Proust had his madeleine, the rest of us have our parents’ basements and attics with the bric-a-brac that promises emotional transport to a different time and place. During my last visit home, I came across my grandmother’s diploma circa 1914: a fascinating document from an era where a couple years of high school was the […]
The life of an IPO-less entrepreneur is a curiosity, especially in difficult economic times. So when well-meaning folks ask “what is it like?”, I answer that while there’s great freedom in working on one’s own ideas, that’s counterbalanced by the realization that most of one’s ideas range from the merely unworkable to laughably money-losing. But […]
As a buzz-worthy term “Big Data” has a lot going for it: easy to remember, vague enough that a shared clear meaning is always in doubt, and its own O’Reilly conference. Like programmers describing the merits of their software only in terms of the number of lines of code, talking about big-ness merely in terms […]