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– the great city builder Daniel H. Burnham
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If you live in the Boston area and are in the tech business you should check out the more or less monthly Web Innovators gathering sometimes referred to in shorthand as WebInno. Here is the WebInnot blog and here is the WebInno registration page and announcement of the next WebInno event.
For all of y’all who suffer from the boston-isnt-as-cool-as-silicon-valley syndrome, I strongly recommend you check out the next WebInno. Here again are the coordinates:
“It’s just over two weeks away until our July 15th Web Innovators Group meeting and we’ve lined up another great set of demonstrators for the event.
As usual, the doors officially open at 6:30pm at the Grand Ballroom in the Cambridge Royal Sonesta, with the “main dish” presentations to the entire crowd starting at 7pm.” (from WebInno)
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I am just finished reading Devil In The White City by Erik Larson. Loved it!
This news item about the first archaeological dig at the site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition caught my eye because that is what the book is about (also about a serial murderer, but that’s something else again.) I am only part way through the book but it’s quite good so far.
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Recently three friends of mine got nice press coverage, so I thought I’d share them:
So in fact, there IS cool tech stuff going on in Boston 
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This New York Times article, “What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer” is pretty interesting, and makes sense at some level:
“Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?” (from “What’s Obcene?”)
and then:
“In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.” (from “What’s Obcene?)
Read the whole article, it’s quite interesting. Do you think this is a reasonable judicial approach?
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I haven’t seen anyone pointing to this article about TechCrunch and Professor Arrington, but it’s very interesting. I remember when it was first starting and how he would write an unbelievable number of interesting and useful reviews about new products. Mike Arrington was a machine! Say what you will about him, TechCrunch is the labor of some extremely hard work:
“Of course, Arrington’s success is about more than partying like a frat boy and schmoozing like a Hollywood agent at a cast party. With the exception of a three-week vacation (during which he worked half-time) at the end of 2006, he says he has worked every day for two years straight.
He gets up at about 10 or 11 am, is at his desk 10 seconds later, and tends to the business side of his operation until early evening, seeing entrepreneurs, doing phone interviews, tracking the news of the day, and writing posts. He’s often at parties or other events until 10. It’s typically not until 10 or 11 pm, when things quiet down, that he has time to think and write more thoughtful, analytical blog entries. “I’ve actually cut back,” he says. ” from TecCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz
Learn all about TechCrunch and Michael Arrington
Technorati Tags: techcrunch arrington
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He’s been saying something like this since a week after 9/11. I agreed with him then, and I still agree with him:
“Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy — particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor.”That’s what a real president would do.” (from Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave)
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I am on a Mac and I have lots of odd little things running, doing backups, syncs, who knows what. Every so often my computer goes “boink!” with no error message or display and I wonder, hmm, I wonder what just happened?
I have a suspicion it’s my hourly backup which is boinking because one file couldn’t be backed up. But it might be finder saying that it was done copying all those files (oh wait, maybe that’s a “bing” not a “boing”) Or might it be something else totally?
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I am a LifeLock customer and so I follow developments in this arena pretty closely. Check this post LifeLock and Identity Theft from Schneier on Security:
LifeLock does a bunch of other clever things. They monitor the national address database, and alert you if your address changes. They look for your credit and debit card numbers on hacker and criminal websites and such, and assist you in getting a new number if they see it. They have a million-dollar service guarantee — for complicated legal reasons, they can’t call it insurance — to help you recover if your identity is ever stolen.
All in all, I probably will remain a customer. Schneier does a good job basically saying that LifeLock is clever and useful but too expensive. That’s more positive than the press they’ve been getting.
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My Citibank MasterCard allows me to generate a virtual credit card number, pretty simply, using a fairly ugly web interface. But a few clicks and you get a picture of a credit card, including numbers, dates and CVC. The magic is that this credit card can be used only once so if it’s stolen you don’t run a risk. Pretty cool. I just used it to pay for some software online and it worked like a charm. Simple and useful!
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