Business, life

Good Books I’m reading now

It’s mainly a post to my presents (not that they are going to read it).
Hey, after all these years that you thought me the love of books. Here is a short list of what I’m reading when I don’t have time (usually around midnight). In this list I’ve included some recent books I’ve read:

  • What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. After Outliers, Blink and Tipping Point anything that Mr. Gladwell will write – I promise to read (as quickly as I can).
  • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – it’s very good book on a simple topic. We know NOTHING on the stock market.
    “Assuming more order than exists in chaotic nature” – Our brains are wired for narrative, not statistical uncertainty. And so we tell ourselves simple stories to explain complex thing we don’t–and, most importantly, can’t–know. The truth is that we have no idea why stock markets go up or down on any given day, and whatever reason we give is sure to be grossly simplified, if not flat out wrong.
  • Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
    In a similar way to the Black Swan – it contain lots of answers on how can we recover from an economic crisis.
  • The Intelligent Investor: It is the best book I’ve read about investing. The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham taught and inspired people worldwide. Graham’s philosophy of “value investing” — which shields investors from substantial error and teaches them to develop long-term strategies — has made The Intelligent Investor the stock market bible ever since its original publication in 1949.
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webdev

Google – Microsoft is moving fast behind you

Very impressive (and short) talk at TED that show that maps.bing.com is moving fast in the direction of Google maps.

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life, Sport

2010 Mavericks in Half Moon bay

This is the competition we are going to watch tomorrow…

Amazing place with great surfers.

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life, Sport, travel

What can I say? Panama man! Panama is the place for surfers

Ahh…. thanks to Yaron – I’ve saw this clip and I’m planing my trip down to Panama.

What an amazing waves!

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good food, life, Sport, travel

Vail 2010

Some (really) good times with friends in the powder of Vail.

Continue reading →

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webdev

PHP is now faster then Java (almost)

It was great to read this blog post Facebook HipHop for PHP. I always like to see big companies like: Yahoo, Google, Facebook etc’ contributing back to the open source community. It seems ‘only’ fair to do it after you leverage open source product in order to build business that worth billions. After read it, I found one big mistake in the middle of the post:
“…This is compared to more traditional compiled languages like C++ and interpreted languages like Java.”

C’mon guys, I guess you wanted to write java script and not Java. Any way, it’s very good new approch that will help us (and lot of other) to improve their hardware usage.
As for Java – it’s still much faster then PHP and other languages. But like in other cases, if you take into consideration that TCO (Total cost of ownership) it’s much better to use languages like PHP, Python, Perl for web development due to the freedom they give you to make lots of changes quickly.

Thank you FB.

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Design, webdev

Web Design in 2010 is not what you think

Very good, short (less then 5min) video from SXSW 2009. Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything. I sign on every word…

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Business, life

Forget your MBA

It’s a great talk that David Heineimeier Hansson gave in Stanford last week. For those of you that are not developers (or geeks) – DHH, is the creator of Ruby on Rails and partner at 37 Signals. This company build (with Ruby on Rails) some very useful/powerful/popular colaboration tools. All are using this ‘strange’ business model of getting money from users that like your product 🙂 The main thing he claim in this talk was that planning is guessing, and for a start-up, the focus must be on today and not on tomorrow. I would add, focus on monitization and not only the product/technology. In a new industry, don’t plan, work like Nike saying: ‘just do it’. It’s not 5 year plan that you need, but rather 2-4 weeks.
Another very important point, tune your skill for the real world and not the academic style.
He is a great speaker and worth an hour of your valuable time.
Here is a link to get the mp3 version so you could listen to it on your next run/car ride/commute etc’.

Enjoy.

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Business

Apple’s new Tablet or the big iPhone

apple's new tablet

Let’s be honest, the iPhone is an amazing device but you won’t say that its killer feature is the phone. I guess that apple, very inelegantly, understood that they now have everything in place to lunch the tablet and to make it a hit. Unlike microsoft that wanted to do it 6-7 years ago without any support to their vision, Apple now ‘have everything’ in terms of:

  • Business model with framework to support it. The iTune and then App Store give apple huge advantage (or you can look at that as very high entry barrier to all the other players in the game like: Microsoft, Dell, HP) when it comes to how people will consume software (who said games? movies? songs?) on such a tool. It’s all in motion and in place. Everyone today (I mean, all the ones that have iPod), know that you can lunch the iTune and there you can get all your: movies, Tv shows, Songs and now even free applications (again who said games? Farm Vil…). It’s easy and it’s working plus, it looks great.
  • The iPhone and it’s ‘know how’ will give apple very important knowladge on how to build this tablet to be useful. Keyboard usage… and other patents will play into their hands so this device won’t be like their 90′ Newton (Yes – I had one :).

I’m not an expert in hardware companies, but it seems that apple as a company (and as a stock) going to do very very well after this tablet will ‘get’ the high end market of ‘netbooks’. Just like Apple is doing with its laptop and their 90% share in the segment of expensive (=more then 1000$) laptop.

Kudos to Steve and his gang.

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