Todd Sampson
Scrapbook of interesting finds
About the author
Todd co-founded Cloudspace in 1996, MyBlogLog (sold to Yahoo! in 2007), OneTrueFan (sold to BigDoor in 2011), and a number of other startups over the years. He served as mentor at TechStars Boulder & Seedcamp London and advises a number of tech startups from Silicon Valley to Bucharest.Todd currently lives in San Francisco where he enjoys exploring the amazing California outdoors with his wife, son and daughter; sailing his Columbia 43; cheering on the U.S. National Soccer Team; hacking Arduino and startups.
Elsewhere
Some Grimlock wisdom:
“SMART PERSON EVENTUALLY FIND SOMETHING THAT WORK. ONCE FIND, IT KIND OF BORING. LOTS OF SMART PEOPLE FIND WAY TO WIN, THROW IT AWAY FOR EXCITING NEW WAY TO LOSE.
STUPID PERSON NEVER GET BORED WITH WINNING. PULL LEVER MAKE MONEY? THEM PULL THAT LEVER FOREVER.
I can’t stop picturing a giant version of this swooping out of the sky like a dragon.
(Source: youtube.com)
Graphene is Amazing
Graphene has been found to be a supercapacitor; a nearly unbreakable touchscreen; and now an uber-efficient filter for creating cheap, clean water from seawater. This is pretty amazing considering graphene was only discovered about 10 years ago; and its discovery didn’t win the Nobel Prize until 2010.
Now that you can make Graphene using a standard DVD drive and etch designs that act as electrodes with a CO2 laser things are going to get really interesting.
Open Source Software License TextMate Bundle
Sick of looking up open source license text for your software? I created a simple TextMate Bundle to add license pages and header license code blocks to your application. No more excuses for leaving off a nice friendly license on that code you publish.
… the basic assumption that a person must serve as the universal endpoint is not only outdated; it’s unsustainable. And yet the client-server model remains by far the most predominant. We continue to think and operate under the assumption that a human being must in some way process every computer output. In many cases this is inefficient and actually limits the capabilities of the devices and the network that they run on.
Gotta love Paul Krugman… From A New Industrial Revolution: The Rise of the Robots: “It’s good to have someone questioning the tech euphoria, but I’ve been looking into technology issues a lot lately, and I’m pretty sure he’s wrong: the information technology revolution has only begun to have its impact. Consider for a moment a sort of fantasy technology scenario in which we can produce intelligent robots…
How to Freak Out Responsibly About the Rise of the Robots
Not a bad take on the current press chatter around robots. That said, robots are going to have a major impact on the service world sooner than people think. But how it happens, and how it impacts jobs, isn’t going to be close to what people are predicting.
(via Why do startups fail? infographic | How to Write a Business Plan)
Premature scaling is absolutely the biggest issue outside finding product-market fit — which is the same thing in essence.
Self-declared self-driving cars
I was watching traffic this morning and realized that beacons matter. As part of authorizing self driving cars, governments need to require them to send out a heartbeat in an open protocol for other cars (self-driving and not), smartphones, et al, to be able to identify their nature.
It’s important for safety and for the later creation of flocking behavior when there are enough self-drivers out there. Hopefully Google’s already prepping a spec to release for other manufacturers to adopt.
Boating already has a system called AIS (Automatic Identification System) that does this well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_Identification_System And it looks like the FAA is trying to move air travel in this direction as well.
Completely agreed that we need to build broadcast functionality into not only cars, but all vehicles and autonomous drones — land, sea, air, underground, and space.
Great to see the FAA being proactive in pushing for plans to integrate unmanned aircraft (e.g. drones) into the national airspace! Going to be a huge shift for the country and business…
“INTEGRATION OF CIVIL UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS INTO NATIONAL AIRSPACE SYSTEM. (a) Required Planning for Integration- (1) COMPREHENSIVE PLAN- Not later than 270 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Transportation, in consultation with representatives of the aviation industry, Federal agencies that employ unmanned aircraft systems technology in the national airspace system, and the unmanned aircraft systems industry, shall develop a comprehensive plan to safely accelerate the integration of civil unmanned aircraft systems into the national airspace system.”
