Web & AI Analyst
This section contains republished articles from my journalism career, including work for The New Stack, Newsroom, and Stuff.co.nz.
Anil Dash is someone I’ve known for a long time, to paraphrase Kara Swisher’s line at the beginning of almost all of her podcasts. I remember sitting down with him at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, in 2007, to get his advice on growing my tech blogging business, ReadWriteWeb. At the time, Dash … Read more
Robert Nishihara is the co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, the company behind the open source platform, Ray — the distributed machine learning framework being used by ChatGPT and other highly-scaled products, such as Uber. I spoke to Nishihara to find out how ordinary companies can take advantage of AI technology and how Ray fits into … Read more
Last January, there were over 18,000 monthly active developers in the Web3 ecosystem, according to the crypto VC firm Electric Capital. The firm has just released a follow-up report, which states there are 23,343 monthly developers as of December 2022. That number had gone over the 26,000 mark during June of 2022, but the “70%+ … Read more
According to Ion Stoica, co-founder of Databricks and Anyscale, and also a senior professor of computer science at Berkeley, 2023 will be the year of “distributed AI frameworks.” Needless to say, he has already had a hand in creating such a tool, in the form of Anyscale’s open source Ray platform. Among other uses, Ray … Read more
When Figma sold itself to Adobe last year, in one sense it was a triumph for web standards. Figma was built on WebGL, JavaScript and (latterly) WebAssembly. It was another sign of the continued strength of web technologies, which in many cases are now just as powerful as native apps. However, there are still several … Read more
Blaine Cook joined Odeo, Ev Williams’ startup, in 2005. Along with his fellow developer, Rabble (a.k.a. Evan Henshaw-Plath), Cook was one of the founding engineers of Twitter in 2006. That same year, Twitter was spun off into its own company, led by its original creator Jack Dorsey. But then, in April 2008, Cook — described … Read more
Last week I presented my top internet technologies of the year. This week I’m going to review the top stories of the year. Believe it or not, there isn’t a lot of overlap. A newsworthy story in the tech industry often isn’t about the best technology. It could be hype or controversy that makes it … Read more
Jaz-Michael King is a Welshman who has been living in the US since the 90s when he moved there to run a Dot Com startup. He still works in the US technology sector, but in his spare time he runs a Mastodon instance called Toot Wales (Twt Cymru), which he pitches as “the Mastodon social … Read more
Tipping points that change the course of internet technology are not rare, but they also don’t come around often. I think we’ve seen two massive tipping points in 2022: generative AI, which has leapt to the forefront of internet culture this year, and the beginnings of a movement away from centralized social media and onto … Read more
Evan Prodromou has been working on decentralized social media for nearly 15 years now, having created an open source Twitter alternative called Identi.ca in 2008. That service morphed a couple of times and eventually became pump.io — which was the genesis for ActivityPub, the core fediverse protocol of 2022. In an interview with The New … Read more
As developers begin to shift away from post-Musk Twitter and contemplate building apps on federated social media protocols, many are asking themselves: what can I do with ActivityPub, the key open protocol of the fediverse? ActivityPub enables different applications to federate content between themselves, which both enables and encourages the open web. The specification from … Read more
While Web3 has been overtaken in the tech news flow by the rise of decentralized social media, the long-running effort to strengthen dApp infrastructure continues. Somewhat surprisingly, Microsoft has now joined the Web3 revolution, albeit in a low-profile way. Donovan Brown, a partner program manager on the Azure incubation team at Microsoft, told The New … Read more
“It’s happening,” blogged Evan Prodromou, whose pioneering work inspired the ActivityPub protocol on which Mastodon runs. “I have not been this excited about federated social networks since we published ActivityPub,” he wrote. “The shift has started.” He’s referring, of course, to the migration of hundreds of thousands of users from Twitter, a centralized social media … Read more
Dr. Joe Fitzsimons, a physicist academic turned startup entrepreneur, believes that developing software using quantum computing is equivalent to programming computers in the 1940s or developing for Arpanet in the 60s. In other words, it’s still early. But his company, Horizon Quantum Computing, is about to launch a software development platform that will, he says, … Read more
Do we want to stay on a social network that shows such callous disregard for its own people? That is the question many of us have been asking as news hit this morning that half of Twitter’s employees have been unceremoniously sacked. Twitter, the company, styles itself as a platform for “public conversation.” Even if … Read more