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More than I wanted to know about Twitter

Post published:February 13, 2014
Post author:philip

While I've used Twitter since 2007, I was generally a fairly passive user. One account I used was mainly automated postings from another blog of mine, and the account I'm now using was largely dormant. My original account I just used to follow people and read their tweets. Recently, I've decided to build up @trauring as my tech-focused account, and I've been trying to learn the intricacies of the world of Twitter. As part of that I've been trying to watch who follows me, and in general I want to determine what I do that causes more people to follow me. When I post an article on this site or tweet a tweet, what topics result in more followers? It's a bit narcissistic perhaps, but I look at it as a temporary experiment and challenge. Eventually I'll get the hang of things and leave well enough alone. It was thus with some amusement that I've been watching some of the accounts that have been following me. I say accounts, not people, because clearly some of these accounts are not real people. Today I noticed two new followers, Reita and Jed. What was so unusual about Reita and Jed? Here's what…

The history of messaging, and where it’s going

Post published:February 6, 2014
Post author:philip

There are in my view four main phases in the history of online and mobile messaging. The first phase included e-mail and to some extent real-time messaging (in the form of chat rooms), but was strictly within walled gardens. You could only communicate with others using the same proprietary service provider (America Online, Compuserve, Delphi, etc.). The second phase was the beginning of interconnected systems and the Internet. E-mail no longer stayed on a single server, but could go between companies. Real-time messaging, switched from chats that people had to join, to curated lists of friends, the buddy list, which dictated who you could chat with and allowed people to know when you were available for chat. To chat with someone you needed to know their username (or be able to find it in a directory). In some implementations, such as MSN Messenger, the other user had to approve you being able to see if they were online, but in others like AIM, you could see who was online as long as you knew their username (assuming they had not blocked you). The third phase was the emergence of text messaging on cell phones. This includes SMS, which spread initially…

The first public introduction of the Macintosh was in Boston

Post published:February 3, 2014
Post author:philip

In 1984, Apple famously announced the Macintosh on January 22 in the iconic Ridley Scott directed '1984' commercial during the Superbowl. Not well known is that the ad was actually shown a few months earlier to a group of computer dealers behind closed doors. The ad announced the imminent launch of the Mac on January 24th, 1984.The Mac was indeed introduced on the 24th, at the Apple Annual Shareholder's Meeting, and was to become available publicly hours later. Video of the shareholder's meeting was found on a Betamax tape in 2004, and released online in 2005. For a bit of history behind what happens in that video, see Andy Hertzfeld's great description on his folklore.org site called The Times They Are A-Changin'. The initial introduction was to Apple's shareholders who went to Cupertino, CA, and was not open to the public. The first public introduction of the Macintosh was actually six days later, across the country in Boston, MA. It took place at a meeting of the Boston Computer Society (BCS). BCS was run by a 20-year old college student, Jonathan Rotenberg, who had founded the society in 1977 at the age of 13. At its peak, it was the largest…

Renting a Bicycle in Tel Aviv

Post published:January 27, 2014
Post author:philip

Yesterday I spent some time at the Tel Aviv Port, a formerly run-down area that has been turned into a super-trendy nice-restauarant upscale-shopping area of the city. While having lunch at a restaurant facing the water, I did something I occasionally do when I'm in new place, I glanced at the 'Near Me' tab in the App Store on my phone. As is common, many of the apps that showed up were transportation related. This included an app called TeloBike (iTunes link), which provided information on the locations of bike rental stations in Tel Aviv, including how many bikes were available at each station. It worked pretty well, and operated in both Hebrew and English. The data for this app presumably comes from the site run by the city of Tel Aviv for bike rentals, Tel-O-Fun. The site itself is not bad, provides a map of all the locations with the number of bikes available, and operates in Hebrew, Arabic, English, French, and Russian. The app Telobike itself is not from the city, or connected to the site directly, but was created by an independent developer. Why doesn't the city have a mobile app itself? I'm not sure. More on that in a second.…

The end of paper?

Post published:January 23, 2014
Post author:philip

Google's Glucose-sensing Contact Lens (Google Blog)

Do the success of tablets signal the end of paper? I think we can never truly understand understand what the future will hold, even if we can predict its trajectory. Ray Kurzweil speaks often about how technology grows exponentially. Not only is technology progressing quickly, but the rate at which it is progressing is increasing. This is counter to how many people perceive it. This is best outlined in Kurzweil's paper The Law of Accelerating Returns. I bring this up because he posits that the 100 years of this century will see the equivalent of 20,000 years of growth at the growth rate at the turn of the century. In other words, even at the growth rate that existed in 2000, it would take 20,000 years to reach the equivalent growth if kept constant, compared to the accelerating growth that really exists and will occur in this century. So how will we consume the written word in 10 years? in 50 years? in 100 years? Can you perceive what the equivalent of 20,000 years of progresss will mean? One can argue now about the tactile difference in reading a paper book versus reading on an iPad, but what about…

A new blog

Post published:January 22, 2014
Post author:philip

I've blogged in the past on a variety of topics, but not on technology and business, which is odd considering I've been working in tech for over 20 years. This blog at trauring.org, and the accompanying Twitter account trauring are an attempt to put out my opinions on technology and working in startups. I'm currently starting a new project, so as that progresses and becomes more public, I'll be posting about that here as well. Philip Trauring

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