Yet despite all that, there is one prominent area in which I find iOS so much better in that even I – a proud Fandroid venture capitalist – have been forced to encourage startups I meet with and work with to develop iOS-first: support for Bluetooth Smart.

In a nutshell, Bluetooth Smart (previously known as Bluetooth Low Energy) is a new kind of wireless technology which lets electronics connect wirelessly to phones, tablets, and computers. As its previous name suggests, the focus is on very low power usage which will let new devices like smart watches and fitness devices and low power sensors go longer without needing to dock or swap batteries – something that I – as a tech geek — am very interested in seeing get built and I – as a venture capitalist — am excited to help fund.

While Bluetooth Smart has made it much easier for new companies to build new connected hardware to the market, the technology needs device endpoints to support it. And therein lies the problem. Apple added support for Bluetooth Smart in the iPhone 4S and 5 – meaning that two generations of iOS products support this new technology. Google, however, has yet to add any such support to the Android operating system – leaving Bluetooth Smart support on the Android side to be shoddy and highly fragmented despite many Android devices possessing the hardware necessary to support it.

To be fair, part of this is probably due to the differences in how Apple and Google approached Bluetooth. While Android has fantastic support for Bluetooth 4.0 (what is called “Bluetooth Classic”) and has done a great job of making that open and easy to access for hardware makers, Apple made it much more difficult for hardware makers to do novel things with Bluetooth 4.0 (requiring an expensive and time-consuming MFi license – two things which will trip up any startup). Possibly in response to complaints about that, Apple had the vision to make their Bluetooth Smart implementation much more startup-friendly and, given the advantages of using Bluetooth Smart over Bluetooth Classic, many startups have opted to go in that direction.

The result is that for many new connected hardware startups I meet, the only sensible course of action for them is to build for iOS first, or else face the crippling need to either support Android devices one at a time (due to the immaturity and fragmentation in Bluetooth Smart support) or get an MFi license and work with technology that is not as well suited for low power applications. Consequently, I am forced to watch my chosen ecosystem become a second-class citizen for a very exciting new class of startups and products.

I’m hoping that at Google I/O this year (something I thankfully snagged a ticket for ), in addition to exciting announcements of new devices and services and software, Google will make time to announce support for Bluetooth Smart in the Android operating system and help this Fandroid VC not have to tell the startups he meets to build iOS-first.

The newest addition to NVIDIA’s mobile lineup (their Tegra line of products) is Parker — named after the alter-ego of Marvel’s Spiderman. Parker joins a family which includes Kal-El (Superman) [the Tegra 2], Wayne (Batman) [the Tegra 3], Stark (Iron Man) [Tegra 4], and Logan (Wolverine) [Tegra 5].

And as for NVIDIA’s high-performance computing lineup (their Tesla line of products), they’ve added yet another famous scientist: Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the battery (and the reason our unit for electric potential difference is the “Volt”). Volta joins brilliant physicists Nikola Tesla, Enrico Fermi, Johannes Kepler, and James Maxwell.

(Images from Anandtech)

It’s a fascinating world of extremely colorful names for the major technologies (i.e., Hadoop, Pig, Hive, Zookeeper, Mahout, Storm, etc.) Truthfully, as recently as a year ago, I worried this was all more hype than reality and while you can sensibly point to signs of bubble-dom, I’ve been meaningfully impressed by the very real things that businesses old and new are starting to do with this new technology.

If you’re at the conference, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to @reply me on Twitter (my handle is @BenjaminTseng)!

(HT: Eric Suh who re-tweeted this)

• Sony switched to a more standard PC technology architecture over its old custom supercomputer-like Cell architecture. This is probably due to the increasingly ridiculous costs of putting together custom chips as well as the difficulties for developers in writing software for exotic hardware: Verge link
• New controller that includes new interface modalities which capture some of the new types of user experiences that users have grown accustomed to from the mobile world (touch, motion) and from Microsoft’s wildly successful Kinect product via their “Eye Camera” (2 1280×800 f/2.0 cameras with 4 channel microphone array): Verge link
• Strong emphasis during the announcement on streaming cloud gameplay: It looks like Sony is trying to make the most of its $380M acquisition of Gaikai to
  • demo service letting users try the full versions of the games immediately as opposed to after downloading a large, not always available demo
  • drive instant play for downloaded games (because you can stream the game from the cloud while it downloads in the background)
  • provide support for games for the PS3/2/1 without dedicated hardware (and maybe even non-PlayStation games on the platform?)

  Verge link

• Focus on more social interactions via saving/streaming/uploading video of gameplay: the success of sites like Machinima hint at the types of social engagement that console gamers enjoy. So given the push in the mobile/web gaming world to “social”, it makes perfect sense for Sony to embrace this (so much so that apparently Sony will have dedicated hardware to support video compression/recording/uploading in the background) even if it means support for third party services like UStream (Verge link)
• Second screen interactivity: The idea of the console as the be-all-end-all site of experience is now thoroughly dead. According to the announcement, the PlayStation 4 includes the ability to “stream” gameplay to handheld PlayStation Vitas (Verge link) as well as the ability to deliver special content/functionality that goes alongside content to iOS/Android phones and tablets (Verge link). A lot of parallels to Microsoft’s XBox Smart Glass announcement last year and the numerous guys trying to put together a second screen experience for TVs and set-top boxes

Regardless of if the PS4 succeeds, these are interesting changes from Sony’s usual extremely locked-down, heavily customized MO and while there are still plenty of details to be described, I think it shows just how much the rise of horizontal platforms, the boom in mobile, the maturation of the cloud as a content delivery platform, and the importance of social engagement have pervaded every element of the tech industry.

(disclosure: DCM is an investor in Green Throttle and UStream)

(Update: as per Pat Miller’s comments, I’ve corrected some of the previous statements I made about the PlayStation 4′s use of Gaikai technology)

• I got engaged
• I was forced to use an iPhone 4 for two weeks instead of my DROID2 while in Asia and remarked on the differences
• I attended famed tech, music, and film convention SXSW and took a picture (click over to see) that made the whole trip worth it
• I endorsed a great leader for President who ultimately did not win
• I formally became a mentor for the Thiel “20 Under 20” Fellowship program
• After over two decades, I finally returned to the country where I was born: Taiwan
• I watched (and loved) the Avengers (sadly I didn’t get around to blogging about The Dark Knight Rises…)
• My brother gave my mom the best Mother’s Day present possible: he graduated (oh and we also bought her a tablet, but the graduation is probably a bigger deal )
• I attended the 2012 GPU Technology Conference and saw some pretty cool GPU and NVIDIA technology demos
• Carly Rae Jepsen won my (and America’s, really) heart – and a spot on my next business card design
• I gave some advice to high school graduates entering college
• I fell in love with (and watched the entirety of) British spy drama Spooks
• I attended The Cable Show, the Cable television industry association event and made some observations about the future of television
• After a few months of use, I weighed in on Google’s Chromebook concept
• I changed servers (and nobody noticed because I did it properly)

Happy New Year everybody! Here’s to a great 2013 and thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading (and continuing to read) my little corner on the internet!

Secondly, I want to wish all my friends and readers a very wonderful holiday season and the best wishes for a very happy new year!

Lastly, I wanted to make a note that I just changed hosts, moving everything over from my previous host Bluehost to my new host WebFaction (which gives me much greater flexibility and control over my servers). Sadly, despite working many hours on the transfer, moving servers is one of those things where, provided you did everything right, nobody should notice anything different – the ultimate thankless task. So I’m writing this in part so you now know .

In the spirit of the post I made some three years ago when I first moved my blog from Blogger to its own domain, I thought I’d share my experiences with the transfer in the event that this is helpful to someone else who is thinking about moving their existing WordPress setup to a Webfaction server (much of this is adapted from the WebFaction doc: http://docs.webfaction.com/user-guide/inbound.html#inbound-moving-a-wordpress-site).

1. Point your domain registrar to WebFaction’s name servers. If your domains were registered with Bluehost, this is something I believe you can access from BlueHost’s Domain Manager tab. I had previously transferred all my domains to a registrar called NameCheap where the access point for this is under “Manage Domains” (which you can see when you mouseover the “Domains” button in the toolbar). After selecting the domain, you wish to modify, click on “Domain Name Server Setup” and after selecting the “Specify Custom DNS Servers” radio button, you can enter WebFaction’s name servers in the text boxes.
2. Use WebFaction’s control panel to register the domain. Click on “Domains/Websites” on the left-hand side and then click the “Add Domains” button on the top of the resulting page.
3. Use WebFaction’s control panel to build a new “Static/CGI/PHP Application”. Go to “Applications” under the “Domains/Websites” header on the left-hand-side and click on the “Add new application” button. Enter a name and make sure to select “Static” in the first dropdown menu.
4. Use WebFactions’ control panel to build a new “website” which maps the application you just created with the domain you just registered. Go to “Websites” under the “Domains/Websites” header on the left-hand-side and click on the “Add new website” button. Enter a name, type out the domain you wish to use in the text field labeled “Domains”, and when you hit “Add a web app”, click on “Reuse an existing web app” and select the application you just created.
5. Export the database from BlueHost. The easiest way to do this is to go into BlueHost and use the PHPMyAdmin tool to log into the administrative interface for the database which corresponds to your WordPress installation and use the export functionality to get a SQL “dump file”. Download that file and then upload it to your WebFaction server/use FTP to pull it off of your BlueHost server.
6. Create a New MySQL Database in WebFaction. Click on “Databases” on the left-hand-side of the WebFaction control panel and click on “Create New Database.” Enter a name, hit the “Create” button, and take note of the password that was autogenerated and the user name (the name of the database before the mandatory “_” character).
7. Import the database dump file into the database you created in Step 6. Use an SSH tool to get shell command access to your WebFaction server. From the resulting command line, run the command “mysql -u db_name -p -D db_name < dump_file” where the italicized db_name should be replaced by the name of the database you just created and the italicized dump_file should be the name of the dump file that you’ve uploaded/transferred to your WebFaction server. The command will ask you for the password to your database (which you of course wrote down from the previous step, but, if not, can easily rectify by clicking on the “Change database password” link under the “Databases” heading on the left-hand side of the WebFaction control panel) and will complete the import.
8. Copy the BlueHost directory containing your WordPress install into the WebFaction directory corresponding to the application you created in Step 3. You can do this by manually downloading the files from BlueHost to your computer and then re-uploading (long, slow, annoying) or you can use wget or FTP to mediate the transfer directly between WebFaction and BlueHost (my recommended choice). Make sure you copy the .htaccess file or your URLs will break and you will need to recreate one from the WordPress admin panel after you’ve completed the transfer
9. Edit the wp-config.php file in the root directory to properly tell WordPress:
   • What the database name is: edit the line that looks like “define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘<database_name>’);” and replace “<database_name>” with the name of the database you created in step 6 (keeping the single quotes)
   • What the right user name is: edit the line that looks like “define(‘DB_USER’, ‘<user>’);” and replace “<user>” with the name of the user in step 6(keeping the single quotes)
   • What the database password is: edit the line that looks like “define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘<password>’);” and replace “<password>” with the password from step 6 (keeping the single quotes)
   • Where the database is: edit the line that looks like “define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘<host>’);” and replace “<host>” with “localhost” (keeping the single quotes)
10. Test the sucker! Note: you may need to wait up to 48 hours for the domain name shenanigans to be properly reflected by DNS servers

However, with the purchase of the Nexus 7, this brought the total number of “smart internet connected devices I own and use” to a total of 6:

• Samsung Galaxy Nexus Verizon edition (4.65” Android phone)
• a Nexus 7 (7” Android tablet)
• a Motorola Xoom (10” Android tablet)
• Chromebook (12” ChromeOS notebook)
• Thinkpad T4o0 for personal use and a Thinkpad T410 for work (both 14” Windows 7 laptops)

Beyond demonstrating my unreasonable willingness to spend money on newfangled gadgets (especially when Google puts its brand on them), owning these devices has been an interesting natural experiment to see just what use cases each device category is best suited for. After all, independent of the operating system you choose, there’s quite a bit of overlap between a 10” tablet and the Chromebook/laptop, between the 7” tablet and the 10” tablet, and between the 7” tablet and the 4.65” phone. Would one device supplant the others? Would they coexist? Would some coexist and others fall by the wayside?

Well, after about a month of adding a 5th device to the mix, I can say:

• I wound up using all the devices, albeit for different things. This was actually quite a surprise to me. Before I bought the Nexus 7, I figured that I would end up either completely replacing the Xoom or find that I couldn’t do without the larger screen. But, I found the opposite happening – that the Nexus 7 took over for some things and the Xoom for others. What things?
  • Smartphone: The smartphone has really become my GPS and on-the-go music listening, photo taking, and quick reading device. Its small size means it fits in my pocket and goes everywhere I go, but its small screen size means I tend to prefer using other devices if they’re around. Because it’s everywhere I go, it’s the most logical device to turn to for picture-taking (despite the Galaxy Nexus’s lackluster camera), GPS-related functionality (checking in, finding directions, etc) and when I want/need to quickly read something (like work email) or listen to music/podcast in the car.
  • 7” tablet: I’ve really taken to the Nexus 7 form factor – and it’s become my go-to-device for reading and YouTube watching. The device is extremely light and small enough to fit in one hand, making it perfect for reading in bed or in a chair (unlike its heavier 10” and laptop-form-factor cousins). The screen is also large enough that watching short-form videos on it makes sense. It is, however, too big to be as mobile as a smartphone (and lacks cellular connectivity, making it useless if there is no WiFi network nearby).
  • 10” tablet: Because of the screen size and its heft, my 10” Motorola Xoom has really become my go-to-device for movie watching, game playing, and bringing to meetings. While the smaller 7” form factor is fine for short-form videos like the ones you’d see on YouTube, it is much too small to get the visual impact you want while watching a movie or playing a game. The larger screen size also gives you more room to play with while taking notes in a meeting, something the smaller screen size only makes possible if you like squinting at small font. It is, however, at least to this blogger, too big and too heavy, to make a great casual reading device, especially when lying in bed
  • 12” Chromebook: What does a Chromebook have that its smaller tablet cousins don’t? Three things: a keyboard, a mouse, and a full PC flavor of Chrome. The result is that in situations where I want to use Flash-based websites (i.e. the free version of Hulu, Amazon Videos, many restaurant/artist websites, etc) or play Flash-based games (i.e. most Facebook games) or access sophisticated web apps which aren’t touch-driven (i.e. WordPress, posting to Tumblr) or which don’t have full functioned apps attached (i.e. Google Drive/Docs), I turn to the Chromebook.
  • 14” Laptop: So where does my 14” laptop fit (and how could I possibly have enough room in my digital life that I’m actively researching options for my next Thinkpad machine)? Simple: it’s for everything else. I track my finances in Excel, make my corporate presentations in PowerPoint, do my taxes in Turbo Tax, compose blog posts on Windows Live Writer, program/develop on text editors and IDEs, write long emails, edit photos and movies… these are all things which are currently impossible or inconveniently hard to do on devices which don’t have the same screen size, keyboard/mouse caliber, operating system, and processing hardware as modern PCs. And, while the use of new devices has exploded as their cost and performance get better, the simple truth is power users will have a reason to have a “real PC” for at least several more years.
• Applications/services which sync across devices are a godsend. While I’ve posted before about the power of web-based applications, you really learn to appreciate the fact that web applications & services store their information to a central repository in the cloud when you are trying to access the same work on multiple devices. That, combined with Google Chrome not only working on every device I have, but also actively syncing passwords and browser history between devices and showing the open browser tabs I have on other systems, makes owning and using multiple devices a heckuva lot easier.

How do you use the different devices you own? Has any of that usage segmentation surprised you?

(Image credit – GetAndroidStuff.com)

But, the premise of the article that I fundamentally disagreed with – and in fact, the very reason I’m interested in technology is that the ability to make transformative ideas means that I don’t think its possible to make “100-year digital skyscrapers”.

In fact, I genuinely hope its not possible. Frankly, if I felt it were, I wouldn’t be in technology, and certainly not in venture capital. To me, technology is exciting and disruptive because you can’t create long-standing skyscrapers. Sure, IBM and Intel have been around a while — but what they as companies do, what their brands mean, and their relative positions in the industry have radically changed. I just don’t believe the products we will care about or the companies we think are shaping the future ten years from now will be the same as the ones we are talking about today, nor were they the ones we talked about ten years ago, and they won’t be the same as the ones we talk about twenty years from now. I’ve done the 10 year comparison before to illustrate the rapid pace of Moore’s Law, but just to be illustrative again: remember, 10 years ago:

• the iPhone (and Android) did not exist
• Facebook did not exist (Zuckerberg had just started at Harvard)
• Amazon had yet to make a single cent of profit
• Intel thought Itanium was its future (something its basically given up on now)
• Yahoo had just launched a dialup internet service (seriously)
• The Human Genome Project had yet to be completed
• Illumina (posterchild for next-generation DNA sequencing today) had just launched its first system product

And, you know what, I bet 10 years from now, I’ll be able to make a similar list. Technology is a brutal industry and it succeeds by continuously making itself obsolete. It’s why its exciting, and it’s why I don’t think and, in fact, I hope that no long-lasting digital skyscrapers emerge.

I’ve blogged a few times before about Chromebooks and how they represent the next logical step in Google’s belief in the web as the core platform for software delivery (seeing how they’re machines that are built almost entirely around the browser), and I jumped at the chance to test it out.

I initially tested out the Chromebook shortly after getting it for a week or two. To be completely honest, I was underwhelmed. While there were many cool things about the operating system (it always being up to date, the built in Google Talk experience, and the ability to use Google Docs as a scratchpad for starters), the machine just felt very slow (likely in part because of the low-end Intel Atom processor inside). The device never seemed to sync properly with my Google account, the lack of a desktop made this feel more like a browser with a keyboard than an operating system, and poor support for offline functionality and handling of peripherals made it feel very constraining. I meant to write up a review on the blog but I never got around to it and it faded from memory, collecting dust in storage…

Flash forward to May when Google unveiled a pretty bold re-vamp of the Chrome OS operating system that lies behind the Chromebook: Aura. Aura replaced what was formerly a within-one-browser-window experience with something which looks and feels a lot more like a traditional operating system with a taskbar, multiple windows (and hence true multi-tasking), a desktop background, a “system tray/control panel” to readily access system-wide settings (i.e. battery life, which WiFi network I’m connected to, screen brightness, etc), and an application launcher. My previous problems with syncing with my Google account are gone (and its support for tab syncing – where I can continue browsing a webpage I was reading on another device – make using this very natural). The experience also just feels faster – both the act of browsing as well as thinsg like how quickly the touchpad responds to commands. Chromebooks now also handle more file types natively (whether downloaded or from removable media), and, with the recently announced offline Google Drive integration, Chromebooks have gotten a lot more useful and have taken another step to achieve the “web file system” vision I blogged about before.

Much to my surprise, I’ve even found myself turning to my Chromebook regularly as a casual consumption device. It being instant-on, browser-centric, and ready support for multiple user accounts makes it a perfect device to watch TV epsiodes or movies from Google Play, Netflix, or Amazon Videos or to share interesting articles to my Tumblr (something that my touch-centric Galaxy Nexus and Motorola Xoom do less well at).

Realistically, there are a set of apps which I’ve found to work much better on Windows/Linux (mainly coding, using Microsoft Excel, and composing blog posts) and which prevent me from using a Chromebook for 100% of my computing needs. But, while important, these only take up a minority of my time on a computer — what actually stops me from using the Chromebook much more actively as a primary machine in my job and day-to-day are two far more pressing items:

1. Evernote does not work. I am a very active user of Evernote for note-taking and note organization, and its unfailing ability to crash whatever tab is open to it on a Chromebook is a pretty major roadblock for me.
2. Some web apps don’t play nice because they don’t recognize Chrome OS properly. The key culprit here for me is Microsoft Outlook. A conspiracy theorist might think this was some ploy by Microsoft to get people using Chrome OS to switch to Windows or by Google to get Outlook users to switch to Google Apps – but at the end of the day, Microsoft’s very nice, new Outlook Web App, which works beautifully on Chrome on my Windows 7 machine, treats the Chromebook as if it were a barely functioning computer running Internet Explorer 6 – leaving me with a crippled web experience for what is my corporate email lifeline. If Google made it possible to spoof the browser identification or found a way to convince Microsoft to give Chrome OS flying colors when it comes to serving up web apps, that would make me a MUCH happier camper.

These issues aside, there is no doubt in my mind that Chrome OS/Chromebooks are a concept worthy of consideration for people who are thinking about buying a new computer for themselves or their loved ones: if you spend most of your time on the computer on the web and don’t need to code or create/consume massive files, these machines are perfect (they boot fast, they update themselves, and they are built with the web in mind). I think this sort of model also will probably work quite well in quite a few enterprise/educational settings, given how easy they are to support and to share between multiple users. This feels to me like an increasingly real validation of my hypothesis of the web as software platform and, while there’s quite a few remaining rough spots, I was very impressed by the new Aura revision and look forward to more refreshes coming out from the Chrome team and more time with my Chromebook .

(Image credit – Chromebook – Google)

• While there is a significant piece of the show that is like a typical technology conference (mainly cable infrastructure/set top box technology vendors like Motorola, Elemental, Azuki, etc showing off their latest and greatest), by far the biggest booths are SXSW-style attempt (flashy booths, gimmicks) by the content owners (NBC, Disney, etc) to get people to notice them. Almost every major content provider booth had a full bar inside, there were lots of gimmicks (see some of the pictures below — Fox and NBC trotted out some of their celebrities, many booths had photo booth games to show off their latest shows – like A&E with its show Duck Dynasty, Turner invited a lollipop maker to create lollipops in the shape of some of their cartoon characters, etc), and a there were a number of networks who used “booth babes” to try to draw more traffic. I guess when your business is dependent on looking sexy & popular for advertisers/cable companies, it should be expected that they would do so during conferences as well.
  
  
• The relationship between content owners and cable companies that has built the profits in the industry is being tested by the rise of internet video. Until recently, I had always been confused as to why Hulu and Netflix seemed so restrictive in terms of content availability. It was only upon understanding just how profitable the existing arrangement between the cable/satellite providers (who are the only ones who can sell access to ESPN, HBO, CNN, etc) and the content owners (who can charge the cable/satellite providers for each subscriber, even those who don’t watch their particular networks) that I began to understand why you can’t get ESPN or HBO online (unless you have a cable/satellite subscription) — much to the detriment of the consumer. Thankfully, I saw some promising signs:
  • At the Cable Show, every content provider and cable provider was talking about “TV Everywhere”. Nearly every single booth touted some sort of new, more flexible way to deliver content over the internet and to new devices like tablets and phones. Granted, they were still operating within the existing sandbox (you can’t watch it without a cable subscription), but the increasing competitive overlap between the cable TV-over-internet services (like Xfinity TV online) and the content providers’-over-internet services (like HBO GO), I feel, will come to a breaking point as
    • Networks like HBO realize they could get a ton of standalone users and make a ton of standalone money by going direct to consumers
    • Smaller networks  increasingly feel squeezed as cable companies give a bigger and bigger cut of total content dollars to networks like HBO and Disney/ESPN/ABC, and resort to going direct to consumers.
  • New “TV networks” are getting real traction. One of the most real threats, from my perspective, to the cable-content owner dynamic is the rise of new content networks like Revision3, Blip.TV, College Humor, and YouTube’s new $200M initiative to build original high-quality “shows”. Why? Because it shows that you don’t need to use cable/satellite or to be a major content owner to get massive distribution. Its why Discovery Networks (owners of the Discovery Channel and TLC) bought Revision3. Its why Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon are funding their own content. After all, Hulu has quite a few made-for-Hulu programs (including Spy which I intend to watch as its tangentially related to MI-5 :-)). Netflix has not only created some interesting new shows, they’ve even decided to resurrect the canceled TV series Arrested Development (canceled by who? that’s right, the evil cancelers of Firefly — Fox). And its why Amazon just announced its first four original studio projects. Are these going to give HBO’s Game of Thrones a run for its money? Probably not anytime soon — but traction is traction, and the better off these alternatives do, the more likely the existing content/distributors are forced to adapt to the times.

I think this industry is ripe for change — and while it’ll probably come slower than it should, there’s no doubt that we’re going to see massive changes to how the traditional TV industry works.

If you haven’t seen it already, go watch British spy show MI5 (or, if you are in the UK, it is called Spooks).

I just finished it this past weekend courtesy of Amazon Instant Video (more specifically, my girlfriend having Amazon Prime which gives us free unlimited access to said video service) and am at a loss as I can’t imagine another TV series taking its place in my life.

The show is, as its name gives away, about Britain’s MI5 spy agency – an analog to America’s FBI in that it deals primarily with domestic threats — and follows the lives and missions of MI5’s Section D. Now, I know what you’re thinking – this is just James Bond in television form. Well, you couldn’t be further from the truth. This is not your usual spy drama. The first episode is about a pro-life terrorist (can you picture even trying to show this in the US?). There is a later episode where MI5 must run counter-intelligence against a Mossad (Israeli’s secret service agency) operation. There is another episode about all the goings on behind the scenes by the CIA and MI5 when the President of the United States makes a visit to the UK. There is one about a British government hit-job on a retired spy who wants to write a tell-all book to clear his conscience. There is even one about making a deal to help the Venezuelan secret service protect their president on a trip to the UK in return for information about a terrorist plot against a British school. These are not topics your run-of-the-mill spy show cover. Combine that with the writers’ willingness to write or kill off everybody (seriously, if you pick any character in Section D there’s a pretty good chance they’ll be killed or written off at some point), great casting, and a chance to see what people in the UK think of the US, and you have a winner .

So, without further ado, five things I learned after watching 10 seasons of MI5:

• Don’t join a secret service: As I pointed out before, chances are, you’ll be killed or sent away. Even if you are not, the work itself is grueling. You don’t control your own schedule, you can’t have normal relationships with people, you spend a ton of time undercover and at risk of being discovered and killed, and your boss is likely a veteran who has, over the years, accrued enough enemies around the world to make dealing with vendettas and having veterans you don’t even know treat you like a pawn a regular occurrence.
• If you do join the secret service, cut off all ties with family and friends. Seriously, it never goes well. Ever.
• Don’t become the asset of a secret service. Its never worth it and there’s also a pretty good chance you or someone you know will be killed.
• Whenever someone tells you to abandon an area because of a “gas leak” or a “chemical leak”, there’s probably a terrorist plot nearby. That was the most common way the MI5 agents evacuated regions where a bomb was believed.
• The US and especially the CIA are nothing but bullies. The number of episodes where the CIA comes across as arrogant and pushy (sometimes to the detriment of itself) is staggering. That is apparently all we Americans are good for…

And there you have it: the life lessons of MI5

(Image credit)

Like with most truths about life, this will seem contradictory. First, take classes seriously. I know, I know — not the sexiest bit of advice, but hear me out: college is one of the last places where you will be surrounded by scholars (both faculty and students) and where your one job in life is to learn how to think. Take advantage of that while it lasts, and make every effort to push your mental horizons. Second, and here’s the contradictory part: don’t take your classes TOO seriously. I don’t mean slack off or go out of your way to fail — but I’d encourage you to never be afraid of skipping a class or a homework assignment if it means finding time for a friend or making time for a great opportunity. College is more about the friends you make and the things you learn outside of the classroom than the time you spend in/on it — and that’s why at the end, I wish I had both taken my classes more seriously and less seriously — in different ways.

I hope this is helpful and congratulations to the class of 2012!

PS: I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention the post I did a few months ago on general career advice for students :-)  Also, my good friend Jen has her answer to this question up on her blog.

Well, I just heard one of the greatest suggestions of all time on the radio: business cards based on this song. To that end, I proposed the following rough sketch of my next business card

Good idea? Or GREATEST IDEA EVER?

While I’m no fan of Santorum’s hypocritical intentions there (anyone else notice how he neglected to mention his own college degree – let alone his MBA and JD?), I do think its worth considering the skeptical view towards American politics’ fixation (dare I say obsession?) with driving up college attendance.

This skeptical view came to me one day when I posed myself the following question: if the goal is to  get more Americans to go to college, why don’t we just make high school last eight years rather than four?

That scenario is not exactly what people think of when they think of driving up college admissions but keep in mind, if we were to somehow able to achieve 100% (or even something like 60-70%) college admissions, an extended high school education (where the last four years might be more advanced and based on applications to different institutions) is basically what you would be creating.

If we think of getting the majority of kids into college in that sense, it begs the question: What would a world like that look like? I’m going to gaze into my imperfect crystal ball and make two guesses:

• First, the costs would be enormous. Even today, with many colleges being independent of the government and with many students bearing the brunt of the cost of college directly, there is huge government involvement with financing. An “eight year high school system”, even if we assumed miraculous levels of efficiency and public-private partnership never before seen in the education system and government, would likely require a huge amount of dollars spent by the taxpayer and by students – if only to provide the financial support lower-income families would need to attend higher education.
• Second, I believe you would see the number of people going into advanced degrees (Masters, PhD’s, MBA’s, JD’s, MD’s, MPH’s, etc) would skyrocket. The reason for that is simple: if everyone goes to college – then its the same as if nobody went to college: the mark of attending college ceases to have any value in setting yourself apart from other people in the eyes of an employer. The funny thing is – one of the reasons I chose the “eight year high school” analogy is precisely because of the analogy that results: that college grads would became the equivalent of today’s high school grads: in the same trouble in terms of competing in the workforce and finding themselves needing to go to “college” (in this case getting an advanced degree).

Its hard to know for sure, and one might even argue that a much more educated workforce is worth the cost but what I think this little thought experiment shows is that just extending high school by four years (the logical equivalent of getting much higher rates of college admissions) is not the obvious universal good that most politicians seem to suggest it is. The fact that students need to go to college at all to participate effectively in the workforce, in my opinion, says more about the lack of effectiveness of our K-12 system than about the value of college.

I think a more meaningful (and time-and-cost-effective) solution to our education system’s woes would actually be to address what I perceive to be the real problems: (1) how students seem to not get enough out of K-12 to contribute to the workforce and (2) how students are forced to pursue expensive degrees just to compete.

1. Bring K-12 quality up to what is needed for people to succeed in today’s workforce. I think this means investing in early education – study after study shows that some of the most effective education investments are those made in pre-kindergarten Head Start programs – embracing new technology-enabled approaches like Sal Khan’s brilliant Khan Academy, changing how we train and compensate teachers, and doubling down on training employable skills (like some of the ones I mentioned here). None of these are that controversial (although the devil is in the details) – what matters is being committed to the notion of increasing the value of K-12 rather than the just the years kids spend in school.
2. Build an actually meaningful system of educational accreditation. Today, one of the most important ways to signal to employers that you can be a decent worker is a piece of paper that costs some $100,000+ called a college diploma. That piece of paper is not only extremely expensive, it also does a terrible job of elaborating what a person is good at (forcing many people to pursue further degrees). This system of accreditation really only serves colleges and the companies/people who make money off of them (i.e., admissions counselors/prep services, etc). This is just my hypothesis but I believe that an accreditation system which actually meaningfully communicated what people’s talents were (i.e. this person is extremely good at math, even though he did not major in math at a top 50 college; or this person is really good at machinework, even though she spent most of her last job planning events, etc) would be beneficial for both employers — who now have a better sense of who they are hiring — and workers — who can now be more discriminating about the value of their education and not needlessly participate in the rat race of tallying up schools/programs which only serve as a rubber stamp on your ability to pay expensive tuition.

(Image credit – SFGate/The Mommy Files)

If it sounds super geeky, it’s because it is . But, in all seriousness, it was a great opportunity to see what researchers and interesting companies were doing with the huge amount of computational power that is embedded inside GPUs as well as see some of NVIDIA’s latest and greatest technology demo’s.

So, without further ado, here are some of my reactions after attending:

• NVIDIA really should just rename this conference the “NVIDIA Technology Conference”. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang gave the keynote, the conference itself is organized and sponsored by NVIDIA employees, NVIDIA has a strong lead in the ecosystem in terms of applying the GPU to things other than graphics, and most of the non-computing demos were NVIDIA technologies leveraged elsewhere. I understand that they want to brand this as a broader ecosystem play, but let’s be real: this is like Intel calling their “Intel Developer Forum” the “CPU Technology Forum” – lets call it what it is, ok?
• Lots of cool uses for the technology, but we definitely haven’t reached the point where the technology is truly “mainstream.” On the one hand, I was blown away by the abundance of researchers and companies showcasing interesting applications for GPU technology. The poster area was full of interesting uses of the GPU in life science, social sciences, mathematical theory/computer science, financial analysis, geological science, astrophysics, etc. The exhibit hall was full of companies pitching hardware design and software consulting services and organizations showing off sophisticated calculations and visualizations that they weren’t able to do before. These are great wins for NVIDIA – they have found an additional driver of demand for their products beyond high-end gaming. But, this makeup of attendees should be alarming to NVIDIA – this means that the applications for the technology so far are fundamentally niche-y, not mainstream. This isn’t to say they aren’t valuable (clearly many financial firms are willing to pay almost anything for a little bit more quantitative power to do better trades), but the real explosive potential, in my mind, is the promise of having “supercomputers inside every graphics chip” – that’s a deep democratization of computing power that is not realized if the main users are only at the highest end of financial services and research, and I think NVIDIA needs to help the ecosystem find ways to get there if they want to turn their leadership position in alternative uses of the GPU into a meaningful and differentiated business driver.
• NVIDIA made a big, risky bet on enabling virtualization technology. In his keynote, NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced with great fanfare (as is usually his style) that he has made virtualization – this has made it possible to allow multiple users to share the same graphics card over the internet. Why is this potentially a big risk? Because, it means if you want to have good graphics performance, you no longer have to buy an expensive graphics card for your computer – you can simply plug into a graphics card that’s hosted somewhere else on the internet whether it be for gaming (using a service like GaiKai or OnLive) or for virtual desktops (where all of the hard work is done by a server and you’re just seeing the screen image much like you would watch a video on Netflix or YouTube) or in plugging into remote rendering services (if you work in digital movie editing). So why do it? I think NVIDIA likely sees a large opportunity in selling graphics chips which have , to date, been mostly a PC-thing, into servers that are now being built and teed up to do online gaming, online rendering, and virtual desktops. I think this is also motivated by the fact that the most mainstream and novel uses of GPU technology has been about putting GPU power onto “the cloud” (hosted somewhere on the internet). GaiKai wants to use this for gaming, Elemental wants to use this to help deliver videos to internet video viewers, rendering farms want to use this so that movie studios don’t need to buy high-end workstations for all their editing/special effects guys.
• NVIDIA wants to be more than graphics-only. At the conference, three things jumped out at me as not being quite congruent with the rest of the conference. The first was that there were quite a few booths showing off people using Android tablets powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra chips to play high-end games. Second,  NVIDIA proudly showed off one of those new Tesla cars with their graphical touchscreen driven user interface inside (also powered by NVIDIA’s Tegra chips).
  Third, this was kind of hidden away in a random booth, but a company called SECO that builds development boards showed off a nifty board combining NVIDIA’s Tegra chips with its high-end graphics cards to build something they called the CARMA Kit – a low power high performance computing beast. 
  While NVIDIA has talked before about its plans with “Project Denver” to build a chip that can displace Intel’s hold on computer CPUs – this shows they’re trying to turn that from vision into reality – instead of just being the graphics card inside a game console, they’re making tablets which can play games, they’re making the processor that runs the operating system for a car, and they’re finding ways to take their less powerful Tegra processor and pair it up with a little GPU-supercomputer action.

If its not apparent, I had a blast and look forward to seeing more from the ecosystem!

I may be in the minority here, but I feel that Thompson lying on his resume was probably not the biggest deal, especially since I doubt that degree made any real difference to why Yahoo hired him. But what was probably a heck of a lot worse was that the misrepresentation made its way into Yahoo’s 10K  — “Mr. Thompson holds a Bachelor’s degree in accounting and computer science from Stonehill College” — a filing to the SEC that Thompson signed, certifying that:

I, Scott Thompson, certify that:

1. I have reviewed this Amendment No. 1 to the Annual Report on Form 10-K of Yahoo! Inc. for the year ended December 31, 2011; and

2. Based on my knowledge, this report does not contain any untrue statement of a material fact or omit to state a material fact necessary to make the statements made, in light of the circumstances under which such statements were made, not misleading with respect to the period covered by this report.

(bolding mine)

This changed Thompson’s sin from one of “just” padding a resume to one of either (1) not carefully reading one of the most important documents a company can issue and/or (2) outright lying to the government and to Yahoo’s investors – not a good sign for a new (and now ex-) CEO. And, also seriously calls into question the Yahoo board of directors’ judgment in that they failed to do a very simple thing such as running a basic background check on a key hire.

As someone who is an investor (both in my job in venture capital investing in startups and outside of my work in the public market) and has been lucky enough to participate in board meetings for some of our portfolio companies, these are particularly alarming signs. While the underlying lie is not really that big a deal, being able to trust the executives and the board members who are supposed to have your best interests at heart is – and misrepresentations in a regulatory filing speak very poorly to a person’s thoroughness, competence, and/or credibility.

The next Yahoo CEO has a difficult job ahead – not only will he/she need to address the underlying problem of Yahoo not having a coherent vision/strategy and having demoralized workers, he/she will likely need to manage the construction of a better board of directors and the implementation of new policies and procedures to prevent this type of thing from happening again.

• The whole family got together at UC Berkeley
• We had lunch at a nice Persian place, on me of course
• We met my brother’s lovely girlfriend Andrea
• My brother and I then gave her the present we had bought (split 50-50) for her: a shiny new tablet!

But of course, my brother outdid me completely on his present by happening to graduate and get his master’s degree from Berkeley thus officially becoming more educated than me . Here we are with our dear mom:

Hope everyone else had a great Mother’s Day – and if you haven’t already, CALL YOUR MOM!