Envelope / Develope

Microsoft just announced that the digital library they launched when eBooks were in vogue is closing the service, with a whimper and a small print saying that they will reimburse the buyers (which if you don't know, some of them already lost their devices and books). For me, besides the physical act of discovering and buying a book, it has a network effect starting to unfold: I read the book and post about it I recommend the book to my friends and sometimes they borrowed it from me (SOME friends, not any...) sometimes I write small ideas or thoughts spurred by ideas presented in the book I hope that my kids will enjoy some of the books I bought With an eBook, the problem seems to be that the usage period is your lifetime or the lifetime of the service ( the minimum of them). Yes, you may be able to borrow your book to friends, for limited periods and you can copy and paste, in case you need some content from it. But the bottom limit is that you are paying for a period of ...

I was feeling small, in the diner, in Bath, New York. I am a 6.3 feel adult, 210 pounds, so not that small. But all people around me where in a different category. I started to have a queasy feeling that food might be one of the culprits, or maybe the hard work. Looking at their hands, work was out of the question. Is the same food in all North America that we consume, isn't it? I asked for the menu, for breakfast, and then I understood why. The "Specials" had at least 10-12 ingredients, meat was present in different ways - bacon, sausage, lard, salami, veal, chicken. The plates where large and prices cheap. Food was plenty but nutrients in it were missing. It was a systemic problem in a three days trip at Watkins Glen area, upstate New York - cheap food, no much variety, mostly from frozen bags/containers and not much flavor. I remember eating a salad, in full summer, and it didn't have any sweetness in vegetables. I felt like ordering cooked carton in each di...

After a few years of not paying attention to my sport life I decided to see how well I fare measuring what can be collected with a sport watch sensors - heart beat, distance, speed, pace and (bonus) my sleeping patterns. After a few deliberations I acquired a Garmin Vivo Active, first edition and started to use it. On that path I discovered some shortcomings which became annoying and funny sometimes: for sleeping you had to start/stop the cycle in order to have a relevant time frame after running a few laps, sometimes, I forgot to stop the timer and jumped in a car and drove home. The smart watch could not detected the speed change and sometimes I ended up with a few good tens of kilometers on my running book. My friends called my "the unknown Ethiopian champion runner of Toronto" whenever an update of the firmware occurred, my customized screens disappeared the wake-up function/ring is effective only if you sleep with the watch; there is no sound but mostly a trembl...

Or read the small print before you buy  I am in the same cohort of adults as you, probably: with limited time for vacations, I am planning almost every day for seeing, sucking up scenery, tasting food or wines or having fun in a memorable way. Rarely there is a moment where playing by the ear is on my schedule. Often times I am forced to improvise as my plans are totally screwed by inevitable mishaps. And here comes one of my reality encounters with what is a map in our days and how different than reality it is.One hand driving, one eye on map and one eye recording the imagery, brain where are you ? In today over-scanned/over-visited/over-blogged/over-you-tubed world to be driven in a dangerous or unknown place by the technology seems like a dystopian event. And still, that happened to me. Garmin has an interesting policy regarding their own GPS devices - the maps are free for LI(F)E. What is not known, but hidden in the bottom of the license agreement, is that the l...

            I was reading " The case against Google " from which several things I never imagined were revealed. Google won the search engine war just because, for one reason, at the time Microsoft was battling a monopoly lawsuit with USA and refrained on hurting Google by using the same tactics used with other competitors during the precedent years.             The complains about unfair treatments are not coming form users, who are totally unaware of the subtleties of the search engines, but from the companies which are getting users through the search engine. The Shyhook, Yelp, Getty museum examples are eye opening!  If your customers are arriving at your site via Google search, the single pipe could always derail them and sink you page rank. What is next, for your business?             Why only the EU had the nerve to fine Google with 2.1 billions for monopolisti...

The small electronic gadgets are everywhere in your life, and I will enumerate just a few of them, most of us for sure have them around the house: smart remote controllers (like Logitech TV remotes) digital cameras wireless routers smart TVs SAN/NAS - array of hard drives to back-up your data smart watches mobile phones tablets, mobile devices GPS devices audio/video recorders or players media players or recorders smart toys for your kids (game consoles, game pads, etc...)                  One of the aspects of almost all of them is that at their "heart" there is a system running, like a small engine. The engine is built on two parts - hardware and software. The hardware part is most of the time fixed, you cannot change it, in best of cases you can upgrade it (that will make a subject for another post). The software part is the subject of this post, for companies building the product is calle...

In my post " when your money is on the line " I took a hard stance on people adventuring to overpromise on goals. Hard to argue or engage if you want to foster innovation or have a innovative working environment. If you are familiar with the normal psyche of the modern being, people are more apprehensive of losing money than going through other unpleasant experiences, so my advice with "money on the line" can lead to a cautious and timid teamwork. Failing-fast and learning from it seems to have a second life in the media. Short cycles, constant monitoring of the results and adapting as you run gets more thumbs up and is preferred today - or agile development. My question is if not somehow "failing-fast" is a continuation of "quick reward hunting" that the society is promoting? What do you learn from failing fast (and quick thinking) that changes you for finding success? Is the time between failures enough to adjust your inner metric to ma...

Coming across an article in NY Times - How to get your mind to read.  The blame is on the national education programs but mostly on the emphasis that context sometimes became the substitute to reading skills. Comprehension falls mostly on System 1*, for most of the skimming thorough type of reading. When the text needs System 2* then the cracks in comprehending what you read skills are showing off. The conclusion of the article "profound changes in how reading is taught, in standardized testing and in school curriculums" is futile, the real issue is to propose a solution which proved successful. To blame the constant barrage of low quality "information" spread on daily news is also an easy target. The reading level,I assume, is at the level of an 8th grader.  What if the access to quality information becomes more of a System 2 kind of effort? Why the student will try to achieve proficiency when the whole media is just bending over to be getting their attention? ...

I was part of multiple business decisions in which we, as a business unit, were promising different things and some of us knew they are not going to happen. When you execute and someone is telling you that is possible to finish the project (which you know is impossible) something is shaken in your core believes. It is a doubt that there is something that you are not able to perceive or that someone can drive you/your team to peaks not even imagined. Or is the prosaic version, "we will see when we reach that point, for now let get the work started". Often times there is the resignation "we did as much as possible, but this is the result", or the sudden enlightenment that in the new context, there is only one way out. Either way, there is a crack in the reality as perceived by you when a group of people are engaging you (among others) in endeavours you have doubt they will be fulfilled. In some organizations they are talking about managing risk, and the risk bein...

Just watched the movie "A monk with a camera" and then read some of the comments. An image is an image and has its own footprint into your experiences and reverberates into your soul. I am totally oblivious on buddhism but was intrigued by the title and then decided to give it a try. I was not let down, because there is emotion, there is humbleness and there is the strive to follow the path of a westerner into buddhism. Based on circumstances you could not have predicted the future of Nicholas Vreeland as becoming a highly regarded monk, based on family upbringing even less. It proved, that life has its own signs and bumps and incredible turns, just not be a spectator, participate and do more than a leaf blown by the wind. The movie has cinematic qualities because images captured by Nicholas Vreeland have simplicity, power dynamism (even in portraits) and a historical background which is still mysterious for majority of viewers. It helps to add iconic images of well known fr...

That is about a posting in Money Sense - a financial publication from Canada, similar to Kiplinger. They try to answer what to do if you are starting to invest today, having all your funds in C$. The main question is, should you change it in other currencies or is it enough to just invest in C$. Should you buy US$ ? Yes, if you believe in the dynamism of the US economy, or of global companies trading in US versus Canadian economy. Yes, if you see more economic growth in US/world than in Canada. No, if you believe that Canada will yield more growth through its efforts than US. No, if you believe the Canadian policies will stimulate the economy in the right direction. There are questions, regarding diversity and significance of the companies you are buying in C$. How large is the Canadian economy in the global economy? How diverse is the Canadian economy? How global is the reach of the Canadian companies in order to shield you of any local downturns? My personal view Fo...

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 ...