Stevie Hawking and Me

Everything I know about Stephen Hawking I learned one evening a couple years ago at the old Claremont Hotel on the border between Oakland and Berkeley, California. I was there to give a speech and was late for the gig, so instead of waiting for an elevator I took the stairs down a couple floors in the old wooden hotel. Bursting through the doors at the bottom of the stairs and into the lobby I almost crashed into Stephen Hawking! Killing a world-famous physicist in a wheelchair is not what I wanted to be remembered for so it was lucky I was able to roll a bit to one side and avoid — just barely […]

The T Word

It is rare when my two primary gigs — technology and finance — intersect in some philosophically satisfying way but it happened recently when Goldman Sachs was being charged with civil fraud by the SEC and I was speaking the same day at the Palmetto Open Source Software Conference (POSSCON) in Columbia, South Carolina.  Just minutes before my time to speak I realized that what I had to talk about was trust — the T-word — a word which has very different meanings in each of these realms.

Trust is present or it is absent. Grab a nerd and he’ll tell you that even the absence of trust is a measure of trust and that particular […]

So a Guy Walks into a Bar…..

What are the odds that this week’s story about the next-gen iPhone “found” in a Bay Area bar came about by accident? A quick survey of former and current Apple employees (okay, it was only four of them) came out 100 percent on the side of this being no accident but a deliberate plant on Apple’s part.

Look how the story grabbed headlines and created free buzz for Apple at a time when Apple doesn’t have a new iPhone to flog in the face of new phones from Microsoft and a bunch of new Android devices. By “losing” a phone Apple stole the attention and, in doing so, told us only one thing we didn’t know […]

Get a Life

Update — Apparently I wasn’t clear enough below for some readers.  Her is the deal: I have so far about 340 candidate companies for 24 positions in my upcoming reality TV series.  That means I have to reject 93 percent of all nominated companies.  Chances are that your startup will not be selected.  So I thought it might be a good idea to point out to those who are true believers in what they are doing that this might be a great time to emphasize more than just the technology and the business.  Emphasize the people who have been, in nearly all nominations so far, ignored.  If you want a better chance of making the […]

Why Twitter is Worth More Than Facebook (At Least to Me)

This column was finished before I realized that this week is Twitter’s Chirp developer conference in San Francisco where Twitter will supposedly (and finally) explain how it intends to make money. As you can see below I have my own ideas on this. Let’s compare my ideas with Twitter’s later in the week and see whose are more fun.

I don’t tweet. Yes, I have a Twitter account that’s attached automagically to this blog and whenever I write something new it sends a link to the world. But that’s not tweeting, not really. Still I have several thousand followers on Twitter and pride myself that I don’t inflict myself on them more than 2-3 times per […]

Masters Tournament

Look at the photo with this column. It’s of an audio microcassette I found in my desk drawer yesterday while madly looking for something else in my overgrown office. As you may be able to read on the picture, it is an interview with Bill Gates from June, 1998. That’s the interview I did for my ill-fated Vanity Fair piece on the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It is almost sixty minutes entirely devoted to Bill talking about Steve. Quite a historical document, especially since its contents have never been published. And they won’t be here, either, except for one short quote that stood out when I listened to the tape today after […]

Turn Your Head and Cough: The Startup Tour Questionnaire is Coming!

We’re halfway through the selection process for the Cringely (NOT in Silicon Valley) Startup Tour with more than 300 companies nominated including half a dozen still in stealth mode. I love to sign NDAs and welcome more stealth mode nominations because they tend to be interesting companies that are fresher. With a major PR push about to begin I am still hopeful we’ll get 500 companies from which to select the final 24.

If you have a startup and are discouraged about the competition for those 24 slots, I urge you to try anyway for two important reasons: 1) The nomination process alone offers real publicity for your company and has already produced unexpected […]

The Last Ed Roberts Story

Thinking about Ed Roberts, who died last week, reminded me of the best story he ever told me about Bill Gates and Paul Allen, explaining why Gates was always richer than Allen and why that differential may not have been fair. Here’s the short version:

There was a time when Paul Allen, not Bill Gates, was the boss at Microsoft. When it came time to visit Albuquerque to demonstrate that first BASIC interpreter to the folks at MiTS, Allen made the trip, not Gates. It was Paul Allen, not Gates, who was later offered the job as head of software for MiTS — a job I have in the past characterized as the single most expensive […]

Terminal Man

Ed Roberts died yesterday in Georgia. He was the founder of MiTS, the designer of the Altair 8800 and as close to being the father of the American personal computer as anyone can get. I say the American personal computer because French readers constantly correct me on this. Where, again, are all those French computer companies?

I knew Ed Roberts, though not very well. I never worked for or with him but I met him many times even years after he gave up computers for medicine in his late 30’s. That transition from digital hardware to medicine is key to Ed’s story and I think provides the crux of this column, which is […]

Why Your Favorite App Isn’t Yet Available on the iPad

Update — The very real problem with the iPad simulator described below is affecting hundreds of developers and turns out to be an artifact of a documentation error by Apple.  Literally what should have been a ‘>’ was made a ‘<’ by mistake (or vice versa).  The result is that some applications were built in a way that was within the tolerance of the simulator but not of the target hardware.  Now that iPads are coming available the solutuion is simple: test your app on the actual device.

It’s iPad Day and the fanboys and girls are out with their credit cards buying the non-3G, non-GPS early model iPads that go on sale […]