There has been a lot of debate about how to protect Internet Freedom. Today, Senator Ted Cruz has an op-ed in the Washington Post on the subject, which starts out with an eloquent and spot-on assessment of what we are trying to protect:
Never before has it been so easy to take an idea and turn it into a business. With a simple Internet connection, some ingenuity and a lot of hard work, anyone today can create a new service or app or start selling products nationwide.
In the past, such a person would have to know the right people and be able to raise substantial start-up capital to get a brick-and-mortar store running. Not anymore. The Internet is the great equalizer when it comes to jobs and opportunity. We should make a commitment, right now, to keep it that way.
This is absolutely what this is about. The ability for any person -- a teenager in Des Moines, a grandmother in Brazil, or a shop owner in Norway -- to get online and start writing, selling, streaming, performing, and transacting -- with pretty much anyone in the world (outside of China). This is the magic of the internet. Right there. By essentially a happy accident, we have created the single most open and vibrant marketplace in the history of the world. The most democratizing, power-generating, market-making thing ever. And the core reason behind this: on the internet you don't have to ask
There has been a lot of debate about how to protect Internet Freedom. Today, Senator Ted Cruz has an op-ed in the Washington Post on the subject, which starts out with an eloquent and spot-on assessment of what we are trying to protect:
Never before has it been so easy to take an idea and turn it into a business. With a simple Internet connection, some ingenuity and a lot of hard work, anyone today can create a new service or app or start selling products nationwide.
In the past, such a person would have to know the right people and be able to raise substantial start-up capital to get a brick-and-mortar store running. Not anymore. The Internet is the great equalizer when it comes to jobs and opportunity. We should make a commitment, right now, to keep it that way.
This is absolutely what this is about. The ability for any person -- a teenager in Des Moines, a grandmother in Brazil, or a shop owner in Norway -- to get online and start writing, selling, streaming, performing, and transacting -- with pretty much anyone in the world (outside of China). This is the magic of the internet. Right there. By essentially a happy accident, we have created the single most open and vibrant marketplace in the history of the world. The most democratizing, power-generating, market-making thing ever. And the core reason behind this: on the internet you don't have to ask
anyone's
permission to get started. And that "anyone" is not just the government -- as we're used to asking the government for permission for lots of things, like drivers licenses, business licenses, etc. In fact, more importantly -- "anyone" means the carriers whose lines you need to cross to reach an audience on the internet. A blogger doesn't have to ask Comcast's or Verizon's permission to reach its subscribers. Neither does a small merchant, or an indie musician or filmmaker. Contrast that with how cable TV works -- in order to reach an audience, you need to cut a deal with a channel, who in turn needs to cut a deal with a carrier, before you can reach anyone. It is completely out of the realm of possibility for me to create my own TV station in the Cable model. In the Internet model, I can do that in 5 minutes without asking anyone's permission. What we don't want is an internet that works like Cable TV. So I agree with Ted Cruz -- his description of the internet is exactly the one I believe in and want to fight for. But where I think he and many others miss the point is that Internet Freedom is not just about freedom from government intervention, it's freedom from powerful gatekeepers, who would prefer to make the internet look like Cable TV, controlling and restricting the mega marketplace we've been so lucky to take part in. Let's not let that happen. p.s., I would encourage any conservatives pondering this issue to read James J. Heaney's powerful and in-depth case for "
I've been a remote or semi-remote worker for a long time now. Which has a boatload of pros (flexibility) as well as cons (distance from "the watercooler"). Over time, I've tried lots of things to help forge a stronger connection among my distributed or semi-distributed teams. As you would expect, it's always a lot harder in the semi-distributed context, where some people are face to face and some people aren't. In those cases, it's always hard to get the f2f people to adopt technology for casual chatting. My new favorite tool for this is Sqwiggle. Sqwiggle is a chat / video service for distributed teams. My favorite feature is that, rather than seeing each person in always-on real-time video, you see black & white snapshots in 10-second intervals. This removes a lot of awkwardness. My second favorite feature is the ability to initiate a video conversation unilaterally -- in other words, if I want to video with Zander, I just click on his face and start talking. No need for "ring him". The folks at Sqwiggle like to note that this results in much more frequent, but a lot shorter, conversations (like what you get when you're in an office together). At USV, we've set up a "Sqwiggle Bot" in the office -- it's an old iMac, sitting on my desk, which is hooked up to a wide-angle camera and is persistently logged into Sqwiggle. Anyone who is working remotely (as lots of us always are), can just dial into the bot, and "poof" we're sitting in the office. It looks like this:
I am so inspired by Kid President. If you haven’t seen the video, go watch it now, and get your pep talk on. So… with kid on our shoulder, let’s think about how to make NYC more awesome. From a tech policy perspective :) A few weeks ago the (already awesome) NY Tech Meetuplaunched a call for conversation about how to make NYC a better place — for the tech community specifically, and for the broader community more generally. The set of goals they kicked off the conversation with were:
Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business, regardless of location, access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.
Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy and world.
Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.
Support the appointment of a Deputy Mayor for Technology Innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.
Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.
Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful new 21st century economy: selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.
Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.
(note: I had a hard time bolding the last one :-) These ideas are a starting point, and it’s been interesting to see how people have reacted to it so far — re-prioritizing (through voting) the list above and adding new ideas. What I like about the NYTM’s list is that it’s not just about making NYC a place that’s inviting for companies to locate to (through things like tax breaks, etc), but about making NYC a leader as an open, connected, wired city. It’s about using tech policy as a starting point to bring opportunities afforded by the internet and networks of people to the city as a whole.
"What if there really were two paths… I want be in the one that leads to awesome." -#kidpresident — Brandon Hatmaker (@brandonhatmaker) February 3, 2013
So, in the words of Kid, let’s get on the path to Awesome. In NYC and everywhere.
anyone's
permission to get started. And that "anyone" is not just the government -- as we're used to asking the government for permission for lots of things, like drivers licenses, business licenses, etc. In fact, more importantly -- "anyone" means the carriers whose lines you need to cross to reach an audience on the internet. A blogger doesn't have to ask Comcast's or Verizon's permission to reach its subscribers. Neither does a small merchant, or an indie musician or filmmaker. Contrast that with how cable TV works -- in order to reach an audience, you need to cut a deal with a channel, who in turn needs to cut a deal with a carrier, before you can reach anyone. It is completely out of the realm of possibility for me to create my own TV station in the Cable model. In the Internet model, I can do that in 5 minutes without asking anyone's permission. What we don't want is an internet that works like Cable TV. So I agree with Ted Cruz -- his description of the internet is exactly the one I believe in and want to fight for. But where I think he and many others miss the point is that Internet Freedom is not just about freedom from government intervention, it's freedom from powerful gatekeepers, who would prefer to make the internet look like Cable TV, controlling and restricting the mega marketplace we've been so lucky to take part in. Let's not let that happen. p.s., I would encourage any conservatives pondering this issue to read James J. Heaney's powerful and in-depth case for "
I've been a remote or semi-remote worker for a long time now. Which has a boatload of pros (flexibility) as well as cons (distance from "the watercooler"). Over time, I've tried lots of things to help forge a stronger connection among my distributed or semi-distributed teams. As you would expect, it's always a lot harder in the semi-distributed context, where some people are face to face and some people aren't. In those cases, it's always hard to get the f2f people to adopt technology for casual chatting. My new favorite tool for this is Sqwiggle. Sqwiggle is a chat / video service for distributed teams. My favorite feature is that, rather than seeing each person in always-on real-time video, you see black & white snapshots in 10-second intervals. This removes a lot of awkwardness. My second favorite feature is the ability to initiate a video conversation unilaterally -- in other words, if I want to video with Zander, I just click on his face and start talking. No need for "ring him". The folks at Sqwiggle like to note that this results in much more frequent, but a lot shorter, conversations (like what you get when you're in an office together). At USV, we've set up a "Sqwiggle Bot" in the office -- it's an old iMac, sitting on my desk, which is hooked up to a wide-angle camera and is persistently logged into Sqwiggle. Anyone who is working remotely (as lots of us always are), can just dial into the bot, and "poof" we're sitting in the office. It looks like this:
I am so inspired by Kid President. If you haven’t seen the video, go watch it now, and get your pep talk on. So… with kid on our shoulder, let’s think about how to make NYC more awesome. From a tech policy perspective :) A few weeks ago the (already awesome) NY Tech Meetuplaunched a call for conversation about how to make NYC a better place — for the tech community specifically, and for the broader community more generally. The set of goals they kicked off the conversation with were:
Make New York City the most wired city on earth by providing every New Yorker and every New York business, regardless of location, access to the fastest broadband networks at the lowest cost.
Reinvent the education system to allow every child, young adult, and all New Yorkers to develop the skills necessary to thrive in a 21st century economy and world.
Make New York City the clear choice for entrepreneurs, software engineers, and other technically skilled professionals to start a business and build a career by making it easy to find partners, financing, office space and housing, employees, and access to markets.
Support the appointment of a Deputy Mayor for Technology Innovation with an appropriate budget charged with the responsibility of reinventing New York City government with a 21st century framework.
Make New York City’s system for civic participation the most open, transparent, accountable, participatory, and innovative in the world.
Make New York City the most citizen-connected community on earth, where its people connect with each other to unleash a powerful new 21st century economy: selling to each other, renting to each other, funding each other, sharing with each other, coworking with each other, meeting up with each other, and hiring each other.
Support public policies that would ensure that technology and the opportunities available to the tech community can reach all New York’s citizens, and help solve issues related to healthcare, human rights and justice, gender equality, transportation, the environment, and other issues of fundamental importance to all New Yorkers.
(note: I had a hard time bolding the last one :-) These ideas are a starting point, and it’s been interesting to see how people have reacted to it so far — re-prioritizing (through voting) the list above and adding new ideas. What I like about the NYTM’s list is that it’s not just about making NYC a place that’s inviting for companies to locate to (through things like tax breaks, etc), but about making NYC a leader as an open, connected, wired city. It’s about using tech policy as a starting point to bring opportunities afforded by the internet and networks of people to the city as a whole.
"What if there really were two paths… I want be in the one that leads to awesome." -#kidpresident — Brandon Hatmaker (@brandonhatmaker) February 3, 2013
So, in the words of Kid, let’s get on the path to Awesome. In NYC and everywhere.
From my home office, it looks like this:
You can see Zander on the right, and Fred's and Albert's offices in the background. So, that's been great, and we're using it more and more. The thing that is more vexing is actually a much simpler problem: Group chat. Back when I was at OpenPlans, we were heavy IRC users. The whole team (folks spread across multiple cities, but concentrated in NYC) was always in the #openplans IRC channel, and it was the social hub of the office. And not just for remote folks -- when it was time for lunch, people would ping the IRC channel. There was tons of chatting back and forth, via IRC, among people sitting next to each other. It was, and is, great. There are a few features that make group chat in IRC awesome: 1) regular chat is unobtrusive. Meaning, you can be in a room, but not get a notification of every single message. 2) username notifications. when someone wants to get your attention, they just mention your handle, and your client bounces a notification to get your attention. 1 and 2 together mean that you can stay logged in to the channel all day long, not be overwhelmed by it, but still be directly reachable when people want to get your attention. 3) it's hackable. Since it's an open system, you can write all kinds of hacks. Our SVN repo was tied into IRC, so every time someone committed code, it posted to the channel. We had a bot that would reply to certain kinds of questions with silly answers. You can build whatever kinds of things on it you want. In sum, it was (and is) a fantastic tool for staying connected with a large group. If you were to add in persistent history and video-chat, you'd have the perfect tool. it's worth noting that you can do similar things with other tools. Campfire, by 37signals, does a lot of this. So does Skype. Those are good tools, but what I've been looking for recently, but haven't been able to find, is a way to get a similar experience out of Google Hangouts. The reason being that the entire USV team is in Gmail all day long, and does a fair amount of one-to-one chatting in gChat (now Hangouts). So, rather than doing the (likely impossible) work of getting everyone to use a new tool, I really really want a way to accomplish this in Hangouts, which we all already use. What's extra frustrating is that, until recently, you could accomplish something similar in Google Talk using Partychat, since Google talk was built on the open XMPP protocol. But with the switch from Google Talk to Google Hangouts, Google dropped support for this:
We realise Google's migration to Hangouts breaks @partychat due to removal of XMPP federation support. We are considering workarounds...
If you listen closely enough, you can hear the eerie mantra "embrace, extend, extinguish" emanating from the Googleplex... So, I've been trying to figure this out. And it's been frustrating. If there is a solution out there, I'm dying to know it.
From my home office, it looks like this:
You can see Zander on the right, and Fred's and Albert's offices in the background. So, that's been great, and we're using it more and more. The thing that is more vexing is actually a much simpler problem: Group chat. Back when I was at OpenPlans, we were heavy IRC users. The whole team (folks spread across multiple cities, but concentrated in NYC) was always in the #openplans IRC channel, and it was the social hub of the office. And not just for remote folks -- when it was time for lunch, people would ping the IRC channel. There was tons of chatting back and forth, via IRC, among people sitting next to each other. It was, and is, great. There are a few features that make group chat in IRC awesome: 1) regular chat is unobtrusive. Meaning, you can be in a room, but not get a notification of every single message. 2) username notifications. when someone wants to get your attention, they just mention your handle, and your client bounces a notification to get your attention. 1 and 2 together mean that you can stay logged in to the channel all day long, not be overwhelmed by it, but still be directly reachable when people want to get your attention. 3) it's hackable. Since it's an open system, you can write all kinds of hacks. Our SVN repo was tied into IRC, so every time someone committed code, it posted to the channel. We had a bot that would reply to certain kinds of questions with silly answers. You can build whatever kinds of things on it you want. In sum, it was (and is) a fantastic tool for staying connected with a large group. If you were to add in persistent history and video-chat, you'd have the perfect tool. it's worth noting that you can do similar things with other tools. Campfire, by 37signals, does a lot of this. So does Skype. Those are good tools, but what I've been looking for recently, but haven't been able to find, is a way to get a similar experience out of Google Hangouts. The reason being that the entire USV team is in Gmail all day long, and does a fair amount of one-to-one chatting in gChat (now Hangouts). So, rather than doing the (likely impossible) work of getting everyone to use a new tool, I really really want a way to accomplish this in Hangouts, which we all already use. What's extra frustrating is that, until recently, you could accomplish something similar in Google Talk using Partychat, since Google talk was built on the open XMPP protocol. But with the switch from Google Talk to Google Hangouts, Google dropped support for this:
We realise Google's migration to Hangouts breaks @partychat due to removal of XMPP federation support. We are considering workarounds...
If you listen closely enough, you can hear the eerie mantra "embrace, extend, extinguish" emanating from the Googleplex... So, I've been trying to figure this out. And it's been frustrating. If there is a solution out there, I'm dying to know it.
