From the notebook: musings about so-called ‘acqhire’ talent acquisitions

So-called “acq-hires” (when a company will buy a startup solely/mostly for the talent rather than the product itself) recently came up in a discussion amongst friends and industry peers. In my consultancy practice I tend to work with larger corporate/enterprise technology clients who want me to help inject a bit of ‘startup mentality’ into their […]

What visa type do you need, exactly, to legally participate in Y Combinator?

Hacker News has been buzzing with the story of Canadian citizen Zak Homuth, who was refused entry earlier in the week by US Customs and Border Protection to participate in Y Combinator with his new startup Upverter. His own account of what happened suggests that Zak made over-reaching assumptions as to his ‘rights’ to enter […]

Cease & Desist letter sent to Fotopedia, abuser of Creative Commons

I was sad to discover that photos belonging to both Violet and I are being reproduced without our permission at ‘photo encyclopedia’ Fotopedia. I’m a firm believer in Creative Commons and copyright reform, and so I license practically all creative work I produce under a Creative Commons Non-Commercial Use Share Alike license. This includes all […]

Weekend musings – BitCoin, PlayStation Network and Google IO

BitCoin I’ve spent the last few months researching BitCoin, which for those who don’t know is a p2p currency system that is (sort of) de-centralized and certainly delineated from any government control or intervention. There’s some pretty sophisticated technology behind it which ensures true scarcity (the fundamental issue for any economic model) but it also […]

Amazon’s incorrect priorities when it comes to copyright enforcement on the Kindle

Bill Schneier has highlighted two types of fraud currently occuring on the Amazon Kindle Marketplace due to lax copyright enforcement. The first type of fraud stems from content farm behavior moving onto Kindle – with scammers sucking up content across the internet, uploading the content as Kindle eBooks to Amazon and then using fake accounts […]