ventureswell

brycedotvc: .

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 10:10:18 -0800

.

"Spread and participate in culture. Remix, reuse, use, abuse. Make sure no one controls your mind...."

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:17:19 -0800

““Spread and participate in culture. Remix, reuse, use, abuse. Make sure no one controls your mind. Create new systems and technology that circumvent the corruption. Start a religion. Start your own nation, or buy one. Buy a bus. Crush it to pieces.””

- The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde: It’s evolution, stupid (Wired UK)

"The battle of Open vs. Closed is not a zero sum game. Both have their time. It’s a sin wave. First,..."

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:16:00 -0800

“The battle of Open vs. Closed is not a zero sum game. Both have their time. It’s a sin wave. First, closed, proprietary solutions come to define a new way of fulfilling a use case and doing business. They solve a problem simply and elegantly and blaze a path to market awareness, acceptance and commercialization. Open, however, always follows. Whether it’s a year, a decade or a century, Open. Always. Wins. The only question is how long, as an industry, are we going to keep our tail tucked between our legs in front of the the great giant proprietary platform of the moment or are we going to get our act together to ensure the “Time to Open” is as short as possible. It takes courage, co-ordination and vision, but we can all play our part to shorten the time frame between the invention of a proprietary app and the absorption of that value into the open web platform.”

- The Open Web Is Dead – Long live the Open Web | Chris Saad

My brother-in-law pointed out that Saad actually misses some lessons from history: open systems & communities actually lead the way. It’s the later closed, proprietary versions that commercialize those behaviors, seemingly-generally by packaging them in a way that’s palatable for mainstream users, before being disrupted by open.

Open, closed, open…

"Experiments that work well have a thousand fathers and mothers."

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:51:22 -0800

“Experiments that work well have a thousand fathers and mothers.”

- JLM on A VC: The Management Team - Guest Post From JLM

"The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what,..."

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:22:19 -0800

““The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.””

- John Maynard Keynes

"The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley isn’t..."

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 17:16:05 -0800

“The mismatch between Silicon Valley and Congress isn’t just that Silicon Valley isn’t engaged enough with lobbying Congress, but that Silicon Valley has this outmoded idea that your ideas succeed when they are right, as proven in the marketplace, rather than because you were better at making a backdoor deal than the next guy.”

- (2) Tim O’Reilly - Google - Further thoughts on SOPA, and why Congress shouldn’t listen…

thepicturegraph: (via Painting with light to show WiFi...

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:41:00 -0800

thepicturegraph:

(via Painting with light to show WiFi networks)

brycedotvc: As a kid, the best skate spots were always the...

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:32:25 -0800

brycedotvc:

As a kid, the best skate spots were always the one’s that required hopping a fence, ducking a rope or dodging a security gaurd.

This picture captures how I’m thinking about the biggest opportunities for startups in 2012.

It’s going to be a big year for hopping fences and playing in markets where we’re not supposed to be.

image via thebenjamins-thebenjamins

"KICKSTARTER IS FUTURE OF ALL CREATIVE. PAID FIRST, THEN RELEASE TO WORLD OPEN, NO COPYRIGHT. ARTIST..."

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:06:11 -0800

“KICKSTARTER IS FUTURE OF ALL CREATIVE. PAID FIRST, THEN RELEASE TO WORLD OPEN, NO COPYRIGHT. ARTIST KEEP ROOF, WORLD GET ART, NO ONE GET SUED.”

- FAKE GRIMLOCK

A VC: Freedom To Innovate

(via fred-wilson)

the compass replaces the map

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 15:50:28 -0800

In fact, it is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The product map is now often more complex and more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map, and “rough consensus and running code” has become the fundamental philosophy for the so-called lean start-up movement.

"On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information..."

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:19:45 -0800

“On the one hand, information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.””

- Stewart Brand, via

Free Ride: Digital Parasites and the Fight for the Business of Culture | Brain Pickings

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:36:41 -0800

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

- Gandhi (via fred-wilson)

Photo

Fri, 25 Nov 2011 11:19:17 -0800

When [Facebook] breaks the web

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 11:49:00 -0800

There’s been an interesting conversation around Anil Dash’s “Facebook is Gaslighting the Web” post. His argument:

Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.

In a followup piece, he cites correspondence with several Facebook engineers. One describes the “linkshim” warning message that first raised Anil’s ire as a bug that they’re working on fixing. Another explains that this case in particular was an accident, but that “we have to balance false positives such as the one you saw with the damage that can occur if spammers can exploit our users’ trust of Facebook URLs.”

They’re both reasonable points. I want to point out, though, that this isn’t the only example of this type of behavior on Facebook’s part.

Partners in Facebook’s new Custom Open Graph initiative (yeah, that’s actually COG) can automatically broadcast activity from authenticated users back to Facebook. It’s this behavior that led to the “Facebook is ruining sharing” vs. “Facebook is the future of sharing” brouhaha.

In presenting those (auto)shared links in the newsfeed, though, Facebook introduces a new navigation convention. Rather than directing the user directly to the destination, clicking a link surfaces the new Facebook Connect authentication dialog within the Facebook site itself.

Here’s an example. First, the links from the Washington Post:

Click on one, and what happens?

I work with Facebook pretty closely, and we are partners in the new Facebook COG. They’ve been clear that what they’re calling “on-site authentication” (or thereabouts) converts at a much higher rate than a standard Facebook Connect implementation that lives on the publisher app’s website.

From a user experience perspective, though, this breaks a fundamental part of the web. And as the number of cases in which Facebook breaks web navigation standards grows, it becomes harder to ascribe noble motives or even excuse the decisions they’re making. Facebook has almost a billion users. Any service operating at this scale is responsible, in a very real way, for the behaviors that they teach their users. When you operate at this scale and start making decisions like these, you run a very real risk of making the entire web worse. That’s a longer conversation, though.

bijan: Previously when walking down the street by myself, I...

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 09:09:38 -0800

bijan:

Previously when walking down the street by myself, I would be head down and staring at my phone. One of the best parts of carrying my camera around everywhere these days is that I’m noticing my surroundings more.

(Leica M9 | 1/125sec, f/3.4, 35mm, ISO 160)

"Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:04:04 -0800

“Facebook has moved from merely being a walled garden into openly attacking its users’ ability and willingness to navigate the rest of the web. The evidence that this is true even for sites which embrace Facebook technologies is overwhelming, and the net result is that Facebook is gaslighting users into believing that visiting the web is dangerous or threatening.”

- Facebook is gaslighting the web. We can fix it. - Anil Dash

rorsketch: Be still, my lopsided paper heart.

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:35:01 -0800

rorsketch:

Be still, my lopsided paper heart.

"You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept..."

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 09:43:30 -0800

““You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.””

- Clayton Christensen: How Pursuit of Profits Kills Innovation and the U.S. Economy - Forbes

"the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily..."

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:33:54 -0800

“the iPod was unique and valuable because it was the only way to legally, inexpensively, and easily download music from the six biggest record labels.”

- How to Change the World: What I Learned From Steve Jobs

beautifully designed, built and marketed, to be sure, but it was the content ecosystem that drove value & lock in.

thepicturegraph: (via #OccupyCal protesters circumvent order...

Sun, 20 Nov 2011 18:08:18 -0800

thepicturegraph:

(via #OccupyCal protesters circumvent order not to post tents by f… on Twitpic)