Category: Business

  • Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

    Tesla, Autopilot and Data Collection

    f I were going to build a self-driving car, I’d want to have a large corpus of field data. What situations come up most commonly? How do humans handle them? How might our computer react in a similar situation? Google’s self-driving car efforts are well known and they’ve spoken publicly about how all the miles…

  • Catherine Rohr on Entrepreneurship

    From “Life after VC“: “Prison is America’s most overlooked talent pool,” she says. “Many gang members are proven entrepreneurs who built highly successful drug operations. The thing they were bad at was risk management.” … “We’re looking for leaders,” says Rohr. “If you weren’t good at selling crack on the street corner, you’re probably not…

  • Cap and Cash Back

    Peter Barnes has written an excellent article for Reuters on a hypothetical scheme an Obama administration might develop to address carbon emissions and stimulate investment in clean energy in a way that is financially and politically viable over the long term. Exciting stuff.

  • Evidence Based Policy and an Obama Administration

    That I’m a fan of Barack Obama is not a surprise to anyone who knows me. One of the things that appeals to me most about him is that he seems to be evidence based rather than ideology based. He is clearly very smart and secure enough in that intelligence that he can surround himself…

  • Microsoft Points and the Hillarity of Patents

    It would seem I am now an “official” inventor. The USPTO has granted, ahem, Method and system for in-line secondary transactions, an element of the work I did on the system that ultimately became Microsoft Points. For the record, I think the US Patent system is horribly, horribly broken, particularly when it comes to software…

  • The (very) end of MSN Music

    This week, Microsoft announced that they will be de-activating the DRM Servers that issue new keys for music from the (now discontinued) MSN Music service. In other words, starting June 1st, copying your purchased music to a new PC and expecting it to play will no longer work. I bring this up because once upon…

  • Samsung on Failure

    Chairman Kun Hee Lee of Samsung Electronics, as quoted in the HBS case on that company: At Sumsung, we reward outstanding performance; we do not punish failure. This is my personal philosophy and belief. We need punishment only for those who lack ethics, are unfair, tell lies, hold others back or stand in the way…

  • The media landscape

    Although School doesn’t necessarily leave you with any more free time than working does, it does leave you with plenty of “mental space” – room to think about new things, how the world might be changing around you and what opportunities that may present. One thing that’s been on my mind lately is the writers…