Your data is your interface

By Jarno Mikael Koponen April 17, 2013

We all view the world differently and on our own terms. Each of us use different words to describe the same book, movie, favorite food, person, work of art, or news article. We express our uniqueness by reviewing, tagging, commenting, liking, and rating things online. Taken together, all of this data can be viewed as a reflection of ourselves. But...

Why Libertarians and gold hoarders love Bitcoins

By Michael Wolraich April 17, 2013

What kind of people use Bitcoins, the digital currency designed by cryptographers to be untraceable? Web entrepreneurs? Open-source evangelists? Anti-corporate hackers? Well, it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the average Bitcoin user is a libertarian. A 32-year-old libertarian male to be precise. According to an online survey by Lui Smyth, a University College London researcher, 44.3 percent of Bitcoin users...

Joanne Wilson: The Gotham Gal who invests in women entrepreneurship

By Liyan Chen April 16, 2013

Joanne Wilson is widely known as the wife of Union Square Ventures founder, Fred Wilson, but is an angel investor in her own right, using her own fortune and that of her husband to invest in early-stage startups. Thus far she has a near-perfect track record. As of the publication of this article, none of the startups in her 35-company...

MOOCs: A view from the digital trenches

By Kevin Werbach April 15, 2013

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m a professor, is among the world’s oldest, largest, and best business schools, with 11 academic departments, 20 research centers, 230 standing faculty, and an endowment nearing $1 billion. With all those resource, it has produced 92,000 living alumni. Now consider this: Over the past eight months, in two sessions of...

Let’s broaden the MOOC experiment

By Brian Whitmer April 13, 2013

If you’re like me, you cop a wait-and-see attitude toward news of big tech breakthroughs. Sometimes it’s hard to know whether the Next Big Thing will end up like Apple’s Ping, Facebook’s Timeline or Gmail. The talk around these launches was all about how life was going to change forever, but in hindsight it was just hyperbole. And honestly, part...

Kaazing controls a car with a smartphone. What comes next?

By Cale Guthrie Weissman April 9, 2013

One way to look at your smartphone is to view it as a “remote control for your life.” You can use it to start and stop videos with either a gesture or sound, to operate your TV and home theater, alert you and the police if your house is being burgled, lock your house, and

In Silicon Valley, it’s good to be king

By Christopher Lochhead April 8, 2013

Silicon Valley is a mythic place, and the San Francisco Bay Area’s allure is well earned. We have a healthy startup ecosystem with a proven track record of nurturing big entrepreneurial winners. It seems you can’t go a week without reading about how some other part of the world is trying to be “the next Silicon Valley.” But there’s a...

Should you pay $250K to go to college?

By Jason Calacanis April 8, 2013

I was talking with my brother recently about higher education. We both struggled our way through school, barely able to afford our approximate $40,000 in tuition and expenses over the four years (he at a state school, me at Fordham University). Now his son has been accepted to a bunch of amazing schools, and we discussed a $250,000 four-year bill....

The tax of new

By Julie Zhuo April 6, 2013

There is something scream-out-loud-exciting about the allure of new. Just Google image search the word, and you’ll see what I mean. New is declared (nay, yelled) in all caps, more often than not set atop a bright starburst, and heaped with exclamations. Nothing could be more exciting! New proclaims, “Look at me, all shiny and enticing! Observe how I...

The truth about email: What’s a normal inbox?

By Dave Troy April 5, 2013

Email is like sex: everybody does it, but few talk about what we actually do or how we do it. And those that do tend to do so with missionary zeal, with lots of suggestions about what you should do. We all spend way too much time on email, and have our own strategies and techniques for dealing with the...