Silicon Valley Musings

This picture was taken in Terminal A at Mineta San Jose International
Airport.

There is a search arms race brewing between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Since these three companies will be frequently mentioned together when discussing search, I thought it would be appropriate to have a short hand way of refering to them collectively.
So I coin the phrase, “gimme”, which is how I would pronounce the acronym GMY […]

MEXICO CITY (AP) - Security has reached the subcutaneous level for Mexico’s attorney general and at least 160 people in his office — they have been implanted with microchips that get them access to secure areas of their headquarters.
Full article here.

As RFID tags are introduced into the supply chain, I feel it will become necessary to have RFID event agents at the edge processing the fine-grain raw RFID data into meaningful events.
Lets look at the example of a shipment of toys from Hong Kong as it makes its way to a Palo Alto based toy […]

As small businesses attempt to gain efficiency through automation,
they usually start by moving their back office processes to digital,
computer-based systems. Before a business takes the next step and
converts their entire workflow to a digital format, there is a period
when paper based forms are entered into the back office systems by
hand. This is a labor […]

Automated workflows that take use RFID for product tracking
will need access to logical RFID Reader locations. I don’t mean the physical
locations of readers or the reader’s identifier, but a logical identifier for a given reader.
For example, the readers associated with moving shipping crates from a ship
the loading dock. I suspect this bank of readers will […]

I just starting to read Dan Brown’s first book, Digital Fortress. Within the first fifty pages I felt there was a technical flaw to one of the central plot twists and was doing a Google search to see if anyone had noticed it.
In the process, I stumbled across this 1998 rec.collecting.books newsgroups posting reportedly […]

During my Digital Vision fellowship at Stanford, one of the things I noticed is that many emerging economies are seeking to attract manufacturing or impersonal service jobs (e.g. call centers). The problem with this approach is it creates low paying jobs that are easily moved to the next lowest bidder.
As an alternative, I suggest emerging […]

My most recent professional experience was as a principal with the Reuters Innovation Studio. At the studio I had an opportunity to think about different products and services that would exploit Reuters market data (e.g. stock quotes and news) assets. So it would only be natural for me to think about searches as financial instruments.
In […]