Antenna designer writes about the iPhone 4
I received a phone call today from PC Magazine. They were running a story on the new Apple iPhone 4, specifically the reports (PC Mag, Gizmodo, Engadget) that people are experiencing decreased reception on their cell phone when they hold the phone by the metal frame.
Paul Buchheit: Four Reasons Google is still Awesome
My recent predictions about which Google products will succeed (and which won't) are causing people to think that I'm anti-Google, which mak...
Steve Jobs’ response on Section 3.3.1
After posting my reaction to clause 3.3.1 of the iPhone SDK terms I decided to write Steve Jobs the following email:
Why Free Plans Don’t Work
The following is a guest article by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch . Not too long ago it seemed like every product I knew was offering some sort of free plan. The strategy was brilliant: get loads of people using your product and eventually turn them into paying customers. Everywhere I looked the
Google agrees to buy ITA Software for $700 million
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Facebook is not worth $33 billion
Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…
Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
Over the years I have spent a lot of time brainstorming startup ideas with people who are (asymptotically) as nerdy as me. For some reasons, every time I brainstorm with a new set of people, the following ideas come up. This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems…
YouTube wins case against Viacom
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
The quest for freedom and safety: Why I donated $100,000 to YesOn19
The common theme uniting most of my efforts is the desire to be free. One of the reasons I'm so interested in startups is that they give peo...
Founder Control
December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A…
I am doing a startup (putting virtual machines on the web)
Update: StackVM is now called Browserling. Hey everyone, I have awesome news! I am doing a startup together with James Halliday! I met James on FreeNode several years ago and it turned out that we had very similar ideas about doing great hacking. So we teamed up as equal co-founders to do a startup. We're on…
Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
Diaspora, the “open Facebook alternative” (NYT story for background if you aren’t familiar), has raised Over $170,000 from over 4600 people in just a few weeks. All for an idea. That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. HereR…
Scribd Puts My Old Uploads Behind a Paywall and Goes Onto My Shitlist
Over the last year, I’ve become a heavy user of Scribd. I have posted over 100 documents to Scribd that have generated over 100,000 reads. Posting to Scribd is fast and easy–much easier than using my extremely cumbersome web hosting...
We are like prisoners... We do not have a life, only work.
DropCatch.com helps you secure expiring domain names.
How to detect a toxic customer
A month ago I received a sales inquiry via email for my invoicing software package. The prospect asked if we could complete the questions he had attached in a spreadsheet: I will need the attached questions answered in order to proceed as I can’t get them all answered off your website.
Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2
Discover more about what's new at AWS with Announcing Micro Instances for Amazon EC2
I just need a programmer
I first became acquainted with Pat Conroy's work when, as a freshman in college, I watched The Great Santini as a requirement for one of my honors courses. This film struck me as both sad and hopeful. Since then, I have seen a couple of other movies adapted from his novels.
A new approach to China: an update
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash
Firstly, the Apple vs. Adobe vendetta gets even nastier, with a public letter from Steve Jobs explaining why Adobe's Flash multimedia format will not ever be allowed into the garden of pure ideology that is the iPhone/iPad fork of OSX.