John Cox

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TechCrunch

How We All Missed Web 2.0′s “Netscape Moment”

Press and pundits have spent years asking whether each big IPO (Loudcloud, Google, Salesforce, soon LinkedIn and Facebook) will be "the next Netscape moment," but this piece argues the real successor already happened in 2009, when DST's $200 million secondary investment in Facebook showed a hot startup could deliver investor liquidity, publicity and acquisition cash without going public. The author ties that shift to the rising costs of being a public company (Sarbanes-Oxley, Reg FD, short-term trading, thin research coverage) and notes that Andreessen and Horowitz see the deal as merely a prelude to an IPO. The piece closes with warnings that late-stage deal quality is already slipping (Spotify's $1 billion valuation) and that employee insider-trading incidents could provoke an SEC crackdown on secondary markets.

Permalink social mediatechnologyhistorybusiness

stackoverflow.com

jquery date picker to show month year only - Stack Overflow

A Stack Overflow-style answer showing how to turn the jQuery UI datepicker (1.7.2 with jQuery 1.4.1) into a month-and-year picker. It hides the day grid with a CSS rule on `.ui-datepicker-calendar`, enables month and year dropdowns and a button panel, and sets the format to 'MM yy'. The key trick is an `onClose` handler that reads the selected month and year from the popup's dropdowns and calls `setDate` with the first of that month, since the widget has no native month-only mode. The complete working HTML file is included so it can be pasted in and run.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentjqueryjqueryui

TechCrunch

Google Payment VP/Former PayPal Exec Osama Bedier On eCommerce: Major Change Is Coming

Alexia Tsotsis reports on a Web 2.0 Expo talk by Osama Bedier, a former PayPal executive who has just joined Google, where the company is reportedly testing an NFC payments system with MasterCard and Citigroup and has filed a patent for a mobile shopping cart that would bundle a whole transaction and collect data on what people buy. Bedier argued that ecommerce has barely changed in 13 years but is about to be remade by the convergence of mobile, local and social, provided three things happen: payments go digital, inventory moves into the cloud, and identity becomes interoperable. He pictured the result as a return to the personalized shopping of 50 years ago, and said it would require companies to cooperate rather than have any one firm own it.

Permalink technologymobilebusinessgoogle

technologytosoftware.com

30+ Awe-Inspiring jQuery Plugins To Ramp-Up Your Skills

The saved text is a navigation menu from a browser-extension site, not an article. It lists a range of video downloaders, including ones for Skool, Whop, Vimeo, Circle, Loom, Kajabi, Thinkific, and SproutVideo, plus several for adult-content sites. Each entry has a one-line pitch about saving videos as MP4s for offline viewing. There's no argument or reporting in it, so nothing here distinguishes it from other pages on the same site, and you may want to re-save the actual page you meant to keep.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentpluginsjquery

www.bbc.co.uk

Mashuptown.com

Mashuptown.com: Marc Johnce - Word Up This Way [Lady Gaga vs. Korn vs. Cameo]

Mashuptown blog post from March 28, 2011, announcing a mashup by Marc Johnce called "Word Up This Way," which combines Lady Gaga's "Born This Way" with Korn's cover of "Word Up!" and drum samples from Cameo's original. The post is just a short announcement with an MP3 link and no commentary. The few comments are a complaint about the missing music player, a bit of spam, and a one-word "good!", so it's useful mainly as a record of this particular mashup and its source tracks.

Permalink audiomusic2010s

SpyreStudios

Curing the Navigation-itis Syndrome | SpyreStudios

Nine rules for keeping website navigation simple: use a single menu that looks like a menu, label items plainly, cap drop-downs at two levels and about ten to twelve items, avoid mega menus, icon-only items and vertical layouts, and make drop-downs work by click for touch screens. The core claim is that too many choices make people give up, so the fix is cutting redundant items rather than getting creative with presentation. As a worked example, it critiques National Geographic's three stacked nav bars and shows how they could collapse into one by using drop-downs, moving search into the main bar, and dropping items like a Home link when the logo already does that job.

Permalink designtips

Percona

Using Flexviews – part one, introduction to materialized views - MySQL Performance Blog

First installment of a series introducing Flexviews, a tool for MySQL that builds and maintains incrementally refreshable materialized views, written ahead of the author's MySQL 2011 conference talk. It builds the concept from the idea that any query result is logically a table, then contrasts ordinary views (recomputed on every access, so rarely a performance win) with materialized views (stored snapshots that act as indexable caches and can be rolled forward to a specific point in time, keeping several views transactionally consistent). It compares complete refresh with incremental refresh, listing the speed benefits of the latter against its limits (no outer joins, no non-deterministic functions, change-capture overhead, extra storage), and previews later parts on change data capture, delta computation, delta application, and using Flexviews for online schema change or ELT.

Permalink performancedatabasetutorialsql

Boing Boing

First photos of Fukushima Fifty published

I can't summarise this one because the text that came through is only Boing Boing's site boilerplate: the terms of service notice, the Amazon affiliate disclosure, the cookies and privacy statement, a pointer to community guidelines, and the Creative Commons license. The article itself didn't come through, so there's no argument or reporting to describe. The only stray fragment, "Who will be eaten first?", looks like part of a forum prompt rather than the piece you saved. If you paste the article body or share the link again, I can write a summary that distinguishes it from similar saves.

Permalink photographynews

www.jarche.com

Harold Jarche » The Evolving Social Organization

Companies lose their original simplicity as they grow past roughly 150 people, adding layers, silos and formal training that push decision-making to the periphery and leave them unable to cope with today's complex, fast-moving markets. The piece argues that the answer is to move toward a "wirearchy" and embed social learning in daily work through a four-step loop: listen, converse, co-create, then formalize and share. It backs this with corporate examples (SFR, ACE Hardware, SunGard's Yammer use, Ford), the Deloitte Shift Index's call for better knowledge flows, and practical advice to start experimenting with free social tools, and it closes with executive quotes and the suggestion to measure results rather than what was learned.

Permalink collaborationleadershipbusiness

Tim Kastelle

Using Networks to Find Knowledge « Innovation Leadership Network

Organizations keep missing disruptive change, and the post splits the problem in two: genuinely unpredictable events, where operational flexibility beats forecasting, and disruptions that are visible but overlooked, where the task is finding an expert who isn't myopic. For the second kind, it argues that the hard part in large firms is knowing who to ask, citing a mining company's "I don't know who to ask" gap. A simulation of search in a real organizational network suggests that going to highly connected people is not the fastest route. Asking the manager responsible for the subject, or starting in the right department, works slightly better, which hints that formally designated subject experts linked to critical projects could connect pockets of knowledge. The author says this is early work, with a PhD student investigating further.

Permalink collaborationleadershipbusiness

innovateonpurpose.blogspot.com

Innovate on Purpose: Innovation does not start with idea generation

Innovation doesn't begin with idea generation, the post argues, taking issue with Mary Adams's *Intangible Capital* (and a common view) that it does. Brainstorming only produces worthwhile ideas once a team already understands three things: the organization's strategic goals, the likely shape of the world two to three years out when the idea reaches market, and customers' unmet or unarticulated needs. The author, writing from OVO, calls this "ideating in context" and says idea generation gets too much emphasis because it's the easiest step to organize, while the strategy, foresight and customer research that make it useful demand real work.

Permalink businessentrepreneurship

openDemocracy

Putting the 'American business model' in its place | openDemocracy

John Kay's 2010 IPPR essay argues that markets win out over planned economies not because greed drives them but because of "disciplined pluralism": they let people experiment freely, copy what works, and ruthlessly drop what fails, whereas planned systems are slow to innovate and slower to admit failure. He attacks what he calls the "American business model," which treats greed as the main motive, financial markets as the best regulator, and the state as a minimal guarantor of property and contract. In his view this is false even of America, since trust, reputation, cooperation, social institutions and state-funded risk management underpin real markets. Economic theory built on that model is limited rather than wrong, and the goal is to understand markets in their social context, not replace them.

Permalink politicsbusinesseconomics

Smashing Magazine

Speeding Up Your Website’s Database - Smashing Coding

A beginner-oriented guide to speeding up database-driven sites, arguing that front-end tuning ignores how long the server takes to assemble pages from PHP and MySQL queries. It shows how to tell whether the database is the culprit (comparing wait times against a static file, and wrapping every `mysql_query` call in a homemade PHP timer), then walks through fixes: indexing columns used in WHERE and foreign-key lookups, running OPTIMIZE TABLE, writing queries so MySQL's cache can use them (avoiding NOW() and CURDATE()), and replacing many small queries with JOINs. It closes with heavier options like hand-rolled caches, Memcached, and simply simplifying slow features such as "customers who also bought," with concrete timings (e.g. an index making a query 113 times faster).

Permalink performancedevelopmentdatabasetutorial

Smashing Magazine

Speeding Up Your Website’s Database - Smashing Magazine

A beginner-oriented Smashing Magazine guide to speeding up database-driven sites, arguing that front-end tuning ignores the time the server spends assembling pages from PHP and MySQL queries. It shows how to tell whether the database is the bottleneck (comparing wait times against a static file, and wrapping `mysql_query` in a timer function to see each query's cost), then walks through fixes: indexing columns used in WHERE and JOIN, running OPTIMIZE TABLE, writing queries that stay cacheable (avoiding NOW() and CURDATE()), building your own file or column caches, replacing per-row lookups with JOINs, and using EXPLAIN. Includes concrete before-and-after timings, such as an indexed query running 113 times faster, plus warnings about backups and leaving admin tools exposed.

Permalink performancedevelopmentdatabasesql