drstarcat.com » Recommendation Engines http://drstarcat.com Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:28:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 The History of Tomorrow’s Internet: Introduction http://drstarcat.com/archives/4 http://drstarcat.com/archives/4#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:28:59 +0000 drstarcat http://drstarcat.com/archives/4 Over the past couple of months I’ve been relatively immersed (relatively only because I work full-time building a company and have a 3-month old daughter) in understanding some of the trends that are coming together to define the next generation of the internet. I didn’t start out with the goal of understanding trends. I started by getting serious about a simple product I’d been toying with for over a year now: a piece of software that gets to know who you are and brings you digital assets of interest. What I discovered instead of a simple product was a web of organizations, people, protocols, and companies that, though all operating independently of each other, had to be implemented and working together before that simple product or the big business I saw emerging from it could ever become a reality.

Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to blog about each of these trends: Identity, Data Portability, Recommendation Engines, and the Attention Economy. I’ll outline how some of the organizations, people, protocols, and companies are connected, discuss some of their history, and finish by showing how they come together to create a new kind of internet.

]]> http://drstarcat.com/archives/4/feed 0 New Beginnings… http://drstarcat.com/archives/3 http://drstarcat.com/archives/3#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:22:39 +0000 drstarcat http://drstarcat.com/archives/3 For someone who’s spent the last three years building a company that connects entrepreneurs and angel investors, I’ve been remarkably out of what’s been happening in boom 2.0. This is partly because I’ve been busy building a company (and a marriage… and a home… and a daughter), but I think it’s deeper than that. From the beginning, I’ve been highly skeptical of web 2.0. The reasons are no doubt many (A few: The value of social apps grew out of the campus scene I had long since left; I’ve been through a boom and bust and so am much more skeptical; I haven’t ever had a big success as an entrepreneur and don’t want to hear about others who are less experienced than I am succeeding; much of the software is targeted and adored by a small and insular community of technology enthusiasts.) Regardless of the reasons (or their legitimacy), since I’m looking for the next big thing, I’ve had to figure out what’s been happening while I’ve been busy with other things.As part of this reawakening, I prepared a presentation for Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital about the future of the internet to get a sense of whether I was on the right track or not. Josh (very generously) listened to this presentation, in spite of the fact that he clearly understands all of this better than anyone and was really looking for a business proposal (which I intended to give him, but my best ideas just weren’t good enough yet–sorry!) Since I went through all this work anyway and since I’m trying to be a little more public, I thought I’d share these ideas with the communities they are about. Just because Josh understands all of this stuff doesn’t mean that other old-timers like me (and maybe even some kids) won’t find this valuable.

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