January 21, 2013
Forbes is calling game over for Microsoft and Windows Phone keeps bleeding share each quarter. Staying the course will not fix it, so here is one piece of unsolicited advice for Ballmer involving an unlikely word: fork. The plan turns existing app catalogues, an Office port, and a curious stream of patent royalties Microsoft already collects on every Android handset into something close to a free OS. With bonus irony.
October 09, 2012
Comparing languages by word lists is always a bit arbitrary: town is Stadt in German but Zaun sounds closer and means fence. So during a Triposo hackathon in Sitges, the cardinal numbers one through nine got scraped out of Wikitravel phrasebooks, a weighted edit distance defined, and the resulting tree clustered. Whether the Germanic, Slavic and Romance groups fall out where you would expect is the question.
September 27, 2012
The 22-year-old Valley founder declares their iPhone app will reinvent banking. The Berlin counterpart wants a company where nine friends can earn a modest living doing something they enjoy. Go big or go home, sure, but go big too early and you also go home. Larry Page once shot down a Google pitch as too small; meanwhile Germany quietly produces world-beaters in concrete pumps. Two startup cultures, two distinct failure modes.
September 17, 2012
Edison said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. He was off by two orders of magnitude. The pub-napkin idea takes an hour, the demo ten, the prototype a hundred. After that the math gets uncomfortable, which is either why most ideas die or, depending on how you squint at it, exactly why they should.
September 08, 2012
Why do cafes drop thousands on a shiny espresso machine, a top grinder and fresh beans, then hand the whole rig to a barista who has no clue? Hiring engineers at Triposo turns out to raise a structurally similar question. If the best coders are 28x more productive than the worst, the puzzle isn't really about coffee at all.
December 21, 2011
Suppose you are an oppressive regime with pesky dissident bloggers. The Great Firewall is expensive and leaky. There is, it turns out, a cheaper legal toolkit hiding in plain sight, one that lets you silence critics worldwide for a tidy profit per infringement. Scientology figured this out years ago. So, less famously, did the state of Bavaria.
October 30, 2011
Goa in November sounds lovely until you meet the Indian visa office in Berlin: photos only taken on premises, Berlin residency not recognised, employer letter required, processing somewhere between one day and two weeks. Also, why exactly do they care which army your grandfather served in? Then you check what an Indian needs to visit Europe and a darker comedy emerges.
August 30, 2011
Google Labs is shutting down. The official mythology, one engineer, 20% time, magic appears on Labs, was already mostly fiction by the time I joined in 2004. What it actually became, and what Larrys new top-down Google says about innovation, is a longer story. Meanwhile, Triposo Labs is now a thing, starting with every geocoded Wikipedia article plotted in order of appearance.
August 07, 2011
Founded Triposo, hired a team, shipped product, raised an angel round, all without a physical office and, awkwardly, without a place to live. The romantic version of the digital nomad life involves cafes and double espressos. The actual version, played out across Sydney, San Francisco and Berlin, involves outlet doublers, mailing luggage ahead and a lot of charging.
June 23, 2011
Two weeks to spare between Silicon Valley meetings and New York, so we took Amtrak: 3300 miles through Denver and Chicago, coding in the lounge car as the Rockies slid past. Each stop turned into a live test of the Triposo guide we were building, stepping off a train into a city you have never seen, armed with only a phone. It mostly works. Chicago, it turns out, has a problem.
May 14, 2011
Marx is out of fashion, but dialectical materialism applied to tech giants is hard to resist. IBM begat Microsoft. Microsoft begat Google. Google begat Facebook. Each one a deliberate negation of the last, right down to which programming language counts as serious. Where does that leave Triposo, with two ex-Googlers trying to do to Lonely Planet what Google did to Yahoo?
May 09, 2011
Part three of leaving Google: what comes after. The itch goes back to the first dot-com boom, when my brother and I started world66, convinced printed travel guides were finished and mobile would take over. We were a decade early. With iPhones and iPads finally up to it, the plan involves seven open datasets, some crafty Python, and a guide that knows it is going to rain tomorrow.
May 08, 2011
Part two of three: the reasons to leave Google anyway. Pitch anything to Larry and Sergey and you get the same note, solve it more generically, which is partly how Wave grew into a 90-minute demo that left everyone unsure what they had just seen. Add strategies, product roadmaps, and the slow realisation that being inside the walled garden eventually makes the outside world stop making sense.
May 02, 2011
After seven years at Google, I'm leaving. Cue the inevitable 'what's wrong with you?' Before I get to the gripes, though, there are a few popular narratives I want to push back on: that Google has gone evil, that the good engineers are all defecting to Facebook, that 20% time was always a myth. Part one of three. The bashing comes later.
September 07, 2010
There's a small genre of web toys that turn your text into ransom-note style images, built around hand-picked Twitter avatars shaped like letters. Hand-picked? In 2010? Surely Google Image Search has opinions about what the letter X looks like. Add the Ajax Search API, a bit of CSS rotation for that authentic kidnapper feel, and see what happens.
July 29, 2010
Demotivational posters are forum currency, but making one is still a tedious little dance: PowerPoint template, image search, color picker, snarky tagline, screenshot, upload. The whole thing ought to collapse into a single URL. Type a search term, a word, a tagline; let the machine fetch the image, sample its colors, and arrange the rest. Conformity not included.
July 17, 2010
A long-ago server crash forced me off Zope and onto Django, which meant rewriting every old project. I never really finished. Today, two get dragged back from the dead: WordColor (once a fragile Windows binary that screen-scraped image search) and LandGeist. It's interesting how much has changed - things that used to require a desktop install now happen entirely in the browser.
June 22, 2010
The internet is gloriously borderless, right up until iTunes, Kindle, Netflix and Hulu politely ask where you live and decline your business. After years of collecting workarounds from outside the US - VPNs, gift cards from helpful eBay strangers, addresses that don't quite need to match anything - here's the field guide. Including the trick Netflix never noticed about Australian zip codes.
May 03, 2010
Switching from iPhone to Android meant losing Trip View, the one app I actually relied on for my Manly ferry commute. No Android equivalent existed, so I built one - simpler than the original, mostly because I am lazy. Most commuters reaching for that app have exactly one question. But there's a small trick that means you never have to tell it which direction you're heading.
November 17, 2009
Buying Super Freakonomics at an airport, as a present, should be easy. Boxes of unpacked books rule out hardcover, so it has to land on the Kindle. Two seconds on Amazon. Then a half-hour spiral through hotel WiFi, iPass, a corporate VPN, and a nervously brief flick of data roaming, just to get the phone online. Amazon nailed the buying part. The rest of the internet, not so much.
I hate small towns because once you've seen the cannon in the park there's nothing else to do.