LS: “Nassim Taleb was great on Charlie Rose last night.”
I saw that interview, which I thought was okay since he struggled to articulate. I have to read his book.
He wasn’t super eloquent but the subject matter isn’t easy to explain to laymen.
I don’t understand the question.
I meant you sound like competing in some sort of market, what are you making or doing?
I feel odd here being a Mechanical Engineering Major, especially as I am helping my school’s ASCE chapter with their Concrete canoe… its rush time for regionals, and we found out we will, more likely than not, have to build a 96"x30"x29" table, in addition to everything else left to do…
But hey, its something while I continue to get set up for a 3 semsters of co-op, graduate in 4 yrs program. Hopefully they won’t mind me trying my darnest not to end up co-oping for someone like Northorp or Lockhead, etc.
Developing software which will help small and medium sized brick and mortar business promote rapidly to the web. There is more to it, but I can’t get into specifics. The competitors are coming after our core business, so there is an element of a race against time.
We’re taking a big entrepreneurial risk, trying to open up a new market.
Developing software which will help small and medium sized brick and mortar business promote rapidly to the web.
Sounds like Groupon 
Its scope isn’t as big as Groupon and our model is quite a bit different.
There is a great video of DHH explaining that there is tons of room to launch for smaller audiences and actually have a business model which charges money (and seeks to be profitable) as early as possible.
I know there are companies out there that monetize, and when they take on venture capital funding, the VCs ask them to remove monetization, because if they are already monetizing, that creates a ceiling on the stock valuation. When these companies have an IPO, they want it to be black box, and feed off the frenzy of people trying to get in on a mania.
Right now, any company with crazy valuations (including Facebook) is probably masking their net earnings. And my theory is, if they are hiding it, there is a pretty good chance the technical value of the company is a lot lower than what they want to push the IPO at.
I’m developing a programming language. Its primary purpose is to act as the glue for a larger project that will be based on the language (yes, I have to write the language first, then build the larger project written in the language) to permit execution of code directly from the Internet using cryptographic hashes and public-key signatures to control who is permitted to execute what code on the local machine*. The pilot application will be a cryptographic “virtual file system” that is essentially an encrypted file system that can be stored remotely so you can have your data in one central location out on the web and access it from any device which has a compatible file system.
I should mention that this is an open source project, by design. My logic is that there is no business model for programming languages (seriously) but since I work in the industry (computer engineering) I can cash in on the reputation points if my language is a hit (and, of course, I believe it will be otherwise I wouldn’t be bothering). I’ve considered starting a data-storage company to sell disk space to anyone but particularly to people who are using my virtual file system and need a good place to store their encrypted data. The idea behind this is that a good encrypted virtual file system that people start adopting should result in increased consumption of remote disk storage and I could cash in on the increase that comes from people using my virtual file system if I promote it on my websites.
Clayton -
*Note that it’s not a mistake that no one has done this before… it’s extremely dangerous but I plan to utilize some new technologies in Intel and AMD chips to permit “secure code authentication” to root a hardware-enforced code authentication system…
Dropbox?
I am a computer programmer. I was tinkering with home-made programming languages for some time, contracted for a few blue-chip corps, worked for a startup similar to Groupon. Right now I am making my living in online media markets (including FB), though not really as an entrepreneur.
On a libertarian side, I am annoying my friends with lectures about government’s hand in everything bad, and free market in everything good. Last micro project is campaigning for boycotte of state-imposed census.
As an intersection between my programmer’s and libertarian activities I am planning an MMO game, with practically no built-in notions of property or governance, with an idea of allowing players to play different goverment styles (including ancap) in different parts of the game world. So far I am striving to find a way of making this interesting to play 
I’m involved with a joint project involving the distribution of glass bottles. One side of the coin is putting poems and other notes inside glass bottles and throwing them into the Atlantic ocean*, the other is filling them with change and throwing them at people on the street.
*All of those bottles will contain a message that says “recycle this”.
An individual project involving Anglo-Saxon runes and Old English. To become fluent in the usage of AS runes, and their applications in correctly using them. To accomplish being able to write anything and everything (that’s English) using the AS runic alphabet with correct phonetic usage. This can be a task, as words such as “question” are spelled as “cwestion”, and “cool” may be spelled as “cul”.
No, that’s different. Dropbox permits you to access your files on the web, there would necessarily be no web access to your files in my system since all data is encrypted and decrypted only on your local machine. In other words, the security policy is the user’s responsibility in my system. There are some nice side-effects that come from this, since any web storage location will do you can actually split your data across mulitple service providers to increase security and parallelism (typically, users have higher bandwidth at their access point than the bandwidth they have with their online storage provider, by splitting data across multiple storage providers, you can significantly increase bandwidth… this is analogous to how a RAID drive can increase data bandwidth with drive parallelism).
You will also be able to do nice things like create complementary drives each of which taken alone is encrypted with unbreakable one-time pad encryption. This halves your bandwidth but gives you a few other nice things you might value more than bandwidth. For example, you can tie a drive to a particular device (this defeats the multi-device usage model of course) and then the complementary drive will be stored locally on that particular machine. Even if the NSA has access to the bits in the aether, you can rest assured they won’t be able to break the encryption without getting ahold of the bits on your local machine. Conversely, a thief who steals your local machine will be SOL - even if they are the NSA - unless they know where your online half of the complementary drive is stored. Or, you can store both halves of the complementary drive out there (you will need an underlying standard encryption below the one-time pad in order to do this) in the web if you want plausible deniability (“it’s just a bunch of random bits!”) and also to increase the difficulty of decrypting your data… the NSA would need to know where both halves of the complementary drive are stored to even have a chance of decrypting it.
Clayton -
Hmm, the last post makes it sound like the complementary drive system is the primary usage model, it is not. The primary usage model uses standard encryption and stores your files in a really cool data structure that allows you to build a file system on top of regular files and directories (a 100MB “virtual drive” will be spread across thousands of little files in a very elegant and efficient data structure rather than stored in one big-ass 100MB file… this is a performance enhancement because most file systems are optimized for handling lots of smaller files rather than a few huge files… but the parameters will all be configurable so you can put everything in one huge file, a few medium files or many small files… it’s up to the user and the system handles it transparently). Also, the virtual drive will have error-correcting codes so you can get software-level protection against hardware failures.
P.S. Most importantly, this is all built on industry-standard file transfer protocols (HTTP at first, FTP eventually) so there’s no need to have a special “client” to access your data, just download it using any web browser. To unpack and decrypt the data, you will need the application software but you can at least back up your encrypted data or move it from one place to another without any special software.
Clayton -
@Izzy, You’re going to have to shield your eyes from the football team at New Mexico .
I have made a point of not talking about work on the Internet and so I won’t talk about it.
Right now I am building an extra pot soil container (I am waiting for the cordless drill battery to charge up as I type). I will also install a few nest boxes in the garden in a few days. I love songbirds.
I will also manufacture a few parts for a friend’s motorcycle over the next week.
Keep myself busy…