There have been many hardware and software developments over the past 18 months in the worlds of AR and VR. However, most of them solely existed only within the separate realms of AR or VR. Many within the industry, including I, eventually see VR and AR merging into some hybrid reality that fluidly moves between the two. Some companies… Read More
APP ADD Will Cause the Next Tech Bust, Absolutely!
After playing Pokemon Go with my nephew this weekend I have another solid data point to support my hypothesis that we are in yet another tech boom. Let’s call it fad based investors jousting with unicorns. Think dotcom bubble of 2000. What drove the dotcom bubble? Cheap money, magical valuations, market overconfidence, and a good… Read More
Hacking Your Way Across the Chasm
Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm” remains one of the most useful and widely read business books within the high-technology business. I say this not only because I spent a decade of my life working with Geoffrey and the rest of The Chasm Group as a consultant, but also because to this day, I have yet to find another book that is so … Read More
Emerging Disruptions from Blockchain
For several years, Bitcoin has captured headlines not only for becoming the leading digital currency, but also for wild fluctuations in its value. Will Bitcoin succeed? The jury’s still out. But now the underlying technology – an encrypted, distributed digital ledger called blockchain – is riding a wave of adoption for many new… Read More
Obama’s greatest legacy may be the global entrepreneurship he sparked
It is rare to go to a government event, especially where political leaders are speaking, in which you can stay awake or be truly inspired. Indeed, I had very low expectations of President Obama’s Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES), which was held at Stanford University last week. I thought it would be nothing more than a publicity… Read More
The amazing artificial intelligence we were promised is coming, finally
We have been hearing predictions for decades of a takeover of the world by artificial intelligence. In 1957, Herbert A. Simon predicted that within 10 years a digital computer would be the world’s chess champion. That didn’t happen until 1996. And despite Marvin Minsky’s 1970 prediction that “in from three to eight years we will… Read More
Getting Maximum Performance Bang for Your Buck through Parallelism
Finding a way to optimally parallelize linear code for multi-processor platforms has been a holy grail of computer science for many years. The challenge is that we think linearly and design algorithms in the same way, but then want to speed up our analysis by adding parallelism to the algorithms we have already designed.
But the … Read More
Democracy is a great thing, except in the workplace
“The Soviet Union I left behind was a dictatorship but the workplace was a democracy; America may be free but the workplace is a dictatorship” said Len Erlikh after I hired him at First Boston (now Credit Suisse First Boston) in 1986. Being of the Jewish faith, he had fled the U.S.S.R.’s religious persecution.
Erlikh’s words have … Read More
How crowdfunding can help save Silicon Valley from its harebrained investors
There are fears that another Ice Age is about to hit Silicon Valley because of the implosion of its unicorns — start-ups valued at more than one billion dollars. By one estimate there were 229 such companies in January of this year. Their valuations are dropping precipitously because they were overpriced and overhyped. The fear … Read More
The chilling effect Peter Thiel’s battle with Gawker could have on Silicon Valley journalism
Gawker infringes on privacy and publishes tabloid-like stories that damage reputations. It is one of the most sensationalist and objectionable media outlets in the country. It also has not been kind to me. So it’s not a company that I would expect to be defending. But I worry that the battle that billionaire Peter Thiel has clandestinely… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography