Next year's trends reported today

An AngelList? (angel.co), or CapLinked?

2011-09-21T13:30:14.102-07:00

An AngelList? (angel.co), or CapLinked?

I totally agree! I'd like to see eBay buy a c...

2011-09-11T20:28:23.799-07:00

I totally agree! I'd like to see eBay buy a crowdfunding platform -- I think that would pull together most of the elements needed.

eBay has enabled countless small retail startups and has (with PayPal) all the needed hooks for supporting small financial transactions.

Hi, Kevin. First and foremost, I want to thank yo...

2011-07-13T20:29:54.950-07:00

Hi, Kevin. First and foremost, I want to thank you for the important work you have done for crowdfunding. Last Friday, I discovered who you were after coming across your speech at Stanford University on the topic of crowdfunding. That speech caused me to purchase your book, The Crowdfunding Revolution, which I have already subsequently read. lol.

Your book lays out some very exciting propositions for the future of the crowdfunding platform, but what I am most concerned with is the current regulatory environment. Obviously, we are only legally able to do what the SEC allows us to do.

I watched the full YouTube video of Chairman Schapiro testifying before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. In minute 40:45, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) asks, “Is the general solicitation ban constitutional and can you cite me to specific published opinions that support your position?” To this, Schapiro states, “The general solicitation ban does limit speech to some extent and it’s one of the issues we are looking at and a first amendment analysis will be part of that”. Meredith Cross, the Director of the Division of Corporate Finance, indicated that if the ban is eliminated and private offerings are allowed through publicity and advertising, the groups to whom the securities are sold via such general solicitations are not in need of the protections provided by the federal securities laws – i.e. that they are, in fact, accredited investors. To me, it sounds like such a change would have little or no impact on how private companies seek and obtain private financing, especially through crowdfunding. Do you agree with this?

Through my research, the best company to navigate the burdensome SEC regulations and capitalize on Rule 504 is ProFounder, www.profounder.com, where one can invite unaccredited/unsophisticated investors to their raise. However, they must abide by the state-by-state investor limits (In Texas, you can only have 35 investors, while in New York you can have 40), as well as completing any filing requirements and paying any applicable fees (In Texas, the fees are $0.00, while New York they are $410.00) Yikes!

However, curiously, on June 27, 2011, they wrote a blog post entitled “Changes to our Site”, which states, “We have decided to stop offering the transaction of securities on our site for new customers as of June 24, 2011. Going forward, this means entrepreneurs using ProFounder cannot invite investors to view, pledge to, or invest in raises on the site.” http://blog.profounder.com/2011/06/27/changes-to-our-site/. This may either be due to increased regulatory heat or simply the lack of demand, considering companies can only invite those with whom they share a “substantial, pre-existing relationship” (i.e. friends, family members, etc.).

I would like to know your thoughts on the upcoming regulatory landscape. Will the SEC’s review of the general solicitation ban have a positive effect on crowdfunding? Feel free to reply to me on here or at my personal e-mail, jonathan.l.hartman [at] gmail.com.

Thanks,

Jonathan

Anyone want to buy a dartboard? Heavily used with ...

2011-03-22T11:25:33.711-07:00

Anyone want to buy a dartboard? Heavily used with numerous VC company logos around the edge.

Michael
P.v.A.P. Evangalist
Social Ventures Ltd.

Thanks for reaching out in the demo pit Kevin and ...

2011-03-03T12:29:58.144-08:00

Thanks for reaching out in the demo pit Kevin and giving us the opportunity to share our vision with you. Disrupting an unfairly monopolized industry is a key motivator of ours, and you're right, if done well the market implications are huge. By reconnecting and re-empowering the people at the grassroots on both sides of the equation we're confident of a fairer deal for all - along with much better experiences of course. It all boils down to the execution - we're happy you'll be watching this space!

Kevin, well thought out and explained proposition ...

2011-02-01T17:14:47.759-08:00

Kevin, well thought out and explained proposition of the true value of crowdfunding start-ups.....

Michael

Seedups Founder

When is the book due out? Looks like a good one!

2010-07-06T17:03:16.279-07:00

When is the book due out? Looks like a good one!

Great presentation! With http://www.believersfund...

2010-07-03T02:40:07.743-07:00

Great presentation!

With http://www.believersfund.com, we are also entering the corwdfunding-arena, highly focused on web and internet start-ups.

Regards, pascal

While it's not as advanced as the API you are ...

2010-06-08T12:09:11.120-07:00

While it's not as advanced as the API you are suggesting, you should check out the application called 'Bump' available for the iPhone and Android platforms.

It allows you to bump phones together to transfer image, music and contact information and might be the right route you are looking for.

I think that http://www.quora.com is trying to do ...

2010-06-01T12:31:18.227-07:00

I think that http://www.quora.com is trying to do something similar, albeit with no micropayments (though I'd be shocked if that wasn't in their long-term roadmap).

I love the idea. On music - that is sort of the id...

2010-05-11T09:18:18.436-07:00

I love the idea. On music - that is sort of the idea behind Pandora. It does all the work of discovery and playlist selection - you just sit back and enjoy. What you are describing is iterating out there - but it is slow - a very difficult problem given the different interests and desires people have.

This was a really good presentation everything was...

2010-03-18T02:28:38.462-07:00

This was a really good presentation everything was aligned with our thinking at www.growvc.com. Thanks!

Great Prezo! You nailed the 'state of union...

2010-03-10T09:21:26.206-08:00

Great Prezo! You nailed the 'state of union' in the Venture capaital today.

Greg

While ARM Holding is going up and Intel Corporatio...

2009-11-20T07:07:35.231-08:00

While ARM Holding is going up and Intel Corporation is moving down, I therefore have no doubt who will end up being a clear winner in the race to become no.1 micro chip producer in the years to come.
ARM with it ARM7 and ARM9 processor can easily take on Intel Atom for many reasons, firstly ARM7 and ARM9 consume less power and have longer standby times the Intel Atom processor. Secondly the ARM7 and ARM9 is much smaller in size then the Intel Atom, this will reduce cost for hardware vendors.
ARM Holding to date powers more then 95% of the smart phones, such as Nokia N97 Mini, iPhone, Blackberry and host of other communication devices such as TV Music player and set-top boxes.

Source:
pay as you go mobile phones

This is a good news, making the gameplay of any
2009-10-23T04:00:02.432-07:00
This is a good news, making the gameplay of any Download Games a lot easier for gamers :)

"I believe this could really transform gaming...

2009-10-05T01:09:47.523-07:00

"I believe this could really transform gaming and virtual world environments, truly pushing them to the cloud while making them accessible to many consumer devices. It could also re-shape game portals, allowing users to try and play any number of high-intensity games without any install or strict hardware requirements." - I agree with your conclusion :)

Nice to know you

Regards

Melvin - Download Games

Like as if somebody haven't knew that already....

2009-07-23T02:47:41.282-07:00

Like as if somebody haven't knew that already...

As my SC teachers have said "the programming is an art of resource management." Or like I put it now "the resource management is a bitch."

My point here is that automated resource management - especially in higher-end application market - would never ever be as efficient as traditional manual resource management.

Additionally, if you take it to the NUMA systems (which are the cheap boxes with 8+ CPUs (not cores)), excessive memory consumption of Java also starts weighing in. On NUMA systems memory is generally slower. Meaning that more memory application consumes, slower it is.

More cores/CPUs/threads trigger so-called "cross traffic" (CPU cache flushes to maintain coherency; RAM content transfer between NUMA nodes) slower the whole system becomes. And Java's GC has to have extra threads (accessing the very same memory as other threads running on different CPUs/cores) meaning that you can't avoid/minimize the cross traffic.

2009-07-20T03:47:35.618-07:00

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

Hi, I wouldnt like to comment your concerns about...

2009-05-23T15:09:30.587-07:00

Hi,

I wouldnt like to comment your concerns about power consumption but I'd like to contribute with some ideas.

1. If you consider RTSJ (Real Time System Java) you could use ITC (Initialization Time Compilation) instead of JIT. RTSJ can speed up your Java application too if you use "Soft Real Time Threads", which is not difficult to implement and can prevent GC to manage memory you can manage easily yourself (Scoped Memory).

These links may be of your interest:

* http://java.sun.com/javase/technologies/realtime/reference/doc_2.1/release/JavaRTSCompilation.html

* http://www.rtsj.org/specjavadoc/book_index.html

2. IBM has a very interesting research project called X10 which generates code in Java and/or C++ as output. The input language is something based on Scala (see release 1.7.x).
You could use it to Write-Once- Run-Everywhere, does not matter if you have a JVM or your your native OS.

A very interesting improvement over Scala is that X10 does not use MPI but it uses PGAS, which is beneficial as STM but provides maximum performance for local data.

IBM X10 Language
* http://www.x10-lang.org/
* http://dist.codehaus.org/x10/documentation/languagespec/x10-173.pdf

STM (Software Transactional Memory)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory

PGAS (Partitioned Global Address Space)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitioned_global_address_space

Regards

Richard Gomes
http://www.jquantlib.org/index.php/User:RichardGomes

(I thought this was intriguing enough, and was pro...

2009-05-13T06:20:00.000-07:00

(I thought this was intriguing enough, and was proud enough of my reply on this to the mahout-dev list, that I will favor you with a cross post here!)

The difference in power consumption between a fully loaded machine and
idle isn't so large (the figure 50% sticks in my head?), but the
difference between a fully loaded and half-loaded machine is quite
small. That is, if the hard disk is up, processor is at full speed,
all memory is fully powered, then using all or most is not a big deal.
Power consumption drops only if you are really idle.

I don't have numbers to back this up at my fingertips, though they're
informed by figures I've seen in the past. I think that's what one
would need to evaluate this argument, and I have a different intuition
about how much this could matter.

The main argument here seems to be, basically, that Java competes well
in wall-time performance by better parallelism and more memory usage.
Maybe, that's an interesting question. Is LLVM going to be more
efficient than Java? unclear, both have an overhead I suppose. But
again interesting question.

But, the topic really does matter. Wasting time means wasting energy,
and when we get to distributed cluster scale, it matters to the
environment. At Google they do a good job of keeping teams really
clear about how much their operations are costing -- it is staggering
sometimes. Developers who might run a big job, oops, see it fail,
start it up again, oops, wrong argument again... might think twice
when the realize how many pounds of CO2 their mistake just pumped into
the atmosphere.

(Mahout folks will now appreciate why I have been messing with the
code all over to try to micro-optimize for performance. I think there
is still not enough attention given to efficiency yet, but hey it's at
0.1.)

And, I think I agree with the conclusion of the blog post for a
different reason:

The Java/C++ performance gap for most apps is pretty negligible these
days. Why? I actually think given a fixed amount of *developer* time,
one can make a faster Java app than C++ app. Why? I can develop
faster, against a larger and more stable collection of libraries,
spend less time debugging, leaving more time to optimize the result.

But that does hit a certain plateau. Given enough developer time, I
can get native code to run faster than even JITted Java. I myself am
hard-pressed to optimize my code (Mahout - Taste) further in Java
without drastic measures.

It may take a lot of time to actually beat Java performance in C++,
but, as the scale of your operations grows, the return on that 1%
improvement you eke out grows. And of course -- when we talk about
code headed for Hadoop, we are definitely talking about large-scale
operations.

For reference, of course, Google operates at such a scale that they
use a C++-based MapReduce framework. It is just almost always
worthwhile to spend the time to beat Java performance.

This isn't going to be true of all users of distributed computing
frameworks, so it's not inherently wrong that Hadoop is in Java, but,
I did find myself saying "hmm, Java?" the first time I heard of
Hadoop.

But isn't this what this whole Hadoop streaming business is about?
letting you farm out the computation itself to whatever native process
you like and just using Hadoop for the management? because that of
course is fine.

I agree, and this is an interesting new way to att...

2009-05-09T19:34:00.000-07:00

I agree, and this is an interesting new way to attack the problem.

Arguably, underutilization due to excess "head-room" is a huge problem for physical servers as well as for VM's. Since the latency for load balancing physical servers (e.g. bringing up a physical server from standby) is at least as bad as the latency for VM migrations now (e.g. using "virtualization 1.0" technology), your proposed methods will become more advantageous over time, not less. In reality, migrating/re-provisioning physical servers is an order of magnitude slower than for VM's.

We have been researching the power efficiency gains of different storage topologies/architectures and agree that this sort of intelligent storage sync (if you'll forgive the oversimplification) could have huge power efficiency benefits. What is especially interesting is that with physical servers, this approach to reducing head-room only really works for homogeneous servers (e.g. server pools). For the case of large numbers of VM's, it can be heterogeneous, with lots of different server applications, perhaps only with a common underlying OS. For example, we see a case in our labs where the active, unique memory footprint of a RHEL server is often only 12-25 MB. (!)

This is one more driver towards virtualization (away from physical servers), and towards novel VM management technologies.

Tim, Benjamin, thanks for the kudos and love your...

2009-05-08T13:50:00.000-07:00

Tim,

Benjamin, thanks for the kudos and love your line of thinking. Feel free to pass on the thoughts. :)

Tim, enjoyed your research paper. I share your thoughts on hash-collisions, and there are good solutions there -- I need to wait to disclose more.

Doing lazy copies (I read your blog post) is an approach. It's actually complementary. Though it has the downsides of breaking the single point-of-failure / atomicity of VM migrations as well as not working across long-distance migrations (where cloud computing is going). It also gets really complicated if multiple migrations occur quickly, like when a hardware starts throwing errors and you need to migrate now.

Keep up some great commentary.

I love the idea of speeding up VM migration and ag...

2009-05-08T13:37:00.000-07:00

I love the idea of speeding up VM migration and agree that it could lead to some pretty cool new scheduling mechanisms. However, if you are paranoid about malicious VMs, then the idea of exploiting shared pages to reduce migration time could be a problem:

How are you going to tell which pages are truly identical and don't need to be copied over the network? Normally vmware uses short hashes to detect identical pages, but there is still a chance for collision. Before doing the actual sharing, it will do a full byte-by-byte check of the two pages. In your case, you can't do the byte-by-byte check, unless you copy the page over the network (but that ruins the whole point!)

I think in practice this generally wouldn't be a problem (assuming vmware uses 64bit hashes, 32bit ones collide pretty frequently). Unfortunately, if a malicious user managed to create a bad page that collided with one of your core kernel memory pages, you'd be in pretty bad shape!

I wrote a short blog post about this here.

Ben et al, good thoughts. The good news is that L...

2009-05-07T12:37:00.000-07:00

Ben et al, good thoughts. The good news is that LLVM can be "staged in" for use as a Linux distro. One could start with a native kernel, some native libs/apps, and some LLVM ones. As the technology/adoptions evolves, more things could be shifted to the LLVM camp. As was mentioned, caching is useful. Though one more simplistic way to go about it, is to do the translation from LLVM to native at install time. The user would only ever see native, but it would be tailored to their hardware.

This is a very cool software solution. It seems li...

2009-05-06T23:17:00.000-07:00

This is a very cool software solution. It seems like it would work great with Cisco's Data Center 3.0 initiative/Nexus line of switches which I've heard provide direct backplane access and direct access to the switches' impressive RAM to VM management software.

Next year's trends reported today

An AngelList? (angel.co), or CapLinked?

I totally agree! I'd like to see eBay buy a c...

Hi, Kevin. First and foremost, I want to thank yo...

Anyone want to buy a dartboard? Heavily used with ...

Thanks for reaching out in the demo pit Kevin and ...

Kevin, well thought out and explained proposition ...

When is the book due out? Looks like a good one!

Great presentation! With http://www.believersfund...

While it's not as advanced as the API you are ...

I think that http://www.quora.com is trying to do ...

I love the idea. On music - that is sort of the id...

This was a really good presentation everything was...

Great Prezo! You nailed the 'state of union...

While ARM Holding is going up and Intel Corporatio...

This is a good news, making the gameplay of any 2009-10-23T04:00:02.432-07:00 This is a good news, making the gameplay of any Download Games a lot easier for gamers :)

"I believe this could really transform gaming...

Like as if somebody haven't knew that already....

Hi, I wouldnt like to comment your concerns about...

(I thought this was intriguing enough, and was pro...

I agree, and this is an interesting new way to att...

Tim, Benjamin, thanks for the kudos and love your...

I love the idea of speeding up VM migration and ag...

Ben et al, good thoughts. The good news is that L...

This is a very cool software solution. It seems li...

This is a good news, making the gameplay of any
2009-10-23T04:00:02.432-07:00
This is a good news, making the gameplay of any Download Games a lot easier for gamers :)