DAN

Yet an even more bizarre activity in the Valley than shushing the talk of a bubble is how some start-ups are advised by investors not to make money. This concept may sound ridiculous from a business standpoint, but for investors, it fuels the get-richer-quicker mentality that exists here.

“It serves the interest of the investors who can come up with whatever valuation they want when there are no revenues,” explained Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor and entrepreneur. “Once there is no revenue, there is no science, and it all just becomes finger in the wind valuations.”

But speaking with Hammond, I realized how much of the writing process—what I tend to think of as unpredictable, even baffling—can be quantified and modeled. When I write a short story, I'm doing exactly what the authoring platform does—using a wealth of data (my life experiences) to make inferences about the world, providing those inferences with an angle (or theme), the creating a suitable structure (based on possible outcomes I've internalized from reading and observing and taking creative writing classes). It's possible to give a machine a literary cadence, too: choose strong verbs, specific nouns, stay away from adverbs, and so on. I'm sure some expert grammarian could map out all the many different ways to make a sentence pleasing (certainly, the classical orators did, with their chiasmus and epanalepsis, anaphora and antistrophe).

As we've already learned with many other attempts to de-humanize the process of journalism and news gathering, it's impossible to take the human touch out completely. But advances like the ones being made by Narrative Science will reduce the number of people needed to do these jobs.

This shouldn't come as a big surprise, though. Technology has been doing this in every field and trade over the last 100 years or more. And it will only continue.

Click above for the full insightful story in The Atlantic.

To pull this off Dropbox must manage incredible volume and stunning complexity—while making that all simply disappear to anyone using the service.

About a decade ago, in a conversation with a co-worker named Barry Lank when we were at Gannett, I marveled over what made the perfect email. (In the late 90s, email still held art status.) Such an email had to be meticulously and deliberately made to appear as though it was haphazard. Kind of like a Disney experience — so easy to the one enjoying the experience, but an orchestration of significance to pull off behind the scenes.

I'm discovering that the same goes for technology businesses now, as so well articulated in the above quote from Forbes' profile of the awesome app Dropbox.

Take a look at the home pages of Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox and Google. Get the idea? A ton of complexity covered with brilliant and simplistic user experience. It's a prerequisite for success in the digital world.

I merely tolerate my living room TV set (I’m a Sony man the way I was a Nokia man before June 29, 2007) but I love my Apple TV—I love that I can unplug it in 1.5 seconds from my hunk of shit and bring it to my grandma’s house and plug it into her hunk of shit and we can watch movies.

There's talk of an Apple TV (not just the "cable box," but the actual TV set) in the works. At least one analyst said he's seen some data points in China suggesting a late-2011 release of such a product.

What would it look like? Maybe a clean pane of touch screen glass, with no border? What size will it be? How much will it cost? There's certainly no dearth of questions. But the real question: Is it real?

Of course, nobody knows. There's a good deal of naysayers who believe that the product would be too far out of the bounds of what Apple is good at -- it would require a lot more storage space; it's a highly commoditized market; Apple's price point would relegate it to selling to only true fanboys; etc.

That's all true. However, I think Apple will release a TV set, and do it the way it entered the smartphone market -- acting as though it was the first on the scene.

There certainly is plenty of room for innovation for Apple to build a product that blows away the entire crowd. Imagine a TV that is built to work with any cable/satellite provider, with no additional hardware. Imagine a TV that can control the cable service, the TV and the audio all from one integrated remote that has fewer than 20 buttons. Imagine a TV preloaded with all of the awesomeness of the current Apple TV, and that would allow the instant download of content and games that could be played from the integrated controller.

These are just the innovations that I can think of. Lord knows Apple can do a lot better than even that. And I believe they will -- soon.

All of this innovation and dad still has to cook? Come on!