Wednesday, August 14, 2013

quick snippet:

There have been two major developments in the consumer web in the last couple of weeks. Google announced the integration of GMail with Google Drive and Dropbox announced Dropbox chooser. With the GMail-Google Drive integrations, GMail users can now send links to files up to 10GB stored on Google Drive from inside the GMail interface. With Dropbox chooser, websites developers can allow users to access the photos, docs and videos in their Dropbox from within the web application.
While both announcements garnered their fair share of press attention, most failed to notice that these developments are only the tip of the iceberg with respect to the tectonic shifts afoot in the cloud computing space.
This integration of consumer cloud storage with the applications represents an interesting trend — one that Filepicker.io, my company, has been actively catalyzing and aggressively pushing forth on for a while now.
So what are these tectonic shifts, and what does it means to enterprise and independent developers, as well as ultimately to users?
The Death of Local Storage
Notice that both the Dropbox and the Google Drive developments are a marriage of storage with applications. Users are increasingly storing their content online in platforms and that means the death of local storage is near.
Facebook has become my defacto online photo hard drive, while friends with DSLRs use Picasa or Flickr for this purpose. I’ve passively collected a lot of family photos and work PDFs in Gmail. Evernote stores my memories. Google Docs, Box, Alfresco and Office Live have my documents. Even Youtube or Vimeo keeps a cache of my favorite videos. Users don’t realize it fully yet but the content you care about lives online now.

Recent Read: Amazon upending retail and Bezos

http://www.fastcompany.com/3014817/amazon-jeff-bezos

AmazonFresh Is Jeff Bezos' Last Mile Quest For Total Retail Domination

Amazon upended retail, but CEO Jeff Bezos -- who just bought The Washington Post for $250 million -- insists it’s still "Day One." What comes next? A relentless pursuit of cheaper goods and faster shipping. The competition is already gasping for breath.

The first thing you notice about Jeff Bezos is how he strides into a room.
A surprisingly diminutive figure, clad in blue jeans and a blue pinstripe button-down, Bezos flings open the door with an audible whoosh and instantly commands the space with his explosive voice, boisterous manner, and a look of total confidence. "How are you?" he booms, in a way that makes it sound like both a question and a high-decibel announcement

Each of the dozen buildings on Amazon's Seattle campus is named for a milestone in the company's history--Wainwright, for instance, honors its first customer. Bezos and I meet in a six-floor structure known as Day One North. The name means far more than the fact that Amazon, like every company in the universe, opened on a certain date (in this case, it's July 16, 1995). No, Day One is a central motivating idea for Bezos, who has been reminding the public since his first letter to shareholders in 1997 that we are only at Day One in the development of both the Internet and his ambitious retail enterprise. In one recent update for shareholders he went so far as to assert, with typical I-know-something-you-don't flair, that "the alarm clock hasn't even gone off yet." So I ask Bezos: "What exactly does the rest of day one look like?" He pauses to think, then exclaims, "We're still asleep at that!"

Recent Read: Inside the mind of Bezos (old 2004 article)

http://www.fastcompany.com/50541/inside-mind-jeff-bezos

On the morning of Thursday, March 6, 2003, Jeff Bezos chartered an Aerospatiale Gazelle helicopter in the remote reaches of southwest Texas. He knew the mountainous area from his teenage years, when he spent summers at his grandfather's ranch: At the Lazy G, he castrated and branded cattle, worked on a Caterpillar tractor, and laid pipes. Now he was interested in buying his own ranch. The chopper flew near Cathedral Mountain, a monumental pile of eroded rock rising sharply from the high plains to a peak of 6,860 feet. The stony soil below was covered by dense forests of live oak, Douglas fir, aspen, maple, ponderosa pine, madrone, Arizona cypress, and juniper. Bezos rode with his executive assistant, Elizabeth Korrell, as the chopper was piloted by a local legend, Charles "Cheater" Bella. The veteran airman had flown in Rambo III, and survived a crash into New Mexico's Organ Mountains. He'd even been hijacked in 1988, when a woman aimed a gun at him and forced him to land in the New Mexico State Penitentiary to break out her inmate husband.
That morning in March 2003, while carrying the richest and arguably most renowned passenger of his long career, Cheater nearly lost control of the copter in the powerful winds. He brought it to a quick landing, but the main rotor sliced into a cedar tree. The airframe split, and the helicopter rolled over and finally settled in the shallow waters of Calamity Creek. The copter was destroyed, but its passengers used their cell phones to call for help, and the U.S. Border Patrol sent a rescue party.
One year later, back at Amazon.com's headquarters in Seattle, Bezos shows no sign of the minor head laceration he was hospitalized for -- and no emotional trauma either. "People say that your life races before your eyes," he says. "This particular accident happened slowly enough that we had a few seconds to contemplate it." He lets out one of his famously booming laughs. Bezos's laugh is like a streak of exclamation points. He laughs much the way a businessman from an earlier era might have slapped your back or pounded the table. But it's a backslap that would break three of your ribs, and a table-pounding that might chop a wooden desk in half like a bravura karate stunt.
"I have to say, nothing extremely profound flashed through my head in those few seconds. My main thought was, This is such a silly way to die." He laughs and laughs and laughs. "It wasn't life-changing in any major way. I've learned a fairly tactical lesson from it, I'm afraid. The biggest takeaway is: Avoid helicopters whenever possible! They're not as reliable as fixed-wing aircraft." Then he laughs hysterically, as though his brush with death were the funniest thing imaginable.
It's tempting but too facile to dismiss Bezos as a guy enjoying a charmed life. His boundless optimism is matched only by his outrageous good luck. The chopper accident was just the latest hairy episode he has survived in nine years as founder and chief executive officer of Amazon. Back in 1997, when the book barons at Barnes & Noble launched their rival Web site, Forrester Research chief George Colony famously predicted that Bezos's little venture was "Amazon.toast." A lot of people in the press and on Wall Street -- and inside the company as well -- thought the critic was correct. But Bezos flourished. Later, when the collective delusion of the 1990s finally ended, Amazon's shares fell from $100 to $6. Bezos remained sanguine. "Jeff irrepressibly casts every challenge as an opportunity," says his longtime friend Linda Stone, a former executive at Apple and Microsoft.

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

2012 Reading list

2012 Reading List (completed books)

The Big Short
Boomerang
freakonomics
The name of the wind
Wise Man's Fear
A crown imperiled
Mist Born: Final Empire
Mist Born 2: Well of ascension
MistBorn 3: The hero of ages
Kill Shot (Vince Flynn)
MistBorn 4: The alloy of law
Super Freaknomics

Favorite TV shows

Currently watching

Suits
True blood
Sleepy hollow
Doctor Who
Game of thrones
White collar
Justified
House of cards
Person of interest
The good wife
Blue bloods
Orphan Black
Davinci demons
Hannibal
The mentalist
Ray Donovan
Californication
The black list
Falling skies
Elementary
The originals
House of lies

Favorites:

Battlestar Galactica
BSG: chrome and blood
Stargate SG1 and atlantis
Supernatural
Sherlock
Boston Legal
The practice
Greek
Fringe
Alias
Friends
Seinfield
Coupling
HIMYM
Kyle XY
Heroes
Dexter
Castle
Melrose place 2.0
Caprica
Firefly
Star trek TNG
Star trek: orig
Arrested development
Two and half men
Lost girl
X files
30 rock
Weeds
Nikita
24
Lost
Prison break
The west wing
Studio 60 on the sunset strip
Dresden files
Damages
4400
The dead zone (t s4)
Downtown Abbey
Homeland
The chicago code
The wire
Shield
Dark Blue
The state within
Political animals
Modern Family
Remington steele
The following
Smallville
Entourage
Las Vegas
Dark angel
Angel
Spartacus
Dirty sexy money
Sanctuary (S1,2)
Street hawk
Knight rider
Terminator: Sarah Connor chronicles
Mad men
Life
The Event
Breaking bad

Ok ish

The vampire diaries

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Email metadata and visualizing your life

Https://immersion.media.mit.edu/demo

If you don't use gmail and have Facebook then

Www.wolframalpha.com/Facebook

Thoughts