Uncategorized LANL working on low-cost fusion reactors 24 August 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment LANL is working on low cost, IEC fusion power reactors. This is Inertial Electrostatic Confinement-based system, otherwise known as the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, invented by Philo Farnsworth, who also invented television, back in the day. Robert Bussard, Eric Lerner’s Focus Fusion, and others have also been working on inexpensive means of fusion. These are important, because […] Read more »
Uncategorized Fearing your idea 18 August 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment Caleb Elston: A good product is not a bucket of features, a mere bulleted list of things users can do. A good product is an exercise in exclusion. A good product is defined as much by what it doesn’t do as by what it does. This is especially true at the start. At the onset, […] Read more »
Uncategorized Map of the world’s undersea cables 16 August 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment Cool. (Via Hacker News) Read more »
Uncategorized Open Source War on Poverty 15 August 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment One thing that can be said about Julian Assange is that he is effective at radical transparency. Large hierarchical organizations (militaries, corporations) now fear for their secrecy. John Robb has a good article on Assange today: …what’s really interesting about Wikileak’s Julian Assange is that he is one of the most important innovators in modern […] Read more »
Uncategorized Your online vote can help end poverty 11 August 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment Your vote on American Express’ website will help us win a $200,000 grant – we’ll use that money in our quest to end world poverty. Vote here (after clicking the link, you need to register the first time you vote). For more information about why you should vote, one of our interns Fred Graves made […] Read more »
Uncategorized Customer Development and Social Business 11 August 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment Great post on Business Model Alchemist on using Customer Development for social business. This is what we’re doing where I work at the Grameen Foundation’s Mifos Initiative, as I described in a post a few days ago. Business Model Alchemist does an imaginary case study for the very real PeePoo company, makers of a biodegradable […] Read more »
Uncategorized Reliably producing greatness using multipersonal entities Created 10 August 2010 / Updated 12 November 2011 by adamf | Leave a Comment Richard Hamming gave a talk on what it takes to be individually great. He says, In summary, I claim that some of the reasons why so many people who have greatness within their grasp don’t succeed are: they don’t work on important problems, they don’t become emotionally involved, they don’t try and change what is […] Read more »
Uncategorized The Art of the Pivot 3 August 2010 by adamf | 1 Comment on The Art of the Pivot So it was 101 days ago that I attended Eric Ries‘ Startup Lessons Learned conference. Going to that conference set off a chain of events, which is why I haven’t posted since then. The SLLConf morning session was all on Agile, and since my team is 100% Scrum and Extreme Programming, I didn’t go. I […] Read more »
Uncategorized Resilience and Complexity 11 April 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment Alex Steffen weighs in on reslience and complexity: Forget gardening suburban lawns — help us redesign urban foodsheds for millions. Forget cohousing — help us retrofit an entire districts with green buildings, clean energy and green infrastructure. Forget biodiesel — help us plan a whole new regional transportation systems. Forget ecocity ideas about making your […] Read more »
Uncategorized Helpful and wasteful social complexity 10 April 2010 by adamf | Leave a Comment Anne makes the distinction between technological complexity and social complexity. They’re not the same, though they depend on each other intimately. Technological complexity is related to what kind of machines we can build; social complexity is related to how our society functions. The rule of law, democracy, and corporations all fall under social technology. When […] Read more »