Internet Todo List for Enthusiastic Thinkers S1E15
It’s fall. In Austin, that means it will be cool for a couple weeks and then proceed to what Texans call “cold”. Those from other parts of the country will scoff at Texans complaining about 40–50F temperatures. It will oscillate between 40 and 60 degrees for a few months, punctuated by some freakishly warm days and the even rarer day of temperatures that could actually freeze water. Come March, things will be pretty nice again. Come May, temperatures will start drifting towards what most people consider unbearable. And so the cycle goes.
Everything old is new again, we all stand on the shoulders of giants, all ideas are old ideas. Chris Granger takes us on a nice tour of programmer interface ideas that are “new” again thanks to those, like Chris, who are looking for good things that didn’t get the attention they deserved the first time around. I suspect a lot of would-be creative types are a little too wound-up in making wholly new things instead of creatively mixing up existing good ideas, especially the under-represented ones. It’s great that people like Chris are exploring old ideas and making them new with today’s technologies.
Anil Dash has led me to ask myself, what if the current system of venture capital, startups, and technology innovation was available to a larger sample of the population? Less efficient startups might create billions of dollars of revenue, but do so by enriching the lives of a few thousand people, instead of a handful of investors and founders. Blue collar coders wouldn’t create the next iPhone, Amazon Prime, or Ruby on Rails; instead, they’d directly use those platforms to build custom tools for their business without needing a bunch of arcane programming chops. My hope is that businesses like Etsy, LivingSocial, and Kickstarter can change the small/local business scene in the same way that Amazon’s cloud services and Rails/Django/PHP/etc. have lowered the bar in creating a technology startup that stands a good chance of succeeding without a huge up-front expenditure. Anything that aids people in doing business locally with a higher rate of success seems like a huge win.
I can’t figure out what I like so much about David Byrne’s music. So I’ll let “Burning Down the House”, from his current tour with St. Vincent, speak for itself.
Your pal, ~akk