (TV show) 225 Pope, Alexander 267 Porsche 292 “post-technology” period, IT industry vii, 5–7 Powell, Michael 98, 206 power grids 233, 285–90 PowerPoint presentations 4–5, 107 Predictive Networks 337 Presley, Elvis 225 prices, downward trends viii, 4–7 PricewaterhouseCoopers 38 printers 78, 96 privacy issues 27, 34, 42–8, 179–83 see also security... mobile phones 179–83 processing power see also computer chips 353 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY exponential growth 4–7, 8–14 Proctor, Donald 106 Prodi, Romano 274–5 profits, future prospects 7, 17–18, 37–40 proprietary technology 24, 26, 80, 86 protectionists, outsourcing 140–6 proteins, biotechnology 241–64 protocols, complexity issues 86 Proxim 210 Prozac 315 PSA Peugeot Citroën 293, 296–7 PSP, Sony 191–3 public accounts 44 Pullin, Graham 177–8 PVRs see personal video recorders Q Qualcomm 164 quantum dots 312, 317, 322, 325 R radiation fears, mobile phones 176 radio 34–5, 36, 39, 94–5, 108, 155–61, 164, 209–18, 223 see also wireless... chips 155–61, 164 “garbage bands” 209–10, 215 music industry 223 spectrum 34–5, 94–5, 209–18 UWB 96–7, 214–19 Radjou, Navi 333–4 railway age vii, 5, 7, 23, 36, 39, 134 Raleigh, Greg 211 RAND 195 rationalisation exercises 31 RCA 108–9, 206, 208, 220, 315 real-world skills, gaming comparisons 194–7 RealNetworks 203 rechargeable batteries 280–4 Recourse Technologies 62–3 Reed, Philip 177 regulations 35, 44, 209–10, 326–9 see also legal issues relational databases 101–2 reliability needs viii, 42–8 religion 19 renewable energy 275–6, 286, 289, 300, 310, 315 ReplayTV 205 Research in Motion (RIM) 152–3 resistance problems, employees 31 return on investment (ROI) 30–1 returns 20, 29–31, 329 see also performance issues risk 20, 30, 329 revenue streams biotechnology 237–8, 241–2 354 gaming 189–90, 191 GM 251–2 mobile phones 151, 154–5, 157, 162–3, 165–6, 174 nanotechnology 321–6 revolutionary ideas vii–viii, 5–7, 13–14, 36–40, 80–4, 107–10, 116, 134, 151–3, 198–200, 236–40, 326–9 RFID radio tags 39, 94–5 Rhapsody 203 Ricardo 296–7 Riley, James, Lieutenant-Colonel 195–7 RIM see Research in Motion ringtones 165–6 RISC chips 200 risk assessments 70–4, 76 attitudes 18 handling methods 71 insurance policies 71–3 management 70–4 mitigation 71–3 outsourced risk 71, 72, 88–92 returns 20, 30, 329 security issues 42–8, 49–69, 70–4 RNA molecules 241–2, 249–50, 265 Robinson, Shane 15–16 robotics x, 233, 316, 332–5 Roco, Mihail 309 Rodgers, T.J. 32 Rofheart, Martin 216–17 Rogers, Richard 300 ROI see return on investment Rolls, Steve 121 Romm, Joseph 298 Roomba 332, 334–5 “root kit” software 51 Rose, John 226 Roslin Institute 256 Roy, Raman 125–8 Russia 115, 130, 140, 142, 145, 319 Ryan, John 312 S S700 mobile phone 171 Saffo, Paul 83–4, 103, 182 Salesforce.com 19, 20, 84, 91–2, 109 Samsung 158–60, 181, 208, 217, 231, 277 Santa Fe Institute 39 SAP 22, 38, 86, 119, 126, 132 satellite television 205 Saudi Arabia 180 scandals 28 scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) 306 SCC see Sustainable Computing Consortium Schadler, Ted 95, 97 Schainker, Robert 285, 289 INDEX Scherf, Kurt 96–7 Schmelzer, Robert 91 Schmidt, Eric 9, 35, 36–8 Schmidt, Nathan 66 Schneider National 29–31 Schneier, Bruce 43, 58, 61–2, 65, 70, 73–4 schools, surveillance technology 181 Schwartz, John 46 Schwinn 140, 143 Scott, Tony 43, 68–9 screen sizes 100–1 screws 23–4 Seagate Technology 207 seamless computing 96–7 Sears, Roebuck & Co 36 Securities and Exchange Commission 321 security issues viii, 25–7, 32–5, 42–8, 49–74, 86–7 see also privacy... airport approach 68–9 anti-virus software 50–1, 60, 67–8 biometric systems 60, 64–5, 71, 74 breaches 43–4, 46, 49–52, 62, 72–3 civil liberties 74 concepts 42–74, 86–7 costs 45–6, 50–1, 62, 70–4 employees 58–63, 69 encryption 53–4 firewalls 51–3, 58, 60, 62, 66–8, 71, 86–7 hackers 4, 43, 47, 49, 51–3, 58–63 handheld computers 67–8 honeypot decoys 62–3 human factors 57–63, 69 identity management 69 IDSs 51, 53–4, 62, 87 impact assessments 70–1, 76 insider attacks 62–3 insurance policies 71–3 internet 35, 42–8, 49–57, 61–2, 66, 66–7, 71, 73–6, 179–83 job vacancies 46 joint ventures 67 major threats 35, 42, 43, 47, 49–63, 66–9 management approaches 60–3, 69 Microsoft 54–6, 72, 74, 76 misconceptions 46–8 networks 42–8, 49–65, 66–9 passwords 53, 58–61, 67, 96–7 patches 56–7, 76 perverse incentives 61–2 police involvement 72 risk assessments 70–4, 76 standards 71–3 terrorism 35, 42, 43, 50, 65, 74, 75–6, 265–6 tools 49–63, 86–7 viruses 45, 47, 49–56, 59–60, 67–8, 74, 86, 89 Wi-Fi 66–7, 93 sedimentation factors 8–9, 84 segmentation issues, mobile phones 167–9 self-configuration concepts 88–9 Sellers, William 23 Seminis 254 Sendo 160 Senegal 182 September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks 35, 42, 43, 50, 65, 75 servers 9–16, 37–8, 62–3, 85–7, 132–3, 203 services industry 14, 17–22, 25–7, 31, 36–40, 80, 88–92, 109, 113–35, 203 see also web services outsourcing 113–46 session initiation protocol (SIP) 104–6 sewing machines 82, 84 SG Cowen 237 shapes, mobile phones 170–6 Shapiro, Carl 24 Sharp 156, 231, 326 shelfware phenomenon 20 Shelley, Mary 267, 269 shipping costs 121 sick building syndrome 302 Siebel 86 Siemens 120, 130, 142, 156, 159, 170, 172, 174 SightSpeed 84, 98, 103 SilentRunner 62 Silicon Valley 9, 32–40, 45–6, 54, 69, 79, 96, 98, 101, 103, 152, 313–14, 321 silk 263, 269 Simon, Herbert 336 simplicity needs 78–81, 84, 87, 88–92, 98–110 SIP see session initiation protocol Sircam virus 45, 49 Sirkin, Hal 120, 140 “six sigma” methods 128 SK 169 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 302 Sky 205 Skype 103–4, 110 Sloan School of Management, MIT 30 Slovakia 120 small screens 100 Smalley, Richard 311 smallpox 265–6 smart power grids 233, 285–90 smartcards 64, 69 smartphones 150–3, 157–61 see also mobile phones SMES devices 289 Smith Barney 37 Smith, George 307–8 Smith, Lamar 75 Smith, Vernon 17 SNP 243–4 SOAP 25–7 355 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY social issues mobile phones 177–8, 182–3 music players 220–1 social outsourcing 143 software see also information technology ASPs 19–20, 91–2, 109 bugs 20–1, 54–6 Cell chips 198–200 commoditisation issues 10–16, 25, 132–5, 159, 203 complexity issues 14–15, 78–81, 82–110, 117–22 firewalls 52–3, 58, 86–7 hackers 51–3, 58–63 Java programming language 21–2, 25, 86 management software 13–16, 21–2, 88, 117–18 mobile phones 158–9 natural-language search software 339–40 operating systems 9, 10, 23–5, 31, 38, 85, 101, 109 outsourcing 38, 115, 138–9 patches 56–7, 76 premature releases 20–1 shelfware phenomenon 20 viruses 45, 47, 49–56, 59–60, 67, 74, 89 solar power 275–6, 286, 289, 301–2, 310, 315, 325 Solectron 112–13, 119 solid-state storage media 204, 207, 219 SOMO... project, mobile phones 177–8 Sony 95, 108, 156, 191–3, 198–200, 203, 206–7, 217, 228, 231, 282–4, 332, 334, 338 Sony Ericsson 156, 158, 159–60, 171 Sony/BMG 222–3, 227, 229 Sood, Rahul 38 Sorrent 187 South Africa 309, 319, 334 South Korea 156, 158, 163–5, 167–9, 170–1, 181, 319 soyabean crops 252–4 spam 76, 89, 118 Spar, Debora 32–3 speculation vii speech recognition 102, 121, 336 SPH-V5400 mobile phone 208 Spider-Man 189–90 Spinks, David 60–1, 63 Spitzer, Eliot 223 Sprint 167–8, 180–1 SQL 53 @Stake 54 Standage, Ella 316 standards green buildings 300–4 open standards 7, 10, 22–7, 31, 38, 43, 85–7, 115, 118–19, 152 356 security issues 71–3 W-CDMA standard 163–4, 168 web services 90–1 Wi-Fi 210–13 Stanford University 82, 137 Star Wars (movie) 186 steam power ix, 5, 134 steel industry 134 steering committees 31 stem cells 268–9 Steven Winter Associates 302 Stewart, Martha 249 STM see scanning tunnelling microscope stop-start hybrid cars 293–4 storage problems, electricity 275–6, 289–90 StorageTek 85 strategy 30 stress-resistance, biotechnology 254 Studio Daniel Libeskind 302 Sturiale, Nick 45 Sun Microsystems 9, 13–15, 21–2, 25, 27, 37–8, 43, 56, 58, 78–9, 83, 85, 87, 91, 102 supercomputers 199–200 Superdome machines 21 supply chains 8, 37–40, 155 surveillance technology 35, 74, 179–83, 309 Sussex University 5, 220, 310 Sustainable Computing Consortium (SCC) 27 Sweden 109 Swiss Army-knife design, mobile phones 171–2 Swiss Re Tower, 30 St Mary Axe 299, 301–2, 304 swivel design, mobile phones 171 Symantec 39, 46, 50, 62–3, 67 Symbian 158 Symbol 210 synthetic materials 258–64, 317 systems analysts 137 T T-Mobile 167–8 Taiwan 156–7, 160 Talwar, Vikram 144 Taylor, Andy 226 Taylor, Carson 287 TCP/IP 25 TCS 132–5, 145–6 Teague, Clayton 314 TechNet 33 techniques, technology 17–18 techno-jewellery design, mobile phones 172–4 technology see also individual technologies concepts vii–x, 4–7, 17–18, 23–7, 32–3, 82–4, 134, 326–9 cultural issues 93–4, 142 INDEX geekiness problems 83–4 government links 7, 18, 27, 31–5, 43–8, 123–4, 179–83, 209–10 Luddites 327 surveillance technology 35, 74, 179–83, 309 Tehrani, Rich 105 telecommunications viii, 23, 26, 103–6, 134, 164–5 telegraph 32–3, 108 telephone systems 84, 103–6, 109–10, 212–13, 214 Telia 109 terrorism 35, 42, 43, 50, 65, 74, 75–6, 265–6 Tesco 168 Tetris 12 Texas Energy Centre 287 Texas Instruments 125–6, 217 text-messaging facilities 165, 167 Thelands, Mike 164 therapeutic antibodies 249–50, 256–7 Thiercy, Max 339–40 thin clients 102 third-generation mobile phone networks (3G) 151, 162–9, 212 Thomas, Jim 318 Thomson, Ken 59 Thornley, Tony 164 3G networks see third-generation mobile phone networks TIA see Total Information Awareness TiVo 203, 205–6 Tomb Raider (game/movie) 187–8 Toshiba 156, 198–200, 203 Total Information Awareness (TIA) 35 toxicity issues, nanotechnology 316–17, 319, 328–9 Toyota 291–5, 297, 300–1, 334 toys see also gaming robotics 334 transatlantic cable 36, 39 transistors 4–7, 8–12, 85–7, 109 see also computer chips Transmeta 313 Treat, Brad 84, 98 Tredennick, Nick 10–11 Treo 150, 153 “Trojan horse” software 51–2 True Crime (game) 187 TruSecure 52, 60, 63 TTPCom 155–6 Tuch, Bruce 210 TVs see also video recorders flat-panel displays ix, 94, 147, 202–3, 230–2, 311 hard disks 204–8 screens 202–3, 230–2 set-top boxes 203, 205–6 UWB 214–18 Wi-Fi 212–18 U UBS Warburg 31, 45, 80–1, 89, 170, 174 UDDI 25–7 ultrawideband (UWB) 96–7, 214–19 UMTS see W-CDMA standard “undershoot” stage, industries 9, 109 UNECE 332–4 Ungerman, Jerry 52 Unimate 332–3 United Airlines 27 Universal Music 222–3, 226–7 Unix 9, 25, 85, 108 USB ports 78 usernames 59 USGBC 300–2 utility companies, cyber-terrorism threats 75–6 utility factors 7, 16, 17, 19–22, 42–8 UWB see ultrawideband V V500 mobile phone 157 vaccines 265–6 Vadasz, Les 33 Vail, Tim 290 value added 5–7, 37–40, 133, 138–9 value transistors 11 van Nee, Richard 211 Varian, Hal 24 VC see venture capital Veeco Instruments 324 vendors complexity issues 84–110 consumer needs 94–7 Venter, Craig 262–3, 271 venture capital (VC) 12, 31, 45, 79, 92, 107, 126–7, 238, 308, 321–6 Verdia 254–5, 261 Veritas 39, 85 Vertex 247 vertical integration, mobile phones 156–61 Vertu brand 173–4 Viacom 224 video phone calls 84, 103–6, 164–5, 167–8 video recorders see also TVs DVRs 205–6 handheld video players 206 hard disks 204–8 PVRs 203, 205–6 Wi-Fi 212–13 video searches, Google 11 357 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, America 180 video-game consoles see gaming Virgin 95, 160, 167–8 Virgin Mobile 160, 167–8 virtual private networks (VPNs) 54, 68, 86–7 virtual tissue, biotechnology 248 virtualisation concepts 15–16, 88–92 viruses 45, 47, 49–56, 59–60, 67–8, 74, 86, 89 anti-virus software 50–1, 60, 67–8 concepts 49–56, 59–60, 74 costs 50–1 double-clicking dangers 59–60 Vista Research 46, 62, 67 Vodafone 164–5 voice conversations internet 103–6 mobile phones 165–9, 171 voice mail 104–6 voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) 103–6, 167 Vonage 104, 110 VPNs see virtual private networks W W3C see World Wide Web Consortium W-CDMA standard 163–4, 168 Waksal, Sam 249 Wal-Mart 95, 114–15, 131–2, 140, 224, 228 Walkman 192 warfare AI 338 biotechnology 265–6 gaming comparisons 195–7, 339 nanotechnology 319 Warner Music 222–3, 226–7 Watson, James 236, 247, 271 web services 21–2, 25–7, 31, 80, 88–92, 109, 203 see also internet; services... complexity issues 88–92, 109 standards 90–1 Webster, Mark 211 WECA see Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance Weill, Peter 30 Welland, Mark 318 Western Union 33, 108 Westinghouse Electric 332 wheat 253 white page 99–100 Wi-Fi 34–5, 66–7, 93, 95–7, 153, 203, 209–18 concepts 209–18 forecasts 209, 212–13 historical background 209–13 hotspots 211–12 mobile phones 212 standards 210–13 358 threats 212–13 UWB 214–18 Wilkerson, John 237 Williams, Robbie 222, 226 Wilsdon, James 318 WiMax 212–13 WiMedia 213 Wimmer, Eckard 265 wind power 275–6, 286, 289–90, 302 Windows 15, 24–5, 55–6, 96, 101, 108, 152, 203 Windows Media Center 203 WinFS 101 Wipro 112, 115, 120–1, 125–9, 131–5, 138, 145–6 Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) 211 wireless technology ix, 11, 34–5, 39, 66–7, 93, 95–7, 109–10, 147, 150–3, 167, 168–9, 171–3, 203, 209–13, 334 see also Wi-Fi Bluetooth wireless links 171–2, 173, 214–15, 218 concepts 209–13, 334 historical background 209–13 Wladawsky-Berger, Irving vii, 5, 19, 22, 25, 38–9 Wolfe, Josh 323 Wong, Leonard 195 Wood, Ben 156–7, 160, 174 Woodcock, Steven 338–9 Word 84, 107 work-life balance 80–1, 94 see also employees World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 25 worm viruses 49–50, 59, 86, 89 Wright, Myles 118 “ws splat” 90–1 WSDL 25–7 X x-ray crystallography 247–8 Xbox 189, 206–7 Xelibri mobile phones 170, 172, 174 Xerox 108–9 XML see extensible markup language XtremeSpectrum 216 Y Y2K crisis 76, 126, 128 Yagan, Sam 229 Yanagi, Soetsu 84 Yurek, Greg 288 Z ZapThink 91

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase

Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application

63 Chris eventually completed his bachelors as well as a master’s degree much later, while working at Google. 64 Google still has that same text-box-and-two-buttons search page, although there are now a large variety of other projects that Google is known (and rumored) to be working on that attract a wider variety of software developers. But in 2005, search, ads, and web apps were about it. 65 PDA = Personal Digital Assistant. This type of device, of which the Palm Pilot was probably the most successful incarnation, carried useful information like a calendar, contacts, and note-taking apps. PDAs basically went away once smartphones became common and provided a superset of PDA functionality plus communications. 66 OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer, a company that makes the actual hardware. 67 Mathias said, “Actually the 6 years were expired.

…

One of Android’s unique and powerful features, since the very beginning, was its system of notifications, alerting the user to information from their installed applications, even if they weren’t using those applications at the time. Before smartphones, notifications were simpler (and less useful). Early data devices, like the Palm Pilot PDAs, had alert features in calendar and alarm apps. The user could configure these applications to play a noise, show a dialog, or illuminate an LED. Alerts of this sort were therefore limited to things the user thought to enter. All of the data on the device was created and synced by the user; there wasn’t information coming out of the ether onto the device.

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones by James E. Gaskin

Debian, decentralized internet, end-to-end encryption, Ford Model T, packet switching, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, telemarketer

Packets in, packets routed, packets delivered. When intelligence is expensive, such as nearly 100 years ago when AT&T started building the network, centralizing the intelligence makes sense. But now intelligence, in the form of processing power, is cheap and portable. Somewhere, no doubt, someone has measured the processing power of a Palm Pilot against the collective intelligence of all the switches in New York City in 1912 or some such. The point is clear: intelligence and processing power is now extremely inexpensive, and the capabilities of the basic telephone connected to the telephone network was long ago surpassed by intelligent devices attached to the Internet.

…

Packets in, packets routed, packets delivered. When intelligence is expensive, such as nearly 100 years ago when AT&T started building the network, centralizing the intelligence makes sense. But now intelligence, in the form of processing power, is cheap and portable. Somewhere, no doubt, someone has measured the processing power of a Palm Pilot against the collective intelligence of all the switches in New York City in 1912 or some such. The point is clear: intelligence and processing power is now extremely inexpensive, and the capabilities of the basic telephone connected to the telephone network was long ago surpassed by intelligent devices attached to the Internet.

Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street by Erik Banks

accounting loophole / creative accounting, borderless world, business cycle, corporate governance, deal flow, estate planning, fixed income, greed is good, junk bonds, old-boy network, PalmPilot, risk/return, rolodex, Savings and loan crisis, telemarketer

They don’t care much for each other, but, like their trading brethren, they need each other, so they try and tolerate each other’s differences. Bankers come in a few different flavors: relationship managers, corporate finance generalists, and industry/deal specialists. The relationship bankers are the big-big-big-picture folks who have very contact-rich Rolodexes/Palm Pilots and know how to charm and impress their clients. They can wax eloquent for hours about a lot of general business and The Right Match: Finding Your Ideal Job | 51 banking topics, but can’t talk for more than a minute about the nuts and bolts of a complicated banking product or deal. They play lots of golf with chairmen and CEOs, CFOs and finance ministers, talking high-level strategy about what the client needs to do to get ahead.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

But the record industry's > credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced. Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since — I really like Patrick!). Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup.

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter by Scaachi Koul

affirmative action, airport security, David Sedaris, feminist movement, microaggression, PalmPilot

Why should I have to dress up when guys can wear whatever they want?” I listened to Avril Lavigne and recited the lyrics as if they were my own thoughts; I watched CNN because I didn’t want to be a frivolous teen; I had crushes on adult men like Jon Stewart and Rahm Emanuel and hot dads at the mall with salt-and-pepper hair and Palm Pilots. But in truth, I just didn’t know if I was allowed to look like a “cute girl” if my body was bigger than the other girls I knew, if my skin was darker, if I was more sullen than sugar. I hid in muted drapery hoping no one would notice or, better yet, they would assume I was just a very tough, genderless sphere.

Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland

Berlin Wall, index card, Maui Hawaii, PalmPilot, Silicon Valley, telemarketer

He almost hummed with relief in the mornings when he learned we could talk at breakfast. Apparently, that was forbidden growing up. Reg must have been pretty gruesome back then. Jason also had this thing called the glory-meter. A glory-meter was an invisible device Jason said almost everybody carries around with them, a Palm Pilot-ish gadget that goes ding-ding-ding whenever we come up with a salve to try to inflate our sense of importance. Examples would be “I make the best sour cherry pie in Vancouver” “My dachshund has the silkiest fur of all the dogs in the park” “My spreadsheets have the most sensibly ordered fields” “I won the 500-yard dash in my senior year.”

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley by Cary McClelland

affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer vision, creative destruction, driverless car, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, full employment, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, high net worth, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Loma Prieta earthquake, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, open immigration, PalmPilot, rent control, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, young professional

The Economist did an article, saying that Apple was going to decline: “We haven’t seen anything revolutionary out of them since the iPhone.” I happened to know the guy who wrote the article. I had lunch with him, just to kind of educate him. So I laid out all of these on the table . . . He starts laying out devices: a Sony Walkman, a Sharp organizer, a Palm Pilot V, an early generation BlackBerry, a Motorola Razr (one of the first flip phones), a DoCoMo phone, and a lineage of iPods and iPhones stretching from 2002 to the present. Now, if you look at this whole thing—and I said this to the journalist—“Is this incremental improvement? Or is it revolutionary?”

Free as in Freedom by Sam Williams

Asperger Syndrome, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Debian, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Eben Moglen, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, informal economy, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Larry Wall, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Maui Hawaii, Multics, Murray Gell-Mann, PalmPilot, profit motive, Project Xanadu, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, slashdot, software patent, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, urban renewal, VA Linux, Y2K

About half of the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone native. Dressed in the gaudy flowerprint shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces are a deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO laptops. Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin. His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest Hawaiian neck.

Time Management for System Administrators by Thomas A.Limoncelli

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, business cycle, Debian, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, PalmPilot, Steve Jobs

Let's take a look at each one of these principles in greater detail. One "Database" for Time Management Information The central tool for time management is your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or Personal Analog Assistant (PAA), which you will use to store your to do list, calendar, and life goals lists. I'm sure you know what a PDA is: a Palm Pilot, Zaurus, or similar product. A PAA is the paper equivalent. You've seen these in many shapes and forms and by names such as organizer, binder, planner, datebook, or even Filofax. Whether you choose to use a PDA or PAA, it will become the platform for just about every technique in the rest of the book.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game