-
Awesome and huge article. Did I say it was awesome?
Loïc muses – Global Or Die: Is There A Future For Local Startups?
Loïc wrote a great article (with video) on global thinking for start-ups, with a ton of great tips (link below).
But, I think he’s being a bit narrow-minded about the death of local internet services.
In many ways he is right that being a copy-cat who makes a localized version of a global service is not an easy task anymore. Nonetheless, I do think there’s a future for local startups. Indeed, I think hyper-locality is the where a lot Web growth is. Much like social media is breaking down the power of Mass Media, I think we need to realize that in some segments, it pays to be local.
For example, a yellow pages or classified service, really does best with a local presence. A media service that is local would do better than some global service.
Just as mass media no longer is for everyone, not every service is at its best if global. Yet, it’s just hard to scale globally with a local business. Web-heads like to add servers, not people, to grow the company.
I know some people who are creating great local services that are not copy-cats and will do well specifically because they are local. Do you know of any?
Link: Global Or Die: Is There A Future For Local Startups?
My friend Loic Le Meur wants to convince startups to avoid the lure of focusing only on local markets. He asked to write the guest post below, which I think is worthy of debate.
*Also, Loïc’s a great example of someone who realizes the tyranny of Silicon Valley, that the Valley really is the only place in the world to run a tech business. I’ve railed against that tyranny, me not being from the West Coast. But, the past few years has shown some growth in cities like New York and Boston in the mobile and Web space. Also, I don’t know if it’s just because I have so many tweeps from there, but lately a lot seems to be happening in London, too. That’s good.
links for 2008-04-15
-
via alexdc
Biology is messy! Synthetic biology will be synthetically messy, too! (plus BONUS)
I’ve been reading about iGEM and the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. It’s a component view of biology – that there are parts in biology that can be used much like electronic parts.
Eh, I know they don’t think it’s that simple, but it sure can be misleading what they are trying to do.
These folks are characterizing biological parts and creating a catalogue from which to plug and play and mix and match to create circuits that do something. They are looking to establish standards, construction tools, and some abstraction to make it easier to build synthetic systems. And that’s all fine and good. It’s like the early days of electronics. And they have done some amazing things, light replicating photography with bacteria, some cool circuits, and more.
But, in my biomedical-scientist eyes, I just wished they would think more than just creating digital circuits on analogue systems. Also, I feel that biology doesn’t gate well, I mean, it’s very non-linear and hard to do on-off ‘mathematics’ with biological components. And by trying to build digital stuff, they lose the value of analogue.
In short, I think the questions they are asking are not the right ones for the system.
And thinking back to Craig Venter, moving forward, synthetic biologists are going to have to think of analogue, of biological answers to questions. We are so accustomed to neat and clean binary fixes to things, but seem to forget that in biology, so much is probability, fuzziness, and selection, and failure is so much more nuanced.
I’ve designed many macromolecules and expression systems, grew all sorts of micro and macro organisms, and dealt with all sorts of biological systems. In so many ways, we were not far from the brewers of Mesopotamia, coaxing and praying for a healthy growth and production of the right enzymes.
Yet, we have had in the past 30 years, and even more so in the past 5, a deeper understanding of the mechanisms. But, we mustn’t just translate that all into our digital minds, we need to think of these organisms and molecules on their terms.
When I was a grad student, my advisor was a physical chemist doing biochemistry. To him, DNA wasn’t just A T C and G, but a chemical entity. I came out of there seeing proteins and DNA in a way that my molecular biologist colleagues did not, and a deeper understanding of the complex interactions in biological systems.
In the same way, synthetic biology is going to have to go beyond linear circuit building, but take advantage of the strength of these marvelous billion-year evolved systems.
Here’s a video of Drew Endy, a leader in this field, putting synthetic biology in perspective:
BONUS: If you really get a kick out of visualizations, the Machinery of Life, by David Goodsell, is a really neat peek into the molecular world at the scale of proteins and bacteria.
The different angles of lifestreams – what’s yours?
I was playing with Six Apart’s Action Streams. It allows me to put a lifestream of all _my_ activities across all _my_ social networks into a single stream I can display on my blog.
Eh, that’s not what I want.
Friendfeed, the poster child of 2008, is similar to the Facebook newsfeed. It turns my _selected_ friends’ _selected_ (by them) feeds into a stream. This is almost like a stream of others’ Action Streams.
Eh, that’s not what I want. All these use _my_ stream or someone else’s stream that was consciously _assembled_, or these aggregate a collection of streams I need to actively collect into a new interface.
SocialThing on the other hand is more what I am looking for. It turns my existing _service streams_ into a stream.
How is that different?
Well, I use particular social services for a particular reason. Each service has optimized how I follow my network. Hence, for each stream produced at each service, there is an optimized interface for following and interacting with that stream. And each of those streams are set up in terms of privacy and access between members of that service.
Also, my networks in those different streams are not identical, since a different network emerges on each service due to the actions on those services. For example, my LinkedIn network is very different from my Twitter network.
SocialThing aggregates those separate streams using the logic that I set up in the service itself, connecting me to the folks I have already connected through those services, unlike Friendfeed, where I need to invite people all over again and see services of theirs I do not want to see.
How it should work is I identify the services I use and the streams from those services show up in one interface from which I can not only follow all these streams, but even allow me to interact (say, upload) with these streams. Also, with a bit of smarts (and maybe some help from me), it can make correlations between services, knowing who are the same folks in each (the overlap).
Either there is a service that does this or there is one in the making. It _is_ the year of the lifestream.
Other related articles from more accomplished people:
Bacteria still rule: Great Long Now seminar by Craig Venter (and Bonus!)
I finally got to listen to the Long Now seminar by Craig Venter. And, wow, was it great.
If you’ve been a regular reader of mine, you know that I think Venter deserves the Nobel many times over. He’s been the big disruptor in genomics for decades, taking technological risks that made the industry jump forward farther than our prejudices would have expected.
The talk followed a thread through his disruptions, providing a foundation for why he’s doing what he’s doing now, which is to define the genome of an organism for practical purposes, such as creating biofuel.
One thing that he made me think about was bacteriology. When I was a scientist, we studied mammalian genes, proteins, and diseases. A bacteriologist always felt like someone from the distant past, with a lab full of smelly slimy plates, studying a ‘boring’ organism. A real microbiologist was studying fungi, like brewer’s yeast, the laboratory workhorse and a model system for mammalian genetic and cellular processes.
Well, after listening to Venter, and aligning my perspective with his, it’s clear that bacteriology is the domain to be in.
His recent Sorcerer II expedition has re-ignited interest in bacteria and bacterial ecology. With the recent rise in metabolomics (the analysis of all the metabolites in the body), we’re starting to realize that our mammalian cells are an even smaller part of the body functions we have than we previously suspected. And as, I hope, the antibiotic era starts to wind down and people start redefining our relationship with bacteria, understanding bacteria has become ever more important.
That makes me think that the kinds of professions that will be on the rise in the post-genomic age are bacterial ecology, bacterial genomics, bacterial virology (phage therapy to replace antibiotics, is a new one for me), and bacterial biochemisty.
Questions I now would like to see answered: what are there bacteria who are exclusive inhabitants of humans, what is the total genomic signature of a human (the sum of human and microbiological), how can we live in a sceptic world (the rise of super-bugs is partly a consequence of our cleanliness).
I don’t know if it’s just me, but it seems like there’s been a phase shift in biology on the order of the early days of molecular biology, with the excitement and promise of a very interesting future.
BONUS: One thing that I heard about that was intriguing was the Personal Genomics project, an open source community kind of project to not only get more genomes to sequence and analyze but also to drive the technology to cheaply sequence genomes (see X Prize, too). Indeed, I’ve been reading about the biological parts registry and wondering weather we are at a stage of garage molecular biology. But that’s a later post. 🙂
links for 2008-04-09
-
“The 2007 championship banner was unfurled, the Red Sox got their rings, and an emotional Bill Buckner tossed out the first pitch to a rousing ovation at Fenway Park.” Play ball!
-
[via alexdc]
-
“Red Sox games have morphed into kaleidoscopic carnivals. No moment is wasted or unsponsored. NASCAR without the crashes. Tangerine trees and marmalade skies. Lugo in the sky with Neil Diamonds.”
Old calculators and future steampunk
Heh. My Dad also had some of these types of clunker calculators. Uh, I was curious to see how it worked and opened it and, well, destroyed the whole thing. It was expensive, but my Dad was kind.
Funny, also, to see these photos today. Earlier I was wondering what would be the ‘steampunk’ version of my grandchildren’s generations, as they look back at how backwards were were.
What got me thinking was a segment from Science Friday about folks who are reviving a pre-antibiotic anti-bacterial treatment (bacteriophage).
It also dovetalis with a recurring thought of setting up a bio-lab at home and trying to remember all I learned about early genetics labs and such. That’s my ‘steampunk’ – milk bottles with fruit flies (I used to use them), capillary tubes with rubber hoses to measure microliters, funky autoclaves, light microscopes, different stains, and … ah, it’s so cool.