Nick Felton, formerly of Facebook, is quite a data visualization artist. I have always enjoyed his annual self-quantified reports, where he uses data to tell the story of his year. He recently sat down with folks from Ghostly and talked about his love affair with data, data visualization and what’s next. It is a great read. [Ghostly]
Every year, much like every day, there is a moment where the end is the beginning. Today, perhaps is as good a moment to reflect on the year which is winding down. It was quite a wonderful year — travel, food, family moments and a chance to meet the mighty, the marvelous and the famous.
It has also been a year of self reflection — an attempt to slow down, get off Internet’s rigmarole, be less anxious and perhaps like a piece of chalk, soak in life. I have enjoyed reconnecting with old friends, made new friends and have slowly start to appreciate personal time.
But it hasn’t been the easiest of years. The relentlessness of internet publishing has a dangerously narcotic effect — the instant gratification and feedback on one’s work is enough to make rest of the world seem slow and plodding. My new life as a full time venture capitalist for True Ventures commands more patience and calm — and if anything 2014 has been a transition towards a more tranquil approach to life, crisis and creation.
Continue reading...Continue reading My 2014 Review & 2015 To-Do List
The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, two publications with different ideas of moral dimensions, are asking the same question, one that has been on my mind for a long time: How does Silicon Valley reconcile the reality of its success with the fear its success instills in real people whose lives it sets to redefine?
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I am known to go to great lengths and even greater distances to meet great bootmakers and shoe stores of some repute. Most people make vacation itineraries around the idea of seeing ruins or really old buildings. I prefer shoes and fantastic food (in that order) to be my guiding light.
“You should presume that someday, we will be able to make machines that can reason, think and do things better than we can,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said in a conversation with Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla. To someone as smart as Brin, that comment is as normal as sipping on his super-green juice, but to someone who is not from this landmass we call Silicon Valley or part of the tech-set, that comment is about the futility of their future.
And more often than not, the reality of Silicon Valley giants, who are really the gatekeepers of the future, is increasingly in conflict with the reality of the real world! What heightens that conflict — the opaque and often tone-deaf responses from companies big and small!
Silicon Valley (both the idea and the landmass) means that we always try to live in the future. We imagine what the future
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A year ago, I hosted a small conclave of fellow (early) explorers of the post-html Internet. And while we are not of the SnapChat generation, most of us grew up connected. There were some who helped build the gear that runs the post-1999 Internet, and some who built the space ships. A neuroscientists who studies mobile and online behaviors, a digital musican and a music enterprenuer; data nerds, visual designers and an infrastructure wizard who streams happiness one stream at a time. And then there was me, who starts the day connected and ends it connected.
Connectedness — which is state of always being connected to the Internet and thus to people, things, life, work, commerce, love, hate and anger – is the single thought that dominates my mind, and it defines how I view everything, how I evaluate everything. It is my telescope and it is my microscope. I
Continue reading...Continue reading Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work
Jim Stodgill of Accenture on big data and its role in the corporation in the post industrial revolution era.
