Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist, and software engineer. His novels have been published around the world, translated into several languages, and praised by The Times, The Economist, and the Washington Post. His journalism has appeared in Wired, Reader’s Digest, The Guardian, The Globe & Mail, and The Times of India, and he writes a weekly column for TechCrunch. Jon also has a degree in electrical engineering and a decade of experience as a software developer, building everything from smartphone apps to billion-dollar asset-allocation services.
I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most… → Read More
A few days ago I landed in England and, expecting little, slipped an old UK SIM card into my phone. I’d bought it when living in London five years ago, and hadn’t used it in over a year. But to my amazement it was still active — as was the money I’d added to its pay-as-you-go account sixteen months earlier…and then I received a friendly text message informing me that my data costs were… → Read More
A new front has opened in the smartphone war, and for the first time in many years, Apple is both outnumbered and outgunned.
I’m not talking about the phones themselves. iOS is still better than Android, although the gap has narrowed. The next iPhone will doubtless be the best phone in the world when it’s released, as ever. It won’t be as customizable – no Swype, no Facebook Home – but those… → Read More
Credit where it’s definitely due: this post was inspired by a Twitter conversation with Box CEO Aaron Levie.
Don’t look now, but something remarkable is happening.
Instagram had twelve employees when it was purchased for $700 million; all of its actual computing power was outsourced to Amazon Web Services. Mighty ARM has only 2300 employees, but there are more than 35 billion ARM-based chips… → Read More
How’s this for synchronicity: Google Glass started shipping on the same week that CISPA passed the House, 3DRobotics unveiled their new site, and 4chan and Reddit pored over surveillance photos trying to crowdsource the identity of the Boston bombers.
Cameras on phones. Cameras on drones. Cameras on glasses. Cameras atop stores, in ATMs, on the street, on lapels, up high in the sky. Modern cars… → Read More
A few months ago, while visiting a hacker friend’s magnificent new San Francisco loft, he gestured to a little alcove stuffed with server racks and said: “And over there are the Bitcoin mines.” I smiled and nodded, thinking, Oh, right, Bitcoin. Is that still a thing?
Andy, if you’re reading this, I apologize. Is it ever, and how. Over the last few weeks the hype around everyone’s favorite… → Read More
This hasn’t been a great year for Foursquare. “Check-ins are no longer what they used to be,” as Ingrid Lunden observed last month. There seems to be a general consensus that “Foursquare keeps resembling Yelp more and more…” but that comparison isn’t necessarily flattering, especially since there’s little doubt that Yelp has much greater public mindshare.
Then former Square COO and current… → Read More
So there’s this startup called SmogFarm, which does big-data sentiment analysis, “pulse of the planet” stuff. I spotted them last year, and now they’ve got an actual product with an actual business model up and running in private beta: KredStreet, “The Social Stock Trader Rankings,” which performs sentiment analysis on StockTwits data and a sampling of the Twitter firehose to determine traders’… → Read More
If you love books–heck, if you even like ‘em–run, don’t walk, and read this magnificent, magisterial essay by Richard Nash on their past, present and future. It’s long. Don’t be frightened. But even if the Internet has shredded your attention span, at least scroll down to its epic final paragraph. Go on. I’ll wait.
It’s been a rotten decade for book publishers, newspapers, and anyone else… → Read More
“First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video.” — Pat Cadigan, Pretty Boy Crossover
Sheesh. A whole lot of people who presumably have never actually seen Google Glass in action appear to be really upset. “People who wear Google Glass in public are assholes,” says Gawker’s Adrian Chen. “You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do… → Read More
Writing software used to be so simple. A giant pain in the ass, mind you, but simple. You were a Microsoft developer, with binders full of Visual Studio CDs; you were a Java developer; you used the LAMP stack; or you worked with something proprietary from IBM or SAP or the like.
Nowadays, though, while the tools and technologies we use have improved enormously…imagine, God forbid, that you’re… → Read More
Their downside to pet projects is that they invariably teach you something you didn’t really want to know. This time, it was that most of the people who do what I do are doomed.
Let me explain. Mostly for fun, I’ve recently built1 a news aggregator I call Scanvine, which ranks stories and authors and publications by how often they’re shared on social media. (TechCrunch does quite well, thanks for… → Read More
By now you must have heard of Unit 61398 of the People’s Liberation Army: “an overwhelming percentage of the attacks on American corporations, organizations and government agencies originate in and around [their] white tower,” claims the New York Times, who were themselves recently owned by the 1337 h4ck3r5 of the 61398. And just recently, there were “extremely sophisticated” attacks on Apple, … → Read More
“Technological revolutions happen in two main phases: the installation phase and the deployment phase,” observes Angel of the Year and new Andreessen Horowitz GP Chris Dixon, who says that the turning point between those phases for the Age of Information is…now.
Meanwhile, “profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down,” notes Paul… → Read More
A project I’ve been working on launched recently. Well, re-launched. A slick little iPhone app called Postography, which lets you send postcards with messages and pictures from your iPhone. Nifty, but sounds fairly straightforward, right? An app that shouldn’t have taken too much time to build.
Unfortunately, we didn’t build it; we rebuilt it. And the company that took the first crack at it… → Read More
A couple of years ago I wrote in this space: “A spectre is haunting Mountain View. No, not bed bugs: bit rot. Google is in serious decline.”
Well, credit where it’s due. These days Google has put its problems behind it and is soaring from strength to strength. Contenders keep coming and trying to claim its crown–and failing. I give you Apple Maps and Facebook’s Graph Search as an example. → Read More
“The middle class is being hollowed out,” says James Altucher. “Economists are shifting their attention toward a [...] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality,” reports the New York Times.
Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: “Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as… → Read More
Databases aren’t sexy, but they’re the absolute foundation of the tech world, the ground on which all of its edifices are constructed. You probably use a hundred every day. At least. They’re like the Spice in Dune: “S/he who controls the database, controls the universe!” Well, don’t look now, but that universe is beginning to quake. → Read More
It’s been a bad week for online security. An “extremely critical” Ruby on Rails security hole; a Yahoo! Mail XSS exploit; and yet another Java 0-day vulnerability. I know, I know, security is hard: still, it’s difficult not to be left with a frustrated throw-up-your-hands “can’t anybody do anything right?” feeling. → Read More
Here’s my favorite Big Idea of the year so far, via John Robb, who’s always worth your attention: The Dronenet, a “short distance drone delivery service built on an open protocol.”
He fleshes it out in a series of posts, but basically, it would be a network of drones that would carry things the same way the Internet carries data: in packets, over a series of multiple hops, routing on the… → Read More
I am about to commit an act of meta-journalism. I’m sorry. I hate meta-journalism. I unfollowed GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram (a fine writer) on Twitter some time ago because I could not muster any more interest in articles about articles and blog posts about blogging. I believe that journalists (like people in most professions) vastly overestimate their own importance, significance, and interestingness… → Read More
Gun control is on many minds this week, but let’s not talk about guns. Let’s talk about drones. (With a reported 300 million guns in private hands in America already, it’s probably too late for gun control anyhow.) Drones are to nation-states what assault rifles are to psychotic mass murderers. Worse yet, the way things are going, it’s only a matter of time until alpha insurgencies like Hezbollah… → Read More
So this is awkward. Ownshelf is a new service that lets people store and share ebooks online. Pretty nifty, huh? They reached out to me in part because I’ve released several of my own books for free under a Creative Commons license. (For those of you new to this column, I write fiction when not writing code, and have had a bunch of novels published by HarperCollins, Hachette, etc., over the years… → Read More
Imagine that you are transported by a time machine to somewhen in the depths of prehistory, like maybe 2005 or something. Imagine further that you subsequently must try to convince people there/then that one day in the future, an online service which codifies, organizes, and ranks excellent answers to very nearly any imaginable question–for free!–will be wildly less successful than one that lets… → Read More
Six weeks ago I was out drinking in a Kipling-themed bar in Rangoon, Myanmar–as you do–and happened to find myself next to a table of high-powered international telecommunications consultants, overhearing juicy lines like “Skype and Viber are going to kill us.” Needless to say I told Twitter right away. Then an old friend who’s also a genuine International Man Of Mystery got in touch and asked… → Read More
Long have I hated Microsoft. For decades their bloated mediocrity infuriated every fiber of my being. Like Adam Sandler and leaf-blowers, for a very long time, they represented everything that was wrong with today’s world. But just as Adam Sandler went and made Punch Drunk Love, over the last few years, Microsoft has released a body of work that even I must grudgingly admit is interesting… → Read More
Two years ago I wrote a post entitled “Can Anything Stop The Facebook Juggernaut?” in which I marvelled at the fact that Facebook was then worth a whopping $35 billion, according to Second Market. Today, after its much-touted stock price “collapse,” the company is worth roughly $51 billion. It’s a strange world when a market-value increase of $16 billion/~45 percent over a two-year period is… → Read More
Happy anniversary to me: I’ve now been writing this here weekly column for exactly two years. Over the last year I have opined, prescribed, and predicted many things. And now, like last year, as part of my one-man crusade for greater opinion-journalism accountability, I’m going to take a moment to go back and look at what I got right … and where I went horribly, hilariously wrong.
(cracks… → Read More
The last time I wrote about 3D printers, an appalling number of people in the comments – including VCs who really, really should know better – kept writing things like: “Nearly identical comments were made about personal computers, desktop printers, color printers, laser printers…” and “just like printing at home” and “Let’s use the traditional paper printer as an example” and “it will follow… → Read More
Last week Glassdoor published its most recent software engineering salary report. Short version: it pays to code. Google and Facebook employees earn a base salary of ~$125K, not counting benefits, 401k matching, stock options/grants, etc., and even Yahoo! developers pull in six figures. Everyone knows why: ask anyone in the Valley, or NYC, or, well, practically anywhere, and they’ll tell you that… → Read More
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