Month: November 2007

Alibaba

“We are lucky the business was not started in Beijing or Shanghai,” there, it might have evolved to serve the sophisticated multinationals nearby. Instead, it has aimed at the kind of small businesses that cluster around Hangzhou.

2014-05-22: Alibaba has had massive growth

Alibaba’s transactions totaled $248B (more than eBay and Amazon combined)
Alibaba delivers 5B packages a year. UPS delivers 4.3B
Alibaba’s money market fund went from 0 to 4th largest globally, in 10 months

Earth Panos

The object of that little experiment was to see if I couldn’t create a 360-degree panorama in Google Earth. The answer was yes, with an additional unexpected use for the georeferenced photos on Flickr — you can turn them into placemarks and position them in front of the panorama, in effect creating clickable hotspots usable from within Google Earth’s PhotoOverlay view.

awesome. but far too complicated! we have to make this 10x easier.

Kindle is boring

When Amazon came to talk to me about being included on the reader a long long time ago, I said sure, but. The but is that I wanted my books to be free and included in every reader, and my blog, too. And the people willing to buy the device are exactly the sort of people that an author like me wants to reach. No harm, no foul, all 3 of us win. If there were 1m of these machines out there and an author had a chance to have her next book show up automatically on all of them, few among us would say, “no thanks to that exposure.”

This is a disruptive approach, the sort of thing only a market leader could pull off. It changes the world in a serious way. I wanted to be part of that. I was unpersuasive. Sorry.

too little too late. instead of creatively destroying the publishing industry, amazon opted for lame middleman.

23AndMe

My SNP for $1000, my 2008 resolution:

groups of customers coming together around shared genotypes and SNPs, comparing notes about their conditions or backgrounds and identifying areas for further scientific research on their own.

2008-05-28: fill out surveys to strengthen the links between your genetic makeup and open research questions. Sounds a lot more fun than “walking for the cure”.
2015-03-15: 23andme enters drugs. This should be very interesting. To date, they have SNPs from 800k people, and that could grow rapidly. I’d expect them to release new higher resolution kits and make them available at cost to their customers.

23andMe, the Google -backed personal genetics startup, will no longer just sell tests to consumers, or genetic data to pharmaceutical companies. This morning, it announced that it plans to start inventing medicines itself.

2015-06-18: 23andme has 1M customers now. I’m pleased to be among the first 0.2% 🙂
2019-07-16: 23andMe Chip Updates

100s of 23andMe customers tested on those earlier chips have pleaded with the company for some way to get access to its latest features, like the health reports and improved ancestry estimates. Many worried about whether their old data was accurate.

2023-06-01: Now they’re doing cancer drugs, but it’s not obvious why their SNPs matter all that much? It feels they need to rebase their approach on much more powerful technology like full genome sequencing. That said, I’ve yet to receive a benefit from my Nebula 30x DNA sequencing.

23ME’610 is designed to do something similar, by binding to a receptor called CD200R1, which was identified as a promising anti-cancer target by 23andMe scientists studying the 23andMe database. CD200R1 is a cell surface receptor protein that is mostly expressed on human immune cells, specifically cancer-fighting T cells and myeloid cells. Tumor cells can express CD200, the only known binding partner for CD200R1, and use this regulatory protein to turn off the activity of T cells. A drug that blocks the ability of CD200 to bind to CD200R1 may activate T cells and enhance their ability to kill cancer cells.

NASA CoLab

The virtual CoLab is a dedicated “island” in the “Second Life” online virtual world, and will later be complemented by a traditional Web-based community website.

while all those SL island are getting a bit tiresome, it is still promising to see NASA try to engage.

Realestate Startup Bros

56.2% of the respondents claimed that they were “seriously considering starting a business within the next 6 months” and 13.4% claimed that they “are [already] in the process of starting a business.” Out of this whopping 70% of workers who have or intend to become entrepreneurs, 42.1% gravitate towards starting something tech-related. Assuming this survey is representative, almost 30% of this demographic can be expected to try their hand at the Silicon Valley Dream over the next year. This news can be taken very positively. The credit crunch has made many of these professionals down on their luck, and entrepreneurship could be a saving grace that will not only provide them with new opportunities but create more jobs for others as well. Before you know it, the crunch actually stimulates the economy instead of the other way around. Such optimism is expressed by a respondent’s remark that “starting a business is an incredibly satisfying experience…it is so great to know that you control your own destiny.”

too funny. busted realtors trying their luck in the internet industry. that will work well, i am sure.