My old site was unceremoniously dumped when Geocities closed down, so I built this one purely as a stop-gap until I can be bothered to build a proper new one. However I'm starting to really like Google's authoring software, so it might stick around for quite a while! These pages contain the same snippets of home-spun software, science, literature and philosophy from the old site, plus some new stuff: my Ruby projects with source code to download.

There’s a page devoted to my ideas about minimal software user interfaces called Simpleware with a couple of sample programs to try, and a page of collected quotes and reflections I call Cool Quotes.

open source currency project

As email, documents, and almost every aspect of our professional and personal lives moves onto the “cloud”—remote servers we rely on to store, guard, and make available all of our data whenever and from wherever we want them, all the time and into eternity—a brush with disaster reminds the author and his wife just how vulnerable those data can be. A trip to the inner fortress of Gmail, where Google developers recovered six years’ worth of hacked and deleted e‑mail, provides specific advice on protecting and backing up data now—and gives a picture both consoling and unsettling of the vulnerabilities we can all expect to face in the future.

IN RECENT years, consumers have become used to feasting on online freebies of all sorts: news, share quotes, music, e-mail and even speedy internet access. These days, however, dotcoms are not making news with yet more free offerings, but with lay-offs—and with announcements that they are to start charging for their services.” These words appeared in The Economist in April 2001, but they’re just as applicable today. During the dotcom boom, the idea got about that there could be such a thing as a free lunch, or at least free internet services. Firms sprang up to offer content and services online, in the hope that they would eventually be able to “monetise” the resulting millions of “eyeballs” by selling advertising. Things did not work out that way, though, and the result was the dotcom crash. Companies tried other business models, such as charging customers for access, but very few succeeded in getting people to pay up.

My name is Raghav Gupta but most people call me Rags, my nickname, which has stuck since 2nd grade. My family and I moved to the US from India when I was 7.

I work at Brightcove, the Internet TV startup, where I'm VP of International Partnerships, based out of London. I also serve as an advisor to some digital media or online service startups, such as MocoSpace, and help them with fundraising, business development, product and strategy. Prior to this I was a digital media consultant and worked with companies like NPR, kSolo - the online karaoke startup and Musikube. Up until March 2005, I'd been at Live365 Internet Radio as a member of their management team, for the past 5 and a half years.

Before that, I was at Mercer Management Consulting.

Before that I was in college at Princeton where I majored in Operations Research.

Professionally, I am interested in things having to do with the intersection of technology, media, entertainment and commerce. Especially in how the internet and related technology are empowering consumers to do things they could never really do before. Personally, I love seeing new places and cultures, experiencing new cuisines, consuming media (books, movies, music), and playing sports (squash, yoga, soccer).

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is *actually* killing the music industry?

According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past 8 years can be fully attributed to (read: blamed on) illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past 8 years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability — much more so than any amount of piracy.

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Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero -- nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods -- from music and video to Wikipedia -- can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free.

Which is not to say companies can't make money from nothing. Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that's two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn't new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this "two-sided market" model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

one of the 8tracks development team

Kevin Marks works at Salesforce as VP of Open Cloud Standards. From 2009 to 2010 we was ay BT as VP of Web Services. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 17 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the Quicktime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer.One of the driving forces behind microformats.org he regularly speaks at Conferences and Symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.

jungian psychoanalysis !
a different view of micro-blogging

The Scottish star's manager has criticised MySpace and Warner Music for not allowing the singer to stream A Girl Like You, claiming he didn't own the copyright

Transcendent Man introduces the life and ideas of Ray Kurzweil, an inventor since the age of five and the most pre-eminent futurist in the world.
Exploring many of the ideas and predictions in his New Times Best-seller, The Singularity is Near, the film focuses mostly on Mr. Kurzweilʼs world-wide speaking tour, as he describes a fast-approaching, radically different future
in which we have merged with our computer creations, will live radically extended lives and will be billions of times more intelligent. Heavily criticized for being too optimistic about what the future will bring and how it
will affect our lives, Ray challenges his detractors even further by publicly stating for the first time his goal of using future technologies to ultimately bring back his late father.

Attention, government and corporate IT types. Repeat after me: MD5 encryption is not secure.

In the wake of the hacking of top US government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton by famous international griefers-cum-hacktivists "Anonymous" (or Anonymous-offshoot AntiSec, to be more precise), security observers are left scratching their heads as to why the company was using super-weak MD5 encryption to protect American government officials and servicemen.

Booz Allen Hamilton maintained a database of usernames and passwords of people that accessed its systems. Included were members of US Central Command (CENTCOM), US Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the Marine Corps, various Air Force facilities, Homeland Security, State Department staff, and apparently, private sector contractors.

In the latest signal of this conundrum, at least six music blogs were deleted last week by Blogger due to copyright complaints. It's uncertain who made the accusations that lead to the deletions, but the most likely culprit is the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a copyright-enforcement organization which had previously filed copright takedown notices against some of the targeted blogs.

FlyingBinary has been formed to respond to the paradigm shift available to businesses from a Cloud Computing operating base and flexible application software. The founders of FlyingBinary are dedicated and passionate individuals who are leading the way to the adoption of a cloud based IT strategy for both Enterprise and SMEs to solve real business problems.

alking to The Times a fortnight ago, Billy Bragg, pop’s most recognisable exponent of democratic socialism, sought to make an important distinction. “The record industry is in trouble,” he said, “but the music industry is thriving.” Had file sharing affected him? Not at all, he beamed.

saw Doug on Virtual revolution's internet rushes (from bbc2 series) - he says something very interesting about the relationship between value and capital today. He suggests that the financial crisis is as a result of the ability of the internet to offer us a free means of production; that the crisis is an adjustment to the fact that we now longer need capital to create value.

Like a billion other people, I download things illegally. I'm also an actor, writer and director whose income depends on revenue from DVDs, movies and books. This leads to many conflicts in my head, in my heart, and in bars.

Episode 1 of Social Media Business: What is “the experience economy” – is it the next step on from agrarian, commodity, service…? How does value – and therefore money, currency – shift when people are more willing to pay for intangible experiences than physical goods? Can we monetize something in our minds? The first episode of my new podcast, Social Media Business, looks at revenue stream associated with providing your online community or social networks with a real world experience such as a meetup, conference or party.

I’ve started a new podcast called “Social Media Business” that will be a regular feature covering where the money is, in social networks. See end of post for more information! (RSS or iTunes)

At the Midem Festival in Cannes in 2008, McGuinness made a forceful speech calling on governments to compel internet service providers (ISPs) to introduce mandatory “three strikes and you’re out”, internet service disconnections of serial file-sharers. He accused Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others of “building multibillion dollar industries on the back of our content without paying for it” and of being “makers of burglary kits who have made a thieves’ charter to steal music from the music industry”. Strong stuff. Since his speech, governments in France and Britain Ireland, have introduced the “three strikes” law. And the music industry has continued to decline while the ISPs continue to flourish, shrugging their shoulders in apparent indifference to the fate of an industry on which they have fed for so long.

Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development.
How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done.
For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions.
In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production.
Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups.
It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution."
In some academic circles, it is positively naïve.
But it should not be.
The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep.
It is structural.
It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Hypebot kindly alerts us to an unintentionally hilarious GQ column by U2 manager Paul McGuinness, supposedly on "how to save the music industry." Of course, that's not what it's actually about -- because the music industry doesn't need saving. Last we checked, it's doing great. As, by the way, are McGuinness and U2. McGuinness has been making similarly wrong arguments for quite some time, and we try to debunk them each time. It seems that we bloggers have finally gotten under McGuinness' skin, as he lashes out at internet bloggers in this piece, specifically for the criticism they gave of his Midem speech in 2008 (criticism such as mine).

A brief history of the foundation of twitter.
Evan Williams and Biz Stone
The Twitter Revolution
The brains behind the Web's hottest networking tool.

The report is called Music Product Manifesto: The Product Features That Will Save Recorded Music. (I know – I hate titles like that too.) This time around researcher Mark Mulligan focus on music product innovation. “In 2009, the album celebrates it’s 100th birthday and yet remains the centerpiece of the recorded music product portfolio,” Mulligan writes. “The time has come for a radical overhaul of the recorded music product range.”

French MPs reject controversial plan to crack down on illegal downloaders
• Critics feared impact of state surveillance on civil liberties
• Surprise no vote at poorly attended session
French politicians have unexpectedly rejected a bill that would have cut off the internet connections of anyone found to be repeatedly downloading music or videos without paying for them. The legislation would also have led to the creation of the world's first state surveillance system on web pirates.

Singularity Hub is your place to keep informed about the daily advances mankind is making in nanotechnology, genetics, biology, artificial intelligence, aging, robotics, and various other fields as we work our way towards the singularity. The singularity is the point in mankind’s future when we will transcend current intellectual and biological limitations and initiate an intelligence and information explosion beyond imagining.

The impossible is becoming possible. The future that you thought would not come in your lifetime is coming sooner than you thought. Singularity Hub is here to tell you about it.