Envelope / Develope

The message is very simple, from the book "Weapons of math destruction", by Cathy O'Neil - our current models used to cut through the data deluge are efficient but biased. People modelling them are biased and there is no incentive to improve them, even if there is collateral damage. Companies selling AI tools are not incentivized on making the "magic-formula" public, open to debate. The users discover the defects after years and after people's life are affected. For the majority there is no feed-back mechanism, or no way to correct the wrong-doing. The book does not offer a solution to the existent AI used in crunching  data. We are biased, but there is hope: openness, dialog and analysis of the results, especially for people who are affected by the algorithms.  Reading the book I remember reading about Google - where they did not know how to use the interviews and post-mortem analysis of the people hired in order to get the right formula of picking the...

This is a post as an entrepreneur, shareholder, observer of the big league M&A. After reading Berkshire Hathaway last shareholder letter a few things jumped at me, due to my past experiences: how to really think about swapping shares in a merger situation looking back to analyze past acquisitions (or post-mortem analysis of acquisitions) how are my next investments judged based on the performance of the actors involved in the past M&A what is the time-horizon to draw a line and judge the benefits of M&A            I have been in both positions (company I worked for being acquired or acquiring). In my direct experience acquiring a company proved to be a bad decision for shareholders. There is a wide spread opinion the larger you are as company the better you are noticed. There were well known cases when number two or three in the industry jumped to swallow number one just because the egos were big and debt was chea...

I was reading through the privacy disaster with Equifax and all the circus of the management on fumbling to handle the situation. There are heads rolling down but not of the executives who sold their shares, before the news popped. And in the light of the news, here is what happened in US, a not so long ago: Trump has signed repeal of the FCC privacy rules . "The decision will allow the Internet providers to compete with Google and Facebook in the online ad market. From that moment, Verizon, Comcast and all other internet providers to gather any data about users and sell it in the $83 billion market for digital advertising." If Equifax was breached, can you imagine the potential for leaks in the future? There are a few takes from those events:  Corporate America has no shame in getting the money and leaving the customers/shareholders in the dust. There are so many examples in the recent past - Wells Fargo , Rite Aid . Nobody is coming after them and the sharehold...

Reading was on of my great escapes, starting with grade one. I was fortunate enough to be "gently coerced" into reading. It was a gradual discovery of an universe which had nothing to do with the daily reality, and in the end one of the great escapes was science-fiction. My country literature was full of different type of genres and, by chance, I was stepping on some of them my mistake. In my childhood, the books were treasured and hunted, some of them passed subversively and amply commented. Maybe I was a by-product of the political environment and less a "free-will" person, in any way. My family helped a lot by sending my in exile in country-side, in the summer-time. Lots of time to kill! Pulp fiction was one of them but was disappearing after the second world two, because the regime was cleansing the society of the "bad fouls of bourgeois thinking". I remember the first time I read "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio, or soft-porn books...

During my long career as software contractor I had the pleasure and honor to work for several companies which were ahead of their time, by the boldness and the products they tried to launch on the market. Most of them failed, some of them reached the short path to success of being acquired and enriching a few entrepreneurs and their staff. At the time I was involved with some of them I really believed had a chance to make impact. One of them was BeOS, the operating system company which believed it has an chance to capture the imagination of the public with some important improvements. I stumbled recently upon Haiku which seems to continue on BeOs legacy. I haven't tried it but seems to continue believing somehow people are still interested in operating systems. That concept is long dead. People are interested to use the machines in helping them with their lives, enrich it or expand it to other realms (enhanced reality). As a software engineer contracted by BeOS through a third ...

You are in 2011, Christmas time and some of the last minute preparations are left for online transaction with the whales of e-commerce, like Amazon or Zappos or smaller players - Altrec , REI . One of the e-book providers in Canada with a large brick-and-mortar presence is Chapters . And in this time and age, it takes six hours to receive an e-gift from Chapters !!!! I don't know what went wrong but my inclination to support a local business versus Amazon when the ingrained quality of service is years behind subsides substantially. Not only I HAD to buy and admit the humiliation of not having the egift for the owner of a Kobo reader BUT, in the same day I HAD the delight of handling the egift for a Kindle owner. Transaction went smooth, no headaches, normal service in this time and age. Why all small players in US can do it elegantly and Chapters with its almost monopoly of book stores in Canada has a sub-par delivery? I will trust less and less any kind of innovation or keepi...

I am following Seeking Alpha just to understand how people are investing and how they build an argument about investing. You have to understand not only the argument but also the position of the author: does she buy the stock, does she have skin in the game or is just a concerted effort to push stocks and create momentum. Keep in mind that transactions happening in seconds based on the arbitrage positions discovered by complex algorithms are the norm in hedge funds. "Many, sadly, fit the description of the American adage (often attributed to Mark Twain) that a mine is a hole in the ground with a liar at the top." I have the same impression about some of the websites pretending they know what are doing. I remember it dearly because although I canceled the notifications for certain web sites promoting their investing letters, it was impossible to stop the flow of offers. That's a sign of very compelling investment ideas... Following the great investors (...

Is there more to be added than a sentence to any photography? asks a critique. In my opinion it is, but depends on the emotional rapport created by the photography or by the resonance with your past/experience. And the same is valid for any "frozen-in-time" type of art, be it painting, sculpture, architecture or the like. The large difference is the response it has in culture by affecting your life or being connected to a large population through personal intertwined events. The problem with photographs/paintings/art facts and other hard-to-remember artifacts is that they have to be around you as anchors in order to live on posterity. It is much easier with music but I predict the video would become the new anchor replacing the main artifact anchor in everyone's life.

           I am using a few atom/rest readers to have a common point of collecting my news. As I read a lot, it struck me about a trend in the web-news media. The arguments for an article are very much personal and based on social connections of the author with some of the people in the midst of the events rather than analytical and documented with solid sources or numbers. Some of the articles are simple author's opinions about what is connected dots  - events, stories, people - all culminating with a take away usually stated in the title. Very seldom you will see more then three extra independent sources, like stats, numbers from non-governmental agencies, data from industry chambers, etc.. In today fast-food and fast-media consumption the slow pondering on the pertinent amount of available information is not considered.          I agree that people empathize with social struggle and life ...

                I wonder why the Darwinism principle is not functioning for a corporate environment?! I've seen a lot of small/medium companies built on wrong/old ideas but still surviving. For me it's like a long illness, you won't feel it, everything seems normal, but the aim is totally chaotic and when you are totally out of sync with the economic reality, the company will be crushed.              I'll tell you about my experiences working for a few companies as contractor. In one company, let's name it VoiceX, they struggled to come on the market with a stable product for almost 4-5 years. A lot of people came, understood the business and left the company but a few of them were persistent and stayed through the thin and thick. When I arrived there, there were at least 8, max 12 developers, mostly with at least a few years with the company...

The Kobo reader is the Chapter's Books response to the digital invasion of the ebooks. In one of my assignments, analyzing the eReader market, I concluded that Kobo is the Toyota of the eReaders. Definitely Kindle has the top marks in design, although I have to use one to find shortcomings as I will present my complaints and suggestions to Kobo's designers. The bad - The price is no longer an advantage. When I bought mine, the difference in price between Kindle and Kobo was almost 100$. Currently Kindle is at the same price level. Several studies discovered that under 100$ price is the tipping point for mass adoption for ereaders. The good - The price/performance/options is good enough for above average users. The bad - I am annoyed to have the same set of celeb's sayings displayed when I start reading. Let me allow to change them. The bad - I can navigate only page by page. You can add a scale to jump in tens or hundreds of pages. When you share the reader and y...

Recently, the CBC broadcasted a bio-reportage of the photographer Annie Leibovitz. The bibliographical reportage is interesting for several reasons: it shows there is no theme or obsession about photography, at least at the beginning of her career. It started at Rolling Stone magazine by supporting the articles of a few big writers. I am biased, but the question of what would be durable twenty years from now, the articles or the shots from RS magazine? And the rest is just life and a lot of wasted shots, with some of them brilliantly captured. Another theme is about experimenting, camera being the "third-eye", registering more than an image but also the history of the situation. Ms. Leibovitz had a camera in hand almost in all unimaginable situations - when people slept, taking their cloth off, arguing or living on the edge. Short lenses were preferred, drugs were permitted in the shot as a hidden personage but mostly I liked the "after-emotional-storm" / "p...

"They made the critical errors of focusing attention only on strategic investments and concentrating on the technology instead of the financial situation." That's normal and understandable as you probably heard of the "nerds running the company". The most  recent example is in 2000-2001, when the bubble in IT burst with a lot of money disappearing. Which proves that business sense is rarely coming only from a simple idea (although my professor in Entrepreneurship tried to convince me otherwise - "play with other people's money") and high hopes. Is the small company making a strategic plan to move upwards in the market or is only a matter of surviving and figuring out as the future unfolds? Unfortunately you will see "the survival mode" prolonged in the life of the SMBs.

Posting for a new employee 1. Who is interviewing is giving you clues about the company I like when you are stepping into a new company. Although right now I'm more sensitive to the external signals (thanks Agatha !) and body language of the people interviewing me. I'm like an sponge ready to absorb and confront my ideas/past experiences with what's happening at that right moment. I'll enumerate my first days in every company I worked for, and I how I evolved from a timid and shy vegetable to a sly dog ( I like to compliment myself, till someone will do it in the posts !). At one job interview, the guys invited me to a table where a dried noodle were wrinkled in a corner. Not big deal, after a Eastern-European ( a.k.a Russian like) army service experience but that told me the lax atmosphere, the informal relationship and a flat organization hierachy. I was in a suit, tie and shinny shoes, leather briefcase and eager to impress. One of the guys came in t-shirt I u...

It's a well known fact the price for basic services is high in Canada. You can ask yourself why the prices for basic phone line, TV subscription or basic mobile phones is outrageously high and the only explanation is the low number of incumbents in each industry, their commodity of crying foul to regulators when other big players try to invade their territory, invoking "social aspects" of their services for all Canadians and the "complacency" of the political parties. My frustration covered the well known facts in the "competitive" industries in Canada - telecommunications, banks, transportation, wireless telecom, media distribution. Here I want to tell about a personal history, our family switching to VoIP. I knew about VoIP telephony and used NetMessenger, then Yahoo and lastly Skype, but at home I continued to pay $34 for almost nothing. So after a few investigations I bought the services of Vbuzzer, a Canadian company which for $60 per year will pr...

The oddity of the software profession is about reading and reusing the code. How often have you heard about reading code or reading design books, stepping outside of your realm of knowledge and sniffing at what other people are trying to resolve? I have to admit my book-wormish attitude because my childhood was pestered with a voracity to read and experience through others' life experiences. I used to buy books of edgy authors and enjoy their forays in brutal wordy experiences or carnivals of words. I miss sometimes the adventure of reading unheard construction of words with a flavor resonating with me which is hard to explain. But that's enough! Lately, my experiences were oriented in the business realm of things. Books like "Build to last", "Crossing the chasm", "The black swan". We were raised to believe the information is the answer to anything. In communism the more you knew about the "real" map of the social network t...

My continuous quest is to find out, gather info and go further that others have done before, rise on their shoulder and see/imagine/try/ruminate from their peaks. It's not a big philosophy, it's one about economy of energy and as one friend of mine said it "don't reinvent the square wheel!". In a lot of industries, philosophies like this go a long way in their development. You survive because your senses are adapted to feel where the wind blows and you know the trade, what to avoid, whom to ally with and the whole mechanism invented by the "specialists" to protect their turf. Is nothing special, just a little adaptation, agility, Darwinism survivor behavior. But for all this to happen, you need the basics, the roots of the industry, the history, the processes and their evolution (like in law Kramer vs. Michigan State ). A few days ago, I began to search for a framework which could generate a GUI interface from an XML file and have a preview function,...

This post is to complain, complain, complain... I'm a software engineer, senior, I'd say, and my continuous gripe for at least a few years is about software development cycles, methodologies and implementations. And I'm contracting ...., no strings attached. I would like to work in a real "software engineering" environment, people caring about what they deliver, how they deliver and proud of their work. It didn't happen for a long, long time. People are complacent, eager for a short, good buck, learning the politic ladder in corporations and teaming for a net social environment where their laziness to be protected. I had stepped up in a small company, manufacturing an embedded hardware device, struggling to implement a perpetual tcp/ip protocol for communication. I don't want to mention about sophisticated and complicated development cycles here, I want to expose simple, normal ways (agile) to lighten your life. But let's continue, it's hard to deb...

Have you seen the recent jumps of the gas price? Just thinking about the decisions and policies followed by the managers of big gas distributors, I wonder who is losing here? Let's suppose a hike in the price of the barrel of petrol happened. How late the effect of this raise will ripple in the real market? What if some companies decide to not buy in that specific day but continue to gauge the price for the operators ? If the whole process of extraction/distribution/selling/buying is a continuous flow is obvious that someone should take the brunt. The small consumers, like me or you could skip/postpone to buy gas for a week or a few days waiting for these extra cents, but what happens with people whose life is interlaced with the price of the gas? Funny game played by the gas distribution companies! How could you explain that you could have a few prices in the same day? Add for Canadians a stronger dollar than before and I wonder, should this small advantage pass on consumers? Alt...

After some experiences on photo-blog sites, I reached an agreement to vent my frustrations along with other blogers, here, on blogspot. Some pictures allowed, though ...