September 29, 2016
Type a word and watch Word2Vec light up each country by how related it is. Coffee glows in Colombia and Ethiopia, as you'd hope - but why does Greenland light up too? And why does Chad get bright for the word walk? A new project, a US-states spin-off, and what happens when Google News decides what your model knows about the world.
September 20, 2016
Airplane seatback systems will swear every movie they offer is a masterpiece. A new iOS app ships with reviews of 15,000 films so you can fact-check at 35,000 feet without WiFi. The first project after leaving Triposo, built as an excuse to learn Swift (now actually pleasant) and to show how to wrangle Wikipedia dumps down to something that fits on a phone.
September 12, 2016
After five years, stepping down as CEO of the travel guide startup founded with my brothers and Jon Tirsen. Not quite a post-mortem - Triposo continues without me - but a frank look at what worked, what didn't, and the awkward question startup founders rarely talk about: what do you do when the one thing you're good at isn't quite enough?
July 24, 2016
Peter Thiel pays kids to drop out of college. Over a beer or two, the question came up: what if the government did the opposite version of the same idea? Hand 18-year-olds a 25,000 dollar check for skipping university - matching the debt they'd otherwise rack up - and watch what happens to the decision. There's even a trick borrowed from the Zappos hiring process buried in here.
July 04, 2016
If you want nobody to live on under 1.90 dollars a day, the Hemingway-style answer is straightforward: give everybody 1.90 dollars a day. Sounds absurd until you do the arithmetic - and the arithmetic is more interesting than you'd expect. With M-Pesa and friends, the plumbing exists too. Three objections, three rebuttals, and a back-of-the-envelope cost that lands closer to the average American charity donation than you'd think.
June 27, 2016
So it is done. The Brits voted 52 to 48 for Brexit. Time for sore losers to assemble. Rerunning the referendum is off the table - that's not how democracy wins - but three sneakier exits from the exit are still on it. One involves Greenland, of all places. Another exploits a technicality nobody has been talking about. The third is just letting Parliament do its job.
June 07, 2016
Silicon Valley keeps shipping miracles, but the productivity numbers refuse to budge. Why? Five theories ranging from the historical (electric motors took decades to actually rewire the factory) to the suspicious (every productive hour gets cancelled by twenty minutes on Facebook) to one that's almost tragic: software designed so anybody can use it means nobody bothers to get great. WordPerfect power users and London cabbies make an appearance.
June 05, 2016
Two years on from the World Cup, the Python football model gets dusted off, retuned, and pointed at the Euros. France comes out on top, thanks mostly to home advantage. But the model's pick for second place is a genuine surprise, and it gives Germany short shrift. The England number matters too - their performance might literally decide Brexit. Actual money has been put down, so this prediction is falsifiable.
May 02, 2016
Trump supporters are angry, and the scariest economic graph Douwe knows hints at why. So where is the next wave of real innovation supposed to come from? The self-proclaimed world capital of it is busy optimizing ad clicks and making the taxi industry slightly more efficient. The app economy is 100 billion in a 100 trillion world. The steam engine affected everybody.
January 02, 2016
Growing up in the Netherlands, street-postcode-city felt like the only sensible way to point at a house. Then you travel. Japan numbers the blocks, not the streets. In Hyderabad you navigate by temples and shopping malls. Bangkok meanders, recursively. Tell a Bangkok taxi driver to take you home to Soi 3 and watch him stare back, politely waiting for the rest of the sentence.
December 03, 2015
After four good years in Berlin, Tonja and Douwe are packing up for Bangkok in January, visa gods willing. Not the weather, not the food, although those help. The real reason involves Triposo, an algorithmic travel guide, and the awkward gap between covering the whole world and actually proving the unit economics. Apparently that gap is best closed from the tropics.
December 15, 2014
A vegetarian quiche invented for Ari and Dhanji wedding, which meant it had to look respectable on a buffet and actually taste of something. Three eggs, 750 grams of brussels sprouts, 200 grams of feta, puff pastry, half an hour of fiddling, 45 minutes at 220. Feeds about four humans. The sprouts get parboiled until a fork goes in under mild protest. The rest is assembly with optimism.
November 30, 2013
Old friends visit from the Netherlands, so naturally an Android phone gets tied to some helium balloons and released over Berlin. First attempt ends with a final photograph of pavement. Second attempt skips the camera, streams SMS coordinates to a bar, and ends up somewhere in the Brandenburg forests. Whether it was retrieved, and what Dropbox has to do with any of this, is the rest of the post.
February 20, 2013
Arriving in Kigali after other African capitals feels closer to Singapore than to Sub-Saharan Africa. Clean streets, banned plastic bags, a national-language switch from French to English for economic reasons. Twenty years earlier, neighbours killed neighbours here and priests handed parishioners over to the Interahamwe. How does a country come back from something like that, and what does its calm say about the rest of us?
February 12, 2013
The Paleo diet insists grains are unnatural and our stone-age bodies were never meant to handle them. Setting aside the awkward objection that taking health advice from a group with a life expectancy of 32 seems suspect, theres a more direct problem visible from the Serengeti this time of year. The grasses are heavy with seeds, and the baboons are not shy. Our ancestors probably werent either.
January 21, 2013
Forbes is calling game over for Microsoft and Windows Phone keeps bleeding share each quarter. Staying the course will not fix it, so here is one piece of unsolicited advice for Ballmer involving an unlikely word: fork. The plan turns existing app catalogues, an Office port, and a curious stream of patent royalties Microsoft already collects on every Android handset into something close to a free OS. With bonus irony.
October 09, 2012
Comparing languages by word lists is always a bit arbitrary: town is Stadt in German but Zaun sounds closer and means fence. So during a Triposo hackathon in Sitges, the cardinal numbers one through nine got scraped out of Wikitravel phrasebooks, a weighted edit distance defined, and the resulting tree clustered. Whether the Germanic, Slavic and Romance groups fall out where you would expect is the question.
September 27, 2012
The 22-year-old Valley founder declares their iPhone app will reinvent banking. The Berlin counterpart wants a company where nine friends can earn a modest living doing something they enjoy. Go big or go home, sure, but go big too early and you also go home. Larry Page once shot down a Google pitch as too small; meanwhile Germany quietly produces world-beaters in concrete pumps. Two startup cultures, two distinct failure modes.
September 17, 2012
Edison said genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. He was off by two orders of magnitude. The pub-napkin idea takes an hour, the demo ten, the prototype a hundred. After that the math gets uncomfortable, which is either why most ideas die or, depending on how you squint at it, exactly why they should.
September 08, 2012
Why do cafes drop thousands on a shiny espresso machine, a top grinder and fresh beans, then hand the whole rig to a barista who has no clue? Hiring engineers at Triposo turns out to raise a structurally similar question. If the best coders are 28x more productive than the worst, the puzzle isn't really about coffee at all.