My brother Sean is working on post-doctoral research in linguistics, especially the use of language in Shakespeare’s plays. Which may seem like a domain far removed from the interests of the technologists who read these blogs, but stick with me. This connects in unexpected ways to analytics of interest to us techies, and ultimately… Read More
Why Is The Modem Still The Unsung Hero Of Mobility?
The unsung hero of the mobile world is not the CPU, it isn’t the GPU, it isn’t even the memory. All of those components have grown extremely quickly in recent years in terms of processing capability, capacity and the ability to shrink thanks to improvements in process technology. The CPU and the GPU seem to get all the accolades, too.… Read More
Microsoft Raises The Mixed Reality Bar Yet Again With New Holographic Platform
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
Solving the EDA tool fragmentation crisis