rob’s next move

Time to donate to the ACLU again...

Pretty cool video showing how vinyl records are made.

There are quite a few free/open-source key-value and document-oriented databases available now.

CouchDB and MongoDB are two most interesting from my perspective.  They have native JavaScript/JSON support and both allow simple map-reduce jobs written in JavaScript to be sent straight to the data store for processing.  You get some map-reduce with your datastore, as compared to getting a datastore (HBase) wtih your MapReduce (Hadoop).

Both the Google and Amazon datastores are very easy to use, but Google's is only available from the AppEngine runtime environment.  Amazon's SimpleDB is available outside of EC2, but the latency is much too high to be very useful.

Cassandra (which came from Facebook) looks solid from a design point-of-view, but its interfaces are quite low-level, creating a large barrier to adoption.

So the Web 2.0 applications of all of these products are pretty obvious.  How will they be used in the enterprise?

Augmented reality has, until now, struck me as one of the most useless applications of technology ever. 

This is different.  I could see this being immensely helpful for security.

I'm re-printing a complete post from Mark Cuban's blog.   It is brilliant.  Emphasis is mine.

The simplest way to create more jobs is to allow small business and entrepreneurs  to  spend less time and money on lawyers and accountants and redirect that intellectual and financial capital to the core competencies of their business.

Any new government policy that requires the hiring of lawyers and accountants will not lead to new jobs, it will lead to time and money being wasted and fewer jobs being created.

Like the administration before it, the current administration seems to have no concept of what it takes to start, run and grow a small business. None.

Here is a hint. If you want to see more jobs created by Small Businesses and entrepreneurs REDUCE the amount of paperwork required. Dramatically simplify the tax code. In other words, if you REDUCE THE OVERHEAD of small business, you effectively create capital for them through reduced costs. Not only do you improve their financial position, but you reduce that great big time suck known as dealing with your accountants and lawyers. The more time wasted with “professional services”, the less time spent doing your job. This seems to be a concept lost on government.

One last thing. It appears to be a goal of the administration to free up loans to small businesses. For the sake of this comment, let me re-define Small Business as those companies with fewer than 20 employees. There are exceptions, but more often than not, the stupidest thing a business of this size can do is borrow money. Its stressful enough for a small business in these times to be profitable. Add to that stress the need to repay a loan and success becomes far more difficult.

If we want to accelerate the formation and growth of these small businesses we need to first reduce the costs imposed on them by the government (at all levels) and then  simplify and reduce the costs of raising capital.  Forget government loan guarantees.  Make capital gains on investments up to $1mm in small companies tax free. Make this process paperwork free for the small business and a 1 page form for the investor.

Thats how we will see economic and job growth in this country

I've been looking at a lot of tools for enterprise software development recently.
DataNucleus is one of the most interesting.

It doesn't do anything new and it doesn't do anything that any number of tools can do better.

They want to be the last-word and one-stop-shop for large-scale data access.

They provide JPA, JDO and REST bindings to all different kinds of data stores: RDBMS, OODBMS, SimpleDB, Hadoop HBASE, etc.

Google uses it as the persistence engine for their AppEngine platform.  It is almost laughably simple to use with their schema-less data store.

A few years ago, VMWare's product lines were simple and straightforward.  Now they are bewildering.   (The screenshot is from their website)

What is the point of a bazillion add-on products?

I suspect that this is more a manifestation of VMWare's product development org structure than anything else.  Unless they change this, I suspect they'll get run over by anyone that can offer a simpler platform solution.

As a regular user of an iPhone, MacBookPro, and Kindle:

• The iPad has the potential success for enabling paid-subscriptions to magazines.  I tried the Economist in Kindle form and hated it.  It's much too hard to flip, glance, and scan though content.
• I pay $0.75 to read the NY Times on the Kindle once a week or so.   I consider it a good deal, particularly on Sunday.  No fingers with black ink.  No ads.  It's a much better experience than the miserable NY Times iPhone App.
• I can't imagine wanting to read a book on a back-lit LCD screen.
  
• The iPad has the potential to enable a digital transition for textbooks.  Again, the Kindle fails the filp, glance and scan test.  If you remember back to your textbook days there was a lot of leafing through the pages to find the one with the subject matter you're looking for while preparing for a test.  You just can't do that with the Kindle.
  
• I like the Kindle app for the iPhone a lot.  It's nice to be able to read a few pages of whatever book any time, any where.  If I'm stuck waiting in line at a store, odds are that I don't have my Kindle.  I almost always have my iPhone in my pocket, and am able to read a few pages.  My last-page-read gets synced back to the Kindle, so I can continue reading where I left off when I get home.  Genius.
  
• I think it would neat to have an iPad around the house, but I think the price point is still too high.
• I think the potential as a Kid's device is enormous.  The price is too high right now and it would need to get ruggedized a bit, but this could be a new market for Apple that would cannibalize the video game and educational toy market. 
  
• The closed-platform nature of the product could be a deal breaker for Apple.  It's irritating enough with the iPhone.
  
• For the first time, the Google Chrome OS makes sense to me.  I'm looking forward to tablets from the Asian hardware companies (MSI, etc.) running Chrome OS showing up this year.  I'd buy one of those if the price was right.  As long as it has a good browser, I can't imagine any feature Apple could provide that would make up for price.
• One needs to look no further than the success of the Netbook vs the failure of the MacBook Air, to validate the last point.