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 speak with little fear of contradiction when I tell you this is the first TechCrunch article posted from Myanmar aka Burma. Only a few years ago the Internet here was both tightly censored and insanely slow. But now that this country is “on the path to democracy,” according to Daw Aung Sun Suu Kyi herself, Free Wi-Fi signs are widespread, and its Internet is freewheeling and … merely… → Read More
Yesterday I walked from Cambodia into Thailand. On the way out of Cambodia, I was fingerprinted; on the way into Thailand, I was photographed. While I waited for the train to Bangkok I read legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski’s tale of how the powers that be “wanted to mandate that I surveil all of my customers, and turn that information over to the Government without a warrant” in exchange for… → Read More
The maker movement is on the cusp of a boom. They’re job-creating world-changers, on the verge of thoroughly disrupting everything from crafts to consumer electronics to, heck, well, everything, by democratizing manufacturing.
Makerbot has released their Replicator 2. Form 1 sought to Kickstart $100,000 for their professional 3D printer; they’re at $1.5 million and counting. Panda Robotics just… → Read More
Once upon a time, in 2003, there were two entrepeneurs with a dream. Their names were Evan Prodromou and Michele Ann Jenkins, and they dreamed of a collectively edited global travel guide — a Wikipedia for travel, if you will. So they created Wikitravel. And it went over like the proverbial “lead zeppelin.” Two years later, a company named Internet Brands bought it from them for $1.7 million… → Read More
This week Google was granted a patent for “Social computing personas for protecting identity in online social interactions”; in other words, “a pseudonym could be presented as someone’s name based upon their choices of who would see that name or their ‘real’ name.” Sound familiar? It does to me. Two months before the patent was filed, I wrote here “Suppose Google … let Plus users define which… → Read More
This was my second TechCrunch Disrupt, and what a difference a year makes.
Not this year. I mean the year that began in July 2006, when Twitter launched. Two months later, Facebook finally opened up to everyone worldwide; in June 2007, Dropbox was founded; and one month after that, the first iPhone went on sale. Since then nearly everyone else has been playing in the space opened up by those… → Read More
“Nicodemus Jones” was a big fan of bestselling crime author RJ Ellory. His five-star Amazon reviews of Ellory’s books were littered with phrases like “modern masterpiece”, “will touch your soul”, “a magnificent book.” He was less kind to Mark Billingham and Stuart MacBride, both of whom were victims of one-star reviews by “Jones.” Last week, author Jeremy Duns found out why: “Jones” was actually… → Read More
Look, I get it. It’s a great story, maybe the greatest in the history of American business. From Day One, Apple did things the right way: clean, elegant, beautiful. But they were brought to their knees by Microsoft’s colossal mediocrity. Their visionary founder was forced out. They teetered on the brink. And then–bam! They were saved (ironically, by Microsoft.) They regained their footing.
And… → Read More
I’m going to get a little political here, but bear with me, this is a tech post in the end.
I’m in the midst of a trip from my new home in Berkeley, through my old stomping grounds in New York City, to my hometown in Canada. Politically, almost everyone in all three places falls in one of two camps: either they view the US Republican Party as evil incarnate, or (like me) they’re fiscal… → Read More
Last week Wikileaks–remember them?–released a sheaf of documents about the Trapwire security system, which, depending on who you believe, is either a network of cameras being used to spy on everyone everywhere, or an ineffective bust more notable for shady business practices than any successful surveillance.
Is it being used for “monitoring every single person via facial recognition“? → Read More
It’s a potential “doomsday machine.” It’s “quite literally out of control.” Hedge fund managers and Nobel winners say it should be banned. Others insist it should at least be regulated. Its practitioners are “parasites.” Mark Cuban says they are “the ultimate hackers,” who “scared the hell out of me.”
Last week they wiped out $440 million of Knight Capital’s capital. Earlier this year they … → Read More
I’m an optimist, I really am, especially when it comes to technology and its ability to transform the world. But today I can’t shake the feeling that we as a species are really screwing up. Guess what? “There is no hope of saving the global coral reef ecosystem.” How’s that for depressing?
Meanwhile, even those few scientists who previously doubted that climate change was human-caused are … → Read More
To paraphrase the late great David Foster Wallace, did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of software development reveals ideological strife and fanaticism on a nearly Godwin’s-law scale? Did you know that software development even had a seamy underbelly? It does, and its name is PHP, the world’s least-loved but arguably most-used programming language.
It’s loathed, it’s despised, and… → Read More
Digg, which in its heyday was effectively run by its power users, is dying. Wikitravel is probably joining it: two-thirds of its admins want to jump ship to the greener grass of the Wikimedia Foundation. Who in turn have their own people problems–a stubborn gender gap and a diminishing number of active admins. Meanwhile, across the Web, people are asking “Is StackOverflow being ruined by its… → Read More
“Center for Digital Archaeology,” said the banner above one of the startups at the Funders and Founders Life 3.0 demo show, and for a moment I got excited, thinking of Vernor Vinge‘s software archaeologists. It wasn’t quite that. Instead, Codifi was a “solution for turning cultural heritage datasets and rich media into web- and mobile-ready interactive experiences.”
Which is cool, and… → Read More
It looked like the X Games, but it was the most significant product launch of the decade so far. For the first time, Google did what Apple has done thrice, with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Granted, Apple announces products that ship immediately, while Google merely allowed a few thousand I/O attendees to pre-order a beta version that wouldn’t ship until next year; but don’t let the mechanics… → Read More
Last week I wrote about television; this week I’ve been thinking about Hollywood. Not least because a screenwriter with a pretty good track record recently attached himself to my squirrel book1 and is hoping to adapt it into a big animated movie. But it often takes five years or more to go from script to screen, so I can’t help wondering–will Hollywood as we know it still be around by… → Read More
What’s wrong with this picture? It’s 2012, cheap broadband is ubiquitous in the developed world, and TV still isn’t dead. In fact it’s thriving. Sure, for the first time ever, Nielsen says more people watch videos on the Internet than on a TV–albeit barely–but if you look at how much time is spent on the two, there’s no comparison: TV utterly dominates. Which explains why, again according to… → Read More
I keep a close and interested eye on the world of ebooks, and I’m pleased to report that it keeps getting weirder. British supermarket chain Sainsbury – who I worked for once, helping to program a new payroll system for a few months, until they scrapped the whole project – recently bought HMV’s share in ebook hub Anobii for a whopping, er, one pound. (Americans: that’s about $1.50.)… → Read More
Feature phones are not the future. Of course that verges on tautology; of course everyone will have a smartphone, until everyone has something smaller and better and even more integrated into the fabric of our lives, like Google Glasses or cybernetic jawbone/retinal implants or whatever Charles Stross dreams up next. But when, exactly?
I’ve spent a good chunk of my life wandering around and … → Read More
So Facebook’s IPO was a disaster. Or maybe it wasn’t. Yes, it was an utter fiasco. No, wait: “The debacle was not the IPO but all the whining by speculators who didn’t make money.” Nope, it was “the flop of the decade“, the worst first week of any IPO in years. Au contraire: “What we have here is an investment banker acting ethically. And the whole financial press is atwitter about it.” Nuh-uh… → Read More
The government of Syria uses made-in-California technology from BlueCoat Systems to censor the Internet and spy on its pro-democracy activists (who are regularly arrested and tortured, not to mention slaughtered wholesale.) McAfee and Nokia Siemens have done the same in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Amesys of France and FinFisher of the UK aided brutal dictators in Egypt and Libya. Sweden’s … → Read More
A life-size fire-breathing dragon. A fully robotic calliope band. A full-scale flight simulator built by teenagers. An entire herd of homemade R2-D2s. Electric cars, steampunk fashion, a robot petting zoo, a piano made of bananas, and a cardboard Trojan Horse. Plus a zillion different interactive attractions, classes, and events for kids of all ages. Yes, the Maker Faire is back in town, and only… → Read More
One year ago I wrote an article called “Why The New Guy Can’t Code,” about how the industry-standard process for hiring software engineers is broken, shortsighted, and counterproductive. It remains my most-read TC post. Of course, I was far from the first to say so, and even farther from the last; every few weeks a similar rant bubbles onto the home page of Hacker News.
And yet recruiting… → Read More
Poor old Android is having a bad year. (Especially compared to last year.) Apple’s iPhone is soaring in China, and apparently overtaking Android in the crucial American market. Oracle’s lawsuit against Google has led to several rather awkward claims, eg that the word ‘license’ in the phrase “we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need” referred to “not a license from anybody”… → Read More
John Robb is an astronautical engineer turned US Air Force Special Operations pilot turned Forrester lead analyst turned startup CTO/COO turned military theorist and author, to oversimplify. His writing has heavily influenced my own (eg you’ll find his phrase “open source insurgency” several times in my novel Swarm.) He blogs at Global Guerrillas and edits Resilient Communities.
Q: Your… → Read More
E-books. Again. Amazon and the DOJ vs. Apple and “The Big Six.” The future of reading. A breathtakingly stupid David Carr piece in the New York Times, which thankfully someone else took down paragraph-by-paragraph, so I don’t have to. Elsewhere, an awesome quote which I want to cheer with the force of a million choirs of angels:
I am completely unmoved by the argument that if Amazon forces… → Read More
Who needs governments? The ongoing trend toward mobile, social and crowdsourcing apps has led to a wealth of new community-based resources that support or supplant traditional civic and government services. Think Kickstarter instead of the NEA or Canada Council. Or consider the new Circle of 6 app, which is intended to help prevent violence before it happens, by letting users reach out to friends… → Read More
Suddenly programming is sexy. Codecademy is drawing hundreds of thousands to its online programming tutorials. “Those jumping on board say they are preparing for a future in which the Internet is the foundation for entertainment, education and nearly everything else … ensuring that they are not left in the dark ages,” says a recent New York Times piece.
The NYT’s Randall Stross went on to… → Read More
I’d like to be an optimist, like Matt Burns. I really would. Like Research In Motion itself, I was born and raised in Waterloo, Ontario. Like its former co-CEO Mike Lazaridis, I studied electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo. I’ve seen RIM transform my home town over the years, giving it new parks, new buildings, huge bequests for the university, and the Perimeter Institute for… → Read More
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