I say no. Not a bubble. A small subset of tech companies are
over-valued, yes. Most notorious are Facebook, Groupon, possibly
Twitter, Zynga, etc. But most are not. And a greater proportion of
startups are 100% bootstrapped and then kept as lifestyle cash cows or
flipped early in small private exits. Many companies have high caps
but probably valued about right and they have real products and
revenue streams, like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle,
Cisco, etc.

I think that a couple factors are contributing. One, returns on safe
investments like bank savings accounts are basically zero. Two,
there's a lot of great free info on the web now for people to
self-educate especially regarding entrepreneurship and angel
investment, as well as more tools like AngelList and more social event
series like Meetups and code jams and contests that help facilitate
bringing people together and leading to new enterprises and deals. Third,
the top 10% wealth-wise have even more discretionary money now than
they did in the 90's, and that combined with an increasing sense that
the US salaryman has no guaranteed future anymore, so we have to
increasingly look to making FU/retirement from entrepreneurship and
investments rather than doing the 9-to-5-til-yer-60 thing.

Like Morpheus, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are at least offering us
more of a choice. Between the blue pill, which is what some want you
to believe, or the red pill, which is documented evidence of the real.
So to the folks who hawk the blue pill, and who profit from having the
masses continue to believe in the illusion they're promoting, Assange
is a terrorist. To those who'd rather know the Truth -- to see the
world as it actually is -- you'd rather take the red pill. And
therefore to those people, he would be a hero. Terrorist or hero. Same
man, same actions.

(Note: Sarah Palin, the dipshit-diva of the right-wing has lately
literally been calling Assange a terrorist. And she's the not only
one. So my hero-or-terrorist model above is not an exaggeration. It's
already happening.)

Having "insider trading" be illegal always seemed a bit comical to me.
Not because I necessarily think it is not unethical (I see arguments
both for and against it) but because in a world where people are
allowed to meet together and communicate, freely, with privacy, in
"secrecy" and nothing recorded, then, well, I think it's inevitable
that it's going to happen. Person A knows X. Person B can profit if he
were to learn X. Somehow, person A's knowledge gets to B, either
directly or through some middle-man. B profits. Person A gets some
sort of renumeration, perhaps directly, perhaps more indirectly. It is
so easy to setup whatever indirect chain of communication or
renumeration you desire in order to achieve "secrecy" and/or legality
and/or plausible deniability. Not to say that I've done it. But I have
done it as a thought experiment to figure out how it could work. And
there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that others are doing it for
real.

Reminds me of how prostitution is illegal (in most places) in the US.
But only if done in the most literal and narrowly-proscribed and
blatant of ways. But if it's in a little more indirect or creative
way, suddenly that's legal.

I love the iPhone and have been using it for almost the entire time it's been out. That said, it's not perfect. What surprises me is some of the features or qualities it still seems to lack after all this time. The operating system used on all the i- devices is called iOS and is now on version 4.1 or so. I have iOS 4.1 on my iPhone 3G and here are some things that it still lacks:

* cache-using back buttons in Safari

* user toggle-able enablement of the screen auto-rotate feature

* collapsed initial tree state in Safari Bookmarks when Adding a New Bookmark

* photo collection synching

If Apple added these features it would significantly improve the user experience, in my opinion, or, at least for me.

Saw the new movie about the creation of Facebook twice so far. Love it. Inspiring. And probably the most realistic potrayal of web software development and web startups I've seen. The directing, acting, writing, music and camera work were all excellent.

I read a book named Hackers by Stephen Levy around a decade or so and loved that too. There were parts of Hackers where it was depicting the early scenes in the life of various software businesses and the combination of making new software plus making money and being free and independent and agile and being able to do a variety of things were really exciting and resonant with me. I knew that I could be perfectly happy and "self-realized" (or whatever) doing that for a living. Seeing this Facebook movie was the second time I had such a strong sense like that again. It was so well made in terms of craft I think and hope that a lot of other people like it too, even those without a passion for software or entrepreneurship.

Also, the movie is full of great dialogue and lines so I'll end this with one of my favorite -- which might not resonate with you much lacking the full context of the scene, but that's okay for now:

"I'm CEO, bitch."

The water under the Golden Gate bridge is cold...

It's been observed that once any organization reaches a certain size
or age it acquires so many institutional rules and traditions, and has
so many layers of staff, that it effectively lives more to serve
itself than to serve the outside world. It also acts increasingly not
to fight the problem it was meant to be a solution for, but to
actually preserve and continue that problem, thereby maximizing the
chance for future job security for the institution itself. It will
increasingly not want to cure the problem, but to temporarily
alleviate it -- alleviate it for only as long as the institution's
services are purchased. Once that happens, the organization has become
a bureaucracy.

In the news today was a story about some military exercises underway
by the US and South Korea, and North Korea's reaction to it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/24/north-korea-vows-nuclear-_0_n_658136...

Their reaction was the usual bluster and extreme rhetoric. They've
done this several times before. They make the same mistake as the one
illustrated in the parable The Boy Who Cried Wolf. They cry wolf so
many times that when a real wolf comes along the world may not believe
them. Also, North Korea and it's leader are probably the closest thing
to being their own worst parody. Imaginary stories in The Onion
about North Korea are sometimes indistinguishable from real ones.

Recently I was reminded of a rule of thumb I've developed when it
comes to evaluating job, contract or startup opportunities: that cash
is never wrong. 

Because equity may or may not yield significant value for you. Because
the work may or may not be interesting. Because a project may succeed
or fail. Because you don't know how long the relationship will last,
or whether it will lead to better things via contacts and word of
mouth, etc. (though it certainly may.) But getting cash pay is never
wrong.

Once you have cash, there are tons of other things you can do with it.
It can be used to buy you more free time later, more energy, more
opportunities, more convenience, more capital for your own startups,
better health, more happiness, more security, more toys, more tools, a
bigger/healthier family, and, perhaps indirectly, and despite what
some people tell you, and most especially if you're a man, money DOES
help buy love.

Cash is never wrong.

A simple web design is ideal. But what is it?

It is minimalistic, stripped to the essentials: text and media and links. Pages are small, static and cached. The formatting and layout are simple and optimized for a single use case. There is no client-side JS unless absolutely necessary. There is no Flash because it would not be usable on the iPhone. This design style minimizes the time needed by the client to download and render the page. This yields a further benefit on mobile devices where connectivity, memory, cpu and battery are all greater bottlenecks than on a desktop computer. This design is easier to read on the screen, less distracting, and easier to scrape. With all or most of the site served in the form of small, simple, static cached web pages and static media files it then requires a minimum of server hardware resources to serve any given level of traffic, and it becomes easier and cheaper to scale it up.

A simple web design is ideal because it is best for the reader, for the server, and because it is a refreshing oasis of signal and brevity in an Internet that is increasingly becoming a sea of noise, clutter, meaningless superficiality and information overload. We should strive for it because it is the right thing to do. And it should be considered best practice.

Here are links to some sites which exemplify this idea. They are by no means the only way to have a "simple" web design, but they illustrate it well:

http://Zyguild.com

http://Syzorg.com

http://Craigslist.org

http://en.wikipedia.org

 

(Wikipedia is a bit on the complex side, but still pretty simple, clean and easy on the eyes and the client hardware.)

Examples of bad:

 

The Readability plugin is a project that helps web surfers retrofit third-party websites with a bit of a Simple Web makeover optimized for readability. It's also been bundled with the most recent version of Safari as a built-in feature. I love it and recommend everybody try it out if you're a hard-core web reading geek like me:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Saw a story on Reddit recently about an UFO spotted in China. It was
the typical thing, a photo of some sort of light or set of lights in
the sky. Could have been anything, and lots of normal
non-alien/non-supernatural things could have caused it.

Here's my position on UFO's and whether they are real and whether they
are truly alien ships from another planet:

When one of these UFO's lands outside my house, a little green man
walks up to my door, knocks, I answer, and he invites me to lunch on
Betelgeuse, and I accept, and we walk onboard his ship and fly to
Betelgeuse, land, get out and then sit down and ACTUALLY HAVE LUNCH
then, and only then, will I believe that UFO's are alien ships bearing
little green men from the stars.

Until then, I'm a skeptic.