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Dennis Ritchie tribute

Dennis Ritchie code snip

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By Damion Hankejh – October 17, 2011

#dontoversimplify Steve Jobs was wrong

Apple Newton 2100

Enough with the revisionist history — Steve Jobs asserted no one wants/needs a stylus.

Steve was wrong — he wanted everyone to believe they didn’t want to use a tablet as a digital pen/paper replacement. It is perhaps the most seminal failure of the iPhad.  He even had a wheelbarrow of technology in the space — later generations of the Newton had it right, but he didn’t create it, and he killed it.  Worse — the limitations of the crappy capacitive display technology he settled for are solvable with software, but someone had a “better” idea: tell them they don’t want it.  Apple could have pushed tablets out that were more than glorified eReader/game slates a decade before the iPhad.  #mistake

“If you see a stylus, they blew it.” ~ Steve Jobs
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By Damion Hankejh – October 7, 2011

Colorfully raising $41 million for an idea

color.xxx pitch deck coverAs an investor I detest PowerPoint pitch decks — they usually suck.  I’d rather see your napkin doodle, but this deck sets a standard worthy of following (and viewing, warning: colorful language within).

People, colors, apps, mobile, social, pivot — people love that shit.  Add a founding dream team (Lala, LinkedIn, PhotoBucket), a limited supply of 16.7 MM colors, and a dash of Ashton Kutcher’s favorite color — what do you get?  $41 MM — Sequoia Capital invested more in an idea from Silicon Valley pre-launch startup, Color Labs, than they dropped on Google.

Ok, ok — had you for a second, eh?  The Color Labs deck (not the $41 MM) is a parody produced by New Work City.  Nonetheless, I’m not kidding — this is what a captivating pitch deck looks like.  Short, clever and ballsy.  Not unlike my own approach to fundraising as a wee 20-something before Bubble 1.0.  If you can’t pull this off, bring your napkin.

Download the parody pitch deck here

Learn more about Color on TechCrunch

Sequoia’s press release

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By Damion Hankejh – March 26, 2011

Gotham Beauty: NYC Transit subway finder

Wow — NYC Transit for Windows Mobile 7 is a stunning use of the Metro interface, paired with an equally elegant and much-needed overhaul of the MTA’s subway map.  Kudos to New York technologists, Fernando Garza and Chevon Christie, for the new eye-candy.

One more reason to ditch my iPhone… just waiting for one more iteration of hardware.  Nokia, please kick it into high gear — if anyone can give Apple some competition in glass and metal fabrication, the Finnish can — their wares kick ass over the plastic crap running Android.

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By Damion Hankejh – March 16, 2011

IE9 – doing more with less

Windows IE9 logoJason Weber, Microsoft’s IE lead program manager, stocks his office with a 4-year-old PC (an early Intel Core 2 Duo) and a 1GHz tablet PC, about which he says, “If I can make IE9 fast here, I can make it fast anywhere.”

This is really great news. As a fellow MIT colleague points out, most of the world doesn’t have duo-core or better CPUs, and most consumers in China and India still run Pentium 4s — even there the performance improvement is dramatic.

On the subject of doing more with less — MSFT has totally knocked it out of the park with MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials).  Every* antivirus solution I have used — both paid and free varieties — has proven to be massive resource hogs.  MSE is genuinely magical — it’s so unobtrusive I don’t even know it’s there until it quarantines a Trojan.  Why, it’s practically a Mac user’s security experience (minus the spinning beach ball) — all without slowing my machine whatsoever.  And it’s free.

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By Damion Hankejh – March 15, 2011

Purity

Purity scale

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By Damion Hankejh – March 7, 2011

Copy-Paste coming to W7 Phone

Yesterday a W7 mobile developer leaked details on Microsoft’s impending W7 update (scheduled for February).  While copy-paste arguably should* have been available 3 months ago upon the debut of W7, kudos to Redmond for releasing the feature ~10x faster than Apple did – Jobs kept copy-paste from Apple users for ~2.5 years:
iPhone release timeline
Here’s hoping W7 copy-paste doesn’t suck — and update velocity is sustained.  The follow-on update, “Mango”, will include Internet Explorer 9 with the Trident 5 rendering engine, HTML 5 and Silverlight, and gesture support.
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By Damion Hankejh – January 5, 2011

Disaster of Diasporic Proportion

The Social Network script image

Four NYU/Courant students are busy correcting a disturbance in The Force.

Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy stopped talking about the privacy shenanigans of dominant social networks and started building a better decentralized solution: Diaspora.

Their timing couldn’t be more prescient — The Social Network, a Scott Rudin/Kevin Spacey produced movie (IMDb) releasing in October based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book The Accidental Billionaires, sheds light on the real genesis of Facebook — and it ain’t pretty:

Campus follies aren’t what will damage Facebook. It’s the much more serious accusations about Zuckerberg’s character—namely, that he stole the idea for the site from three Harvard students (twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra) and later betrayed Saverin out of his ownership stake. Sorkin’s draft screenplay leaves no doubt as to who’s in the wrong. Much of the movie takes place in a deposition room, with Zuckerberg’s undergraduate machinations played out in flashback, and some of the film’s final frames inform audiences that the Winklevosses received a $65 million settlement. Napster cofounder and early Facebook president Sean Parker also comes off poorly, as a high-flying but functionally homeless cocaine fiend who plies Zuckerberg with girls and venture capitalists.

There’s your deadline, Diaspora.

Charlie O’Donnell from First Round Capital offers an intriguing path forward.  Ping me if you need bitchin IP strategy/defense — I’ve yet to lose an IP battle and for your cause I’ll do it for free.

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By Damion Hankejh – May 15, 2010

iPhone Opera

Opera Server Side CompressionWith the flop of Opera’s Unite (browser w/ embedded server) finally behind us, the Norwegian company debuted their free Opera Mini browser for iPhone today. I’m pleasantly surprised Apple approved the app (for now) and loving the upgrades from Safari:

  • Full-screen browsing (see settings)
  • Dial-pad start page for quickly opening sites
  • Find-in-page searching
  • Site compression (a band-aid solution for AT&T’s crap 3G network)

I’ve run across many first-time users complaining about the default Opera interface and all of its flourishes, but I’m guessing they didn’t bother to poke around to discover the unique features the app offers.  A simple tweak in the browser’s settings (the crescent wrench button) allows toggling full-screen browsing!  For that alone, I’ll discard Safari, but there’s more…

Browsed pages are compressed by Opera servers before being sent to your phone for decompressed display, thus achieving faster browsing — it appears notably faster than using Safari over 3G and Opera reports an average compression of 63.6% (peaking at 90%).

Opera’s server-side compression system is mentioned as a feature of both WinMo Mobile and Mini, but implemented differently — Mini uses compression automatically and Mobile requires the Opera Turbo Add-on:

Using Opera to browse the Web with your mobile phone can save you money on your phone bills, by reducing your data usage substantially. Opera Mini uses only a tenth of the bandwidth of other browsers, compressing Web pages by up to 90%. On Opera Mobile, turning on Opera Turbo compresses data up to 80% or leave Opera Turbo off to get full Web site data, as you would on a PC.

Opera Turbo Add-on:
http://www.opera.com/business/solutions/turbo/

Opera Flash Add-on: psych!

See ya in Trash Bin Hell Safari.

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By Damion Hankejh – April 13, 2010

Sold: Recession-proof technology

One of my earliest Ingk Labs SaaS spinoffs was sold this week. InstantService was acquired by Nasdaq: ARTG and will be merged with their growing suite of enterprise e-commerce services.  UPDATE 10/21 — The acquisition catapulted ATG to its leadership position in the live-help market, powering e-commerce sites with the highest annual combined web sales of $40.2 billion.

Upon debuting InstantService, I recall AT&T, IBM and Motorola asserting, “We believe our customers prefer to [disconnect from what was then mostly dial-up and] call us in our call centers. And chatting is free.” ~ [ palmface ]

My how times change — they are all customers today and InstantService continued to grow through the dot-com collapse and our ongoing recession. As it turns out, customer support is among the last services that corporations consider on the recession chopping block. Sony reduced phone use by 50% and achieved over 90% customer approval. McAfee now handles 80% of all support through InstantService chat, cutting average wait time from 25 minutes to 40 seconds and reducing support costs by 86%.

At Ingk Labs, we call this an experiment in recession-proof technology. The exit will further fuel Ingk Labs investments supporting New York entrepreneurs.

http://bit.ly/isartg2

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By Damion Hankejh – January 14, 2010