PalmPilot

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

The digital IOUs would be stored until the user docked their PalmPilot to a computer, at which point the payments would clear. Essentially, Confinity had created primitive digital checks, marrying handheld devices and finance. But as with the earlier ideas, PalmPilot-based IOUs didn’t represent a stop-the-presses breakthrough. That is, until the team tweaked the product yet again. For its 1998 generation of Palm IIIs, Palm tucked a half-inch sliver of red plastic into the corner. Palm pitched this infrared (IR) port as a way for PalmPilot users to beam information, but even as IR-bearing PalmPilots shipped, it wasn’t exactly clear what users would beam.

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The check arrives, and the onerous task of dividing up the bill begins. One diner reminds the group that they have PalmPilots, which include a calculator and Confinity’s money-beaming software. Presto: debts beamed, tab divided. Confinity would reorient the company, its software, and its pitch around beaming money from PalmPilot to PalmPilot. This idea had two virtues. First, it leveraged the thousands of lines of cryptographic handheld device code they’d already written. Second, it was a new thing in the world. To date, no one had made much use of the PalmPilot IR ports, other than swapping notes or sinking battleships. In beaming money, Confinity had an IR port use case.

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But his grandson, while intrigued by his friend Thiel’s company, thought the PalmPilot idea a dud. He came west for an interview nonetheless—which was not a success. “Sacks definitely didn’t pass the aura test,” one early Confinity team member said. The team objected, in part, to Sacks’s total dismissal of the PalmPilot product. “It was a dumb idea,” Sacks remembered. “There were two problems: one is that there are only five million Palm users, so unless you’re with somebody who also had a PalmPilot, the app is useless. And then there’s the other problem: even if you’re with somebody who’s got a PalmPilot, what would you use it for? Nobody could really come up with anything better than splitting dinner tabs.”

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

Rather, it made security software for handheld devices. In college, Levchin had grown fascinated with software and cryptography, and purely as a hobby, he had created some security software for PalmPilots, making it available for free download. After thousands of people downloaded the software, it occurred to him that he might have a business on his hands. Levchin’s freeware had solved an incredibly complex problem. Implementing cryptographic algorithms on a PalmPilot, with its hamster-league 16 MHz processor, was kind of like restocking a large warehouse using men on unicycles—conceptually possible, certainly, but difficult to do elegantly (much less quickly).

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On the day their first venture-capital deal was due to close, the PayPal team met its investors at a restaurant called Buck’s, and the $4.5 million investment was transferred, live, from one PalmPilot to another. Millions of dollars were sailing around the restaurant on infrared beams. The future had come to Buck’s. (Levchin had coded around the clock for five straight days to allow the “beaming at Buck’s” to take place. After the successful transfer of funds, he fell asleep at the table and woke up hours later next to his partially eaten omelet. Everyone else had left, figuring he could use the rest.) PayPal’s application for PalmPilots became popular, attracting about 300 users a day. To boost interest, Levchin’s team built a Web site that showcased a demo version of the handheld product.

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Implementing cryptographic algorithms on a PalmPilot, with its hamster-league 16 MHz processor, was kind of like restocking a large warehouse using men on unicycles—conceptually possible, certainly, but difficult to do elegantly (much less quickly). Levchin and his cofounder, Peter Thiel, brainstormed about ways to turn Levchin’s innovations into a commercial product, and eventually they hit upon the idea of developing software that allowed people to store money on their PalmPilots and exchange it wirelessly. Financial transactions clearly needed the kind of security that Levchin’s code provided. When Thiel and Levchin began to talk up their idea, their peers in Silicon Valley loved it. Levchin said, in an interview with Jessica Livingston in her book Founders at Work, “The geek crowd was like, ‘Wow. This is the future.

A Man for All Markets
by Edward O. Thorp
Published 15 Nov 2016

When Jeff and I were discussing strategy on the first day, at one point the prices were $90 per share for 3Com and $110 per share for PalmPilot. Buying 135 shares of PalmPilot outright cost $14,850, but if we paid $9,000 for 100 shares of 3Com we got both 135 shares of PalmPilot and 100 shares of the 3Com “stub” company. (Think of each 100 shares in 3Com as a ticket having two parts, one labeled 135 SHARES OF PALMPILOT and the other piece or stub labeled 100 SHARES OF 3COM POST-SPIN-OFF.) If you buy the hundred shares of 3Com you pay $9,000 and get $14,850 worth of PalmPilot and a 3Com stub with a current estimated value of between $1,500 and $2,500. Sell this for, say, $2,000 and the 135 PalmPilot shares only have a net cost of $7,000.

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Not possible? It happens often. For instance, in the next example the $9,000 Ford plus a $2,000 rebate is like 100 shares of 3Com and the identical Ford for $14,850 is like 135 shares of PalmPilot. Now for the details. Famous for its PalmPilot handheld personal organizer, the company 3Com, with stock market ticker COMS, announced that it was spinning off its PalmPilot division as a separate company. Some 6 percent of PalmPilot, ticker PALM, was offered to the public in an initial public offering at a price of $38 per share on Thursday, March 2, 2000. By the end of the day the 23 million shares that had been issued changed hands more than one and a half times, for a one-day trading volume of 37.9 million shares.

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The price peaked at $165 before closing at $95. The portion of PalmPilot sold in the IPO was deliberately set well below demand and led to a buying frenzy and price spurt typical at the time for tech stock IPOs. So far, this just repeated what we had often seen during the previous eighteen months of the tech stock boom. Now for the market inefficiency. At Thursday’s closing the market priced PalmPilot at $53.4 billion, yet it valued 3Com, which still owned 94 percent of PalmPilot, at “only” $28 billion. But that means the market valued 3Com’s 94 percent of PalmPilot at $50 billion, so it valued the rest of 3Com at negative $22 billion!

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

At least PayPal had a suitably grand mission—the kind that post-bubble skeptics would later describe as grandiose: we wanted to create a new internet currency to replace the U.S. dollar. Our first product let people beam money from one PalmPilot to another. However, nobody had any use for that product except the journalists who voted it one of the 10 worst business ideas of 1999. PalmPilots were still too exotic then, but email was already commonplace, so we decided to create a way to send and receive payments over email. By the fall of ’99, our email payment product worked well—anyone could log in to our website and easily transfer money.

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The reason is simple: it’s easier to dominate a small market than a large one. If you think your initial market might be too big, it almost certainly is. Small doesn’t mean nonexistent. We made this mistake early on at PayPal. Our first product let people beam money to each other via PalmPilots. It was interesting technology and no one else was doing it. However, the world’s millions of PalmPilot users weren’t concentrated in a particular place, they had little in common, and they used their devices only episodically. Nobody needed our product, so we had no customers. With that lesson learned, we set our sights on eBay auctions, where we found our first success.

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Every entrepreneur envies a recognizable ad campaign, but startups should resist the temptation to compete with bigger companies in the endless contest to put on the most memorable TV spots or the most elaborate PR stunts. I know this from experience. At PayPal we hired James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, to be our official spokesman. When we released our first software for the PalmPilot, we invited journalists to an event where they could hear James recite this immortal line: “I’ve been beaming people up my whole career, but this is the first time I’ve ever been able to beam money!” It flopped—the few who actually came to cover the event weren’t impressed. We were all nerds, so we had thought Scotty the Chief Engineer could speak with more authority than, say, Captain Kirk.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

Starting at the end of 1998, Levchin and Thiel began experimenting with the idea of using the same technology to send an IOU, which could then be linked to a bank account once the PalmPilots were connected to a dock. They renamed the PalmPilot software company Confinity, a neologism Levchin came up with for “infinite confidence,” and made Thiel CEO. Levchin’s technology was almost absurdly narrow—only super-nerds owned PalmPilots at the time—but Thiel continued to see the basic idea as potentially disruptive. Levchin hadn’t invented a new kind of IOU; he’d invented a new currency. Once you had Confinity’s payments app on your PalmPilot, which could be downloaded by zapping it from your friend’s handheld, you could then use digital IOUs instead of dollars to buy stuff.

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“We should meet for breakfast,” Thiel said, before they parted. Sure, Levchin responded. “How about tomorrow?” Thiel asked. They met the following morning at a diner just south of the Stanford campus. As Thiel sipped a berry-and-banana smoothie, Levchin spoke about his fascination with PalmPilots, the handheld computers that had a certain cache among geeks. He’d taught himself to program on the digital planners, which, like proto-iPhones, had apps that let users write memos, keep track of appointments, and—wonder of wonders—send messages remotely. The process was clumsy: You had to buy a special modem that snapped onto the end of the device, plug the entire waffle-iron-sized appliance into a phone jack, and then suffer through the noisy, slow process of transferring data by dial-up modem.

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The process was clumsy: You had to buy a special modem that snapped onto the end of the device, plug the entire waffle-iron-sized appliance into a phone jack, and then suffer through the noisy, slow process of transferring data by dial-up modem. But Levchin thought it was awesome. “One day,” he told Thiel, “everyone is going to use these at work.” The one problem, Levchin said, was that PalmPilots didn’t have any security built in, making them effectively useless for businesses. As a cryptographer, he figured the answer was to build an encrypted network that would allow the handheld computers to communicate with the mainframe systems run by big companies. Thiel looked at Levchin intensely.

Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia
by Anthony M. Townsend
Published 29 Sep 2013

Crowley moved on to a new job at Vindigo, a start-up whose Palm Pilot app was one of the first city guides for a mobile device. Before do-it-all smartphones, PalmPilots—wireless-less handheld computers known as “personal digital assistants”—stood in as digital replacements for paper-based daily planners. This was before 3G, and Wi-Fi was just coming to market, and just beginning its infectious spread. The PalmPilot didn’t feature a wireless connection of any kind. Each time you returned to your PC, you snapped the thing into its cradle and hit a button, syncing data across a serial cable. Like other PalmPilot apps, Vindigo used the daily sync as a way of keeping the guide content on your device up to date.

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Innovations, 245 NYCwireless, 126–34, 174–75 O’Bryant, Richard, 174 Occupy Wall Street, 133, 226 Odendaal, Nancy, 178 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 288 O’Hagan, John, 80 Olivetti, 137 Olympic Games: Summer 1996, 66 Summer 2016, 66 O’Malley, Martin, 211 O’Neill, Tip, 212 One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), 177, 188, 190 open-data legislation, 228 Open Plans, 158, 228, 307 open source: advocates of, 126–34, 209, 223, 237, 241, 291 in computer language, 124 for empowerment of poor, 186–89 model transparency in, 296 systems using, 156, 158–59, 293 OpenStreetMap, 187 operational planning, 67 Opower, 41–42 Web 2.0 conference of, 237 O’Reilly, Tim, 237, 241 “government as a platform” idea of, 241–42 O’Reilly Media, 237 Orwell, George, 275–76 Osgood, Chris, 213–16 Osorio, Carlos Roberto, 67–68 O’Sullivan, Dan, 136 Ouroussoff, Nicolai, 106 outside.in, 155 Owen, David, 278 Paes, Eduardo, 66–68, 223–24 Pahlka, Jennifer, 237–43, 291 Pakistan, 233 Palmisano, Sam, 62–63, 68, 223–24 PalmPilot, 121–22 Panasonic, 127 Panopticon, 13 Paris, bicycle sharing in, 11 ParkNOW!, 244–45 patents, 60–61 Path Intelligence, 271 Pattern Language, A (Alexander), 144, 285–86 Paulos, Eric, 41 Paxton, Joseph, 19 Convensia homage to, 23 design challenges of, 28 PBS, talk show of, 4 peer-to-peer systems, 163 Percifield, Leif, 139 “perpetual architect program,” 21 Perrow, Charles, 256–57 personal computer, 62 Personal Locker, 293 Peterson, Steven, 292 Philadelphia, Pa., 194–99, 287 Wireless Philadelphia in, 194–99 Philadelphia Magazine, 195 Philippines, conflict in, 12 PhoundIt, 319 PHP, 124 Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers (O’Sullivan and Igoe), 136 Pittsburgh, Pa., 79, 81, 83 PlaNYC sustainability initiative, 201 “platform play,” 149 Plato, 173 Plow Tracker, 208 Poindexter, John, 270 Point About, 200 Portland, Oreg., 82–85, 88–89 Tri-Met transit authority of, 204, 235 Posco, 30 Pradas, Juan, 219, 222–23 Price, Cedric, 20–22 PriceStats, 183 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 313 psychohistory, 79, 88, 315 public access cable television, 117–19, 164–65 punch cards, 59–62 Qiang, Christine Zhen-Wei, 178 R, 209 radio-frequency identification tag (RFID), 23–24, 28 RadioShack, 138 railroads, 61, 63 Rainert, Alex, 123–25, 134, 146 RAND, 79–81, 259, 277 Ratti, Carlo, 220, 231, 291 Real-Time Rome, 161 Regional Plan Association of New York, 105, 309 Regional Planning Association of America, 95–96 Reims, Andrea, 190 RelayRides, 163 Republic, The, 173 Return of the Whole Number of Persons Within the Several Districts of the United States (1793), 58 Rheingold, Howard, 34–35, 303 Ricci, Dom, 295 Rio de Janeiro, 65–69, 223–24 Intelligent Operations Center of, 66, 68, 82, 90–92, 224 Projeto Morrinho, 91–92 RJR Nabisco, 62 Roadify, 202 Roberts, Lawrence, 259–60 Rockefeller Foundation, 173–74 ROI (return on investment), 68 Rojas, Francisca, 204 Romer, Paul, 284 Rose, Charlie, 4 Roush, Wade, 258 Routesy, 292 Royal Academy of Engineering, 265 Royal Ordnance Survey (U.K.), 186 Royal Sappers and Miners, 20 Rozin, Daniel, 136 Rudofksy, Bernard, 111 rural telecottage or telecenter, 175–76 Russell, Bertrand, 251 Rutan, Burt, 203 SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment), 63–64 SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), 63, 76 St.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

A higher-fidelity prototype is closer to the envisioned final product in terms of its functionality, its “look and feel,” or both. A low-fidelity prototype can be as simple as a series of sketches that depict the flow of screens along a software program’s navigation path. Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the PalmPilot, famously started designing the device by carving a block of wood into its shape, and then trimming a chopstick that he used as a stylus. To get a feel for whether and how he might use a PalmPilot, he carried the prototype for weeks, pulling it out every time he needed to schedule a meeting or access contact information. Early in the solution development process, an entrepreneur is likely to create both “works like” and “looks like” prototypes.

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If a startup is not on track, those leading it should ask regularly whether pivoting to a new business model makes sense. Pivoting, in and of itself, is not a harbinger of failure. In fact, many prominent ventures were products of a pivot. For example, PayPal began as a way to beam funds between PalmPilots. When this market proved too narrow, the team introduced fund transfers via email—just as eBay was taking off. Likewise, YouTube started as a service that allowed online daters to upload video profiles. Successful pivots like these often have one thing in common, however: They happen early in the venture’s development.

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The best way to synthesize: For best practices when developing personas, see Goodman et al., Observing the User Experience, Ch. 17; and Alan Cooper, The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (Carmel, IN: Sams-Pearson Education, 2004). Also known as structured ideation: For best practices when brainstorming, see Scott Berkun, “How to Run a Brainstorming Session,” Scott Berkun blog; and Tina Seelig, “Brainstorming—Why It Doesn’t (Always) Work,” Medium, Jan. 8, 2017. Jeff Hawkins, inventor: Alberto Savoia, “The Palm Pilot Story,” Medium, Mar. 2, 2019. Early in the solution development process: The distinction between “works like” vs. “looks like” prototypes is a widely accepted principle in design. For a good explanation of the distinction—and why designers should use both types—see Ben Einstein, “The Illustrated Guide to Product Development (Part 2: Design),” Bolt website, Oct. 20, 2015.

eBoys
by Randall E. Stross
Published 30 Oct 2008

Stross Copyright The Cast The Benchmark Partners Dave Beirne previously, founder of Ramsey Beirne Associates, an executive search firm in Ossining, New York Bruce Dunlevie previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Bill Gurley previously, general partner at Hummer Winblad, a venture capital firm in San Francisco, California; joined Benchmark in 1999 Kevin Harvey previously, founder of Approach Software, in Redwood City, California Bob Kagle previously, general partner at Technology Venture Investors (TVI), a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Andy Rachleff previously, general partner at Merrill Pickard, a venture capital firm in Menlo Park, California Selected Individuals Mentioned Bill Atalla son of TriStrata founder John Atalla John Atalla founder, TriStrata Louis Borders founder and CEO, Webvan Eric Greenberg founder, Scient Bob Howe CEO, Scient Jerry Kaplan CEO, Onsale Bill Lederer CEO, artuframe/Art.com Burt McMurtry general partner, Technology Venture Investors Pete Mountanos CEO, Charitableway Pierre Omidyar founder and chairman, eBay Tom Perkins retired general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers Danny Shader Benchmark entrepreneur in residence; founder and CEO, Accept.com Rob Shaw founder, Newwatch/Ashford.com Jeff Skoll cofounder and vice president, eBay Paul Wahl CEO, TriStrata Jay Walker chairman, Priceline Steve Westly vice president, marketing, eBay James Whitcomb president, Newwatch/Ashford.com Meg Whitman president and CEO, eBay Selected Companies Mentioned (Partner representing Benchmark) Accept.com (Bruce Dunlevie) payment systems for electronic commerce Ariba (Bob Kagle) online ordering of materials and supplies for businesses Art.com [originally named artuframe] (Bob Kagle) posters and frames sold via the Web Ashford.com [originally named Newwatch] (Kevin Harvey) watches, pens, leather bags, and other luxury goods sold via the Web Charitableway (Andy Rachleff) online for-profit solicitor for nonprofit organizations Critical Path (Kevin Harvey) hosts e-mail services for large organizations eBay (Bob Kagle) online person-to-person auctions via the Web ePhysician (Dave Beirne) prescription ordering for doctors via a PalmPilot Juniper Networks (Andy Rachleff) manufacturer of high-speed routers for the Internet Newwatch [renamed Ashford.com; see above] Priceline (Dave Beirne) online bidding for airline tickets and hotel rooms Red Hat (Kevin Harvey) distributor of Linux, an alternative operating system to Windows Scient (Dave Beirne) technical consulting services to e-tailers Toysrus.com (Bruce Dunlevie) aborted joint venture to sell toys via the Web; to have been cofunded by, but organizationally separate from, Toys “R” Us TriStrata (Dave Beirne) security software for data networks within large corporations Webvan (Dave Beirne) groceries sold via the Web and delivered to the home Introduction When eBay, a small Internet auction company based in San Jose, California, sought venture capital, it had to pass an informal test administered by the venture guys before they would consider making an investment: Was there a reasonably good likelihood that the investors could make ten times their money within three years?

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It was Dunlevie who had helped arrange a way for Ink, which had evolved into another company, eShop, to do something that few pen-computing companies in the early 1990s were able to accomplish: make money. EShop was sold to Microsoft. (Dunlevie was 3 for 3 in his pen-computing investments; another company that he backed was Palm, whose PalmPilot several years later would be a broadly recognized brand but had not yet become the franchise it would be later for 3Com.) After eShop’s sale, Omidyar had periodically phoned Dunlevie, telling him of progress in his newest venture. “I’ve got this e-commerce site called eBay. It’s gathering steam,” Omidyar had said when he called in late 1996.

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From one million SKUs, to 500,000, 200,000, 100,000, 50,000, then down to 30,000, only 50 percent more items than a huge Safeway carried. Each Monday morning the Benchmark partners held a free-form partners’ meeting. No one held a particular place around the table, but what each partner typically brought with him to the meeting revealed some differences in personality. As the venture guy behind the PalmPilot, Bruce Dunlevie not surprisingly used a Pilot to make appointments and look up phone numbers for other partners during the meeting, but he also brought along a tall messy stack of legal pads, each reserved for a separate pending deal, with many pages filled in and the top pages folded over; interspersed were clippings from the computer-industry trade press, which he would pull out and send flying across the table, like paper Frisbees, to the partner who may have missed the item.

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius
by Arika Okrent
Published 1 Jan 2009

On the first afternoon of the conference, I stepped timidly into the over-air-conditioned lobby of the hotel with Mark Shoulson. He and I had spent the long flight to Phoenix going over the finer points of Klingon colloquialisms, but I wasn't sure I was ready to put them to use. I saw a small group gathered around a table, PalmPilots in hand. They were conversing in Klingon, haltingly, and with much use of their PalmPilot dictionaries, but nonetheless getting their points across. No one was in costume. Mark introduced me to the group, and I smiled and waved weakly, not sure what to say or how to say it. I sat and listened for a while. I was privately pleased when I understood my first spoken Klingon sentence: “Ha'DIbaH vISopbe'” (Animal I-it-eat-not)—“I'm a vegetarian.”

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But because people were out of practice and the group was of mixed skill level, this particular conversation wasn't the best display of Klingon-speaking potential. I saw that later, as we walked over radiating sidewalks to a Mexican restaurant for the opening banquet, when I witnessed Captain Krankor and his girlfriend holding hands and chatting in Klingon, sans PalmPilots. Captain Krankor (also known as Qanqor) is a software engineer and musician from Massachusetts known as Rich when he's in regular clothes. When he wears his Klingon costume, he is Krankor, and he only speaks Klingon. In both of his personas he is round and compact, with a large, appreciative laugh that shows off his dimples.

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He said he was having a great time so far, and he was really hoping Marc Okrand would make an appearance, as he sometimes does at the qep'a's. “I'm starstruck,” he said with a wide smile. “I brought a new copy of The Klingon Dictionary for him to sign.” The second morning, when I greeted Scott by the coffee machine, he would only speak to me in Klingon, having taken the vow for that day. Luckily, someone had beamed me a PalmPilot dictionary at lunch the previous day, so I had the means to understand him in a painfully pause-filled kind of way. As the rest of the group came down from their rooms, he gained more game conversational partners and I gained some interpreters, the most skilled of whom was my guide, Mark, who through the rest of the weekend made it a point to keep me included with unobtrusive simultaneous translation in a low, gentle voice.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

The next steps—to embed the technology invisibly in a piece of glass, to make it smart enough to display a virtual keyboard with auto-correct, and to make it sophisticated enough to reliably manipulate content such as photos or web pages on that screen—made it hugely expensive even to produce a working prototype. Few production lines even had experience manufacturing multitouch screens. There were touchscreens in consumer electronics, but over the years these had typically been pressure-sensitive touchscreen devices on which users pushed on-screen buttons with a finger or a stylus. The PalmPilot and its successors such as the Palm Treo were popular implementations of this technology. Even if multitouch iPhone screens had been easy to make, it wasn’t at all clear to Apple’s executive team that the features they enabled, such as onscreen keyboards and “tap to zoom,” were enhancements that consumers wanted.

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He became one of the inventors of the graphical user interface at Xerox PARC. The first Macintosh and later Microsoft Windows were rooted in Kay’s work. Apple prototyped something it called the Bashful in 1983 but never released it. The first tablet to get any consumer traction came from Jeff Hawkins, the entrepreneur behind the PalmPilot in the late 1990s. He built the GRiDPad from Tandy, which was released in 1989. It worked with a stylus, weighed about five pounds, and cost about $2,500. Bookkeepers in the U.S. army used it to fill out electronic forms and keep better track of inventory. It was shortly followed by competitors such as the NCR 3125.

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Its battery life was terrible, and its most hyped feature, handwriting recognition, didn’t work well. It was, fittingly, one of the first projects Jobs killed when he returned in 1997. By then, if you wanted computing power that was portable, you could buy a laptop. Everything else involved too much compromise. Indeed, the PalmPilot and devices like it became so popular for the next half decade because they didn’t try to do too much. They were small, inexpensive, and ran for a long time on AAA batteries. But they were really electronic calendars and address books, not tablet computers. The most recent effort in tablets had been made by Bill Gates and Microsoft in 2002.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

When Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek founded PayPal (then known as Confinity) in December 1998, Confinity was intended to be a mobile phone encryption company using Max’s highly efficient encryption technology. From there, the company pivoted first to mobile phone cash (pivot #1) and then to PalmPilot payments via infrared beaming (pivot #2). Unfortunately, the network of PalmPilot users who wanted to beam money to each other simply wasn’t that robust, so we pivoted again and added e-mail payments (pivot #3). By the end of the year, we saw an emerging market in settling eBay transactions and pivoted our product development efforts to serve that market (pivot #4).

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Even if you do manage to hire the people you want, you’ll often have to scramble their roles and job titles as the organization changes in response to market feedback. At PayPal, we thought we were a mobile encryption product, and we hired accordingly. Then we shifted rapidly in turn to cash on mobile phones, then cash on PalmPilots, then payments between PalmPilots, and finally payments via e-mail. We couldn’t have done so if our people were tied to neat and tidy jobs like “mobile encryption engineer.” Take Jamie Templeton, one of our key early employees at PayPal. We hired Jamie to work on the product, but over the course of just three years, he shifted from product to engineering to systems to policy, depending on what the company needed.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 10 Jan 2011

HOW EVEN THE LEADING NEW ECONOMY STOCKS RUINED INVESTORS Stock High 2000 Low 2001–2002 Percentage Decline Amazon.com 75.25 5.51 98.7 Cisco Systems 82.00 11.04 86.5 Corning 113.33 2.80 99.0 JDS Uniphase 297.34 2.24 99.5 Lucent Technologies 74.93 1.36 98.3 Nortel Networks 143.62 .76 99.7 Priceline.com 165.00 1.80 99.4 Yahoo.com 238.00 8.02 96.4 PalmPilot, the maker of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), is an example of the insanity that went well beyond irrational exuberance. Palm was owned by a company called 3Com, which decided to spin it off to its shareholders. Since PDAs were touted as a sine qua non of the digital revolution, it was assumed that PalmPilot would be a particularly exciting stock. Little did 3Com know how strongly the market would react. In early 2000, 3Com sold 5 percent of its shares in Palm in an initial public offering and announced its intention to spin off all the remaining shares to the 3Com shareholders.

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Recall the illustration of 3Com spinning off 5 percent of the shares of PalmPilot stock it owned, announcing its intention to spin off the remaining 95 percent later. Irrational exuberance pushed the price of Palm’s stock so high that if you bought 3Com, which still owned 95 percent of Palm, you could have effectively bought Palm stock for less than the price at which it was selling in the market. The 95 percent of Palm that 3Com owned was worth $25 billion more than the total market capitalization of 3Com at going market prices. Here was an obvious case of mispricing and an apparently profitable arbitrage opportunity. The clear arbitrage (borrow PalmPilot stock and sell it short and buy 3Com) could not be undertaken.

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Palm took off so fast that its market capitalization became twice as large as that of 3Com. It turned out that the market value of the 95 percent of Palm owned by 3Com was almost $25 billion greater than the total market capitalization of 3Com itself. It was as if all of 3Com’s other assets had been worth a negative $25 billion. If you wanted to buy PalmPilot, you could have bought 3Com and owned the rest of 3Com’s business for minus $61 per share. In its mindless search for riches, the market created anomalies that were even stranger than the fraudulent accounting practices that were soon to be revealed. Yet Another New-Issue Craze In the first quarter of 2000, 916 venture capital firms invested $15.7 billion in 1,009 startup Internet companies.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

He’d been writing ingenious encryption that ran on the weak chips of handheld PDAs like the PalmPilot, the hot tech of the day. They hit on the idea of creating software to let people transfer money digitally—from one PalmPilot to another, or even online: PayPal. At school, Levchin had developed a reputation for being a ferocious font of code, working in relentless, multi-day-long jags. So it was with the origins of PayPal: He’d already written scads of crypto emulators, so he was able to crank out the prototype of PayPal’s initial PalmPilot software by himself. When PayPal secured $4.5 million in financing, for a PR stunt he and Thiel decided to have the investors beam $3 million of it in digital money from one PalmPilot to another.

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When PayPal secured $4.5 million in financing, for a PR stunt he and Thiel decided to have the investors beam $3 million of it in digital money from one PalmPilot to another. They pondered doing a fake mock-up, one that just pretended to send the money. But Levchin was “disgusted” with the idea, as he later recalled in the book Founders at Work. “What if it crashes?” he thought. “I’ll have to go and commit ritual suicide to avoid any sort of embarrassment.” Instead, he and the two other programmers they’d hired by then hunkered down and coded almost nonstop for five straight days. In Founders, Levchin recalled not sleeping at all during that period: “It was just this insane marathon.”

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In Founders, Levchin recalled not sleeping at all during that period: “It was just this insane marathon.” They finished their work barely one hour before the demo was set to begin. At a local restaurant called Buck’s, with reporters crowded around a pair of PalmPilots, the $3 million was successfully transferred from one device to another. Levchin ordered an omelet for breakfast but fell asleep before he could eat it. “The next thing I remember,” he said, “I woke up, and I was on the side of my own omelet, and there was no one at Buck’s. Everyone was gone. They just let me sleep.” As PayPal took off, he kept up those empyrean feats of coderly productivity.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
by Alan Cooper
Published 24 Feb 2004

Sometimes features are needed to reach goals, but more often than not, they merely confuse users and get in the way of allowing them to get their work done. Ineffective features make users feel stupid. Borrowing from a previous example, the successful PalmPilot has far fewer features than did General Magic's failed Magic Link computer, Apple's failed Newton, or the failed PenPoint computer. The PalmPilot owes its success to its designers' single-minded focus on its target user and the objectives that user wanted to achieve. About the only good thing I can say about features is that they are quantifiable. And that quality of being countable imbues them with an aura of value that they simply don't have.

…

In 1992, when the PenPoint crashed and burned, the Apple Newton inherited the promise of the handheld revolution. When the Newton failed to excite people, General Magic's Magic Link computer became the new hope for handhelds. That was in 1994. When the Magic Link failed to sell, the handheld market appeared dead. Venture capitalists declared it a dry hole. Then, out of nowhere, in 1996, the PalmPilot arrived to universal acclaim. It seized the handheld no-man's-land six years late. Markets are always ready for good products that deliver value and satisfy users. Of course, companies with a long history of making hardware-only products now make hybrid versions containing chips and software. They tend to underestimate the influence of software and subordinate it to the already-established completion cycles of hardware.

…

Most of the examples in Chapter 1 , "Riddles for the Information Age," make this clear. As more and more products are hybrids of hardware and software, the need for a Goal-Directed design increases, because it is agnostic regarding the implementation medium. 3Com Corporation—original maker of the PalmPilot—is a good example of a hybrid-product company where design created a smooth integration between hardware and software. A single tap of the screen and the machine awakens instantly in the exact state it was in when it was last shut down. When hardware is instantaneously responsive to users' actions, it is a clear indicator that the hardware design incorporated the needs of the software.

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior
by Jonah Berger
Published 13 Jun 2016

Such visual cues not only make novel technology feel more familiar, they also shape the reference category used to evaluate the device. Apple’s Newton was an early predecessor to today’s smartphone. It was designed and viewed as a computer, and ultimately evaluated as an underperforming one. The PalmPilot was introduced only a few years later, but because it fit in a pocket and resembled a daily agenda book, that, instead of a computer, became the standard of comparison. And seen as an improvement over the standard agenda book, the PalmPilot became quite successful. 5. Come On Baby, Light My Fire Kara sat quietly in the dark waiting for the race to begin. It would be a sprint. Nothing complicated, just a straight track.

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See also Social comparison; Social facilitation Moving to Opportunity, 225–28, 232 Music website experiment, 46–49, 52–53 Names, 14, 150–56, 161 hurricanes’ influence on choice of, 16, 153, 154–55, 156, 170–71 last, 169 phonemes in, 152–53 prebirth secrecy about, 59n National Assessment of Educational Progress, 118 National Industrial Recovery Act, 223 NBA teams, 15, 207–8 NCAA teams, 208n Negotiation, 36–41 Neighborhood effects, 226–28 Newton (Apple), 184n Nike, 180 1984 (Orwell), 78n Nixon, Richard, 163 Nobel Prize winners, 66 Nolan, Jessica, 200 North Face, 103, 109–10 Note-taking, 195 Nouveau riche, 130–31 Novelty, 16, 164–71 benefits of, 164–65 Chinese characters experiment, 157–60 Goldilocks effect and, 166–71, 230 Obama, Barack, 141, 220 Occupation and social class, 92n Ogbu, John, 118–19 Oops! . . . I Did It Again (album), 43 Opower, 202–3, 209, 216n, 219–20, 232 Opportunity costs, 126 Optimal distinction, 16, 171–81, 230 automobile selection and, 177–79 in eating club members, 173–76 Orwell, George, 78n PalmPilot, 184n Pantone, 148, 149 Pantoneview, 148 Parakeets, social facilitation and, 190 Parallel parking, 16, 195 Parking parallel, 16, 195 preferences, 49–52, 53 Pasarell, Charlie, 212–14 Phonemes, 152–53 Physical appearance similiarity, 30–32 Physical attraction, 6–11, 230–31 Pierce, Paul, 207 Plato, 6–7 Point of light experiment, 21–23, 28, 47, 74 Politics, social comparison in, 220 Polizzi, Nicole (“Snooki”), 99–101, 180 Pope, Devin, 207 Prada, 129 Premotor cortex, 33–35 Presley, Elvis, 45 Princeton University, 3, 46, 171–76 Privacy, 59–60 Pronin, Emily, 3 Public Works Administration, 223 Quitting, 217–19 Race, academic performance and, 16, 117–20, 141–42 Rand, Ayn, 78n Rand, Lindsay, 141 Rats, social facilitation/comparison and, 189, 215 Reagan, Ronald, 162 Relative performance.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

We have these handheld devices that we all believe are going to be everywhere one day, but right now only a couple of million people have them. Reid was the progenitor of the original idea. He said, “You know, the thing that you can secure is money.” There was not really a good reason why your PalmPilot or your desktop computer can’t be a wallet. You just need a way to put money in and take money out while it’s secure. And that’s basically the evolution of PayPal—where it went from PalmPilot money transfer to web and online money transfer. At PayPal, we created an entirely new market for something that did not exist before the internet and before eBay. Pre-eBay, if you wanted to buy something from Alabama and you lived in Wisconsin, you had to physically go there and buy it. eBay fundamentally enabled the idea of cross-border commerce, which just was not a thing before.

…

And so I realized that around me were all kinds of system administrators that carried around these various little physical password generators. For every new machine that people had to log into, they needed to generate a onetime password. A system administrator would literally have twenty-five of these hanging off their belt. I wanted to reverse engineer all the algorithms and put them into a single PalmPilot emulator. It became kind of an obsession. I started distributing it on the internet, which in 1995 was a very small place, and shockingly people were willing to pay me money for support. Then I pitched this to Peter Thiel, and it eventually became PayPal. I did lots of other startups before PayPal.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

In the market decline that followed, shares in these companies became worthless. As the following table shows, investors suffered punishing losses even in the leading Internet companies. PalmPilot, the maker of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), is an example of the insanity that went well beyond irrational exuberance. Palm was owned by a company called 3Com, which decided to spin it off to its shareholders. Since PDAs were touted as a sine qua non of the digital revolution, it was assumed that PalmPilot would be a particularly exciting stock. Little did 3Com know how strongly the market would react. In early 2000, 3Com sold 5 percent of its shares in Palm in an initial public offering and announced its intention to spin off all the remaining shares to the 3Com shareholders.

…

Palm took off so fast that its market capitalization became twice as large as that of 3Com. It turned out that the market value of the 95 percent of Palm owned by 3Com was almost $25 billion greater than the total market capitalization of 3Com itself. It was as if all of 3Com’s other assets had been worth a negative $25 billion. If you wanted to buy PalmPilot, you could have bought 3Com and owned the rest of 3Com’s business for minus $61 per share. In its mindless search for riches, the market created anomalies that were even stranger than the fraudulent accounting practices that were soon to be revealed. Yet Another New-Issue Craze In the first quarter of 2000, 916 venture capital firms invested $15.7 billion in 1,009 startup Internet companies.

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Standard & Poor’s 500, 179, 181 see also specific funds Nagel, Stefan, 250 NASDAQ, 80–81, 82, 109, 128, 254 National Cash Register, 48, 53 national income changes, as element in systematic risk, 224 National Student Marketing (NSM), 67–68, 69 “naughties,” 344, 411 New Economy, 241, 249 accounting fraud in, 93–95 Internet-driven, 79–97, 104–5 New Economy stocks, 172, 177 New England Patriots, 148 new investment technology, 26, 31, 189–228 alpha in, 219 beta in, see beta CAPM in, see capital-asset pricing model MPT in, see modern portfolio theory risk in, 190 new issues, 257, 318 caution with, 75 of Internet stocks, 84–87 of 1959–62, 57–59 of 1980s, 70–75 Newsweek, 57 Newton, Isaac, 47 New Yorker, 88 New York Post, 89 New York State Teachers Association, 384 New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), 56, 109, 144, 151, 397 Babson Break in, 51–52 speculation in, 48–55 New York Times, 91, 393 Nifty Fifty, 36, 68–70 NINJA loans, 101 Nobel Prize, 35, 183, 197, 209 No-Brainer Step, 379, 380–82 NO-DOC loans, 101 no-equity loans, 100 Non-Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Lo and MacKinlay), 139 Nortel Networks, 83, 90, 161, 166 NSM, see National Student Marketing NTT Corporation, 76 nucleus theory of growth, 64 NYSE, see New York Stock Exchange odd-lot theory, 149 Odean, Terrance, 93, 234, 246, 256 O’Higgins, Michael, 150 Once in Golconda (Brooks), 49 “one-decision” stocks, 69 online brokers, Internet bubble aided by, 91–92 online investment advisers, 408 OPEC, 337 open-end funds, 402 operating expenses, 402 option premiums, 39 O’Shaughnessy, James, 150 Outlook (S&P), 393 overconfidence, 231, 232–35 overtrading, 234, 255–56 PalmPilot, 83 Paternot, Stephen, 86 P/BV ratios, see price-to-book value ratios P/E effect, 263 P/E multiples, see price-earnings multiples pension funds, 167, 182, 184, 303–4 P/E ratios, see price-earnings multiples performance, 65–68 of buy-and-hold strategy, 158 of common stocks (1970s), 340 of concept stocks, 65–68 of mutual funds, 66, 174–82, 398–400 vs. future results in mutual funds, 399, 401 Performance Systems, 68, 69 Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), 83 Peters, Thomas J., 233 Pets.com, 84 Philadelphia 76ers, 145 Phillips, Don, 400 Phoenix, University of, 169 Pittsburgh Steelers, 148 Polaroid, 68, 69, 161 Ponzi schemes: Internet investment as, 80, 242 of Madoff, 258–59 ZZZZ Best as, 74 portfolio management, 66, 160–61, 164, 170, 174–84, 261, 349–50, 351, 361–62, 366–67, 389, 398 see also “smart beta” Portfolio Selection (Markowitz), 197 portfolio theory, see modern portfolio theory positive feedback loops, 80 Pound, John, 253 PowerShares, 270, 281 Prechter, Robert, 151–52 present value, 32, 125n price-dividend multiples, 330, 340, 341, 343 price-earnings (P/E) multiples, 57, 64, 65, 126, 264, 274, 336, 344, 346–47, 394–95 of blue-chip stocks, 68 crash in (1970s), 340 cyclically adjusted (CAPE), 347, 387 of growth stocks, 121–23, 130–33, 406 of high-tech stocks, 81 inflation of, 64 performance and, 263, 396 see also performance, of common stocks (1970s); performance, of concept stocks Priceline.com, 83 price stability, 54 price-to-book value (P/BV) ratios, of stocks, 264, 270, 274 price-volume systems, 143–44 Price Waterhouse, 153 Princeton University, 161 probability judgments, 233–34, 238 Producers, The, 166 product asset valuation, 72 professional investors: limitations of, 162–63 profit-maximizing behavior, as argument against technical analysis, 116–17 profits, 339 in inflation, 339 measurement of, 339 profit-sharing plans, 304 Prohibition, 52 property taxes, 314 prospect theory, 243–45 prospectuses, warnings on, 59 PSI Net, 90 psychological factors in stock valuation, see castle-in-the-air theory; technical analysis Puckle Machine Company, 45 Puerto Rico, 404 purchasing power, effects of inflation on, 28–29, 125n, 307, 315 Purdue University, 82 Quandt, Richard, 140 quant, defined, 221n Quinn, Jane Bryant, 91 Qwest, 166 Radio Corporation of America (RCA), 48, 53 railroad industry, 91, 96 RAND Corporation, 197 Randell, Cortes W., 66–68 random events, forecasting influenced by, 164–65, 176 random walk: defined, 26–28, 139, 140 difficult acceptance of, 145–46 fundamental conclusion of, 154 summarized, 35–36 random-walk theory, 105–6, 266–67 assumptions of, 190, 229, 230 fundamental analysis and, 182–84 guide for, 291 and housing bubble, 105–6 index funds and, 379–80 role of arbitrage in, 248–49 semi-strong form of EMH, 26, 182–84 strong (broad) form of EMH, 26, 182–84 technical analysis and, 137–41, 154–57 weak (narrow) form of EMH, 26, 140, 183 Raptor, 94 rate of return: after inflation, 338 for bonds, 194–96, 307, 315–21, 342–43, 344, 345 in CAPM, 213–19 for common stocks, 194–96, 307 compounded, 351 diversification and, 198–200 expected, see expected rate of return future events and, 30, 343–48 high, for bearing greater risk, 194–96, 212–13, 350, 408 investment objectives and, 306–13 negative, 196 for real estate, 313 rebalancing to, 360 risk-free, 215–18 “small caps” vs.

Multitool Linux: Practical Uses for Open Source Software
by Michael Schwarz , Jeremy Anderson and Peter Curtis
Published 7 May 2002

Use Your Palm-Connected Organizer Difficult-o-Meter: 3 (moderate Linux skill required) Covers: pilot-link http://sourceforge.net/projects/pilot-link pilot-manager http://www.moshpit.org/pilotmgr/ kpilot url http://www.kde.org/ jpilot http://jpilot.org/ malsync http://www.tomw.org/malsync/ Question: Doesn't switching to Linux mean that I will have to give up my Palm computing device (or PalmPilot as most humans still call them)? Answer: Absolutely not! You have an embarassment of options for linking your Palm, Sony Clie, or Handspring Visor to Linux. Which one of the host of choices you select will depend on your needs, your desktop choice, and your personal tastes. Heck, I actually use more than one of the packages every single day. It is a lot of fun! Introduction PalmOS devices, including the PalmPilot, the Palms III, IIIx, V, Vx, VIIx, m100, and now m500, etc., the Handspring line of personal digital assistants (PDAs), the Sony Clie, and so on are the most widely used type of PDA in the market, recent inroads by the so-called PocketPC notwithstanding.

…

Those of you who have PalmOS devices already know what we are talking about here. What you want is some guidance to help you choose the tool that's right for you. Seeing how these packages do their work is the only way to make that choice, hence all the pretty pictures (so perhaps this is a bit of an apology after all). One more note: We will use the terms palm, Palm, pilot, and PDA interchangeably throughout this chapter. In every case we mean one of the PalmOS-based personal digital assistants, without regard to a particular model or manufacturer. The Handspring Visor: A Brief Digression I recently bought a Handspring Visor Deluxe when I accidentally ran over my long-used and much-loved Palm V.

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Program Description addresses This program will read your addressbook database and write it to standard output in a fairly useful format. pilot-addresses This will export and import your addressbook. read-todos This will output the to-do lists in your palm to a text format. install-todos The function complementary to the read-todos program. This will take a text file of to-do items and store them in your palm. pilot-schlep This will turn your palm into a one-file file system. You can save any disk file (that will fit in your palm's free memory) on your palm and then use this program to extract it again. Very James Bond. pilot-mail This will read mail from a POP3 account into your palm's mail application and will send any mail coming from your palm using the sendmail program.

Hatching Twitter
by Nick Bilton
Published 5 Nov 2013

He hadn’t actually gone to London, of course, especially after being arrested and deported from Prague for protesting there. Instead he had assisted with May Day from the comfort of a cubicle at Palm, Inc., the maker of the PalmPilot, where he was freelancing, using the company’s servers and computers (without his supervisors’ knowledge, of course) to cause havoc for the bankers, who used, well, PalmPilots. Story time was interrupted when Ev showed up. He slid over a chair and sat quietly watching Noah, who became self-conscious and straightened his back. Ev interjected a few times with questions about Rabble’s coding skills and work habits.

…

The big question Ev, Noah, Jeremy, and Tim were unable to answer in those discussions was what these groups of people would actually want to share with one another. This was where Jack’s status idea fit perfectly. When Biz heard the concept, it reminded him of an idea he had been obsessed with at Google. He had owned a phone called a Treo at the time, which had a crude black-and-white screen and was half PalmPilot, half cell phone. He had started suggesting to coworkers that Google should build its own “Phone-ternet.” “What the hell is a Phone-ternet?” people would reply. “It’s like an Internet, but for your phone!” Biz told those who would listen. “Get it? Phone plus Internet. Phone-ternet?” People just rolled their eyes.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 1 Jan 2001

NERO TULIP Hit by Lightning Temporary Sanity Modus Operandi No Work Ethics There Are Always Secrets JOHN THE HIGH-YIELD TRADER An Overpaid Hick THE RED-HOT SUMMER Serotonin and Randomness YOUR DENTIST IS RICH, VERY RICH Two A BIZARRE ACCOUNTING METHOD ALTERNATIVE HISTORY Russian Roulette Possible Worlds An Even More Vicious Roulette SMOOTH PEER RELATIONS Salvation via Aeroflot Solon Visits Regine’s Nightclub GEORGE WILL IS NO SOLON: ON COUNTERINTUITIVE TRUTHS Humiliated in Debates A Different Kind of Earthquake Proverbs Galore Risk Managers Epiphenomena Three A MATHEMATICAL MEDITATION ON HISTORY Europlayboy Mathematics The Tools Monte Carlo Mathematics FUN IN MY ATTIC Making History Zorglubs Crowding the Attic Denigration of History The Stove Is Hot Skills in Predicting Past History My Solon DISTILLED THINKING ON YOUR PALMPILOT Breaking News Shiller Redux Gerontocracy PHILOSTRATUS IN MONTE CARLO : ON THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN NOISE AND INFORMATION Four RANDOMNESS, NONSENSE, AND THE SCIENTIFIC INTELLECTUAL RANDOMNESS AND THE VERB Reverse Turing Test The Father of All Pseudothinkers MONTE CARLO POETRY Five SURVIVAL OF THE LEAST FIT–CAN EVOLUTION BE FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS?

…

Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties. DISTILLED THINKING ON YOUR PALMPILOT Breaking News The journalist, my bête noire, entered this book with George Will dealing with random outcomes. In the next step I will show how my Monte Carlo toy taught me to favor distilled thinking, by which I mean the thinking based on information around us that is stripped of meaningless but diverting clutter.

…

Because of a psychological bias; people who surrounded me in my career were too focused on memorizing section 2 of The Wall Street Journal during their train ride to reflect properly on the attributes of random events. Or perhaps they watched too many gurus on television. Or perhaps they spent too much time upgrading their PalmPilot. Even some experienced trading veterans do not seem to get the point that frequencies do not matter. Jim Rogers, a “legendary” investor, made the following statement: I don’t buy options. Buying options is another way to go to the poorhouse. Someone did a study for the SEC and discovered that 90 percent of all options expire as losses.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
by Gabor Mate and Peter A. Levine
Published 5 Jan 2010

“What could I do?” was also the defence of another patient, Mike, who pocketed my PalmPilot one day when I left him sitting in my office for no more than twenty seconds. It was during my early days at the Portland; I’d stepped into the next room to pick up a prescription pad. I naïvely believed that this man, who once made me a finely worked wood carving to express his gratitude, could be trusted. Perhaps he could be trusted, but his addiction could not. Five minutes after he left I noticed the empty space on my desk where the PalmPilot had been. I shut the office, reassured the waiting patients that I’d be back shortly and hurried down the block to Mike’s hotel.

…

It took a few sharp knocks before he opened the door. “I want it back,” I said. “What?” he replied. “Look, Mike, you have two options: you return my PalmPilot immediately or immediately I call the police.” Mike slumped on his bed, a defeated look on his face. “Okay, first thing tomorrow.” “No, first thing right now.” “I don’t have it,” Mike said. “Then find it.” We walked down the stairs of the Sunrise Hotel together and entered the pawnshop around the corner. “I need that PalmPilot back,” Mike announced to the owner. “It belongs to this guy.” The pawnbroker feigned shock. “What you mean?” he cried. Quite obviously, or so his body language implied, this was the first time ever that here, on the East Hastings drug and crime strip, anyone had tried to pass stolen goods at his establishment.

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell
by Eric Schmidt , Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle
Published 15 Apr 2019

And even though you’re no longer coaching our team, we’re going to do our best to keep making you proud.” Claris continued as an Apple subsidiary until 1998. Bill became the CEO of a startup named GO Corporation, which attempted to create the world’s first pen-based handheld computer (a precursor to the PalmPilot and today’s smartphones). It was an ambitious vision but ahead of its time, and the company shut down in 1994. “GO didn’t go,” Bill was fond of saying. Around that time, Intuit cofounder and CEO Scott Cook, along with his board of directors, was looking to replace himself as CEO. John Doerr, a Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist,* introduced Bill to Scott.

…

Plus, your mom still disapproves. *If not before the first company! As Peter Drucker astutely pointed out, the greatest manager of all time was probably “the fellow who managed the building of the first pyramid in Egypt some 4,500 years ago.” *After Donna left Claris, she became CEO of Palm, makers of the PalmPilot. Later she was CEO of Handspring and lead trustee for Yale University, and she is currently the CEO of Numenta, a machine intelligence company. *You can read more about Google’s “Project Oxygen” study in a December 2013 Harvard Business Review article by David Garvin, “How Google Sold Its Engineers on Management.”

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony
by David G. W. Birch
Published 14 Apr 2020

, and web browsers did not support encryption or authentication anyway (Green 2018). It looked as if no person-to-person solution would gain traction. Then along came PayPal. PayPal The company was established in 1998 (under the name Confinity) to develop security software for hand-held devices such as the PalmPilot. PayPal itself was a money-transfer service developed within Confinity and, as The Economist observed at the time, was ‘more like real digital money, because it allow[ed] consumers to pay each other as well as merchants’ (Economist 2000). As an aside, I must note that there were plenty of email payment services springing up around that time too.

…

History has repeatedly gone through this cyclic coevolution of technology, business and regulation to end up with something pervasive and fundamental to the way society operates, which is why I think it is useful to make this comparison. Benoît Cœuré, chair of the Committee on Payments and Market Infrastructures (BIS), and Jacqueline Loh, chair of the Markets Committee (BIS), made this point, saying that ‘while Bitcoin and its cousins are something of a mirage, they might be an early sign of change, just as PalmPilots paved the way for today’s smartphones’24 (Cœuré and Loh 2018). This, I think, is the narrative that I find most plausible. But what are Bitcoin and its ilk paving the way for? I think it is new kinds of markets that trade in digital assets with no separate settlement: cryptocurrencies with an institutional link to real-world assets.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

Dalzell pointed out that there was already something like this under way inside the company and told Bezos about a young engineer named Rob Frederick whose mobile commerce startup, Convergence, Amazon had acquired in 1999. Frederick’s group was working on APIs that would allow non-PC mobile devices like phones and PalmPilots to access the Amazon store. After that meeting, Bezos invited O’Reilly to speak to a group of engineers, and later at an Amazon all-hands meeting, about lessons from computer history and the importance of becoming a platform. Bezos added Frederick’s team to the Associates group under Colin Bryar and tasked them with creating a new set of APIs to let developers plug into the Amazon website.

…

Finally, after years of setbacks and internal rancor, Amazon was unquestionably a technology company, what Bezos had always imagined it to be. CHAPTER 8 Fiona Back in the Paleozoic era of the Internet, around the year 1997, an entrepreneur named Martin Eberhard was sitting in a Palo Alto coffee shop with his friend Marc Tarpenning, sipping a latte and pondering the inevitably bright future of mobile computing. The PalmPilot, the pioneering personal digital assistant, had just been introduced, and cell phones were evolving quickly into sleek devices that slid easily into a jacket pocket. Eberhard and Tarpenning worked for a disk-drive manufacturer and had just returned from a conference called DiskCon. In other words, they were bored out of their skulls and looking for something more interesting to do.

…

It was meant to disappear in the reader’s hands, yet it sported a wedge-shaped body with a jumble of angular buttons, an attempt to make a bold design statement while allowing for the easy entry of text. Bezos wanted a device that did one thing extremely well. But the former Palm engineers at Lab126 had watched the PalmPilot get overtaken by more versatile gadgets, so at the last moment they packed the Kindle with other features, like a Web browser and an MP3 player, which were quarantined in an unusual “experimental” section of the device. In retrospect, the first Kindle provided an exultant answer to Bezos’s question.

The Hacker's Diet
by John Walker

Computer tools are available online, as spreadsheets and macros for Microsoft Excel, or as an application for the handheld Palm Computing Platform. You don't need a computer to use The Hacker's Diet; easy-to-work paper and pencil methods are presented in the book. But if you have a computer with Web access or Excel, or a PalmPilot, the companion tools may save you time and provide more insight into the engineering underpinning of the methods described in the book, while producing an illustrated log of your progress. The Hacker's Diet Online The Hacker's Diet Online is a Web-based application hosted at Fourmilab which allows you to maintain weight and exercise logs, produce custom charts and trend analyses, and plan diets from any computer with Internet access and a Web browser.

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Palm Computing Tools A handheld computer that's never far from your side is an excellent tool for logging your daily weight and providing real-time snapshots of the progress of your diet and long term weight management. An implementation of the Eat Watch, the central component of The Hacker's Diet, for the Palm Computing Platform (PalmPilot, Palm, etc.) puts this tool where it belongs—right in the palm of your hand. There's no more need for paper logs, spreadsheets, macros, or any Microsoft products whatsoever—just write your daily weight into your Palm and you can view weight logs, charts, trend analysis, and calorie balance right on your handheld computer.

On Intelligence
by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
Published 1 Jan 2004

The Future of Intelligence Epilogue Appendix: Testable Predictions Bibliography Acknowledgments On Intelligence Prologue This book and my life are animated by two passions. For twenty-five years I have been passionate about mobile computing. In the high-tech world of Silicon Valley, I am known for starting two companies, Palm Computing and Handspring, and as the architect of many handheld computers and cell phones such as the PalmPilot and the Treo. But I have a second passion that predates my interest in computers— one I view as more important. I am crazy about brains. I want to understand how the brain works, not just from a philosophical perspective, not just in a general way, but in a detailed nuts and bolts engineering way.

…

I went home that night, thought about the problem, and in two days had designed a handwriting recognizer that was fast, small, and flexible. My solution didn't use a neural network and it didn't work at all like a brain. Although that conference sparked my interest in designing computers with a stylus interface (eventually leading to the PalmPilot ten years later), it also convinced me that neural networks were not much of an improvement over traditional methods. The handwriting recognizer I created ultimately became the basis for the text entry system, called Graffiti, used in the first series of Palm products. I think Nestor went out of business.

Heads I Win, Tails I Win
by Spencer Jakab
Published 21 Jun 2016

Beyond the pitiful performance of speculative new offerings as a group, though, it seems that it’s the true believers who sometimes don’t get something very basic—addition and subtraction. The most famous case of an utterly nonsensical price occurred the month that the technology boom peaked, March 2000, when Palm had its initial public offering. Remember PalmPilots? Before iPhones and even BlackBerrys, the personal digital assistants were hot stuff, and so was their maker, 3Com. The company had other businesses too, but it spun off a 5 percent stake in Palm to investors. In an upcoming tax-free deal each share of 3Com would entitle its owner to receive 1.5 shares of Palm.

…

See also subprime mortgage loans mutual funds, 32, 69, 102, 112, 137, 149, 221 actively managed, 79, 149–57, 159–60, 174 and “Dogs of the Dow,” 192 and hedge funds, 170, 173–75, 235 and high fees, 149–50, 153, 155–56, 174, 188 high-performing, 111, 151–52, 154 lag the market, 26, 126, 159 losses in, 33, 115, 152 low-cost, 82 origins of, 156–57 passive, 151–53 poor performing, 13, 154–55, 159, 175 ranking of, 150–52 and stock purchases/sales, 60–61, 115–16 successful managers of, 99, 111 See also Vanguard Group MyPlanIQ, 79–80, 83 Nasdaq Composite, 37, 46 National Bureau of Economic Research, 49–50 Ned Davis Research, 89, 226–27 Nenner, Charles, 121–23, 143 Neuberger Berman, 233 Neuberger, Roy, 233 New Century Financial, 198–200 New York Stock Exchange, 182, 233 New York Times, 29, 154 Newsweek, 237 Newton, Isaac, 41 Niederhoffer, Victor, 168–69 Ninja Trading Service, 211 notes, 204–7. See also United States: Treasury notes NPR, 233 Odean, Terrance, 22–23, 209 oil, 50, 100, 104, 109, 121, 166, 200–201, 205–6 Openfolio, 23, 195 options trading, 164–65, 192, 206, 208, 213–14 O’Shaughnessy, James P., 219–20, 229 Pagel, Michaela, 217 PalmPilots, 185 Parness, Michael, 210–13, 215 passive investing, 23, 41, 56, 115, 158–60, 166, 180, 219–20, 256–57 Paulson, John, 235 pension funds, 158, 174, 187–88 Pentagon, 145–46 pharmaceutical companies, 85–87, 89, 188 Philip Morris, 189–89 Phillips, Don, 152 portfolios, 12, 22–23, 56, 96, 191, 195 advice on, 27, 52–53, 62–64, 81–84 and cash, 50, 52, 63, 117 diversification of, 81–84, 95 equal-weighted, 136, 224–25 growth of, 38, 63–64, 76, 83 and market decline, 50, 52–54, 76 monitoring of, 217–18, 229 “monkey,” 106–9, 112, 225 randomly picked, 108, 225–26 rebalancing of, 38, 62–64, 74, 78–79, 82, 94–95, 249–50, 257 and risk taking, 74, 76, 156, 257 “robo,” 250 volatility of, 62–63, 81, 220 PowerShares FTSE RAFI US 1000, 223–24 Prechter, Robert, 124–25, 128, 143 price-to-book value, 193, 195 price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, 89–95, 139–40, 145, 193, 219–20.

Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks
by Scott J. Shapiro

Corporate types used Motorola two-way pagers, which had a keyboard for fast communication, or the more expensive BlackBerry, which also had a keyboard and could send and receive emails. Personal data, such as calendars and notes, were stored in PDAs (personal digital assistants), such as the PalmPilot. The PalmPilot did not have a keyboard, so users had to learn a new way of writing with a stylus (known as Graffiti). Danger, the company that developed the Sidekick, set out to change how people used their cell phones. The first model—which they called the Hiptop, because it was chunky and surprisingly heavy, and therefore designed to be worn on the hip— not only had a QWERTY keyboard, but also a large screen that slid out to reveal a keyboard that could pivot 180 degrees.

…

As for apps, the Hiptop came with a notepad, to-do list, address book, and calendar. It came loaded with a web browser, instant messaging for multiple platforms (AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft), and, of course, texting. The most revolutionary aspect of the Hiptop was that it was always connected. As soon as data was entered into the phone, it was backed up to the cloud. PalmPilots, by contrast, had to be manually synced to desktop computers (first using cables, later infrared transmitter). Conversely, when new data hit a remote server, it was pushed down to the phone. New emails would arrive on the Sidekick as soon as the email server received them. If you had multiple devices, all of them would sync up as well.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

Rather than focus on clinical studies or theoretical work Boyden’s team is focused on building tools that a generation of brain scientists can use to jump-start our nascent understanding of our nervous system. Such a mission would never succeed without utilizing expertise from well outside the field of neurobiology. The Media Lab has been successful at adapting to changes that have crushed many businesses (remember the Palm-Pilot?), or, for that matter, research labs (Xerox famously neglected many of the best innovations to emerge from Xerox PARC).42 The Lab owes its adaptability to the strong core values and principles that Negroponte and others put in place when it was established; while the world and the Lab have changed in many substantive ways, the core principles remain solid.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

These were the first words Selfridge delivered at a symposium in late 1958, held at the very same National Physical Laboratory from which Turing had escaped a decade before. Selfridge’s presentation had the memorable title “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning,” and while it had little impact outside the nascent computer-science community, the ideas Selfridge outlined that day would eventually become part of our everyday life—each time we enter a name in our PalmPilots or use voice-recognition software to ask for information over the phone. Pandemonium, as Selfridge outlined it in his talk, was not so much a specific piece of software as it was a way of approaching a problem. The problem was an ambitious one, given the limited computational resources of the day: how to teach a computer to recognize patterns that were ill-defined or erratic, like the sound waves that comprise spoken language.

…

Pac-Man, 177 MTV, 176, 214 Mumford, Lewis, 38, 107, 112, 146–47, 154, 242n Murray, Arnold, 43 Museum of the Moving Image, 177 music, 45, 53, 128–29, 214, 217, 258n mutations, genetic, 58, 182–83 Myst, 183–84 Nakagaki, Toshiyuki, 11 Napier, Charles James, 35 Napster, 214, 217 NASDAQ, 117 Nation, 225 National Physical Laboratory, 42, 54 natural selection, 56–63, 83, 169, 170–74, 184, 185–86, 193, 203, 204 Nature of Economies, The (Jacobs), 156 NBC, 136 near-optimal solutions, 228 Negroponte, Nicholas, 159 neighborhoods, 18, 36–38, 41, 50–51, 87–91, 96, 99, 106, 115, 119, 123, 186, 203, 204, 205, 220, 229–30, 233, 246n Netscape browser, 124–25 networks: algorithms for, 88, 89, 161 information, 96–97, 116–26, 134–35, 204–5, 217–18 neural, 18, 21, 78, 115, 118–19, 121, 127, 133–34, 142–44, 146, 198–99, 203–4, 205, 209, 223, 238n, 241n, 256n, 261n, 262n–63n television, 135–36, 159, 160 see also Internet neurons, 18, 21, 78, 115, 118–19, 121, 127, 133–34, 142–44, 146, 198–99, 203–4, 205, 209, 223, 238n, 241n, 256n, 261n, 262n–63n neurotransmitters, 115 New Age, 113–14 New Economy, 224 New Republic, 135 newspapers, 159–60, 207 New Urbanist movement, 147, 230 New York City, 50, 93, 107, 113, 230 New York City Planning Commission, 50 New Yorker, 146 New York Times, 125, 131, 257n–58n Nightline, 135 Nintendo, 176 Nixon, Richard M., 132 nonequilibrium thermodynamics, 12, 43, 52 noosphere, 115–16 nucleic acids, 85 olfactory skills, 76 online communities, 17, 148–62, 204–5 Open Shortest Path First routine, 229 Open Source, 153 orangutans, 202 order: chaos vs., 38, 52, 65, 117–23, 154, 169, 179, 218–20, 226, 237n global vs. local, 39–40, 74–80, 82, 86, 90, 93, 108–9, 218–19, 224 see also control Organic Art, 182 “organic clocks,” 20 organization: global, 224–26 goal-directed, 118 hierarchical, 15, 98, 132, 136, 145, 148–49, 153, 208, 223, 225, 263n–64n political, 67, 225–26 self-, see self-organization size limitations of, 259n–60n social, 9, 27, 33–41, 92–94, 97–100, 109, 204, 252n–54n see also systems OSS code, 175 Out of Control (Kelly), 168–69 pacemaker cells, 14–15, 16, 17, 23, 40, 64, 67, 164 PalmPilots, 54 “Pandemonium: A Paradigm for Learning” (Selfridge), 54 Pandemonium model, 53–57, 65, 169, 231 Papert, Seymour, 65, 164, 166 paradigm shift, 48–49, 64 Paradise Lost (Milton), 53–54 Pattern on the Stone, The (Hillis), 173 patterns: of behavior, see behavior development of, 49, 184–85, 246n feedback on, 40–41 of heredity, 46 hub-and-spoke, 119 letter, 54–57, 65 mathematical, 42 of movement, 18–20, 41, 168 musical, 45 recognition of, 18, 21, 22, 44–45, 52, 54–57, 65, 103–4, 123–24, 126–29, 199, 206, 220, 221, 226, 231, 233 social, 18, 36–40, 41, 49–50, 52, 91, 95, 137, 185 spatial, 20, 27, 48, 90–91, 159, 223 speech, 44–45 spontaneous, 180 temporal, 20, 27, 48, 91, 104–5 urban, 40–41, 90–91, 146, 147, 159, 223 “Perceptrons” (Minsky and Papert), 65 phase transitions, 111–12 phenotypes, 58, 59 pheromone, 52, 60–63, 64, 74, 75–76, 78, 79, 84–85, 98, 115, 167, 206, 226, 228–29, 243n–44n Phillips Interactive, 178 physics, 21, 105 Picasso, Pablo, 23 Pinker, Steven, 118 planets, rotation of, 46 “platform agonistic,” 139–40 Pleistocene era, 202, 262n plow, wheeled, 112 politics, 39–40, 67, 94–95, 161, 224–26, 264n population growth, 34, 99, 110–11, 112, 116, 164–65, 252n–53n pornography, 208 post-structuralism, 65 power law, 119 Powers of Ten, 231–32 predictions, 9, 47 Prelude, The (Wordsworth), 39 pricing, 155–56 Prigogine, Ilya, 43, 52, 64–65 prioritization, 78 probability theory, 46–47 problem-solving, 74, 79–80, 120, 126–27, 227–29, 251n–52n product placement, 214 programs, computer: artificial-life, 59–63, 65 branching paths in, 58 codes in, 169, 170–71, 173–74, 175, 180, 205–6 evolution of, 57–59, 60, 205–6 mini-, 170–74 number-sorting, 170–74, 209, 231 predator, 172–73 see also software proteins, 85 Proverbs, Book of, 71 “pseudo events,” 145 purchase circles, 221–22 Quake, 182, 183, 208–9 quality management, 67 racial diversity, 89, 95, 247n randomness, 19, 62, 77, 78–79, 87, 121, 163, 171, 220, 222–23, 244n, 247n recognition systems, 103 redwood forests, 258n reentry, neural, 256 reflexes, 38–39 Reliable Sources, 135 Renaissance, 101–2, 147 Replay, 211 “Residence in London” (Wordsworth), 27 Resnick, Mitch, 16–17, 23, 64, 76, 163–69, 180, 189, 260n Restak, Richard, 133–34 retina, 201 Rheingold, Howard, 148 Ridley, Matt, 82, 86 Rizzollati, Giaccamo, 198–99 Rockefeller Foundation, 46, 50 Roman Empire, 33, 109–10 Rosenstiel, Tom, 135 rules, 19, 180–81, 226 St.

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors
by Spencer Jakab
Published 1 Feb 2022

They also aid in price discovery, stopping bubbles from forming as easily. At times when it is too hard or too expensive to bet against a stock, prices can be wrong, harming the least informed investors. The most famous case was in March 2000 when, just weeks before the tech bubble burst, the networking company 3Com sold 5 percent of its stake in Palm, maker of PalmPilot personal digital assistants—the iPhones of their day. The company planned to spin off the rest to shareholders in a tax-free transaction later that year. Given the number of Palm shares they were to receive and the market price of Palm after it started to trade, a share of 3Com should have been worth at least $145 but instead was $82.

…

Morgan Asset Management, 255–56 JPMorgan Chase, 160, 217 K KaloBios, 39 Kearns, Alex, 103–4 Kindleberger, Charles P., 179 Klarman, Seth, 184 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 Kruger, Justin, 28 Kynikos Associates, 77 L Ladies’ Home Journal, 150 Lamberton, Cait, 54, 62 Lamont, Owen, 80 Langer, Ellen, 27 Langlois, Shawn, 45 Laufer, Henry, 237 Lay, Kenneth, 85 Lebed, Jonathan, 163 Leder, Michelle, 239 Ledger, Heath, 138 Left, Andrew, 39, 116–26, 148, 191, 214, 217 GameStop and, 120–24, 129, 130, 133, 146 harassment of, 122 WallStreetBets and, 121–23, 126, 129, 130, 133, 136, 238 Lehman Brothers, 80, 117 Lending Tree, 162 Levie, Aaron, 26 Lewis, Michael, 16, 88 Lindzon, Howard, 24, 49, 176 LinkedIn, 239 Livermore, Jesse, 78–79 locating a borrow, 72–73, 80 Loeb, Dan, 111 Lombardi, Vince, 8 Long-Term Capital Management, 260 Loop Capital, 128 Los Angeles Times, 215 loss aversion, myopic, 236 lotteries, 62, 239, 241, 242 Lowenstein, Roger, 260 Lucid Motors, 164 M Mad Money, 254 Madoff, Bernie, 117, 206 MagnifyMoney, 162 Mahoney, Seth, 19, 31, 176–77 Malaysia, 75 Malkiel, Burton, 253 Manias, Panics, and Crashes (Kindleberger), 179 Manning, Peyton, 64 Man Who Solved the Market, The (Zuckerman), 237 Maplelane Capital, 217 March Madness, 57 Marcus, 257 margin calls, 203–5 margin debt, 58–59, 62, 67, 138, 188 Markets Insider, 103 MarketWatch, 45, 180 MassMutual, 87, 131, 171 Mavrck, 142 Mayday, 48–50, 66 McCabe, Caitlin, 128–29 McCormick, Packy, 23, 35, 104, 202 McDonald, Larry, 99 McDonald’s, 154 McHenry, Patrick, 239 McLean, Bethany, 85 Medallion Fund, 237 MedBox, 117 Melvin Capital Management, 6–8, 56, 72, 94–96, 110–12, 114, 119, 121, 123, 128–30, 132, 135, 136, 146, 189, 190, 202, 205, 217, 218, 222, 227 meme stocks, xii–xiv, 5, 7–9, 11, 12, 14, 22, 30, 32–34, 36, 39, 40, 47, 54, 63, 67, 72, 73, 76, 100, 108, 123, 125, 127, 129, 132–33, 135, 137–40, 146, 147, 153–55, 157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 169, 170, 178, 179, 181, 183, 185, 191, 193, 194, 198–99, 204–5, 208, 219, 220, 222, 227, 229, 230, 237, 238, 240, 246 AMC, 39, 93, 125, 127, 132, 169, 188, 220–21, 224–26 Bed Bath & Beyond, 115, 133, 188 BlackBerry, 93, 115, 133, 169, 178, 188, 224 bot activity and, 165, 166 GameStop, see GameStop, GameStop short squeeze insiders of, 224 Koss, 132, 169, 188, 224 margin debt and, 58 Naked, 132, 188 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 payment for order flow and, 207 Robinhood’s trading restrictions on, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206 Merton, Robert, 101, 102, 108 Microsoft, 46, 93 Mihm, Stephen, 48 millennials, 21, 26, 27, 56, 71, 88, 142, 143, 148, 162, 242, 246, 255 Minnis, Chad, 126, 157, 242 MoneyWatch, 59 monthly subscription services, 32 Morgan Stanley, 28, 55, 178, 219 Morningstar, 216, 244, 245, 254, 255 Motherboard, 131–32 Motter, John, 215–17, 226 Mudrick, Jason, 220–21 Mudrick Capital Management, 220 Mulligan, Finley, 230 Mulligan, Quinn, 142, 214 Munger, Charlie, 183–84, 241 Murphy, Paul, 78 Musk, Elon, 19, 75, 82–83, 92, 124, 143, 149, 152–53, 155–57, 160, 161, 167, 212, 216 tweets of, x, 60, 82, 83, 124, 144, 152–54, 161, 170 Must Asset Management, 221 mutual funds, 139, 151, 221, 234, 244, 245, 254–56 myopic loss aversion, 236 N Naked Brand, 132, 188 Nasdaq, 60, 92, 98, 104 Nasdaq Whale, 98, 104–6, 108, 109, 227 Nathan, Dan, 192 National Council on Problem Gambling, 31, 57 National Futures Association, 118 Nations, Scott, 99 Nations Indexes, 99 NCAA Basketball, 57 Netflix, x–xi, 15, 50, 98, 133, 208 Netscape, 24 Neumann, Adam, 105 New Yorker, 143 New York Mets, 8, 161 New York Post, 124, 172 New York Stock Exchange, 49 New York University, 20, 82, 177 Nikola, 64 NIO, 120 Nobel Prize, 101, 260 Nokia, 169, 178, 188 nudges, 31–32, 235–36 Nvidia, 98 O Obama, Barack, 13, 38 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 160, 197 Occupy Wall Street movement, 12, 125 Odean, Terrance, 235, 238, 243 Odey, Crispin, 126 Ohanian, Alexis, 12, 37–38, 125 O’Mara, Margaret, 38, 156, 157 Omega Family Office, 191 O’Neal, Shaquille, 64 Oppenheimer, Robert, 83 options, 34–35, 99–107, 217 call, see call options delta and, 107, 108 losses and quick approval processes for, 103 put, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Robinhood and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 Options Clearing Corporation, 102 P Pagel, Michaela, 235 Palantir Technologies, 120 Palihapitiya, Chamath, 143, 144, 152–53, 155, 157–58, 160, 164, 212, 234, 246, 253 Palm, 84 PalmPilot, 84 Pao, Ellen, 38 Paperwork Crisis, 49 Parker, Sean, 38 payment for order flow, 10, 33, 153, 196, 206–9 Penn National, 57 penny stocks, 60, 120, 133, 166, 167 Permit Capital, 223 Pershing Square Holdings, 56 Pets.com, 90 PetSmart, 89 Pew Research, 71 Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, The (Hirst), 7 Piggly Wiggly, 78–79 PiiQ Media, 166 PIMCO, 216 Plotkin, Gabriel, 41, 56, 67, 73, 80, 85, 86, 95–96, 110–12, 114–15, 116, 122, 123, 129, 130, 133, 140, 146, 148, 157, 158, 161, 191, 197, 213–14, 217, 218, 227, 240, 246, 250, 253 at congressional hearing, 6–11 Porsche, 77 Portnoy, Dave, 57, 152–55, 158–59, 161, 181, 188–89, 212 Povilanskas, Kaspar, 195 Pruzan, Jonathan, 219 Psaki, Jen, 192 Public.com, 196, 207, 209 pump and dump, 163 put options, 46, 99, 106, 111–12, 148 Q Qualcomm, 46 R RagingBull, 163 Random Walk Down Wall Street, A (Malkiel), 253 Raskob, John J., 150–52, 154, 156 Raytheon, 153–54 RC Ventures LLC, 114 Reagan, Ronald, 156, 234 Reddit, xi, xii, 11–12, 19, 22, 23, 25, 36–39, 41, 42, 107, 122, 125, 162, 164, 199 founding of, 37–38 Gill’s influence on, 141–42; see also Gill, Keith; WallStreetBets karma on, 47, 141–42 mechanics and demographics of, and GameStop, 37 offensive subreddits on, 38 r/ClassActionRobinHood, 196 r/GMEbagholders, 140 r/investing, ix, 46 r/wallstreetbets, see WallStreetBets Super Bowl ad of, 12 Volkswagen squeeze and, 78 Reddit Revolution, xv, 41, 42, 75, 99, 152, 170, 192, 206, 211, 219, 220, 230, 246, 261 see also GameStop, GameStop short squeeze; WallStreetBets rehypothecation, 80, 92 reinforcement learning, 35 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (Lefèvre), 78 Renaissance Technologies, 237 retail trading, xiii, xiv, xvi, 4, 7, 9–14, 49, 56–59, 63–64, 66, 67, 81, 98, 140–41, 143, 169–70, 178, 181, 183, 186, 194, 218, 237, 238, 244, 247 retirement accounts and pension funds, 5, 13, 27, 31–32, 41, 69, 76, 77, 81, 171, 182, 234, 235, 245, 252, 255, 256 Rise of the Planet of the Apes, 135–36 RiskReversal Advisors, 192 Ritter, Jay, 63, 65 Roaring Kitty (Gill’s YouTube persona), 2, 18, 45, 48–49, 92, 130, 133, 144, 171, 174–75, 191, 211, 213 Roaring Kitty LLC, 171 Robinhood, xi, xiii, xv, 4–6, 13–14, 19, 22–35, 41–42, 50, 53, 55, 57, 61, 66, 70, 81, 98, 139, 141, 153, 154, 157, 158, 161, 176, 178, 183, 184, 187–90, 193, 194, 195–210, 212–13, 219, 237–38, 243, 245, 246, 259 account transfer fees of, 54 average revenue per user of, 66–67 Buffett on, 240–41 call options and, 97–98 Citadel and, 10, 11 clearinghouse of, 187 commissions and, 49, 50 customer loan write-offs of, 205 daily average revenue trades of, 59 daily deposit requirement of, 205 former regulators hired by, 239–40 founding of, 3, 23–25, 90 funding crisis of, 187–88, 193, 198, 203, 205–6 gamification and, 29–31 Gold accounts, 32, 58, 97, 202 growth of, 25–26, 50 herding events and, 238 Hertz and, 61 hyperactive traders and, 193, 202, 207, 236 initial public offering of, 200–201, 219 Instant accounts, 32 Kearns and, 103–4 lawsuits against, 196 margin loans of, 58–59, 205 median account balances with, 50, 54 options and, 34–35, 102–4, 106, 108–9 payment for order flow and, 10, 33, 196, 206–9 revenue from securities lending, 73 risky behavior encouraged by, 202–3 Robintrack and, 53, 61 SPACs and, 64 stimulus checks and, 56 Super Bowl ad of, 28, 30, 200 technical snafus by, 53–54 Top 100 Fund and, 61 trading restricted by, 187–89, 194, 195–200, 203, 206, 209 valuation of, 49 WallStreetBets and, 22–23 wholesalers and, 33–35, 49, 104, 106 Robin Hood (charitable foundation), 196–97 robo-advisers, xv, 27, 257–58 Betterment, 27, 54, 183, 193, 242, 257, 258, 261 SoFi, 27, 56, 57, 158 Rockefeller, John D., 9 Rodriguez, Alex, 64 Rogers, Will, 163 Rogozinski, Jaime, 23, 39, 46, 50, 53, 55, 70–71, 97, 122, 138, 144, 190, 231 Roper, Barbara, 29–30, 35, 54, 185, 241 Rozanski, Jeffrey, 46 Rukeyser, Louis, 156 Russell 2000 Value Index, 125, 191 S S3 Partners, 76, 81, 130, 133, 170, 217 SAC Capital Advisors, 7, 110 Sanders, Bernie, 65–66, 198 S&P (Standard & Poor’s), 83 S&P Dow Jones Indices, 70, 254 S&P 500, 76 Sanford C.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

Paper may be used less, but where it is growing, paper is worth more. No product better captures this niche than the Moleskine notebook and the company behind it. It is the defining paper object and brand of the Internet age, growing parallel to the digital technology that was supposed to supplant notebooks (the PalmPilot digital planner came out the same year as Moleskine’s first notebook). Not only did the Moleskine notebook succeed in the face of disruptive digital competition, it situated itself as the ideal companion to smartphones, tablets, virtual note management services, and digital illustration software.

…

See virtual schools online selection, 130 online selling, 129 online shoppers, 134 Onorati, Christine, 140 Ooey Gooey, 182 Oppenheimer, Todd, 187 Orchard, Rob, 106, 107 Ordanini, Andrea, 39 Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development, 184–185 Organized Mind, The (Levitin), 37 Orpilla, Primo, 211, 212, 213, 220 outsourcing, 154, 156, 165, 192 OYE, 16 Pagni, Mark, 52, 56–59, 62, 63–64, 65–66, 69, 73–74 PalmPilot, 31 Panasonic, 54 Pandemic, 85, 91 Pando Daily (website), 112 Pandora, 20 Pane, Jess, 130 Panis, Jacques, 167 paper appeal of, 31, 35, 37–38, 105, 111, 114, 143, 188, 189, 222, 229, 238, 240 digital challenge to, unique, 30, 31 disadvantages of, 143 in education, 181, 188, 189, 192, 197, 198 making games out of, 95, 96 market for, 44–45 See also books; card games; cards/invitations; magazines; newspapers; notebooks/journals; stationery Paper FiftyThree, 47 paperless office, 30–31, 46 Paperless Post, 44–45 Paradox of Choice, The (Schwartz), 130 Park, Rosa, 103–104 Partners & Spade, 138 Patek Philippe, 168 PayPal, 211 Paz and Associates, 127 Pearson, 185, 186 Peebles, Benjamin, 187–188, 203–204 pencils, 44, 138, 208, 212 pens, xiv, xvii, 29, 35, 37, 41, 43, 44, 47, 126, 150–151, 192, 197, 208, 221, 222, 227, 228, 238 Percolate, 219–220 Perrot, Clèment, 70–71 Pescovitz, David, 213–214 Pew Research Center, 142 phones.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

She jetted to Paris for a yearlong sabbatical and took up painting, contemplating ways to contribute to a bigger mission. When she met an entrepreneur named Jeff Hawkins, she decided that his startup, Palm Computing, was the next big wave of technology, and accepted a position as CEO. Under Dubinsky’s leadership, the startup developed the PalmPilot, the first runaway success in the fledgling market for personal digital devices. The PalmPilot was released in 1996 and, within a year and a half, sold over a million units. But in 1997, when Palm was acquired by 3Com, Dubinsky did not agree with some strategic decisions. For example, when the finance group wanted to require all departments to cut budgets by 10 percent, Dubinsky spoke up in protest, urging the company to invest in areas that were succeeding and apply cuts to those that weren’t.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

He took over as the CEO of Confinity and brought along as many of his buddies from the Stanford Review as could fit in the Palo Alto office. The group included his coauthor, Sacks, and a half dozen others.xv Having found his people at Stanford, Thiel was not going to let them go. The rest of the guys were very lucky he felt that way. Unfortunately, Confinity was ahead of its time: Few people had PalmPilots, and even fewer had a bunch of PalmPilot friends with whom they regularly exchanged money. It was a great invention for a Silicon Valley libertarian boys’ club but of limited use to the rest of the country. Confinity was also not the only digital-payments company around. It wasn’t even the only digital-payments company in its office building.

…

Webvan’s strategy, he wrote, was to offer “the quality and selection of Whole Foods, the pricing of Safeway, and the convenience of home delivery.”59 But according to Relan, the company shouldn’t have invested in so much infrastructure. Webvan built high-tech distribution systems from scratch: giant networks of new algorithms, miles of conveyor belts, fleets of custom trucks with PalmPilot-wielding delivery drivers. At its short peak, Webvan had a billion-dollar contract with Bechtel to build new distribution facilities around the country. This was the utopian vision of e-commerce, one in which the web’s efficiencies generated gains for everyone involved: investors, workers, and customers alike.

…

Like Jim Clark, Thiel invested in young graduates from the University of Illinois, products of the government’s campus supercomputer center. One of those U of I kids was a twenty-three-year-old named Max Levchin, who in 1998 was hanging around Stanford with a couple of ideas. Handheld computers were just reemerging as a viable technology, and the potential of PalmPilots enraptured the Valley’s nerds. Levchin’s start-up Fieldlink (later Confinity) began, by the fast-acting grace of Thiel Capital Management, as a mobile encryption software firm for business that allowed workers to communicate securely from the field. When Palm debuted infrared communications ports on the new Pilots, Confinity shifted to the specific function of payments between users.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

If each owner were willing to share a bit of the surplus energy stored in their cars with their neighbours, it might cover the whole country’s needs.11 Simon Daniel is an inventor whose work reveals the power of these newly localised storage systems. His first success was a folding keyboard he designed in the 1990s, just as the PalmPilot, an early pocket-sized tablet computer, was taking off. His latest adventure is to string together thousands of batteries to make a gigantic virtual power plant. For Moixa, his company, to buy the batteries itself, it would need large amounts of capital, perhaps running into the tens of millions of dollars.

…

Abu Dhabi, UAE, 250 Acemoglu, Daron, 139 Acorn Computers, 16, 21 Ada Lovelace Institute, 8 additive manufacturing, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 Adidas, 176 advertising, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227–8 AdWords, 227 aeroponics, 171 Afghanistan, 38, 205 Africa, 177–8, 182–3 Aftenposten, 216 Age of Spiritual Machines, The (Kurzweil), 77 agglomeration, 181 Air Jordan sneakers, 102 Airbnb, 102, 188 aircraft, 49–50 Alexandria, Egypt, 180 AlexNet, 33 Algeciras, HMM 61 Alibaba, 48, 102, 108, 111, 122 Alipay, 111 Allen, Robert, 80 Alphabet, 65, 113–14, 131, 163 aluminium, 170 Amazon, 65, 67–8, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122, 135–6 Alexa, 25, 117 automation, 135–6, 137, 139, 154 collective bargaining and, 163 Covid-19 pandemic (2020–21), 135–6 drone sales, 206 Ecobee and, 117 Go stores, 136 Kiva Systems acquisition (2012), 136 management, 154 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 monopoly, 115, 117, 122 Prime, 136, 154 R&D, 67–8, 113 Ami Pro, 99 Amiga, 16 Anarkali, Lahore, 102 anchoring bias, 74 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 Angola, 186 Ant Brain, 111 Ant Financial, 111–12 antitrust laws, 114, 119–20 Apache HTTP Server, 242 Appelbaum, Binyamin, 63 Apple, 47, 62, 65, 85, 94, 104, 108, 112, 122 App Store, 105, 112, 115 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data collection, 228 iOS, 85 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 105 media subscription, 112 watches, 112 APT33 hacker group, 198 Aral, Sinan, 238 Aramco, 108, 198 Armenia, 206–7 Arthur, William Brian, 110, 123 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88, 113, 249 academic brain drain, 118 automation, 125–42 data and, 31–2, 142 data network effect, 106–7 drone technology and, 208, 214 education and, 88 employment and, 126–7 healthcare and, 88, 103 job interviews and, 153 regulation of, 187, 188 arXiv, 59 Asana, 151 Asian Development Bank, 193 Aslam, Yaseen, 148 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 asymmetric conflict, 206 AT&T, 76, 100 Atari, 16 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 Aurora, 141 Australia, 102, 197 automation, 125–42 autonomous weapons, 208, 214 Azerbaijan, 173, 206–7 Ballmer, Steve, 85 Bangladesh, 175 banking, 122, 237 Barcelona, Catalonia, 188 Barlow, John Perry, 184 Barrons, Richard, 195, 211 Bartlett, Albert, 73 batteries, 40, 51, 53–4, 250, 251 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Bayraktar TB2 drone, 206 Bee Gees, 72 Bekar, Clifford, 45 Bell Labs, 18 Bell Telephone Company, 100 Benioff, Marc, 108–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 152 Berlin Wall, fall of (1989), 4 Bermuda, 119 Berners-Lee, Timothy, 55, 100, 160, 239 Bessen, James, 46 Bezos, Jeffrey, 135–6 BGI, 41 Biden, Joseph, 225 Bing, 107 biological weapons, 207, 213 biology, 10, 39, 40–42, 44, 46 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 biopolymers, 42 bits, 18 Black Death (1346–53), 12 BlackBerry, 120 Blair, Tony, 81 Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, 22 blitzscaling, 110 Blockbuster, 138 BMW, 177 Boeing, 51, 236 Bol.com, 103 Bollywood, 181 Boole, George, 18 Bork, Robert, 114–15, 117, 119 Bosworth, Andrew, 233 Boyer, Pascal, 75 Boyle, James, 234 BP, 92, 158 brain, 77 Braudel, Fernand, 75 Brave, 242 Brazil, 202 Bremmer, Ian, 187 Bretton Woods Conference (1944), 87 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 87, 129, 191 Brookings Institution, 130 BT, 123 Bulgaria, 145 Bundy, Willard Legrand, 149 Busan, South Korea, 56 business, 82, 92–124 diminishing returns to scale, 93, 108 economic dynamism and, 117 economies of scale, 50, 92 growth, 110–13 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 linear value chains, 101 market share, 93–6, 111 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24 network effect, 96–101 platform model, 101–3, 219 re-localisation, 11, 166–79, 187, 252, 255 state-sized companies, 11, 67 superstar companies, 10, 94–6 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252, 255 taxation of, 96, 118–19 Butler, Nick, 179 ByteDance, 28 C40 initiative, 189 Cambridge University, 127, 188 cancer, 57–8, 127 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 car industry, 93 carbon emissions, 35, 90, 251 Carlaw, Kenneth, 45 Carnegie, Andrew, 112 Carnegie Mellon University, 131 Catholic Church, 83, 88 censorship, 216–17, 224–6, 236 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 194 Cerebras, 34 cervical smears, 57–8 chemical weapons, 207, 213 Chen, Brian, 228 chewing gum, 78 Chicago Pile-1 reactor, 64 Chile, 170 China automation in, 127, 137 brainwave reading in, 152 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 245 drone technology in, 207 Great Firewall, 186, 201 Greater Bay Area, 182 horizontal expansion in, 111–12 manufacturing in, 176 misinformation campaigns, 203 raw materials, demand for, 178 Singles’ Day, 48 social credit systems, 230 superstar companies in, 95 US, relations with, 166 chips, 19–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 Christchurch massacre (2019), 236 Christensen, Clayton, 24 CIPD, 153 cities, 11, 75, 169, 179–84, 188, 255 Clegg, Nick, 225–6, 235 climate change, 90, 169, 187, 189, 251, 252 cloud computing, 85, 112 Cloudflare, 200 cluster bombs, 213 CNN, 185, 190 coal, 40, 65, 172 Coase, Ronald, 92 Coca-Cola, 93 code is law, 220–22, 235 cold fusion, 113–14 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 Colombia, 145 colonialism, 167 Columbus, Christopher, 4 combination, 53–7 Comical Ali, 201 commons, 234–5, 241–3, 256 companies, see business comparative advantage, 170 complex systems, 2 compounding, 22–3, 28 CompuServe, 100 computing, 4, 10, 15–36, 44, 46, 249 artificial intelligence, 4, 8, 31–4, 54, 88 cloud computing, 85, 112 internet, 47–8, 55, 65, 84 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 machining, 43 Moore’s Law, see Moore’s Law quantum computing, 35 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52 conflict, 87, 189, 190–215 attack surfaces, 192–3, 196, 209, 210 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 de-escalation, 212–13 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 institutional change and, 87 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225 new wars, 194 non-proliferation, 213–14 re-localisation and, 189, 193, 194, 209 consent of the networked, 223 Costco, 67 Coursera, 58 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 12–13, 59, 78–9, 131, 245–9 automation and, 127, 135, 136 cities and, 183 contact-tracing apps, 222–3 gig economy and, 146 lockdowns, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 manufacturing and, 176 misinformation and, 202–4, 247–8 preprint servers and, 60 recession (2020–21), 178 remote working and, 146, 151, 153 supply chains and, 169, 246 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 workplace cultures and, 151, 152 cranks, 54 credit ratings, 162, 229 critical thinking skills, 212 Croatia, 145 Crocker, David, 55 crowdsourcing, 143–4 Cuba, 203 Cuban missile crisis (1962), 99, 212 cultural lag, 85 cyberattacks, 11, 114, 140, 181, 187, 190–200, 209–14, 256 CyberPeace Institute, 214 Daniel, Simon, 173–4 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 183 Darktrace, 197 data, 8, 11, 71, 217–19, 226–31, 235, 237–42, 256 AI and, 8, 32, 33, 58, 106 compensation for, 239 commons, 242 cyberattacks and, 196 doppelgängers, 219, 226, 228, 239 interoperability and, 237–9 network effects, 106–7, 111 protection laws, 186, 226 rights, 240 Daugherty, Paul, 141 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroe thane), 253 death benefits, 151 Dediu, Horace, 24, 30 deep learning, 32–4, 54, 58, 127 deforestation, 251 dehumanisation, 71, 154, 158 deindustrialisation, 168 Deliveroo, 154, 163 Delphi, 100 dematerialised techniques, 166, 175 Denmark, 58, 160, 199–200, 257 Deutsche Bank, 130 Diamandis, Peter, 5 Dickens, Charles, 80 digital cameras, 83–4 Digital Geneva Convention, 211 Digital Markets Act (EU, 2020), 122 digital minilateralism, 188 Digital Nations group, 188 Digital Services Act (EU, 2020), 123 diminishing returns, 93, 108 disinformation, see misinformation DoorDash, 147, 148, 248 dot-com bubble (1995–2000), 8, 108, 150 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 DoubleClick, 117 drone technology, 11, 192, 204–9, 214, 256 Dubai, UAE, 43 Duke University, 234 dystopia, 208, 230, 253 Eagan, Nicole, 197 eBay, 98, 121 Ecobee, 120 economies of scale, 50, 92 Economist, The, 8, 65, 119, 183, 239 economists, 63 Edelman, 3 education artificial intelligence and, 88 media literacy, 211–12 Egypt, 145, 186 Elance, 144 electric cars, 51, 69, 75, 173–4, 177, 250 electricity, 26, 45, 46, 54, 157, 249–50 see also energy Electronic Frontier Foundation, 184 email, 6, 55 embodied institutions, 82 employment, 10, 71, 125–65 automation, 125–42 collective bargaining, 147, 149, 154, 156, 162–5 dehumanisation and, 71, 154, 158 flexicurity, 160–61, 257 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 lump of labour fallacy, 139 management, 149–54, 158–9 protections, 85–6, 147–9 reskilling, 159–60 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 Enclosure, 234–5, 241 energy, 11, 37–8, 39–40, 44, 46, 172–4, 250 cold fusion, 113–14 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172, 250 gravitational potential, 53 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 storage, 40, 53, 114, 173–4, 250, 251 wind power, 39–40, 52 Energy Vault, 53–4, 173 Engels, Friedrich, 81 Engels’ pause, 80, 81 environmental movement, 73 Epic Games, 116 estate agents, 100 Estonia, 188, 190–91, 200, 211 Etzion Airbase, Sinai Peninsula, 195 European Commission, 116, 122, 123 European Space Agency, 56 European Union, 6, 82, 147, 186, 226 Excel, 99 exogeny, 2 exponential gap, 9, 10, 67–91, 70, 89, 253 cyber security and, 193 institutions and, 9, 10, 79–88, 90 mathematical understanding and, 71–5 predictions and, 75–9 price declines and, 68–9 superstar companies and, 10, 94–124 exponential growth bias, 73 Exponential View, 8–9 externalities, 97 extremism, 232–4 ExxonMobil, 65, 92 Facebook, 27, 28, 65, 94, 104, 108, 122, 216–17, 218, 219, 221–2, 223 advertising business, 94, 228 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228, 239–40 extremism and, 233–4 Instagram acquisition (2012), 117, 120 integrity teams, 234 interoperability, 237–8 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 misinformation on, 201, 225 network effect and, 98, 223 Oculus acquisition (2014), 117 pay at, 156–7 Phan photo controversy (2016), 216–17, 224, 225 platform model, 101 polarisation and, 233 relationship status on, 221–2 Rohingya ethnic cleansing (2018), 224, 225 US presidential election (2016), 217 WhatsApp acquisition (2014), 117 facial recognition, 152, 208 Factory Act (UK, 1833), 81 Fairchild Semiconductor, 19, 21 fake news, 201–4 family dinners, 86 farming, 170–72, 251 Farrar, James, 148 fax machines, 97 Federal Aviation Administration (US), 236 feedback loops, 3, 13 fertilizers, 35, 90 5G, 203 Financial Conduct Authority, 122 Financial Times, 183 Finland, 160, 211–12 Fitbit, 158 Fiverr, 144 flashing of headlights, 83 flexicurity, 160, 257 flints, 42 flywheels, 54 Ford, 54, 92, 162 Ford, Gerald, 114 Ford, Henry, 54, 162 Ford, Martin, 125 Fortnite, 116 fossil fuels, 40, 159, 172 France, 100, 138, 139, 147, 163 free-market economics, 63–4 freelance work, 10, 71, 142–9 Frey, Carl, 129, 134, 141 Friedman, Milton, 63–4, 241 Friedman, Thomas, 167 FriendFeed, 238 Friendster, 26 Fudan University, 245 fund management, 132 Galilei, Galileo, 83 gaming, 86 Gates, Bill, 17, 25, 84 gender, 6 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 87 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 226 General Electric, 52 General Motors, 92, 125, 130 general purpose technologies, 10, 45–8 generative adversarial networks (GANs), 58 Geneva Conventions, 193, 199, 209 Genghis Khan, 44 GEnie, 100 genome sequencing, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 245–7, 250, 252 Germany, 75, 134, 147 Giddens, Anthony, 82 gig economy, 10, 71, 142–9, 153, 162, 164, 239, 252, 255 Gilbreth, Lillian, 150 Ginsparg, Paul, 59 GitHub, 58, 60 GlaxoSmithKline, 229–30 global financial crisis (2007–9), 168 Global Hawk drones, 206 global positioning systems (GPS), 197 globalisation, 11, 62, 64, 156, 166, 167–71, 177, 179, 187, 193 internet and, 185 conflict and, 189, 193, 194 Glocer, Thomas, 56 Go (game), 132 GOAT, 102 Gojek, 103 Golden Triangle, 170 Goldman Sachs, 151 Goodfellow, Ian, 58 Google, 5, 35, 36, 94, 98, 104, 108, 115, 122 advertising business, 94, 112–13, 116, 117, 227 Android, 85, 94, 117, 120 chip production, 113 Covid-19 pandemic (2019–21), 222–3 data network effect, 106–7 death benefits, 151 Double Irish tax loophole, 119 Maps, 113 quantum computing, 35 R&D, 114, 118 vertical integration, 112–13, 116 X, 114 YouTube acquisition (2006), 112, 117 Gopher, 59, 100 GPT-3, 33 Graeber, David, 133–4 Grand Bazaar, Istanbul, 102 Graphcore, 34, 35 graphics chips, 34 Grateful Dead, The, 184 gravitational potential energy, 53 gravity bombs, 195 Greater Bay Area, China, 182 Greenberg, Andy, 199 Gross, Bill, 53 Grove, Andrew, 17 GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije), 199 Guangzhou, Guangdong, 182 Guardian, 8, 125, 154, 226, 227 Guiyang, Guizhou, 166 H1N1 virus, 75 Habermas, Jürgen, 218 Hard Times (Dickens), 80 Hardin, Garrett, 241 Harop drones, 207–8 Harpy drones, 207–8 Harvard University, 150, 218, 220, 221, 253 healthcare artificial intelligence and, 57–8, 88, 103 data and, 230, 239, 250–51 wearable devices and, 158, 251 Helsinki, Finland, 160 Herlev Hospital, Denmark, 58 Hinton, Geoffrey, 32, 126–7 HIPA Act (US, 1996), 230 Hitachi, 152 Hobbes, Thomas, 210 Hoffman, Josh, 174 Hoffman, Reid, 110, 111 Holmes, Edward, 245 homophily, 231–4 Hong Kong, 182 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 Houston Islam protests (2016), 203 Houthis, 206 Howe, Jeff, 143 Hsinchu, Taiwan, 181 Hughes, Chris, 217 Hull, Charles, 43 Human + Machine (Daugherty), 141 human brain, 77 human genome, 40–41, 90, 229, 234, 250 human resources, 150 Hussein, Saddam, 195 Hyaline, 174 hydroponics, 171 hyperinflation, 75 IBM, 17, 21, 47, 98 IDC, 219 Ideal-X, 61 Ikea, 144 Illumina, 41 Ilves, Toomas Hendrik, 190 ImageNet, 32 immigration, 139, 168, 183–4 Impossible Foods, 69 Improv, 99 income inequality, 155–8, 161, 168 India, 103, 145, 181, 186, 224, 253, 254 Indonesia, 103 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81, 157, 235 informational networks, 59–60 ING, 178 innovation, 14, 117 Innovator’s Dilemma, The (Christensen), 24 Instagram, 84, 117, 120, 121, 237 institutions, 9, 10, 79–88, 90–91 path dependence, 86–7 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156, 175, 180 integrated circuits, 19 Intel, 16–17, 19, 163 intellectual property law, 82 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (1987), 237 International Alliance of App-Based Transport Workers, 164 International Court of Justice, 224 International Criminal Court, 208 International Energy Agency, 77, 82 International Labour Organization, 131 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 87, 167, 187 international organisations, 82 International Organization for Standardization, 55, 61 International Rescue Committee, 184 International Telecommunication Union, 55 internet, 7, 47–8, 55, 65, 72, 75, 84–5, 88, 115, 184–6 code is law, 220–22, 235 data and, 11, 32, 71 informational networks, 59–60 localisation, 185–6 lockdowns and, 12 network effect, 100–101 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 platform model and, 102 public sphere and, 223 standardisation, 55 Wi-Fi, 151 interoperability, 55, 120–22, 237–9, 241, 243, 256–7 iPhone, 47, 62, 85, 94, 115, 175 Iran, 186, 196, 198, 203, 206 Iraq, 195–6, 201, 209 Ireland, 57–8, 119 Islamic State, 194, 233 Israel, 37, 188, 195–6, 198, 206, 207–8 Istanbul, Turkey, 102 Jacobs, Jane, 182 Japan, 37, 152, 171, 174 Jasanoff, Sheila, 253 JD.com, 137 Jena, Rajesh, 127 Jio, 103 job interviews, 153, 156 John Paul II, Pope, 83 Johnson, Boris, 79 Jumia, 103 just in time supply chains, 61–2 Kahneman, Daniel, 74 KakaoTalk, 27 Kaldor, Mary, 194 Kapor, Mitchell, 99 Karunaratne, Sid, 140–41, 151 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Keynes, John Maynard, 126, 158 Khan, Lina, 119 Khartoum, Sudan, 183 Kim Jong-un, 198 King’s College London, 179 Kiva Systems, 136 Kobo360, 145 Kodak, 83–4, 88 Kranzberg, Melvin, 254 Krizhevsky, Alex, 32–3, 34 Kubursi, Atif, 178 Kurdistan Workers’ Party, 206 Kurzweil, Ray, 29–31, 33, 35, 77 Lagos, Nigeria, 182 Lahore, Pakistan, 102 landmines, 213 Law of Accelerating Returns, 30–31, 33, 35 Laws of Motion, 20 learning by doing, 48, 53 Leggatt, George, 148 Lemonade, 56 Lessig, Larry, 220–21 Leviathan (Hobbes), 210 Li Fei-Fei, 32 life expectancy, 25, 26 light bulbs, 44, 157 Lime, 27 Limits to Growth, The (Meadows et al.), 73 linear value chains, 101 LinkedIn, 26, 110, 121, 237, 238 Linkos Group, 197 Linux OS, 242 Lipsey, Richard, 45 lithium-ion batteries, 40, 51 lithium, 170 localism, 11, 166–90, 252, 255 log files, 227 logarithmic scales, 20 logic gates, 18 logistic curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 London, England, 180, 181, 183 London Underground, 133–4 looms, 157 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 Lotus Development Corporation, 99 Luddites, 125, 253 Lufa Farms, 171–2 Luminate, 240 lump of labour fallacy, 139 Lusaka, Zambia, 15 Lyft, 146, 148 machine learning, 31–4, 54, 58, 88, 127, 129, 143 MacKinnon, Rebecca, 223 Maersk, 197, 199, 211 malaria, 253 Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 shootdown (2014), 199 Malta, 114 Malthus, Thomas, 72–3 malware, 197 Man with the Golden Gun, The (1974 film), 37 manufacturing, 10, 39, 42–4, 46, 166–7, 175–9 additive, 43–4, 46, 48, 88, 166, 169, 175–9 automation and, 130 re-localisation, 175–9 subtractive, 42–3 market saturation, 25–8, 51, 52 market share, 93–6, 111 Marshall, Alfred, 97 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 18, 147, 202, 238 Mastercard, 98 May, Theresa, 183 Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, 189 McCarthy, John, 31 McKinsey, 76, 94 McMaster University, 178 measles, 246 Mechanical Turk, 142–3, 144, 145 media literacy, 211–12 meningitis, 246 Mexico, 202 microorganisms, 42, 46, 69 Microsoft, 16–17, 65, 84–5, 88, 98–9, 100, 105, 108, 122, 221 Bing, 107 cloud computing, 85 data collection, 228 Excel, 99 internet and, 84–5, 100 network effect and, 99 Office software, 98–9, 110, 152 Windows, 85, 98–9 Workplace Productivity scores, 152 Mill, John Stuart, 193 miniaturisation, 34–5 minimum wage, 147, 161 misinformation, 11, 191, 192, 200–204, 209, 212, 217, 225, 247–8 mobile phones, 76, 121 see also smartphones; telecom companies Moderna, 245, 247 Moixa, 174 Mondelez, 197, 211 Mongol Empire (1206–1368), 44 monopolies, 10, 71, 94, 95, 114–24, 218, 255 Monopoly (board game), 82 Montreal, Quebec, 171 mood detection systems, 152 Moore, Gordon, 19, 48 Moore’s Law, 19–22, 26, 28–9, 31, 34, 63, 64, 74 artificial intelligence and, 32, 33–4 Kodak and, 83 price and, 41–2, 51, 68–9 as social fact, 29, 49 superstar companies and, 95 time, relationship with, 48–9 Moravec, Hans, 131 Moravec’s paradox, 131–2 Motorola, 76 Mount Mercy College, Cork, 57 Mozilla Firefox, 242 Mumbai, India, 181 mumps, 246 muskets, 54–5 MySpace, 26–7 Nadella, Satya, 85 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206–7 napalm, 216 NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), 56 Natanz nuclear site, Iran, 196 National Health Service (NHS), 87 nationalism, 168, 186 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 191, 213 Netflix, 104, 107, 109, 136, 137, 138, 139, 151, 248 Netherlands, 103 Netscape Communicator, 6 networks, 58–62 network effects, 96–101, 106, 110, 121, 223 neural networks, 32–4 neutral, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 new wars, 194 New York City, New York, 180, 183 New York Times, 3, 125, 190, 228 New Zealand, 188, 236 Newton, Isaac, 20 Nigeria, 103, 145, 182, 254 Niinistö, Sauli, 212 Nike, 102 nitrogen fertilizers, 35 Nixon, Richard, 25, 114 Nobel Prize, 64, 74, 241 Nokia, 120 non-state actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack, 205, 214, 225 Ocado, 137 Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria, 239 Oculus, 117 oDesk, 144 Ofcom, 8 Ofoto, 84 Ogburn, William, 85 oil industry, 172, 250 Houthi drone attacks (2019), 206 OAPEC crisis (1973–4), 37, 258 Shamoon attack (2012), 198 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 Olduvai, Tanzania, 42 online shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 open-source software, 242 Openreach, 123 Operation Opera (1981), 195–6, 209 opium, 38 Orange, 121 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 119, 167 Osborne Computer Corporation, 16 Osborne, Michael, 129 Osirak nuclear reactor, Iraq, 195–6, 209 Ostrom, Elinor, 241 Oxford University, 129, 134, 203, 226 pace of change, 3 pagers, 87 Pakistan, 145, 205 palladium, 170 PalmPilot, 173 panopticon, 152 Paris, France, 181, 183 path dependence, 86 PayPal, 98, 110 PC clones, 17 PeerIndex, 8, 201, 237 Pegasus, 214 PeoplePerHour, 144 PepsiCo, 93 Perez, Carlota, 46–7 pernicious polarization, 232 perpetual motion, 95, 106, 107, 182 Petersen, Michael Bang, 75 Phan Thi Kim Phuc, 216–17, 224, 225 pharmaceutical industry, 6, 93, 250 phase transitions, 4 Philippines, 186, 203 Phillips Exeter Academy, 150 phishing scams, 211 Phoenix, Arizona, 134 photolithography, 19 Pigou, Arthur Cecil, 97 Piketty, Thomas, 160 Ping An Good Doctor, 103, 250 Pix Moving, 166, 169, 175 PKK (Partîya Karkerên Kurdistanê), 206 Planet Labs, 69 platforms, 101–3, 219 PlayStation, 86 plough, 157 Polanyi, Michael, 133 polarisation, 231–4 polio, 246 population, 72–3 Portify, 162 Postel, Jon, 55 Postings, Robert, 233 Predator drones, 205, 206 preprints, 59–60 price gouging, 93 price of technology, 22, 68–9 computing, 68–9, 191, 249 cyber-weapons, 191–2 drones, 192 genome sequencing, 41–2, 252 renewable energy, 39–40, 250 printing press, 45 public sphere, 218, 221, 223 Pulitzer Prize, 216 punctuated equilibrium, 87–8 al-Qaeda, 205, 210–11 Qatar, 198 quantum computing, 35 quantum physics, 29 quarantines, 12, 152, 176, 183, 246 R&D (research and development), 67–8, 113, 118 racial bias, 231 racism, 225, 231, 234 radicalisation pathways, 233 radiologists, 126 Raford, Noah, 43 Raz, Ze’ev, 195, 209 RB, 197 re-localisation, 11, 166–90, 253, 255 conflict and, 189, 193, 194, 209 Reagan, Ronald, 64, 163 religion, 6, 82, 83 resilience, 257 reskilling, 159–60 responsibility gap, 209 Restrepo, Pascual, 139 Reuters, 8, 56, 132 revolutions, 87 Ricardo, David, 169–70, 177 rights, 240–41 Rise of the Robots, The (Ford), 125 Rittenhouse, Kyle, 224 Roche, 67 Rockefeller, John, 93 Rohingyas, 224 Rome, ancient, 180 Rose, Carol, 243 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 56 Rule of Law, 82 running shoes, 102, 175–6 Russell, Stuart, 31, 118 Russian Federation, 122 disinformation campaigns, 203 Estonia cyberattacks (2007), 190–91, 200 Finland, relations with, 212 Nagorno-Karabakh War (2020), 206 nuclear weapons, 237 Ukraine cyberattacks (2017), 197, 199–200 US election interference (2016), 217 Yandex, 122 S-curve, 25, 30, 51, 52, 69–70 al-Sahhaf, Muhammad Saeed, 201 Salesforce, 108–9 Saliba, Samer, 184 salt, 114 Samsung, 93, 228 San Francisco, California, 181 Sandel, Michael, 218 Sanders, Bernard, 163 Sandworm, 197, 199–200, 211 Santander, 95 Sasson, Steve, 83 satellites, 56–7, 69 Saturday Night Fever (1977 soundtrack), 72 Saudi Arabia, 108, 178, 198, 203, 206 Schmidt, Eric, 5 Schwarz Gruppe, 67 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee), 129 self-driving vehicles, 78, 134–5, 141 semiconductors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 Shamoon virus, 198 Shanghai, China, 56 Shannon, Claude, 18 Sharp, 16 Shenzhen, Guangdong, 182 shipping containers, 61–2, 63 shopping, 48, 61, 62, 75, 94, 102, 135 Siemens, 196 silicon chips, see chips Silicon Valley, 5, 7, 15, 24, 65, 110, 129, 223 Sinai Peninsula, 195 Sinclair ZX81, 15, 17, 21, 36 Singapore, 56 Singles’ Day, 48 Singularity University, 5 SixDegrees, 26 Skydio R1 drone, 208 smartphones, 22, 26, 46, 47–8, 65, 86, 88, 105, 111, 222 Smith, Adam, 169–70 sneakers, 102, 175–6 Snow, Charles Percy, 7 social credit systems, 230 social media, 26–8 censorship on, 216–17, 224–6, 236 collective bargaining and, 164 data collection on, 228 interoperability, 121, 237–8 market saturation, 25–8 misinformation on, 192, 201–4, 217, 247–8 network effect, 98, 223 polarisation and, 231–4 software as a service, 109 solar power, 37–8, 53, 65, 77, 82, 90, 171, 172, 173, 249, 250, 251 SolarWinds, 200 Solberg, Erna, 216 South Africa, 170 South Korea, 188, 198, 202 Southey, Robert, 80 sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Soviet Union (1922–91), 185, 190, 194, 212 Spain, 170, 188 Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20), 75 Speedfactory, Ansbach, 176 Spire, 69 Spotify, 69 Sputnik 1 orbit (1957), 64, 83 stagflation, 63 Standard and Poor, 104 Standard Oil, 93–4 standardisation, 54–7, 61, 62 Stanford University, 32, 58 Star Wars franchise, 99 state-sized companies, 11, 67 see also superstar companies states, 82 stirrups, 44 Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 208 Stockton, California, 160 strategic snowflakes, 211 stress tests, 237 Stuxnet, 196, 214 Sudan, 183 superstar companies, 10, 11, 67, 94–124, 218–26, 252, 255 blitzscaling, 110 collective bargaining and, 163 horizontal expansion, 111–12, 218 increasing returns to scale, 108–10 innovation and, 117–18 intangible economy, 104–7, 118, 156 interoperability and, 120–22, 237–9 monopolies, 114–24, 218 network effect, 96–101, 121 platform model, 101–3, 219 taxation of, 118–19 vertical expansion, 112–13 workplace cultures, 151 supply chains, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175, 187, 252 surveillance, 152–3, 158 Surviving AI (Chace), 129 Sutskever, Ilya, 32 synthetic biology, 42, 46, 69, 174, 245, 250 Syria, 186 Taiwan, 181, 212 Talkspace, 144 Tallinn, Estonia, 190 Tang, Audrey, 212 Tanzania, 42, 183 TaskRabbit, 144 Tasmania, Australia, 197 taxation, 10, 63, 96, 118–19 gig economy and, 146 superstar companies and, 118–19 Taylor, Frederick Winslow, 150, 152, 153, 154 Tel Aviv, Israel, 181 telecom companies, 122–3 Tencent, 65, 104, 108, 122 territorial sovereignty, 185, 199, 214 Tesco, 67, 93 Tesla, 69, 78, 113 Thailand, 176, 203 Thatcher, Margaret, 64, 163 Thelen, Kathleen, 87 Thiel, Peter, 110–11 3D printing, see additive manufacturing TikTok, 28, 69, 159–60, 219 Tisné, Martin, 240 Tomahawk missiles, 207 Toyota, 95 trade networks, 61–2, 166–7, 169, 175 trade unions, see collective bargaining Trading Places (1983 film), 132 Tragedy of the Commons, The (Hardin), 241 transistors, 18–22, 28–9, 48–9, 52, 113, 251 transparency, 236 Treaty of Westphalia (1648), 199 TRS-80, 16 Trump, Donald, 79, 119, 166, 201, 225, 237 Tufekci, Zeynep, 233 Turing, Alan, 18, 22 Turkey, 102, 176, 186, 198, 202, 206, 231 Tversky, Amos, 74 23andMe, 229–30 Twilio, 151 Twitch, 225 Twitter, 65, 201, 202, 219, 223, 225, 237 two cultures, 7, 8 Uber, 69, 94, 102, 103, 106, 142, 144, 145 Assembly Bill 5 (California, 2019), 148 engineering jobs, 156 London ban (2019), 183, 188 London protest (2016), 153 pay at, 147, 156 satisfaction levels at, 146 Uber BV v Aslam (2021), 148 UiPath, 130 Ukraine, 197, 199 Unilever, 153 Union of Concerned Scientists, 56 unions, see collective bargaining United Arab Emirates, 43, 198, 250 United Autoworkers Union, 162 United Kingdom BBC, 87 Biobank, 242 Brexit (2016–20), 6, 168 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 203 DDT in, 253 digital minilateralism, 188 drone technology in, 207 flashing of headlights in, 83 Golden Triangle, 170 Google and, 116 Industrial Revolution (1760–1840), 79–81 Luddite rebellion (1811–16), 125, 253 misinformation in, 203, 204 National Cyber Force, 200 NHS, 87 self-employment in, 148 telecom companies in, 123 Thatcher government (1979–90), 64, 163 United Nations, 87, 88, 188 United States antitrust law in, 114 automation in, 127 Battle of the Overpass (1937), 162 Capitol building storming (2021), 225 China, relations with, 166 Cold War (1947–91), 194, 212, 213 collective bargaining in, 163 Covid-19 epidemic (2020–21), 79, 202–4 Cyber Command, 200, 210 DDT in, 253 drone technology in, 205, 214 economists in, 63 HIPA Act (1996), 230 Kenosha unrest shooting (2020), 224 Lordstown Strike (1972), 125 manufacturing in, 130 misinformation in, 202–4 mobile phones in, 76 nuclear weapons, 237 Obama administration (2009–17), 205, 214 polarisation in, 232 presidential election (2016), 199, 201, 217 presidential election (2020), 202–3 Reagan administration (1981–9), 64, 163 self-employment in, 148 September 11 attacks (2001), 205, 210–11 shipping containers in, 61 shopping in, 48 solar energy research, 37 Standard Oil breakup (1911), 93–4 taxation in, 63, 119 Trump administration (2017–21), 79, 119, 166, 168, 201, 225, 237 Vietnam War (1955–75), 216 War on Terror (2001–), 205 universal basic income (UBI), 160, 189 universal service obligation, 122 University of Cambridge, 127, 188 University of Chicago, 63 University of Colorado, 73 University of Delaware, 55 University of Oxford, 129, 134, 203, 226 University of Southern California, 55 unwritten rules, 82 Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 194 UpWork, 145–6 USB (Universal Serial Bus), 51 Ut, Nick, 216 utility providers, 122–3 vaccines, 12, 202, 211, 245–7 Vail, Theodore, 100 value-free, technology as, 5, 220–21, 254 Veles, North Macedonia, 200–201 Véliz, Carissa, 226 Venezuela, 75 venture capitalists, 117 vertical expansion, 112–13, 116 vertical farms, 171–2, 251 video games, 86 Vietnam, 61, 175, 216 Virological, 245 Visa, 98 VisiCalc, 99 Vodafone, 121 Vogels, Werner, 68 Wag!

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

PayPal became enduringly important in the lore of Silicon Valley because it launched several important careers—not just Hoffman’s and Thiel’s, but also that of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX—and helped establish a set of guiding principles for the Internet generation of technology companies. One of these principles was extreme adaptability. PayPal began as a security system for PalmPilot, a short-lived handheld device, and evolved into a system for processing transactions on eBay, the world’s first successful online marketplace. Another principle was that speed and aggressiveness, at a level beyond what the rest of the world thinks of as normal, are essential to success. (Silicon Valley’s favorite motto is, “It is better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission.”)

…

NBC Neal, Ann Collier Neal, Richard Neighborhood Housing Services of Chicago net neutrality Netscape networks; academic study of; as alternative to institutions and transactions; as disruptive; human need and; inequality maintained by; political application of; pre-digital; users vs. income of New Century New Deal; dismantling of; repudiation of New Democracy, The (Weyl) New Freedom New Nationalism New Republic, The New York New Yorker, The New York Times, The Nicklaus, Jack NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act) Nissan Nixon, Richard Nobel laureates in economics Nonzero (Wright) normative, as economic term Nortel North American Free Trade Agreement nouveau riche Nudge (Thaler) Obama, Michelle Obama administration; auto industry and; donors to; during 2008 crisis; tech industry and Obamacare Obama Foundation Oberlin College Office of Management and Budget (OMB) oil prices old money O’Neill, Eugene online dating ontology “Open Letter on the Digital Economy” open marriage options market Orange County, CA O’Reilly, Tim Organization Man; rebellion against; replaced by network model; replaced by transaction model; see also corporations; General Motors; institutions Organization Man, The (Whyte) “Organization Study” (Sloan) OTC market; see also derivatives overnight lending systems Packard, David Page, Larry Painter, Patrick Palmer, Arnold PalmPilot Panetta, Leon paradigm shifts; in economics Park Forest, IL Partnoy, Frank Patil, DJ Patriot Act Paulson, Henry PayPal Pearl Harbor Pecora hearings Peltz, Nelson Penn Central Railroad pension funds; economy changed by; 401(k)s vs.; investing of; maintained by corporations Perot, Ross Perrin, Steve Peterson, Rafi Petito, Frank Pfleger, Michael phenomenology Phibro Pickens, T.

That Used to Be Us
by Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum
Published 1 Sep 2011

By contrast, the communist countries were discredited by their dismal record in achieving economic growth. So they embraced free markets and globalization. Likewise, the IT revolution was started in the United States. The transistor, communications satellites, the personal computer, the cell phone, and the Internet, not to mention the PalmPilot, the iPad, the iPhone, and the Kindle, were all invented in the United States and then were brought to the world market by American-based companies. That gave more people than ever the tool kit to compete with us and remove the barriers erected by their own governments. Similarly, the American government has been able to borrow several trillion dollars because of confidence, both at home and abroad, in the American economy and because of the special international role of the dollar, which dates from the days of American global economic supremacy.

…

Nazis Nelakanti, Raman Venkat Nepal Netflix Netscape Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) Nevada New Deal New Haven (Connecticut) public schools New Jersey New Leaders for New Schools New York City; JFK Airport; Penn Station; public schools New Yorker, The New York Mets baseball team New York State New York Stock Exchange New York Times New York Times–Discovery Channel New York Yankees baseball team New Zealand Nike Nixon, Richard Nixon Peabody law firm Nobel Prize No Child Left Behind Act (2002) Noida (India) Nordhaus, William North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA; 1994) North Carolina Northport (Alabama) Northwestern University NPR nuclear power Nuclear Regulatory Commission nuclear weapons Nueva School (Hillsborough, California) O Oakwood Medical Investors Obama, Barack; budget and deficit under; Clinton appointed secretary of state by; education encouraged by; energy policy and; health-care plan of; inauguration of; overseas travel of; review of regulations ordered by O’Connell, Jerry O’Connor, Carroll Ohio Old Lyme (Connecticut) Middle School Olson, Mancur Olympic Games O’Neill, Paul One Percent Doctrine, The (Suskind) OODA loop Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD); Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Otellini, Paul Out of Our Minds (Robinson) outsourcing; climate change and; of customer service; immigration policies versus; of parts of business processes P Pacific Railway Acts (1862; 1864) Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza, Shah of Iran Pakistan Palmeiro, Rafael Palmisano, Samuel PalmPilot Parks, Rosa Partners for Livable Communities Pasteur, Louis Patent Act (1790) Patent and Trademark Office, U.S. Paul, Rand Paul, Ron Paul, Vivek PCs, see personal computers Peace Corps Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on Pearlstein, Steven Peking University Pell Grants Pence, Mike Pentagon; terrorist attack on, see September 11 People magazine People of Plenty (Potter) People’s Daily Perez, Raul Perino, Dana Perkins Pancake House (Minneapolis) Perot, H.

Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
by Nancy Jo Sales
Published 17 May 2021

“You would call each other up and go to the movies. People would actually say, ‘This is my boyfriend. This is my girlfriend.’ It was like, we’re gonna hold hands a little bit and then enter the world of sex together. It’s crazy to me that kids will never have that again,” she added. “Everything has changed. As soon as I got a PalmPilot, guys were asking me for nudes.” Which, she said, she did enjoy sending and receiving, sometimes, though never unsolicited. “A nude is like a vampire; it has to be invited in,” she joked. Amy said that she had initially embraced the changes brought about by technology, believing it would all lead to more sexual freedom and happy experimentation in relationships, but now she wasn’t so sure.

…

I had moved away from him emotionally, for a moment, and he could feel it, though he didn’t know why, and it worried and excited him. Which was maybe what made him want to flatter me. He smoothed his rough hand down my hip, whispering, “You’re gonna have to send me some pictures.” Which just made my heart ache. * * * Nudes. They were another game changer in dating, uncommon before PalmPilots and phones. Now, so normalized that kids are sending them in middle school before they’ve ever held hands with someone or had a first kiss. It’s hard not to see a connection between porn and the normalization of nudes. It’s as if we’ve all become our own personal pornographers; we’re all Hugh Hefner.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

No matter how you organize it, the design thinking process is always “open-ended, open-minded, and iterative,” as Tim Brown put it in his book Change by Design. Design thinking has driven the creation of some of the world’s most familiar products. Apple’s computer mouse was designed by a young team that went on to form IDEO, now the world’s foremost design thinking studio. IDEO has played a role in designing products ranging from the PalmPilot, to the Swiffer, to the coaster bike. Today, design thinking reaches beyond the physical. “In Korea, we have the term ‘design management,’ or ‘design gyeong-yeong’ in Konglish,” Jin Ryu, Woowa Brothers’ vice president of public relations, explains. “It means adopting design thinking to management.”

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

Thiel had already drained a red, white, and blue smoothie. “You’re here,” Thiel said, sounding pleased. He ordered another smoothie. Levchin chose egg whites. Levchin stumbled through an explanation of his notional new company. Using the techniques of elliptical curve cryptography, he would turn the PalmPilot, a popular handheld device of the late 1990s, into a digital safe box for business information. Companies would purchase the encryption tool for employees because they wouldn’t want their corporate secrets to be stolen. Thiel took a second and a half to respond. Though only thirty years old, he had a grave, deliberate manner.

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See also WeWork New Enterprise Associates (NEA), 92 Netscape investment, 142, 144, 145 3Com investment, 100, 103 UUNET investment, 138–39 News Corp, 159 New Yorker, 25, 64, 179, 371 New York Knicks, 302 New York Times, 25–26, 142, 144, 365, 368, 369 New York Times Company, 188 Nicholson, Jack, 302 Nicira, 293–95, 296, 379, 453n Nobel Prize, 17, 23, 67, 95 Nokia, 201, 205, 229 non-compete agreements, 96, 97–98, 431n nondisclosure agreements, 306, 431n, 433n Nosek, Luke Founders Fund, 208, 209, 211–15, 444n Levchin and PayPal, 199–200 Novell, 186–87 Noyce, Robert, 52–57 background of, 52 Intel and Rock, 55–57 Traitorous Eight and founding of Fairchild, 34–39, 53, 54–55, 423n Wolfe’s account of, 52–53, 56, 57 Nozad, Pejman, 315–16 O Obama, Barack, 339 O’Dell, Mike, 134, 139 Ohanian, Alexis, 216–17, 218 oil crisis of 1973, 63–64, 68 Okta, 295–96, 379 Olsen, Chris, 436n Omidyar, Pierre, 164–70, 316 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc., 172 “open-loop,” 62 OpenTable, 350–53, 358 Oppenheimer family, 341 Oracle, 265 O’Reilly, Tim, 386–87 “organization man,” 22 Organization Man, The (Whyte), 22 origin story, 17–21 ownable network effects, 164 P Page, Larry, 173–76, 178–91, 290. See also Google Palantir, 208–9, 403 Palevsky, Max, 48–50, 56, 423n PalmPilot, 200 Pao, Ellen, 269–71 Pareto, Vilfredo, 209 Pareto principle. See 80/20 rule Parker, Sean Facebook, 194–98, 254, 256, 257–61, 380 Founders Fund, 208, 212 Plaxo, 196–98, 199, 207 Partovi, Ali and Hadi, 455n Pasteur, Louis, 128 patents, 398–99 path dependency, 261, 263, 272, 299, 377, 379, 460n “pattern recognition,” 309 Patterson, Arthur, 128–32.

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design
by Alvin E. Roth
Published 1 Jun 2015

The two most popular operating systems, iPhone and Android, have captured so much of the market that they’ve become almost self-perpetuating. In the process, they have displaced earlier popular Internet phone operating systems, notably the BlackBerry, which in turn had replaced non-Internet phones and non-phone digital assistants such as the PalmPilot. Notice how markets interact with one another. Amazon couldn’t have become the marketplace it is without the Internet, which couldn’t have become a marketplace without first computers and then smartphones. And smartphones couldn’t have become marketplaces without a way to pay for purchases over the phone.

A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence
by Jeff Hawkins
Published 15 Nov 2021

So, I went back to working on personal computers in Silicon Valley. I started having success as an entrepreneur. From 1988 to 1992, I created one of the first tablet computers, the GridPad. Then in 1992, I founded Palm Computing, beginning a ten-year span when I designed some of the first handheld computers and smartphones such as the PalmPilot and the Treo. Everyone who worked with me at Palm knew that my heart was in neuroscience, that I viewed my work in mobile computing as temporary. Designing some of the first handheld computers and smartphones was exciting work. I knew that billions of people would ultimately rely on these devices, but I felt that understanding the brain was even more important.

Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 1 Jan 2000

By any PKI rules, no one should do business with this site. The certificate received is not from the same company that sells the software. This is exactly what a man-in-themiddle attack looks like, and exactly what PKI is supposed to prevent. Example two: I visited www.palm.com to purchase something for my PalmPilot. When I went to the online checkout, I was redirected to https://palmorder.modusmedia.com/asp/store.asp. The SSL certificate was registered to Modus Media International; clearly a flagrant attempt to defraud Web customers, which I deftly uncovered because I carefully checked the SSL certificate.

…

Eventually, people will realize that it doesn’t make sense to write laws that are specific to a technology. Fraud is fraud, whether it takes place over the U.S. mail, the telephone, or the Internet. A crime is no more or less of a crime if cryptography is involved. (The New York sales clerk who, in 1999, used a Palm Pilot to copy customers’ credit card numbers would be no less guilty if he used a pen and paper.) And extortion is no better or worse if carried out using computer viruses or old-fashioned compromising photos. Good laws are written to be independent of technology. In a world where technology advances much faster than congressional sessions, this is what can work today.

The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril
by Satyajit Das
Published 9 Feb 2016

Recent innovations have focused on marketing and distributing existing goods and services, rather than on creating entirely new industries. Smartphones and tablets have cannibalized desktop and laptop computers. Apple's iPhones have replaced BlackBerrys, portable music players such as Sony's CD Walkman, and personal digital assistants like the once ubiquitous PalmPilot. Google and blogs divert revenue from newspapers, publishing, and libraries. Digital advertising diverts revenue from newspaper, magazine, and TV advertising. Technological innovation increasingly relies on lowering costs, which is achieved by reducing the quality of the product as well using untrained individuals or personal assets.

Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
by Claire L. Evans
Published 6 Mar 2018

He thrusts a container of the company’s “secret sauce” into her face: it’s “Blowfish’s own pioneering broadband solution-oriented end-to-end flavor enhancement to spice up the Internet,” he says. But CyberSlacker sees that the emperor is naked. Her retort: “It looks like a jar of salsa on top of an old PalmPilot.” She smashes the secret sauce and goes on an anti-capitalist tirade. For the early true believers, the Alley obsession with making money was beginning to feel offensive on a spiritual level. After Jaime’s own hot flash of entrepreneurial fever, she learned not to trust anyone who chose a quick buck over interesting work.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

PayPal’s Charity Robot Paypal—payments platform Long before Airbnb had figured out how to tap into Craigslist’s network, PayPal had a similar challenge. In 1999, PayPal faced intense competition from better-funded rivals like X.com and dotBank. Who would win the market for online payments was anyone’s guess. After failing with its initial idea of a peer-to-peer payments system for PalmPilots, a handheld PC device (also called a PDA) popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, PayPal pivoted to facilitating payments for online auctions. This strategy meant going after sellers on eBay, the leading auction-based product marketplace on the Web. Luke Nosek, a cofounder of PayPal who served as its VP of marketing and strategy, had an idea.

Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
by John de Graaf , David Wann , Thomas H Naylor and David Horsey
Published 1 Jan 2001

It takes a lot of energy to run all this stuff. There always seems to be a “better” model that we’ve just gotta have. Writing in 2000 about Compaq’s then-new iPaq 3600 Pocket PC, Seattle Times technology reporter Paul Andrews warned that the iPaq, with its “sleek Porsche-like case and striking color screen,” cost $500 more than an ordinary PalmPilot. “But without the color display, music, and photos of the iPaq, life seems pretty dull,” he lamented.10 And take travel. We drive twice as much per capita as we did a half century ago, and fly an amazing twenty-five times as much.11 Middle-income Americans seldom ventured more than a few hundred miles from home then, even during two-week summer vacations.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

Each pattern recognition module could recognize a linear sequence of patterns from a lower conceptual level. Each input had parameters for importance, size, and variability of size. There were “downward” signals indicating that a lower-level pattern was expected. I discuss this research in more detail in chapter 7. In 2003 and 2004, PalmPilot inventor Jeff Hawkins and Dileep George developed a hierarchical cortical model called hierarchical temporal memory. With science writer Sandra Blakeslee, Hawkins described this model eloquently in their book On Intelligence. Hawkins provides a strong case for the uniformity of the cortical algorithm and its hierarchical and list-based organization.

All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture
by Harold Goldberg
Published 5 Apr 2011

Their philosophy of life wasn’t too complex: They didn’t need to get rich quick; they just wanted to live life their way, on their own terms. Yet inside they knew that the $12,000 to $15,000 a month they were bringing in from Microsoft and Yahoo wasn’t enough to run a company, at least not for very long. Then Howard Tomlinson, an executive at Astraware who was converting the game for use on the PalmPilot portable digital assistant device, suggested that they put up a shareware version of Bejeweled on the Web. Tomlinson told Kapulka to sell the full version for $19.99. Kapulka called Vechey and Fiete explaining that Tomlinson had a theory that essentially held that if it isn’t expensive enough, people will think it’s a crappy game that’s not even worth the cheap price.

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
by David Callahan
Published 1 Jan 2004

Lompoc is an hour away from Santa Barbara and has perfect weather year-round. There is a baseball diamond and a volleyball court. The population of inmates at Lompoc has gotten rougher in recent years, but it's still a great place to catch some sun and get in shape, although ultimately, like any of the prison camps, "it's jail, not Yale." No cell phones, no PalmPilots, no toupees, and no day trading from a laptop in your cell. Also, the food stinks.29 Whether they go to prison or not, convicted white-collar criminals nearly always face fines and settlement penalties. These are impressive only to the untrained eye. The federal government's dismal record of collecting fines assessed in white-collar crime cases illustrates another way that wealthy felons evade serious consequences.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

But to my brother, it was the future of computing. “This means that in a few years, it will be possible to create a handheld device that holds all your personal information,” he said. He told me this in 1978. The Apple II had been introduced only a year earlier. The IBM PC was nearly three years in the future. The PalmPilot was more than eighteen years away. But my brother saw the future, and I took it to heart. I went back to college as a history major but was determined to take enough electrical engineering courses that I could design the first personal organizer. I soon discovered that electrical engineering requires calculus, and I had never taken calculus.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

But in pitching the idea to Larry Page, he gave it an extra flourish. As much as he was shaped by the work of Geoff Hinton, he was also the product of a 2004 book titled On Intelligence, written by a Silicon Valley engineer, entrepreneur, and self-taught neuroscientist named Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins invented the PalmPilot, a forerunner of the iPhone from the 1990s, but what he really wanted to do was study the brain. In his book he argued that the whole of the neocortex—the part of the brain that handled sight, hearing, speech, and reason—is driven by a single biological algorithm. If scientists could re-create this algorithm, he said, they could re-create the brain.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

PayPal had been founded back in 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, among others. Thiel was an avid libertarian, who had wanted to use Levchin’s cryptographic expertise to fulfill the Cypherpunks’ dream of sending money through encrypted channels, between private individuals and in particular between mobile devices like the PalmPilots of that time. In early staff meetings, Thiel gave speeches that could almost have come from the Cypherpunk mailing list. “PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before,” he said. PayPal grew quickly, but in 2001, as the company readied for an initial public offering, it hit roadblock after roadblock from lawmakers concerned about the possibilities for money laundering and other illegal activities.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

“You can change the world, you can redesign it.”3 The department pounded a kind of practical idealism into the students’ heads; during one field trip, they were taken in buses to the city dump and driven through the caverns of trash so they could see where wasted effort ended up. Chesky and Gebbia teamed up one summer to work on a project for the hair-dryer maker Conair and on another idea that bodybuilder Chesky dubbed the Chesky Solution. He had a notion to use PalmPilots and other mobile gadgets, along with body sensors, to track people’s health. Neither project went anywhere, but the duo solidified their friendship during long creative brainstorming sessions. “Everything for me came together because we had such a fun time working on that project,” says Gebbia, who was always on the lookout for a business partner.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

It attracted a diverse cult following with its switchblade-style slide-out keyboard, downloadable software, email, and backups of personal information in “the cloud.” While most businesspeople were still chained to their BlackBerrys, the Sidekick found popularity among young people and hipsters, many of whom switched from PalmPilots. Rubin was a member of a unique “Band of Brothers” who passed through Apple Computer in the 1980s, a generation of young computer engineers who came of age in Silicon Valley as disciples of Steve Jobs. Captivated by Jobs’s charisma and his dedication to using good design and computing technology as levers to “change the world,” they set out independently on their own technology quests.

Hedgehogging
by Barton Biggs
Published 3 Jan 2005

Getting your performance on a daily basis doesn’t mean that you are going to be dominated by it.) Most investors think they are rational, but in fact they are prone to drown in randomness and to incur emotional torture from short-term performance swings.Taleb says:“When I see an investor monitoring his portfolio with live prices on his cellular telephone or his PalmPilot, I smile and smile.” In other words, turn off the Bloomberg.When an investor focuses on short-time increments, he or she is observing the variability of the portfolio, not the returns—in short, being “fooled by randomness.” Our emotions are not designed to understand this key point, but as investors, we need to come to grips with our emotional liabilities.

Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Published 1 Mar 2013

Your initial target market can be very small, hyper-focused on the smallest subset of users that you think will generate meaningful results. Ultimately, you need to prove two things before you can move on to the Virality stage: Are people using the product as you expected? If they aren’t, maybe you should switch to that new use case or market, as PayPal did when it changed from PalmPilot to web-based payment or when Autodesk stopped making desktop automation and instead focused on design tools. Are people getting enough value out of it? They may like it, but if they won’t pay, click ads, or invite their friends, you may not have a business. Don’t drive new traffic until you know you can turn that extra attention into engagement.

Stamping Butterflies
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
Published 1 Jan 2004

It was the foreign ones that seemed to upset the man in the suit most. The man had not bothered to introduce himself but the fact two officers from NYPD's Sixth Precinct stood up when he came in told Bill Hagsteen all he needed to know. The thickset officer had carried away Bill's iMac, his PowerBook, his PalmPilot, his digital recorder, his camera and his MP3, while the young one, the Hispanic kid with the cheekbones, had fastened the door to Bill's brownstone with a plastic seal the size of the Pope's fist and run a length of police tape across the bottom of his stoop. After this, they ran him down to the Sixth and there he'd stayed.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Published 6 Jul 2008

The Federal Circuit Court Opinion in this case can be found at http://www.ll. georgetown.edu/federal/judicial/fed/opinions/00opinions/00-1464.html (accessed February 24, 2008). 16. For the views of the Justice Department on the relation between antitrust and intellectual property see Klein (1997). Also in 1997, Xerox sued 3Com, maker of the PalmPilot, over the “graffiti” handwriting recognition system. The Xerox patent covered the “idea” of using a variation on the Latin alphabet to aid the computer in recognizing the difference between different letters. Needless to say, Xerox never put the idea to any good use, and the Xerox “invention” does not seem to have assisted 3Com in any material way in designing a useful working system. 17.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Later, Dunlevie spotted a day where his calendar was free, and booked a red-eye flight to New York. Dunlevie was riding into the sunset of his venture capital career when he hopped aboard the plane. One of the four original partners at Benchmark, the mild-mannered investor was known for being an early backer of Palm, creator of the 1990s hit PalmPilot handheld device. Before that, he had been quarterback of his high school football team and gone on to get an MBA at Stanford. Slim, tall, and balding, Dunlevie was far more intellectual than a standard VC. He read books voraciously and avoided publicity—the opposite of many of the modern-day VCs who spend endless hours consuming and dispensing ideas on Twitter.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

After college, a small school in Pennsylvania where he took odd jobs cobbling together websites, Hurley had moved back in with his parents. He was aimless and a little bored. One day he was leafing through an issue of Wired magazine and came upon an article on Confinity, a California company trying to move currency through early handheld computers called PalmPilots. Confinity needed a designer. On a whim Hurley sent a résumé. He heard back the next day. Could he come for an interview tomorrow? This was 1999, when Silicon Valley was flush with cash and desperate for warm bodies. Confinity asked Hurley to design a logo for their new payments service, PayPal, and hired him quickly.

Peer-to-Peer
by Andy Oram
Published 26 Feb 2001

Such a policy might control the following: The required length, complexity, and change frequency of the account passphrase Whether a user’s PC can memorize the account passphrase Whether users are required to authenticate one another, and if so, how Whether everyone, or only designated shared-space administrators, can invite and uninvite members Who, outside of the enterprise, can join a group, and on what terms The Groove product was designed to be as easy to use as a PalmPilot, because Ozzie’s prior experience with Notes showed that the vast majority of security leaks were caused by human (that is, user and administrative) error. The goal was therefore to create a product that delivers high-grade security by default, requiring as little of the user (or administrator) as possible.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

In the new arrangement, Google hired some top engineers from Mozilla, including Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher. While their employer would be Google, their job would be the same: making improvements in Firefox. Another hiring coup came with Linus Upson, a thirty-seven-year-old engineer with browser experience from Netscape, Steve Jobs’s company NeXT, and Palm, where he created the browser for the PalmPilot. “This was very clever on Larry and Sergey’s part,” says Schmidt, “because, of course, these people doing Firefox extensions are perfectly capable of doing a great browser.” The Mozilla refugees worked in what was known at Google as the Product Client Group. This group covered all of Google’s applications that were not web-based but hewed to the more traditional model, where a user installs the program on a computer and thereafter runs it on that machine.

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

It was of course hard to predict in 1997 that Amazon, then a fledgling company with an untested business model, would do so well. And one should not forget that for every Amazon that yields such an extraordinary return there are many companies that might have seemed even better prospects but flamed out or went bankrupt—remember Palm (the maker of the once popular PalmPilot) or WorldCom? Is there a way to manage risk without sacrificing returns? Diversifying one’s investment portfolio is one way of reducing its riskiness. The volatility of an index such as the Standard & Poor’s (S&P) 500 that covers a broad range of firms in multiple industries is generally lower than the volatility of any individual stock included in that index.

Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
by P. W. Singer
Published 1 Jan 2010

McCoy’s sick bay “revolutionized the way we think about patient care.” Inspired by Bones’s medical tricorder (actually just a tricked-out salt shaker), Adler revolutionized the medical field by inventing the cyber knife, which does surgery by sending a beam into cancer tumors. Rob Hatani, who was equally inspired by the tricorder to invent the PalmPilot PDA, explains that this degree of influence is to be expected, given the popularity of the show among scientists. “In Silicon Valley, everyone’s a Star Trek fan. It’s like football in Green Bay.” The franchise and its influence was reborn again in the 1980s with Star Trek: The Next Generation. The successor series differed in often focusing on the darker side of technology (such as its introduction of the Borg, the new adversary species, whose robotic technology had eradicated all empathy), but it too had a major influence on scientists.

Gray Day: My Undercover Mission to Expose America's First Cyber Spy
by Eric O'Neill
Published 1 Mar 2019

So small it could fit into your palm. I used a small radio control to—” An alarm beeped. Hanssen dragged his Palm Pilot out of his back pocket. He checked it and smiled. “Ah, the Novena.” “The what?” He frowned. “I thought you were Catholic? Didn’t those Jesuits at Gonzaga teach you to pray?” “More like Sister Rose at de Chantal, but yeah.” Hanssen stood up. “Then you should know that novena is Latin for ‘nine.’ Nine days of prayer. I pray to Mary every day at one p.m.” He snapped his Palm Pilot shut and returned it to his left back pocket. “Come with me.” The gloom of his office made kneeling down before a small triptych feel oddly like being in church.

…

Hanssen had little respect for those he saw above him in the chain of command. It wouldn’t break the case, but it might be useful. I filed it away for later. As Kielman showed us around, Hanssen muttered to himself or tapped on his Palm Pilot. He only perked up when Dr. Kielman mentioned ACS. “I have grave concerns about the ACS system,” Hanssen said, tapping his Palm Pilot against his leg with one hand and spinning the stylus through the fingers of the other. “The system is flawed,” he continued. “All it takes is one bad bureau person to invalidate all the security.” We stopped at a computer displaying the ACS terminal, with its green monochrome screen.

…

“My office.” He paused. “Bring the rowing machine.” I followed Hanssen from the bright halogen lights of the main pit area of the SCIF into his gloomy cave. He paused before slumping into the executive chair to pull a thick gray device from his back pocket. My eyes tracked his hand. “It’s a Palm Pilot.” He froze, watching me watching him. I stared at the thick digital assistant and caught the label on the back. A Palm IIIx. “I have a pager,” I said through a mouth dried out by my pathetic joke. He slipped the Palm into the blue canvas bag beside his desk. “And that’s why you’ll always be a worthless clerk.”

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson
Published 15 Jan 2004

See also PayPal logos; PayPal tools PayPlace, 85, 177 ‘pay to surf’ programs, 58 AllAdvantage, 105 PDA (personal digital assistant) devices. See Palm Pilot person-to-person payments C2it, 176–177 eBay monopoly, 187–188 technology deficit, 9 policing mechanism on Internet, 51 political donation with company funds, 110 pornography industry market, 215–217 PowerPoint presentations, 297 pre-IPO shares, 238 press conferences Confinity Palm Pilot demo, 10 with FBI, 201 press releases FDIC ruling on PayPal, 254 PayPal 5 million users, 182 sale of PayPal to eBay, 280–281 X.com (PayPal), 81 Priceline, 30 priorities short-run vs. long-term, 50 X.com (PayPal) infrastructure vs. growth, 105 .

…

After selling NetMeridian to Microsoft, Max moved to Silicon Valley on the lookout for his next startup idea. Peter and Max hit it off. After several lunchtime discussions over the following weeks, the pair decided to launch a company with a security focus allowing users to store encrypted information on Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistant (PDA) devices. They settled on the name Fieldlink, since Palm devices use infrared ports to link up and beam information to each other. Peter initially agreed to help finance the venture with seed money from his fund, but with additional persuasion from Max he consented to becoming the company’s full-time CEO.

…

Without exact cash on hand, a consumer’s only option was to write a check, a cumbersome form of payment that required a trip to the bank and a wait of several days before the check cleared and the recipient could take possession of the funds. Peter and Max surmised that technology had yet to offer a viable alternative to cash for person-to-person payments. Fieldlink, they reasoned, could be positioned to develop a solution. Palm Pilots, designed to travel with their owners, would be an ideal platform for a digital wallet. The convenience of such an invention could earn Fieldlink’s product the status of killer application, especially if the software behind it could be beamed through infrared ports from one Palm user to the next.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 18 Dec 2006

In this way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other types of technologies—are featured to death. The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists.

…

It’s hard to be a tapper. Creativity starts with templates. CHAPTER 1 SIMPLE Commander’s Intent. THE low-fare airline. Burying the lead and the inverted pyramid. It’s the economy, stupid. Decision paralysis. Clinic: Sun exposure. Names, names, and names. Simple = core + compact. Proverbs. The Palm Pilot wood block. Using what’s there. The pomelo schema. High concept: Jaws on a spaceship. Generative analogies: Disney’s “cast members.” CHAPTER 2 UNEXPECTED The successful flight safety announcement. The surprise brow. Gimmicky surprise and “postdictability.” Breaking the guessing machine. “The Nordie who …” “No school next Thursday.”

…

But when you know that your organization thrives on names—i.e., the specific actions taken by specific members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations. Palm Pilot and the Visual Proverb Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices. Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use?

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

Even though it’s not rocket science to reverse-engineer this stuff, no one else had done it before me, so there’s some complexity involved. The real difficult thing actually was getting an implementation of a cryptographic algorithm on a Palm Pilot, because Palm Pilots are very low power, and, back then, they were really low power—like a 16 MHz processor. So, to do an encryption of a public key operation on a Palm Pilot was really expensive. There is some art involved in how you speed it up—both from the user interface perspective and the math perspective. In math, you have to see how much you can squeeze out of it, and in the user interface, you have to make it feel like it’s not taking that long, even though it really is taking like 2 seconds, which is a really long time.

…

It was one of these things where the software wasn’t perfect, but the security path where the money changed hands was definitely provably secure. The danger was that the Palm Pilots might crash, but the transaction was perfectly safe. I could have bet my own life on the transaction. The thing that was not safe was just the software was not really perfect. It was clunky; I was worried that it might crash. So we had stacks and stacks of Palm Pilots preloaded with the same software. Obviously, money could only reside in one of them, but the plan was that, if I see that any one of them is crashing, I’m going to make a fresh pair, because we needed two Palm Pilots, one for the receiving and one for the sending. I was fully prepared.

…

Livingston: What did you do first after you got this new funding? Levchin: As soon as we got funding, we started hiring aggressively, and we built this app for the Palm Pilot, which was getting pretty good growth. We were getting 300 users a day. Then we built a demo for the website, which was functional, so you could do everything on the website that you could do on a Palm Pilot, except the website was unsexy and we didn’t really care. It was like, “Go to the website and download the Palm Pilot version. It’s really cool.” Livingston: Three hundred people were downloading it per day? For fun? Levchin: Well, there are lots of geeks.

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry
by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff
Published 6 Apr 2015

One company had more success creating a portable office aide: RIM nemesis U.S. Robotics. Its Palm Pilot 1000, launched in 1996, the year after U.S. Robotics bought California startup Palm computing, was a sleek device storing calendar, contact, and other information that could be synchronized with users’ computers. Promoted as a personal digital assistant, the Palm was an instant hit with professionals. You didn’t need an engineering degree to operate the machine. And unlike Newton’s faulty handwriting, the Palm came with a digital keyboard that was easily operated with a stylus. No more “egg freckles.” Missing from the Palm Pilot, however, was a wireless connection.

…

RIM managers were influenced by management guru Geoffrey Moore, who argued in his influential book Inside the Tornado that innovative technologies had a better chance of success if sold within a proven product category.1 The most popular handheld device going in 1998 was the Palm Pilot, sold as a personal digital assistant, or PDA. Palm Pilot was a huge hit because it allowed busy professionals to easily store and update calendar and contact information on a pocket-sized device. If the e-mail-enabled Leapfrog came with calendar and contact applications, Castell urged Lazaridis, then RIM could position its product as the most comprehensive PDA on the market.

…

Missing from the Palm Pilot, however, was a wireless connection. Fans would have to wait until 1999 for a new Palm Pilot to be linked wirelessly to the Internet and e-mail. RIM was quietly putting the finishing touches on its own handheld communicator in the spring of 1996. Its conquer-the-world strategy was audacious for a company with fewer than one hundred employees, but RIM’s low profile had its advantages: bigger global companies didn’t take the small Waterloo company seriously. “We seem to be doing quite well without anyone knowing,” Lazaridis told the Globe and Mail in one of his first mainstream media interviews. Working in the shadows, Lazaridis’s team had accumulated eight years of experience helping Sweden’s Ericsson, Toronto’s Rogers, and New Jersey’s RAM Mobile Data, the small wireless data arm of BellSouth, transform Mobitex into a working radio network with better coverage across the continent than its main rival, ARDIS, the data network that was created by Motorola for IBM and sold to American Mobile Satellite in early 1998.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 10 Feb 2010

In this way, slowly and quietly, remote controls—and, by extension, other types of technologies—are featured to death. The Palm Pilot team, aware of this danger, took a hard line against feature creep. When the team began its work, in the early 1990s, personal digital assistants (PDAs) had an unblemished record of failure. Apple’s famous debacle with its Newton PDA had made other competitors gun-shy. One of the competitors on the PDA market in 1994 looked like a malnourished computer. It was a bulky device with a keyboard and multiple ports for peripherals. Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot team leader, was determined that his product would avoid this fate. He wanted the Palm Pilot to be simple. It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists.

…

But when you know that your organization thrives on names — i.e., the specific actions taken by specific members of the local community—that knowledge informs the kinds of photo ops you look for. Do you shoot the boring committee deliberations or the gorgeous sunset over the park? Answer: the boring committee deliberations. Palm Pilot and the Visual Proverb Compact ideas help people learn and remember a core message. But they may be even more important when it comes time to help people act properly, particularly in an environment where they have to make lots of choices. Why do remote controls have more buttons than we ever use?

…

It would handle four things: calendars, contacts, memos, and task lists. The Palm Pilot would do only four things, but it would do them well. Hawkins fought feature creep by carrying around a wooden block the size of the Palm. Trae Vassallo, a member of the Palm V design team, says, “The block was dumb, which resonated with the simple technological goals of the product, but it was also small, which made the product elegant and different.” Hawkins would pull out the wooden block to “take notes” during a meeting or “check his calendar” in the hallway. Whenever someone suggested another feature, Hawkins would pull out the wooden block and ask them where it would fit.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

In 1998 programmer Max Levchin teamed with derivatives trader Peter Thiel to create a “digital wallet”—an encryption platform that allowed you to store cash and information securely on your mobile phone. That soon evolved to software that allowed you to send and receive digital cash wirelessly and securely via a Palm Pilot (the first of several iterations) so that two friends could split a dinner tab using their PDAs. It was a neat idea that leveraged Max’s and Peter’s technology and finance backgrounds, respectively (complementary assets that gave them a competitive edge as founders). Max and Peter named the company Confinity—a mix of confidence and infinity. But the Palm Pilot wasn’t catching on. So Max and Peter iterated again. They developed an online payment transfer service that didn’t require a Palm or any other mobile phone application.

…

To make the service, which they dubbed PayPal, even more useful to businesses, they added credit card processing. No merchant accounts needed to process a credit card payment: just a simple, universal online interface. Confinity signed up early adopters for peer-to-peer money transfers on both the Palm Pilot application and the PayPal online payment transfer service, although not as quickly as expected for the Palm Pilot. The company struggled to find and articulate a mass-market use case; the general public was not accustomed to electronically and wirelessly sending cash to one another. In short, PayPal’s Plan A had played out. There were no more iterations to make, no more small bets to take.

…

(Remember, PayPal’s first focus was on mobile payments.) That quickly turned into “Ooh—maybe those people are our customers!” Which in turn led to a realization that the company should pivot to Plan B: offer the eBay community an easy way to pay for the items they bought in online auctions. In 1999 PayPal ditched the Palm Pilot app (the original Plan A) and focused on eBay. Plan B wasn’t something random, like an online chat application. It stayed true to PayPal’s initial encryption roots while shifting to capitalize on what appeared to be the real market need. As it happened, my career Plan B intersected with PayPal’s Plan B.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products
by Leander Kahney
Published 14 Nov 2013

Though it was the only really innovative thing Sculley achieved under his tenure, Jobs had many reasons to end the Newton’s brief life. Most executives would have thought twice about killing a well-loved product, and Newton lovers flooded Infinite Loop’s parking lots with placards and loudspeakers. (“I give a fig for the Newton,” one sign read.) PDAs were on the rise, thanks to the success of handhelds like the Palm Pilot, but to Jobs, the Newton was a distraction. He wanted Apple to concentrate on computers, its core product. Jobs aimed at making innovative products again, but he didn’t want to compete in the broader market for personal computers, which was dominated by companies making generic machines for Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

…

“He showed us on-screen rotating and zooming—and I was really surprised that we could do that stuff.” That morning was the first time the team had even heard of multi-touch. Today it doesn’t seem exceptional, but back then, touch interfaces were pretty primitive. Most touch devices, such as Palm Pilots and Windows tablets, used a pen or stylus. Screens that were sensitive to fingers, not pens, like ATM screens, were restricted to single presses. There was no pinching or zooming, no swiping up and down or left and right. Kerr explained to his colleagues that the new technology would allow people to use two or three fingers instead of just one, and that it would afford much more sophisticated interfaces than simple single-finger button presses.

…

“Honestly, we can do better, guys,” he told the team. Fadell was loath to admit defeat. “The multi-touch approach was riskier because no one had tried it and because they weren’t sure they could fit all the necessary hardware into it,” he said. And Fadell had been skeptical of touch screens from the start, based on experience of devices like Palm Pilots, which were clunky and awkward. “We all know this is the one we want to do” Jobs said, referring to the P2. “So let’s make it work.”9 Two years later, during the iPhone introduction at Macworld, Jobs jokingly flashed an image of an iPod with a rotary dial pad on its screen. This was how not to build a new phone, Jobs said, as the audience laughed.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

By 1998, he was ready to apply his genius for crafting secure forms of computerized communications to the world of business. Thiel and Levchin (along with a third partner, John Bernard Powers, who soon departed) launched Confinity, a startup aimed at enabling money transfers on Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistants (PDAs) equipped with infrared ports. At the time, the Palm Pilot was an exceptionally popular mobile device whose adoption rate was expected to grow, and launching a payment system on a mobile device that people carried with them everywhere made sense. The business logic behind Confinity seemed indisputable.

…

Despite these efforts, Billpoint failed to get traction among eBay users, partly because of its belated launch, partly because of ill-advised business moves by eBay—for example, the decision to squelch deals that would have promoted Billpoint’s use by non-eBay merchants. PayPal continued to grow. By the time Confinity shut down its Palm Pilot business in late 2000, its offspring PayPal had already garnered three million accounts—three hundred times the number achieved by its parent company. Not since the launch of the first credit card, Diners Club, has the world seen such rapid global adoption of a new payment instrument. In February 2002, PayPal went public.

…

B., 54–55 classified ads, 49, 63, 120, 131, 133–34 click-throughs, 190, 197 cloud-based networking, 30, 56 cloud-based storage, 54, 56, 56, 59, 102, 177–78 cloud computing, 145, 155, 209 Coase, Ronald, 234–35 Coca-Cola, 198–99 code, computer, 53, 79–80, 131–32, 140, 143, 166, 170, 172, 240, 254–55, 267 coffee machines, 143, 157–58, 159 colleges and universities, 8–9, 91, 97–99, 265–68 community-driven curation, 67–68, 78 comparative advantage, 188–89 competition complexities, 210–13 computer programming, 52, 99, 131–32, 267 Confinity, 80, 83 Congress, U.S., 248–49 connectivity platforms, 200–201, 285, 289 consulting firms, 8, 194 consumer relationship management (CRM), 11, 96, 174 consumer-to-consumer marketplace, 2–3, 29 contact information, 163, 190 contracts, 142, 166, 172, 197, 225–26 control systems, 164–65 convex growth, 20, 295, 297 Cook, Tim, 148 co-opetition (co-creation), 194, 212, 227 copyright, 57, 167, 208, 258, 259 core developers, 141–42 corporations, 157–58 governance by, 164, 256–60 image ads for, 229–30 sponsorship by, 137, 139–40 corruption, 160, 236–37 cosmetics industry, 206 Coursera, 8, 265, 266, 267 Craigslist, 47, 49, 91–92, 101, 103, 165, 193, 224 credit, 170, 175, 243–44, 263, 275–76, 277 credit cards, 37, 81, 83, 84, 137, 139–40, 175, 226, 243, 275 credit reports, 243–44 crime, 165, 231, 257 critical assets, 220–21 critical mass, 97, 112, 188, 195, 201–2 Croll, Alistair, 191, 196 cross-side effects, 29, 30, 34, 295 crowd curation, 167–70 crowdfunding, 40, 51, 92, 96, 102, 111 crowdsourcing, 12, 267 Cryptography, 171 currency, 5, 15, 36, 37–38, 46, 159, 173–74 customized ads, 244 Cusumano, Michael A., 58, 178–79 Damodaran, Aswath, 16–18 data: accountability based on, 253–56 aggregators for, 141, 145–46, 244–48, 254, 255, 262–63, 278 big, 11, 247–48, 276 brokers of, 244–45 capture and collection of, 218–19, 264, 296 in communications, 176–78 flow of, 170, 246–48 leveraging of, 217–20 manipulation of, 251–53 in nationalism, 247–48, 260 platforms for, 200 profiles derived from, 48, 119, 127 security of, 230, 243–46, 260 software for, 91–92, 107, 255, 269, 270–71, 275, 276–77, 278, 284, 286 storage of, 54, 56, 56, 59, 102, 171–73, 177–78 strategic, 217–20 tactical, 217–18 tools for, 10–11, 48, 49, 71 databases, 24–25, 42–44, 63, 72–75, 76, 91–92, 107 “Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability,” 245 Data.gov, 283 Data Jams, 282 dating services, 26–28, 30, 93, 97–98, 120, 123, 166, 194 De Beers, 208–9 decentralization, 159, 171–73, 272–74 deep design, 179–80 defaults, 170, 263, 276 Delicious, 95–96 demand-side economies of scale, 18–20, 32, 34, 226 democracy, 149–50, 257, 283 department stores, 264, 287 designers, graphic, 66, 72, 106, 118–19, 267 design structure matrices, 57–58 diabetes, 269–70 diamond industry, 208–9 digital currency, 171, 274–78 digital message deliveries, 94–95 digital real estate, 174–75, 216 digital rights management (DRM), 31 Diners Club, 84 direct-to-consumer channels, 264 discounts, 22, 25–26 disintermediation, 68–69, 71–72, 78, 161–62, 170–71, 298 disk defragmentation, 200 dispute resolution, 169–70 Djankov, Simeon, 238, 239 doctors, 263, 268, 269, 271, 279 Dorsey, Jack, 97 dot-com bubble, x, 22, 79, 80, 113, 288 Dribbble, 37, 66, 118–19 driverless cars, 284 driver ratings, 254, 264 driving records, 232–33, 277 Dropbox, 32, 102, 109 Drucker, Peter, 210 drug trafficking, 162 Duhigg, Charles, 146 Duracell, 162 DVDs, 63, 111, 139 e-commerce, 56, 91, 111, 124–25, 145, 204–5 Earth Class Mail, 94–95 eBay, vii, ix, 2, 3, 17, 24, 36, 38, 40, 83–84, 85, 91, 93, 111, 112–13, 125, 135, 161–62, 163, 169–71, 172, 173, 196n, 205, 206, 207, 215, 262 economics, 72, 78, 230, 234–39 economies of scale, 18–20, 206 Edison, Thomas, 19, 284 editors, 7, 10, 68, 72, 93, 129–30, 262 education, 7–8, 77, 96, 111, 122, 124, 212, 233, 261, 263, 265–68, 269, 288, 289 education platforms, 96, 111, 265–68, 289 Eisenmann, Thomas R., ix, 130 electric lighting, 19, 285 electric power, 19, 69, 247, 284–85 Electronic Arts (EA), 94, 124, 240 electronic health records, 270 electronics, 75, 178, 206 email, 81, 85, 101–4, 185 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 10–11 encyclopaedias, 10–11, 129–30, 133, 149–51 Endomondo, 75 end-to-end design principle, 52–54 energy: efficiency of, 254, 284–85, 286 industry for, 261, 272–74, 289 resources of, 69–70, 254, 272–74 enhanced access, 112, 118, 119–21, 126, 127, 296 enhanced curation, 121–22, 126–27 enhanced design, 223–24 enterprise management, 173–75 enterprise resource planning (ERP), 11 entrepreneurs, 79–83, 86, 96, 111, 205, 282 environmental issues, 62, 70–71, 233, 237, 272, 274 Equal Credit Opportunity Act (1974), 243–44 Equity Bank, 277–78 e-readers, 178 eToys, 22 Etsy, 65, 73, 149, 212, 262, 299 European Union (EU), 242, 247–48 events listings, 112–15, 126 Excel, 216 excess inertia, 241, 296 exclusive access, 213–15 expert networks, 30, 36, 68, 93, 96, 99, 117–18 extension developers, 141, 142–45, 147, 148–49, 153–54 external networks, 100–101, 102, 103–4, 105 Facebook, 3, 12, 20, 32, 33, 37, 39, 41–50, 66, 90–91, 98–103, 104, 112, 121, 126, 131–35, 132, 133, 145, 151, 159, 163, 168, 181, 184, 185, 197, 204, 216–18, 221, 226, 245, 251–52, 267, 270–71 Fair Credit Reporting Act (1970), 175 fairness, 179–81, 230 fair use doctrine, 259 farm prices, 42–44, 60 FarmVille, 221 Fasal, 42–44 Federal Reserve, 174 Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 242, 243–44, 245 FedEx, 61, 249–50, 278 feedback loops, 21, 28, 45–46, 68, 71, 72, 100–101, 108, 139, 167–70, 218–19, 223, 296 feet on street (FOS) sales forces, 43–44, 91 files, 63, 166 encryption of, 200 formats for, 29–30 film industry, 9, 66, 138–39, 163, 178, 259, 267 filters, 38–41, 42, 59, 133, 295, 296–97 financial crash of 2008, 178, 230 financial services industry, 11, 16–18, 33, 164, 171–73, 178, 230, 261, 274–78, 289 fitness and sports activities, 74–76, 245, 270–71 five forces model, 207–10, 212, 213, 221 500px, 37, 47 Fiverr, 116, 193 fixed costs, 9–10, 209, 224–25, 278 follow-the-rabbit strategy, 89–91, 105 food industry, 76, 254, 255, 278 Ford, Henry, 19, 32 Ford Motor Co., 19 Fortune 500, 65 Foursquare, 97, 98 fragmented industries, 131, 262, 265, 268–69, 289 fraud, 175, 196–97, 255, 257, 276 Free: The Future of a Radical Price (Anderson), 22 freelancers (independent contractors), 21, 36, 37, 64, 65, 117–18, 193–94, 196, 210, 213, 233–34, 249–51, 279, 280, 287, 297, 299 free trade, 205, 206, 235 Friedersdorf, Conor, 236 Friendster, 98 FuelBand, 74, 75 full-time employees, 249–50 FUSE Labs, 252–53 games, gaming, 94, 103, 124, 132, 159, 163, 178, 211, 212, 217, 221, 240 “Gangnam Style,” 84, 147 gatekeepers, 7–8, 151–52, 171–73, 243, 253, 262, 265, 268, 275–76, 281, 289, 298 Gawer, Annabelle, 58, 178–79 Gebbia, Joe, 1–2 General Electric (GE), 4, 13, 19, 76, 78, 86, 110, 201, 204, 208, 247, 284 Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, 238–39 geographic focus, 98–99, 271 Germany, 96–97, 161, 205 Gillette, King, 109–10 Global 500, 209–10 Go-Jek, 278 Goldberg, Whoopi, 23 Goodwin, Tom, 11–12 Google, vii, 3–7, 21–25, 30–33, 49–50, 55, 58, 64, 72, 111, 112, 120, 121, 125, 134, 137, 140–41, 148, 153–54, 159, 198–99, 214–17, 226, 240, 242, 250, 267, 270–71 Google AdWords, 72, 120, 121, 125 Google Maps, 49–50, 55, 148, 200 Google Play, 154 government platforms, 261, 281–83, 289 graphical processing units (GPUs), 56, 57, 58 graphic design, 67, 226 Great Britain, 160, 205 gross domestic product (GDP), 160, 161 Grossman, Nick, 253, 254, 255, 256 Guardian, 144–45 Gurley, Bill, 16–18, 21 Haber-Bosch process, 19 Hachette Book Group, 251 Haier Group, vii, 76, 125, 198–99, 222 Halo, 94, 240 Halo: Combat Evolved, 94 Hammurabi, Code of, 274 hard drives (HDs), 56, 57, 58 hardware, 56, 57–58, 136, 152–53, 178–79 Harvard University, 98–99, 266 hashtags, 58, 104 Havas Media, 11–12 health care, 32–33, 35, 69, 71, 77, 200, 233, 234, 238, 245, 261, 263, 265, 268–72, 277, 280, 289 health insurance, 234, 263, 271–72, 277, 280 Heiferman, Scott, 113–14, 126 heirlooms, 161–62 Here, 49–50 Hertz, 9 heuristics, 123–24 Hilton Hotels, 8, 64 Hipstamatic, 100 homeowners’ insurance, 175, 232 horizontal integration, 33, 74–76, 208 hospitals, 69, 71, 233, 270, 271–72 hosting sites, 88, 198, 223–24 hotel industry, 1–2, 8–9, 10, 12, 64, 67, 101, 111, 142–43, 198, 224, 229–33, 236, 253, 287 Hotmail, 103, 104 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 204, 208, 225 HTTP, 177 Huffington Post, 90 human resources, 14, 39 human rights, 159, 160–61 hypercompetition, 209–10, 213 IBM, x, 137, 152, 179, 284 iCloud, 75 identity theft, 244 InCloudCounsel, 279 income streams, 139–41, 143, 144, 215 India, 73, 91 Indiegogo, 96, 124 Indonesia, 278 Industrial Awakening, 285–86 industrial development, 205–10, 224–25, 268 industrial-era firms, 19, 32, 34, 256, 285, 288 Industrial Revolution, 288 Industry Standard Architecture (ISA), 58 information, 40, 42 agencies for, 243–44 age of, 253, 256, 260 asymmetries of, 161–62, 164, 181, 182, 220, 228, 258–59, 262–63, 265, 269, 281, 289 exchange of, 36, 37, 39, 41, 47–48, 51, 134 intensive need for, 262–63, 265, 268, 281, 289 mis-, 129–30 platforms for, 190, 200, 287 units of, 296–97 initial public offerings (IPOs), ix, 91, 204–5 Instagram, 3, 13, 32, 46, 47, 66, 85, 100, 102–3, 104, 204, 217, 218, 299 instant messaging, 131, 198, 211 insurance industry, 9, 62, 71, 142, 164, 175–76, 232, 268, 277 integrated systems, 33, 74, 131 Intel, vii, x, 57–58, 89, 137, 178–81, 270–71, 284 Intel Architecture Labs (IAL), 179–81 intellectual property (IP), 33, 57, 167, 174–75, 180, 258 interaction failures, 190, 192, 196–97 Interbrand, 198–99 interest rates, 170, 244, 276 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 93 internal transparency, 176–79 International Financial Reporting Standards, 238–39 Internet, 24–25, 32, 60–63, 76–79, 95–96, 107–13, 121, 167, 201, 204, 205, 209, 244, 249, 250, 263, 264, 283–89, 299 Internet of things, 76, 201, 204, 283–86, 289 inventory, 9, 11–12, 25, 42, 141, 184, 186, 262 investment, ix, 16, 63, 164, 168–69, 184–86, 209, 278 iPads, 95 iPhone, 3, 6–7, 72, 131, 140, 147, 148, 178, 211, 213–14, 222 iStockphoto, 167–68, 173 iTunes, 75, 131, 142, 153, 164, 214, 231 Japan, 66, 205–6 Jassy, Andrew, 177–78 Java programming language, 140 Jawbone, x, 77, 245 job listings, 39, 49, 50, 51, 63, 111, 118–19, 120, 131, 133–34, 137, 184–86, 196, 201, 218 Jobs, Steve, viii, 53, 131, 214 joint venture model, 137, 138 judiciary, 237, 238, 250 JVC, 138–39 Kalanick, Travis, 18, 62 Kelley, Brian P., 157 Kenya, 277–78 Kercher, Meredith, 129–30, 149–50 Keurig Green Mountain, 143, 157–58, 159, 181 Kickstarter, 40, 92, 96, 102, 111 Kindle, 7, 10, 67, 140, 154, 243 Kindle Fire, 140 Knox, Amanda, 129–30, 149–50 Korengold, Barry, 61 Kozmo, 22–23 Kretschmer, Tobias, 257 Kuraitis, Vince, 270, 271 labor: child, 164 division of, 280 market for, 39, 49, 50, 51, 63, 111, 118–19, 120, 131, 133–34, 137, 196, 201, 218, 235 platforms for, 200, 201, 213, 233–34, 248–51, 279–81, 289 regulation of, 230, 249–51, 260, 288 self-employed, 21, 36, 37, 64, 65, 117–18, 193–94, 196, 210, 213, 233–34, 249–51, 279, 280, 287, 297, 299 unions for, 280, 288 Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 235, 237 law firms, 8, 204, 279 laws and legal systems, 88, 164–70, 182, 230, 247–49, 257, 258, 260, 281 lead generation, 113, 117 Lean Analytics (Croll and Yoskovitz), 191, 196 lean startups, 199, 201–2 Lee Kuan Yew, 160–61 LegalZoom, 204, 225 Lending Club, 77, 275, 276 Lessig, Lawrence, 164–65, 166 Levchin, Max, 79–81 Lexis, 204, 225 liability coverage, 175, 232 libertarianism, 79, 80, 236, 238 licensing fees, 61, 131, 258–59 licensing model, 136–37, 138, 139, 214, 235, 296 lightbulbs, 284–85 linear value chains (pipelines), 6, 183–84, 297, 298 LinkedIn, 39, 41–42, 48, 50–51, 103, 111, 119, 170, 173, 184, 197, 218–19, 223, 226, 245 Linux, 137, 138, 154, 200 liquidity, 189–91, 193, 194–95, 201–2, 297 local content regulations, 246–47 logos (icons), 82, 83 “long tail” (software adoption), 216–17, 219 Lyft, 49, 50–51, 67, 213, 227, 250–51, 297 Ma, Jack, 125, 206, 215 MacCormack, Alan, 57 magazines, 72, 151, 197, 244, 264, 275 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 69, 71 mail, 63, 94–95, 171 MailChimp, 109 Malaysia, 160 Management Science (MacCormack and Baldwin), 57 mandis (market-makers), 42–44 Manghani, Ravi, 273–74 manufacturing efficiencies, 208, 209, 261 MapMyFitness, 75 mapping services, 49–50, 55, 148, 200 marginal economics, 72, 78 Marini, Rick, 184–85 marketing, 14, 19, 25, 52–53, 72, 73–74, 84–85, 100, 101, 105, 183–84, 209–10, 267 Marketplace Fairness Act (2013), 249 marketplaces, 60, 91, 190, 204, 249 markets: access to, 87–88, 98, 194, 215, 218, 220 aggregation of, 68–69, 72–73, 78, 262, 297 controls for, 164–65 data on, 42–44 emerging, 210–11 entry barriers to, 207–8, 215, 219–20 expansion of, 4, 20, 31–32 failure of, xiii, 161–63, 164, 170–71, 182, 234–35, 256, 257, 258–59, 263, 289 free, 149, 161–65, 173–76, 180, 182, 234–36 frictionless entry into, 25–26, 34, 81, 107–8, 111, 117, 124–25, 130, 168, 206, 297 incumbent advantage in, 86, 218, 261, 263 late-mover problem in, 87–88, 98 liquidity of, 171, 196 local, 70–71, 117–18, 264 manipulation of, 238, 251–53, 260, 287 micro-, 98–99, 105 multi-sided, 159, 164 new entrants to, 207–10, 262, 296 niche, 88, 216, 223–24, 228, 300 one-sided, 157–58, 159 share of, 16–22, 33, 53, 60–62, 65, 81, 87–88, 112–13, 131–33, 132, 133, 137–40, 152–53, 157, 222–26, 260, 287 strategy for, viii, xi, 10, 16–18, 20, 21, 31–32, 33, 42–44, 57–58, 69–73, 77, 78, 89, 111, 124, 173, 210–11, 272–74, 278 supply and demand in, 69–71, 173, 210–11, 272–74, 278 “thickness” of, 164, 171, 173 two-sided, 81, 89, 93, 110, 119, 175, 196, 215, 218, 295, 298 winner-take-all, viii, 224–27, 228, 279–80, 300 marquee strategy, 94–95, 105 Marriott Hotels, 8–9 massive open online courses (MOOCs), 266–67 mass media, 40, 63, 72, 77, 262, 264 MasterCard, 226, 275 matching services, 17, 47–48 Matharu, Taran, 4–5 McCormick Foods, 76 McGraw-Hill, 204, 208 Mechanical Turk, 249, 280 Medicare, 250 Medicast, 269, 279 Medium, 71–72 Meetup, 113–15, 126 Megaupload, 87–88 membership fees, 123, 125 Mercateo, 96–97 mergers and acquisitions, 208, 216, 220–21, 228 Metcalfe, Robert, 20, 297 Metcalfe’s law, 20, 21, 295, 297 metering tools, 272–73 Microsoft, vii, x, 3, 13, 20, 29, 33, 52–53, 94, 103–4, 110, 124, 131, 140, 152–53, 179, 181, 200, 211, 216, 226, 240, 241, 252, 267, 270–71 Microsoft Outlook, 103–4 Microsoft Vista, 52–53 Microsoft Windows, 30, 53, 140, 152–53, 200, 222, 240 Microsoft Windows XP, 53 middlemen, 68–69, 71–72, 78, 161–62, 170–71, 298 Minerva Project, 268 mining, 225, 263 mislabeled bargains, 161–62, 170–71 MIT, ix–x, xi, 214, 266, 267 MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, ix–x MIT Platform Strategy Summit, xi, 214 moderators, 151–52 modular design, 54–57, 221 monetary policy, 159, 173–74 monetization, 38, 63, 106–27, 188, 215 MonkeyParking, 233, 234 monopolies, 18–19, 162, 163, 172–73, 182, 208–9, 227, 237, 238, 240–41, 242 Monster, 218–19, 223, 226 mortgages, 237, 243, 263 Mount, David, 285–86 MP3 players, 178 multidirectional platforms, 272–74 multihoming, 213–15, 223–28, 250–51, 297, 300 multinational corporations, 246–48 multi-sponsor decision-making, 139–40 multi-user feedback loop, 46, 100–101 music industry, 63, 71, 75, 87, 111, 134–35, 147, 178, 213, 226, 231, 258, 287, 297 MyFitnessPal, 75, 245 Myspace, 87, 92, 98, 125–26, 131–34, 132, 133, 135, 143, 204, 221, 226 Nakamoto, Satoshi, 171–73 Nalebuff, Barry J., 212 NASDAQ, ix, 80 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 237 navigation tools, 191, 297 NBC, 204, 225 negative cross-side effects, 30–32, 34, 295 negative externalities, 163, 229–34, 257, 287 negative feedback, 28, 157–58, 166–67 negative network effects, 17, 26–32, 34, 47, 49, 51, 68, 112–15, 120, 121, 123, 126, 151, 229–34, 287, 298 negative same-side effects, 30, 298 Nest, 204, 225 Netflix, 63, 163, 204, 225 Netscape, 62, 110 network matching, 26–28 network orchestrators, 32 News Corp., 126 news feeds, 121, 168, 251–52 newspapers, 63, 144–45, 264, 287 New York City, 61, 113, 123, 229–30, 231, 258–59 New York State, 69–70, 274 New York Stock Exchange, 55, 171 New York Times, 205 NeXT, 53 Nigeria, 247 Nike, 4, 74–76, 78, 205, 271 9/11 attacks, 113 99designs, 66, 106 Nintendo, 94, 211, 240 noise, 28, 114, 120, 199, 200 Nokia, 49–50, 64, 131, 226 Novel Writing Month, 4–5 NTT, 89 oDesk, 201 oil and gas industry, 225, 235, 259, 263, 272 OkCupid, xi, 26–28, 30, 195–96 oligopolies, 209, 238 on-boarding effect, 90–91, 97 online courses, 96, 111, 265–68, 289 Open Data, 282 “open in” vs. “open out” websites, 144 open source, 57, 172–73, 254–55 OpenTable, 17, 90, 95, 101, 103, 194, 262 operating system (OS), 6–7, 52–53, 152–53, 211, 222, 226, 240 Palm Pilots, 80, 83 Parker, Geoffrey G., ix, 23–24, 69, 110, 130, 241, 242 parking, 62, 233, 234 partner-against-partner competition, 211, 212, 227 patents, 109, 157, 174–75, 241 payments systems, 8, 56, 79–83, 85, 137, 142, 145, 155, 222, 274–78, 285 PayPal, 17, 21, 23, 24, 37, 79–83, 85, 91, 93, 94, 111, 275 PDF, 29–30, 92–93 peer-to-peer lending, 170, 275–76 percentage of active users, 190, 192, 193 Percival, Sean, 125–26 peripheral applications, 52–57 peripheral hardware, 178–79 personal computers (PCs), 58, 140, 152–53, 178–79, 200 personal digital assistants (PDAs), 80 pharmaceuticals industry, 225 photo-editing tools, 47, 104 photo-sharing sites, 6, 37, 47, 66, 100–103, 104, 118, 142, 167–69, 172, 173, 193, 198, 217, 226, 299 piggyback strategy, 91–92, 105, 184 Pinterest, 3, 168–69 platform-against-partner competition, 211–12, 227 platform-against-platform competition, 211, 227 Platform Leadership (Gawer and Cusumano), 178–79 platforms: adjacent, 222–23, 295, 296, 298 architecture of, 47–48, 164–65, 170–73, 182, 221 assets of, 9, 68–71, 160, 180, 181, 209, 212, 220–21, 238, 260 authors’ research on, ix–xi, 23–24 as business model, vii, 35, 60–62, 64, 66–67, 73–77, 163, 184–86, 188, 258 capitalization of, 9, 16–18, 82, 109, 145, 278 compatibility of, 53, 213–14, 240, 260 competition in, viii, 17–18, 33, 60–62, 68, 73–77, 83, 86, 87–88, 96–97, 131–34, 152–54, 155, 156, 157–58, 174–75, 181, 185–86, 189, 199–200, 203, 207–27, 234–35, 240–43, 256–60, 264, 287, 299 consumers and customers of, viii, 6–8, 26, 29, 31–49, 60–67, 71–74, 78–82, 86–97, 107, 108–21, 125, 134, 135, 145–47, 157–58, 176–78, 180, 187–92, 197–205, 210–23, 240–43, 251–54, 263, 272–78, 295–99 controversial aspects of, 129–30, 149–50, 192–93, 213–14, 229–30 core interaction of, 38–44, 49–59, 119, 134, 141–42, 180, 187, 189–90, 195, 199–200, 201, 202, 295 costs for, 9–10, 25, 37–38, 63, 82, 152–53, 184, 186, 209–10, 224–25, 228, 234, 265, 286, 296, 299 curation and governance of, 12, 14, 26–28, 32, 33, 34, 42, 47, 49, 51, 67–68, 72, 77, 78, 87–88, 111, 121–22, 123, 157–82, 187, 191, 192–93, 295–96, 297, 298 decision-making in, 73, 127, 139–40, 156, 169, 180, 187–88, 253–56 design of, 35–59, 90, 101, 111, 125–28, 134–35, 144, 154–56, 163, 164–65, 170–73, 179–80, 181, 182, 219, 221, 223–24, 228, 283–84, 285, 295 developers or programmers for, 6–7, 21, 30, 92, 106–7, 124, 131–32, 135, 141–49, 156, 157, 166, 173–74, 199–200 disruption caused by, vii, viii, 3, 4, 14, 60–78, 204, 231, 261–89, 296 economic impact of, vii–xi, 3, 12, 14, 60–62, 66, 72, 78, 159–61, 230, 231, 234–35, 237, 246–48, 261–89, 298–99 ecosystem of, 12, 33, 57, 64, 65, 72, 75, 77, 78, 101, 107, 132, 134–35, 152–53, 154, 158–59, 163, 165, 166, 178, 179, 182, 187, 193, 200, 212, 216, 219, 225, 262, 272, 275, 278 efficiencies of, 7–8, 10, 17, 18–20, 47–48, 60, 63, 69, 71, 72–73, 139–40, 181, 186–87, 191–92, 208, 257, 263–64, 269, 284–85, 286 externalities of, 33, 162, 163, 164, 181, 182, 229–34, 242, 257, 260, 287 fees charged by, 9, 10, 37–38, 73, 82, 106–8, 110, 113–27, 169–70, 194, 225–26, 244, 262–63, 296, 299 financial valuation of, 16–18, 33, 60–61, 79, 126 funding of, ix, 16–18, 23, 40, 51, 52–53, 92, 96, 102, 106, 111, 184–86, 276–77 future trends in, 261–89 global impact of, 104, 111, 205, 246–48, 261, 272–74 glossary for, 295–300 growth of, viii, 3–4, 14, 15, 20, 22–24, 34, 59, 76, 81–86, 97, 99–109, 145, 174, 175, 187–88, 195–99, 203–5, 230, 239–53, 259–60, 297 infrastructure of, 64, 73, 134–35, 141–46, 205, 209–10, 298 intermediation of, 68–69, 71–72, 78, 161–62, 170–71, 298 inversion by, 11–12, 15, 32–33, 211 launching of, vii, viii, 11–14, 58–59, 79–105, 88–99, 112–15, 298 layered interactions of, 49–51, 53, 54, 59, 71–72, 144–45, 169 leadership in, 33, 106–7, 189, 201, 220–21, 235, 259–60, 286–89 leverage by, 103, 206–7, 228, 263–64 management of, 10–18, 24–25, 79–109, 118–19, 121, 126–28, 134–47, 136, 152–59, 164–67, 176–203, 211, 212, 222–23, 296, 298 marketing of, 14, 19, 25, 52–53, 72, 73–74, 84–85, 100, 101, 105, 183–84, 186, 209–10, 267 match function in, 44, 47–49, 59, 187, 189–92, 193, 194–95, 202, 223, 297, 298 as nation-states, 158–61 network effects in, 16–34, 44–51, 65, 68, 78, 90–91, 108–23, 126, 128, 151, 186, 188, 196, 202, 206, 210–18, 224–34, 247–48, 257, 260, 287, 295–300 off-platform interactions and, 87, 116, 117–18, 213–15, 223–28, 250–51, 256, 297, 299, 300 outside contributors to, 10–11, 14, 74, 91–92, 103–4, 111, 119, 127, 130–33, 133, 148–49, 154–56, 173–75, 178, 189, 199–200, 206–10, 216, 219, 221, 227, 228, 240–41, 295, 296 pipelines vs., 6–10, 35, 42, 45, 46, 58, 63–68, 73–77, 89, 101, 105, 110, 123, 183–87, 220–21, 231, 258, 264, 297, 298 producers in, viii, 6, 7, 12, 19, 25–51, 60–66, 71, 87, 90–94, 101, 107–21, 125, 134, 135, 149–52, 187–92, 196–98, 203, 209–10, 212, 218–20, 223, 275, 285, 295–99 profit margins of, ix, 33, 61, 130–31, 138–41, 143, 148, 188, 197, 208–9, 215, 220, 225, 231, 233, 242, 259–60, 284, 285, 287, 296 pull-based process in, 44, 45–49, 59, 84, 86, 89, 99–100, 105, 187, 189, 223, 299 push-based process in, 84, 85, 97, 105 re-architecting of, 57–58 regulation of, 166, 199, 225, 227, 229–60, 239, 263, 274, 281–83, 287, 289 revenues of, 3, 16–18, 81–82, 83, 87, 102, 106–27, 138–41, 143, 144, 157–58, 184–88, 194, 215, 225, 285, 287 revolution in, 5, 6–15, 261–89 risk assessment and management in, 77, 117, 154–56, 162, 165–66, 170, 175–76, 180, 182, 192–93, 232–33, 237–38, 299 sales volume of, 25, 42–44, 82–83, 115–16, 157, 163, 169–70, 183–84, 186, 196, 218 scalability of, 7–8, 18–20, 24–26, 29, 34, 35, 65, 68, 71, 74, 85, 167, 206, 247–48, 262, 298 social impact of, 163, 164–65, 169, 174, 229–60, 239, 280–81, 286–89 strategies for, 204–28 transparency of, 121, 164, 166, 176–79, 182, 243, 253–56, 260 user base of, 58–59, 81–85, 86, 89–99, 118–19, 145–46, 165, 184–86, 190, 203, 215, 218–19, 222–23, 224, 295, 299 PlayStation, 94, 139, 178, 211 PlayStation 3, 139 PlayStation Portable (PSP), 178, 211 PlayStation PSP-2000, 211 “popular in your network,” 197 pornography, 67, 88, 133–34, 152, 164, 167 Porter, Michael, 207–8, 210, 213, 219 positive cross-side effects, 30, 34, 295 positive externalities, 163, 233, 287 positive feedback, 21, 82–83 positive network effects, 17, 20, 26, 28, 29–30, 32–33, 65, 78, 187, 196, 202, 225, 287, 298 positive same-side effects, 29–30, 34, 298 premium listings, 120–21 pre-roll advertisements, 223 prices, pricing: agricultural, 42–44, 60 effects of, 22, 23, 34, 298 fixing of, 169–70, 227, 240–43, 251, 252–53 free (freemium), viii, 22, 108–10, 111, 125–27, 254–55, 258 levels of, 163, 208, 232, 260, 262, 272–73, 286 predatory, 241–43, 258 strategies for, viii, 60, 69–71, 109–10, 115, 208 surge, 252–53 variable, 272–73 printing, 66, 109, 284 privacy and security issues, 79–80, 146, 159, 163, 171–73, 230, 243–48, 260, 285 privacy laws, 247–48 privatization, 232–33, 238 production: costs of, 224–25 efficiencies of, 18–19 evangelism strategy for, 96–97, 105 fraud in, 196–97 openness of, 149–52 products: design and development of, 219–20 distribution of, 19, 64, 186, 209–10 launches of, 52–53 lines of, 178–79 name spelling of, 161–62, 170–71 optimization of, 12, 254 services substitutions for, 207, 208 professional services, 8, 39, 50, 51, 73, 96, 103–4, 111, 117–18, 184–86, 190, 209–10, 218–19, 279–81, 289 Project Homeless Connect, 282 property ownership, 70–71, 124 property rentals, 1–2, 8–9, 10, 12, 64, 67, 101, 111, 142–43, 198, 224, 229–33, 236, 253, 287 proprietary model, 136, 137–39, 140, 146–49, 154–56, 240–43 prostitution, 165, 231 public good, 163, 169, 174, 230, 256–60, 280–81 public relations, 85, 105, 229–30 publishing industry, 7, 10, 63, 64, 67, 68, 71–72, 204, 208, 210, 231, 242–43, 244, 251, 262 QQ social network, 217 Quirky, 47 Quora, 30, 36, 68, 71–72, 93, 103 railroads, 209, 225 random access memory (RAM), 56, 57, 58 Rangaswami, J.

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee
Published 23 May 2016

As we mentioned in chapter 6, one approach to attaining the critical mass necessary for a viable matchmaker is to start out as a single-sided enterprise. Palm was essentially a single-sided company when it launched the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA).5 It avoided the problem of attracting app developers to a pioneering device by developing and installing a suite of apps itself. When the Palm Pilot became successful, Palm was able to become a multisided platform by attracting third-party app developers and hardware manufacturers. In retailing, single-sided firms clearly have more control over their customers’ experience, but they pay for it by having to raise more capital and incur higher operating costs.

…

See also critical mass; ignition money side of the platform, 33–34, 93–94 Monster, 50, 124 Motorola, 113, 116 M-PESA, 164, 167–181, 205 additional services in, 178–180 critical mass for, 170–171 economic development and, 180–181 how it works, 170 ignition at, 174–178 pricing in, 173 M-Shwari, 178–179 MSN, 82 multi-homing, 28 multisided platforms building, 35–37 challenges of, 9 communication and trust in, 58–61 as communities, 137 critical issues to address in, 36–37 critical mass for, 9–12, 14, 68, 69–83 definition of, 8 designing, 35–37 differentiation in, 28 discovery of/research on, 14–17 economic influence of, 205–206 economic rules and, 1–2, 12–14 evaluating new/potential, 149–164 examples of, 17–18 foundational, 40 friction reduction by, 55–68 future of, 197–206 governance of, 135–148 groups connected by, 1 growth/prominence of, 37–51 history of, 2–3, 12–14, 39–40, 198, 199–201 how many sides to have in, 109–110 identifying, 18–19 ignition of, 35–37, 68–83 pioneering, 37 pricing in, 85–100 retail transformed by, 183–196 technology in turbocharging, 19–20, 39–51 thick markets and, 30 traditional economic rules and, 1–2 value creation and division in, 57–58 MySpace, 28, 74, 138 governance of, 146–148 Video, 82 near-field communication (NFC) chips, 158, 159, 160–161, 162, 163 Netflix, 105, 191, 192 network effects, 21–31 behavioral externalities and, 136–140 creative destruction and, 49 definition of, 21 demand interdependency and, 32–33 direct, 22–25, 29, 137 first-mover advantages and, 23–24 indirect, 25–30, 136–137, 203 mastering, 27–30 number of platform sides and, 109–110 positive and negative, 22–23, 29 pricing and, 32 on shopping malls, 193 value creation/division and, 57–58 newspapers advertising in, 200–201 creative destruction and, 50 pricing, 94, 96, 99–100 pricing of, 32 New York Times, 184, 192–193 Nokia, 111, 112, 118 omnichannel retailing, 194–196 Open Handset Alliance (OHA), 115–116 open source licensing, 115–116 OpenTable, 7–8, 9–14 creative destruction and, 50 critical mass for, 9–12 ecosystem for, 103–104 fee structure of, 10, 13–14, 82, 90, 95 friction solved by, 57, 152 ignition strategy at, 79, 80, 82, 155 network effects at, 21, 25 no-show policy, 144 table management system, 10 thickness of market, 30 time to reach ignition, 164 two-sided platform of, 16–17 operating systems. See computer operating systems opportunistic behavior, 139 Orange, 112 Owings Mills Mall, 184, 192–193 Page, Larry, 114 Palm Pilot, 104 participants Apple Pay, 157–164 attracting, 155–156 getting the right ones, 30, 124–125 governing interaction among, 37, 135–148 in M-PESA, 172–173 payment systems. See credit/payment cards fleet cards, 86–92, 98–99 mobile, 58, 149–150, 156–164 M-PESA, 164, 167–181 PayPal, 80–81 PayPal, 80–82 personal computers, 19, 35 microchips, 40–41 operating systems, 43–44 pioneering platforms, 37 checklist for, 150–155 retail creative destruction and, 181–196 “Platform Competition in Two-Sided Markets” (Rochet & Tirole), 15 platforms, 16–17 foundational, 40 multi-homing with, 28 reseller, 107–108 sizing, 124–126 vertically integrated, 106–107 PriceGrabber, 186 price levels, 91–93 Priceline, 12 price structures, 91–93 pricing, 19, 30–35, 36, 85–100 access charges/usage fees, 94–95 assessment for, 151, 153–154 in B2B exchanges, 66 balancing interests in, 31–32, 35, 87–89 at Diners Club, 13 free, 93–94 ignition and, 82 maintaining optimal, 98–100 money side, 33–34, 93–94 new rules for, 96–98 at OpenTable, 10, 13–14 price level vs. price structure in, 91–93 sensitivity to, 96 single-sided vs. multisided, 89–91 subsidy side, 33–34, 93–94 traditional economics on, 15 printing press, 200–201 procurement, 67–68 profit, 57–58, 76.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

Levchin’s cryptography idea was a little vague, but Thiel, who soon joined the company as its CEO, refined it: Confinity would store money—essentially in the form of digital IOU notes—on devices like the Palm Pilot, which seemed to be on the verge of taking over the world. With the necessary password, the infrared of one Palm Pilot could beam the note, linked to a credit card or bank account, to another Palm Pilot, using a software application called PayPal. It was a cumbersome and perhaps pointless service, but at a time when venture capitalists were pouring money into kibu.com, an online community for teenage girls, and DigiScents, which tried to transmit smells through the Web, the idea’s weirdness made it seem innovative and therefore attractive.

…

Levchin and his engineers stayed up coding for five nights to get ready for the announcement, which took place in front of a dozen journalists at Buck’s, a restaurant in Woodside that was already a legendary site of big Silicon Valley deals. As the TV cameras rolled, venture capitalists from Nokia successfully beamed their preloaded millions from one Palm Pilot to another. “Every one of your friends will become like a virtual, miniature ATM,” Thiel told the press. His strategy was to scale up as quickly as possible, in the belief that the key to beating competitors on the Internet was viral growth. Each new customer was given ten dollars for signing up and another ten dollars for every referral.

…

Confinity kept track of users via a counter linked to its database that the company called the World Domination Index—every few minutes, a pop-up box on company computers would refresh the number with the sound of a ding—and by November 1999, just a few weeks after its launch, it was growing by 7 percent a day. But it became clear that setting up an account on the PayPal website, which enabled transactions with anyone who had an e-mail address, was a far more popular way to send money than trying to get Palm Pilots to mate on a restaurant table (the mobile Internet was in its earliest, glitch-ridden stage). The e-mail idea seemed so simple that it would be only a matter of time before competitors figured it out. The pace grew even more frantic, with hundred-hour workweeks. The most dangerous competitor, X.com, founded by a South African immigrant named Elon Musk, was located just four blocks up University Avenue.

The Pleasure of My Company
by Steve Martin
Published 1 Oct 2003

Clarissa the shrink-in-training clinked three times on my door with her Coke can. The knock of someone whose hands are full. The door opened on its own, and I remembered not hearing it latch when I entered earlier with my small sack of earplugs. Clarissa, balancing a cell phone, briefcase, sweater (pointless in today’s weather), Palm Pilot, soda can, and wrapped baby gift (she hadn’t wanted to leave it in the car), closed the door and made a purse-induced leathery squeak as she crossed the room. I liked her outfit: a maroon skirt topped by a white blouse with a stiffly starched front piece that was vaguely heart-shaped, giving her the appearance of an Armani-clad nurse.

…

He even worked in the numbers 15 and 14, which is the year the print was made, 1514. I showed the etching to Clarissa and she seemed spellbound; she touched the page, lightly moving her fingers across it as if she were reading Braille. While her hand remained in place she raised her eyes to the wall where I had tacked up my square. She then went to her Filofax and pulled out a Palm Pilot, tapping in the numbers, checking my math. I knew that magic squares were not to be grasped with calculators; it is their mystery and symmetry that thrill. But I didn’t say anything, choosing to let her remain in the mathematical world. Satisfied that it all worked out, she stuck the instrument back into its leatherette case and turned to me.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane
Published 11 Apr 2004

The need for context means that present-day software can be programmed to recognize only relatively straightforward patterns—patterns that do not present serious perceptual problems or require vast amounts of contextual knowledge in order to be identified. ImageChecker is neural net software that scans digitized mammograms for patterns associ- WHY PEOPLE STILL MATTER City Time Los Angeles Wed 6:00 am New York Wed 9:00 am 27 Sydney 11:00pm London Wed 2:00 pm Paris Wed 3:00 pm Alphabetic Characters Numeric Characters Figure 2.1. The Palm Pilot. ated with cancer. As with all neural networks, ImageChecker must first be trained on previously analyzed mammograms to “learn” which visual patterns to flag.16 Once trained, the software provides an effective complement to the radiologist’s work. As one clinician describes it, ‘The current [computer-aided detection] algorithms are extremely good at detecting suspicious calcium deposits, which is one of the signs of breast cancer, but they are not as good at detecting subtle masses.

…

If we take a step back from aircraft production, we see how the BoeingCATIA story illustrates a final computer-supported strategy—the creation of new, information-intensive products including CATIA itself, an important revenue source for Dassault Systèmes. CATIA, CDs, cell phones, DVDs, geo-positioning devices, the modern echocardiograph machine, the Eurex Trading network, complex financial derivatives, and the Palm Pilot are all successful products that computers have made possible. WHY JOBS CHANGE As the Boeing-CATIA example illustrates, computers change work through a three-step process. The first step occurred when Boeing purchased CATIA to pursue particular competitive strategies that were impractical without computers.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

The first “machinery of freedom” Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Noseck designed was PayPal. In his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Thiel notes proudly, “Of the six people who started PayPal, four had built bombs in high school.” Originally called Confinity, the company was started in December of 1998 as a payment system for the Palm Pilot handheld computer. The ambitious philosophy of PayPal is clearly stated in early remarks from Thiel: “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means,” he once told his staff, “because if they try the people will switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.”

…

Thiel says, “It’s always a red flag when entrepreneurs talk about getting 1% of a $100 billion market.” He wanted to invest in monopolies, not competitive businesses. 2. Build businesses that have “network effects.” Thiel’s first two major investments, PayPal and Facebook, both benefit from having millions of users who want to connect with each other. When PayPal was just a payment system for Palm Pilot, it was a failure. As soon as it became the standard payment system for eBay, it got the network-effect wind at its back. 3. Economies of scale are critical. Google is pretty much unassailable in search-engine advertising because it has huge economies of scale. This leads to the conclusion that there will be very few winners in each sector of tech.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations
by Thomas L. Friedman
Published 22 Nov 2016

In late 1997, Paul Jacobs, who later succeeded his father as CEO, had a brainstorm. One day he came into a staff meeting in San Diego, took a Qualcomm cell phone and taped it together with a Palm Pilot, and told his team: “This is what we’re going to do.” The idea was to try to create a device that combined the Palm Pilot—at that time basically a combination calendar, Filofax, address book, and day planner, with note-taking capabilities and a wireless Web-based text browser—with a 3G cell phone. That way when you called up a phone number in the Palm Pilot address book, you could just click on it and the cell phone would dial it. And with the same device you could surf the Internet.

…

Norman, Greg Norman, Jeff North American Free Trade Agreement North Korea; nuclear program of Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ) Noyce, Robert nuclear testing moratorium nuclear weapons Nutch (search engine) Obama, Barack; foreign policy of; gay marriage and Obama, Michelle Obama, Sasha and Malia obesity Occupy Central movement oceans, acidification of Odanabi.com oil prices Olin College of Engineering 1G wireless networks 123D Catch ONOS (Open Network Operating System) On the Origin of Species (Darwin) open-source community open-source software OpenStack opinion writing, craft of Opportunity@Work Oracle SQL Orenstein, Peggy Origin of Wealth, The (Beinhocker) Ornstein, Norm Oromo people Osofsky, Justin Ottoman Empire outsourcing ownership; political innovation and; resilience and ozone layer Packard, Wayne Pakistan Palantir Technologies Paleolithic era Palestine Palestine Liberation Organization Palmer, Arnold Palm Pilot Paprocki, Loren Parenti, Christian Paris climate agreement (2016) Park Nicollet Health Services passwords patents, technological change and patience pausing, importance of Pawlenty, Tim PayPal; Working Capital of Peace Corps, expansion of Pearl Harbor, Japanese attack on peer-to-peer payment system Periscope (app) Perry, Matthew Persian Gulf personal drones Personal Genetics Program pesticides, overuse of Peter Hobart Elementary School Petritsch, Wolfgang phase changes, supernova and Philippines Phillips, Richard phosphorus “Physics in Finance: Trading at the Speed of Light” (Nature) “ping” command PINs Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley (Clodd) Pires, Clint Placed Inc.

Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America
by Barbara Ehrenreich
Published 2 Jan 2003

The ideal case—and I've read that the technology for this is just around the corner—would be the consumer whose Palm Pilot displays the menu and prices for every restaurant or store he or she passes. Even without such technological assistance, affluent job hunters expect to study the salary-benefit packages offered by their potential employers, watch the financial news to find out if these packages are in line with those being offered in other regions or fields, and probably do a little bargaining before taking a job. But there are no Palm Pilots, cable channels, or Web sites to advise the low-wage job seeker. She has only the help-wanted signs and the want ads to go on, and most of these coyly refrain from mentioning numbers.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

The output of “black box” artificial intelligence tools can’t ever be predicted. So they can never be truly and verifiably “safe.” * * * But they’ll likely play a big role in AGI systems. Many researchers today believe pattern recognition—what Rosenblatt’s Perceptron aimed for—is our brain’s chief tool for intelligence. The inventor of the Palm Pilot and Handspring Treo, Jeff Hawkins, pioneered handwriting recognition with ANNs. His company, Numenta, aims to crack AGI with pattern recognition technology. Dileep George, once Numenta’s Chief Technology Officer, now heads up Vicarious Systems, whose corporate ambition is stated in their slogan: We’re Building Software that Thinks and Learns Like a Human.

…

Well, with some notable exceptions, that’s more or less the state of affairs right now, and even so, AGI research is moving steadily ahead. Consider how Goertzel’s OpenCog stays afloat. Parts of its architecture are up and running, and busily analyzing biological data and solving power grid problems, for a fee. Profits go back into research-and-development for OpenCog. Numenta, Inc., brainchild of Jeff Hawkins, the creator of the Palm Pilot and Treo, earns its living by working inside electrical power supplies to anticipate failures. For about a decade, Peter Voss developed his AGI company, Adaptive AI, in “stealth” mode, widely lecturing about AGI but not revealing how he planned to tackle it. Then in 2007 he launched Smart Action, a company that uses Adaptive AI’s technology to empower Virtual Agents.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Doto Get More of It
by Kelly McGonigal
Published 1 Dec 2011

If the world doesn’t end without you watching every private and global crisis unfold (prediction: It won’t), consider cutting out mindless consumption of these media. THE WHAT - THE - HELL EFFECT: WHY GUILT DOESN’T WORK Before he ordered a Guinness from the bartender, a forty-year-old man pulled out his Palm Pilot. First beer, 9:04 p.m. His intention to drink? Two beers, tops. Several miles away, a young woman arrived at a fraternity house. Ten minutes later, she typed into her Palm Pilot: One shot of vodka. The party was just starting! These drinkers were part of a study by psychologists and addiction researchers at the State University of New York and the University of Pittsburgh. A group of 144 adults, ages eighteen to fifty, had been given handheld personal computers to keep track of their drinking.

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler
Published 7 Nov 2017

Instead, we compare things in the same category—cars to cars, phones to phones, computers to computers, widgets to widgets. Imagine we bought the first iPhone, which was the only smartphone at the time. There was no similar product to compare it to, so what would we compare it to? (Yes, Palm Pilot and BlackBerry were around back then, but the iPhone was so far ahead as to be a completely different category of product. Also, Palm Pilot? No thanks, Grandpa). How would we figure out if it was worth the cost? When Apple first introduced the iPhone, the price was $600. A few weeks later, the company reduced the price to $400. That created a new category to which to compare the iPhone—the first iPhone, which was, in fact, the identical iPhone at a different price.

Intern: A Doctor's Initiation
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 26 Dec 2007

In closing, he offered this thought: “Keep a simple value system. Work out what things in life you care about, the beliefs you hold near and dear, and stick to them. You are about to go through a most tumultuous time. What are you willing to accept? What are you willing to fight for?” I wrote it down in my Palm Pilot: Figure out a value system. Arriving in New York a month later, I still didn’t have a system down, but I did have some vague ideas about the kind of doctor I hoped to become. CHAPTER FOUR bogus doctor Buy a long stethoscope. —ADVICE FROM A MEDICAL SCHOOL PROFESSOR I spent the first morning of internship running errands.

…

Despite any misgivings I had about medicine, the uniform conferred authority, cachet, membership in an exclusive guild. I stuffed the pockets with useful paraphernalia: a Pocket Pharmacopeia, a Sanford Guide to Antimicrobial Therapy, a Facts and Formulas, a Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics, a small notebook, my Palm Pilot, a few pens, a stethoscope, a reflex hammer, a tuning fork, a penlight, a small ruler, a pair of EKG calipers, and a handful of alcohol swabs. I could have added more, but my shoulders were starting to sag. I checked myself out in the mirror. I still looked like a medical student, not a resident, much less a doctor.

Big Dead Place: Inside the Strange and Menacing World of Antarctica
by Nicholas Johnson
Published 31 May 2005

A few days earlier our manager had emailed us reminding us to talk with him first before bringing up anything new at the meeting. Chairs were brought for them from the office, we introduced ourselves one by one, and said where we were from and how long we had been in The Program. Erick Chiang took notes on a pad of paper, and Tom Yelvington used a Palm Pilot. Erick asked what we thought would improve the Waste Operation. Suggestions abounded, most of them involving the replacement or improvement of capital equipment, which would probably be the proposal of many departments; budgets must be met, and none of us expected that Waste would take priority, since our equipment was adequate for the most part.

…

He said that a thirdparty consultant had been hired, and their task was to make sure that wages were the same as market wages in CONUS for equivalent job descriptions. Someone asked him, “Will they take into account that we work a 54-hour week instead of a 40-hour week?” “Now that’s a good question. To tell you the truth—I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m going to find out. And I’m going to get back to you on that.” He scribbled on his Palm Pilot. About a year later, when the “compensation structure” review was completed, we received an email from Tom Yelvington in Denver saying that no significant changes to wages were needed in order to attract and retain talented employees. I sent a query up the chain of command asking again whether the compensation structure survey was based on a 40- or 54-hour workweek.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
by William R. Easterly
Published 1 Aug 2002

I can also access the Internet, another new technology, and read thousands of economics papers and check other information web sites. I did a lot of research for this book over the web. I can get the e-mail addresses and telephone numbers of other economists from the web. I store those addresses and phone numbers on a Sharp electronic organizer that is today nearly obsolete compared to the Palm Pilot but did not exist at all a few years ago. Thecoffee I guzzle as I work is Starbucks’ high-quality coffee, another product unavailable a few years ago. I used tobe limited in my supply of good coffee to what I could get on occasional trips to Bogoti, Colombia; otherwise I was stuck with the horrors of the grocery store brand.

…

Demonstrators at the Prague2000 annual meeting of the IMF and World Bank threw rocks and Molotov cocktails to express their disenchantment with globaleconomic growth. The most obvious vested interest that has an incentive to oppose creatively destructivegrowthisthe groupworkingwiththeold technologies. I resist the new Palm Pilot palmtop computer because I have all my telephone numbers in the now obsolete Sharp Wizard electronic organizer. More generally, there will bea coalition of workers and corporations in the old industries pleading for protection against the new technology. When the newtechnology is coming from abroad, this often translates into protection against competing imports made with the new, moreefficient technology.

The Smartest Investment Book You'll Ever Read: The Simple, Stress-Free Way to Reach Your Investment Goals
by Daniel R. Solin
Published 7 Nov 2006

I give some examples of this erroneous advice in the next chapter, which is aptly entitled "Financial Pornography," because that is what this "advice" is. Even if you find the financial media entertaining, you should ignore everything you read in the magazines and news~ papers, everything you see and hear on the television and everything that you pay to have pumped into your Palm Pilot or BlackBerry that purportS to tell you where the markets are headed or whether or not a particular stock or fund should be bought or sold. The financial media (with rare exceptions, such as Canadian economic journalist Jonathan Chevreau, The Wall Street jQumafs Jonathan Clements, and well~respec t ed American economic journalist Jane Bryant Quinn) are part of the problem.

Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age
by Duncan J. Watts
Published 1 Feb 2003

Networks of social information, moreover, are important not just because they help us make better individual decisions but also because they allow things that have caught on in one setting to spill over into another. Since this kind of spillover is critical to the dynamics of a cascade, social networks are central to the notion of a little thing becoming big. When 3Com released its first version of the Palm Pilot, only the most radical aficionados of technology bought them. This small group of people, mostly engineers and technology workers in Silicon Valley and the encompassing Bay Area of northern California, didn’t need anyone else’s say-so in order to have the newest new thing. What they really cared about was the innovation itself—they just had to have it, regardless of what anyone else thought.

…

And the presence of these multiple active influences is sufficient to exceed the thresholds of even quite stable nodes, so they start to activate as well. This event, when it happens, is what the business consultant and writer Geoffrey Moore calls crossing the chasm, referring to the leap a successful innovation (like our example of Palm Pilots from before) needs to make from its initial community of early adopters to the much larger general population. At the lower boundary, there is no such chasm to be crossed, just early adopting clusters of different sizes. Only at the upper boundary is it important not only that the innovator find the early adopters but that the early adopters be in a position to exert their collective influence on the early and late majorities.

The Future of Technology
by Tom Standage
Published 31 Aug 2005

Being chained to your desktop is out: mobility is in. The titan of the computer industry has set its sights on an entirely new market. It is not alone. Dell, Hewlett-Packard and other computer-makers have diversified into handheld computers, which increasingly have wireless connectivity and even full-fledged mobile telephony built in. The Palm Pilot, originally an electronic organiser, has metamorphosed into the Treo, a far more elaborate device which also incorporates a mobile phone, e-mail and wireless internet access. As the computer industry tries to cram pcs into pocket-sized devices, the mobile-phone industry has arrived at the same point – but from the opposite direction.

…

O’Neil, David 73 O’Neil, John 28, 30 OneSaf 197 online banks 37 online shopping viii, 37 open standards 7, 10, 22–7, 31, 38, 43, 85–7, 115, 118–19, 152 operating systems 9, 10, 23–5, 31, 38, 85, 101, 109 operators, mobile phones 157–61, 162–9 Opsware 8, 15 optical-character recognition 121 Oracle 5, 20–2, 33, 38, 39–40, 46, 56, 62, 86, 243 Orange 157–8 organic IT 13–16, 88 original design manufacturers (ODMs), mobile phones 156–7 O’Roarke, Brian 192 O’Roarke, John 96 Orr, Scott 187 orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) 212–13, 215–17 INDEX Otellini, Paul 11, 95 outshored developments, software 38, 115, 138–9 outsourcing viii, 9, 19–20, 22, 38, 68–9, 71, 72, 88–92, 112–46, 158–60 see also globalisation barriers 121–2, 143 concepts 112–46 costs 112–24, 131–5, 140–3 cultural issues 122, 142 Europe 140–6 historical background 119–20, 125–6, 133 India 38, 109, 112–15, 119–22, 125–35, 137–8, 140–6 legal agreements 121–4 mobile phones 155–6, 158–60 opportunities 144–6 protectionists 140–6 reasons 123–4, 143 services 113–30 social outsourcing 143 “overshoot” stage, industries 9, 10–11, 109 overview vii–x, 6–7 Ovi, Alessandro 275–6 Oxford GlycoSciences 243 P Pacific Cycle 140 Page, Larry 9 Pait, Rob 207 Palladium 74, 76 Palm Pilot 150 Palmisano, Samuel 22 Paltrow, Gwyneth 173 Panasonic 156 Papadopoulos, Greg 14, 78–9, 83–4, 91 Papadopoulos, Stelios 237 Parker, Andrew 143 Parks Associates 96, 203 Parr, Doug 319 particulate filters 296–7 passwords 53, 58–61, 67, 96–7 patents, nanotechnology 321–6, 329 Patriot Act, America 35 PCs 9–16, 78–81, 82–110, 151, 171–3, 202–18 see also digital homes; hardware commoditisation issues 9–16, 132–5, 203 complexity issues 78–81, 82–110 screen sizes 100–1 UWB 214–18 Wi-Fi 209–18 PDAs see personal digital assistants Peck, Art 203 PentaSafe Security 60 Pentium chips 199–200 PeopleSoft 39, 86, 119, 126, 132 Perez, Carlota 5–6, 134 performance issues see also processing power; returns cars 291–8 Cell chips 198–200 cost links 29–30 Perlegen 244 personal digital assistants (PDAs) 151, 277, 279 see also handheld computers personal video recorders (PVRs) 203, 205–6 perverse incentives, security issues 61–2 Pescatore, John 55 Pfizer 69, 240, 247, 312, 315 pharmaceutical companies 239–40, 241–50, 312 PHAs 260 Philippines 130 Philips 120, 217 “phishing” 76, 89 phonograph 82, 84 photo-voltaic cells 280 photos ix, 78, 95, 101, 179–83 Physiome 248 Picardi, Tony 79 Pick, Adam 156 Pink Floyd 225 Piper, H. 292 Pittsburgh convention centre 304 Pivotal 187 plasma screens 230–2 plastics 238–9, 259–64 PlayStation 191–2, 199–200, 206–7 plug-and-play devices 78 plug-in hybrid cars 295–6 Poland 120 police involvement, security breaches 72 polio 265 politics 32–5 see also governments Pollard, John 157 pollution 275, 296–7, 299–304, 319 Pop Idol (TV show) 225 Pope, Alexander 267 Porsche 292 “post-technology” period, IT industry vii, 5–7 Powell, Michael 98, 206 power grids 233, 285–90 PowerPoint presentations 4–5, 107 Predictive Networks 337 Presley, Elvis 225 prices, downward trends viii, 4–7 PricewaterhouseCoopers 38 printers 78, 96 privacy issues 27, 34, 42–8, 179–83 see also security... mobile phones 179–83 processing power see also computer chips 353 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY exponential growth 4–7, 8–14 Proctor, Donald 106 Prodi, Romano 274–5 profits, future prospects 7, 17–18, 37–40 proprietary technology 24, 26, 80, 86 protectionists, outsourcing 140–6 proteins, biotechnology 241–64 protocols, complexity issues 86 Proxim 210 Prozac 315 PSA Peugeot Citroën 293, 296–7 PSP, Sony 191–3 public accounts 44 Pullin, Graham 177–8 PVRs see personal video recorders Q Qualcomm 164 quantum dots 312, 317, 322, 325 R radiation fears, mobile phones 176 radio 34–5, 36, 39, 94–5, 108, 155–61, 164, 209–18, 223 see also wireless... chips 155–61, 164 “garbage bands” 209–10, 215 music industry 223 spectrum 34–5, 94–5, 209–18 UWB 96–7, 214–19 Radjou, Navi 333–4 railway age vii, 5, 7, 23, 36, 39, 134 Raleigh, Greg 211 RAND 195 rationalisation exercises 31 RCA 108–9, 206, 208, 220, 315 real-world skills, gaming comparisons 194–7 RealNetworks 203 rechargeable batteries 280–4 Recourse Technologies 62–3 Reed, Philip 177 regulations 35, 44, 209–10, 326–9 see also legal issues relational databases 101–2 reliability needs viii, 42–8 religion 19 renewable energy 275–6, 286, 289, 300, 310, 315 ReplayTV 205 Research in Motion (RIM) 152–3 resistance problems, employees 31 return on investment (ROI) 30–1 returns 20, 29–31, 329 see also performance issues risk 20, 30, 329 revenue streams biotechnology 237–8, 241–2 354 gaming 189–90, 191 GM 251–2 mobile phones 151, 154–5, 157, 162–3, 165–6, 174 nanotechnology 321–6 revolutionary ideas vii–viii, 5–7, 13–14, 36–40, 80–4, 107–10, 116, 134, 151–3, 198–200, 236–40, 326–9 RFID radio tags 39, 94–5 Rhapsody 203 Ricardo 296–7 Riley, James, Lieutenant-Colonel 195–7 RIM see Research in Motion ringtones 165–6 RISC chips 200 risk assessments 70–4, 76 attitudes 18 handling methods 71 insurance policies 71–3 management 70–4 mitigation 71–3 outsourced risk 71, 72, 88–92 returns 20, 30, 329 security issues 42–8, 49–69, 70–4 RNA molecules 241–2, 249–50, 265 Robinson, Shane 15–16 robotics x, 233, 316, 332–5 Roco, Mihail 309 Rodgers, T.J. 32 Rofheart, Martin 216–17 Rogers, Richard 300 ROI see return on investment Rolls, Steve 121 Romm, Joseph 298 Roomba 332, 334–5 “root kit” software 51 Rose, John 226 Roslin Institute 256 Roy, Raman 125–8 Russia 115, 130, 140, 142, 145, 319 Ryan, John 312 S S700 mobile phone 171 Saffo, Paul 83–4, 103, 182 Salesforce.com 19, 20, 84, 91–2, 109 Samsung 158–60, 181, 208, 217, 231, 277 Santa Fe Institute 39 SAP 22, 38, 86, 119, 126, 132 satellite television 205 Saudi Arabia 180 scandals 28 scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) 306 SCC see Sustainable Computing Consortium Schadler, Ted 95, 97 Schainker, Robert 285, 289 INDEX Scherf, Kurt 96–7 Schmelzer, Robert 91 Schmidt, Eric 9, 35, 36–8 Schmidt, Nathan 66 Schneider National 29–31 Schneier, Bruce 43, 58, 61–2, 65, 70, 73–4 schools, surveillance technology 181 Schwartz, John 46 Schwinn 140, 143 Scott, Tony 43, 68–9 screen sizes 100–1 screws 23–4 Seagate Technology 207 seamless computing 96–7 Sears, Roebuck & Co 36 Securities and Exchange Commission 321 security issues viii, 25–7, 32–5, 42–8, 49–74, 86–7 see also privacy... airport approach 68–9 anti-virus software 50–1, 60, 67–8 biometric systems 60, 64–5, 71, 74 breaches 43–4, 46, 49–52, 62, 72–3 civil liberties 74 concepts 42–74, 86–7 costs 45–6, 50–1, 62, 70–4 employees 58–63, 69 encryption 53–4 firewalls 51–3, 58, 60, 62, 66–8, 71, 86–7 hackers 4, 43, 47, 49, 51–3, 58–63 handheld computers 67–8 honeypot decoys 62–3 human factors 57–63, 69 identity management 69 IDSs 51, 53–4, 62, 87 impact assessments 70–1, 76 insider attacks 62–3 insurance policies 71–3 internet 35, 42–8, 49–57, 61–2, 66, 66–7, 71, 73–6, 179–83 job vacancies 46 joint ventures 67 major threats 35, 42, 43, 47, 49–63, 66–9 management approaches 60–3, 69 Microsoft 54–6, 72, 74, 76 misconceptions 46–8 networks 42–8, 49–65, 66–9 passwords 53, 58–61, 67, 96–7 patches 56–7, 76 perverse incentives 61–2 police involvement 72 risk assessments 70–4, 76 standards 71–3 terrorism 35, 42, 43, 50, 65, 74, 75–6, 265–6 tools 49–63, 86–7 viruses 45, 47, 49–56, 59–60, 67–8, 74, 86, 89 Wi-Fi 66–7, 93 sedimentation factors 8–9, 84 segmentation issues, mobile phones 167–9 self-configuration concepts 88–9 Sellers, William 23 Seminis 254 Sendo 160 Senegal 182 September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks 35, 42, 43, 50, 65, 75 servers 9–16, 37–8, 62–3, 85–7, 132–3, 203 services industry 14, 17–22, 25–7, 31, 36–40, 80, 88–92, 109, 113–35, 203 see also web services outsourcing 113–46 session initiation protocol (SIP) 104–6 sewing machines 82, 84 SG Cowen 237 shapes, mobile phones 170–6 Shapiro, Carl 24 Sharp 156, 231, 326 shelfware phenomenon 20 Shelley, Mary 267, 269 shipping costs 121 sick building syndrome 302 Siebel 86 Siemens 120, 130, 142, 156, 159, 170, 172, 174 SightSpeed 84, 98, 103 SilentRunner 62 Silicon Valley 9, 32–40, 45–6, 54, 69, 79, 96, 98, 101, 103, 152, 313–14, 321 silk 263, 269 Simon, Herbert 336 simplicity needs 78–81, 84, 87, 88–92, 98–110 SIP see session initiation protocol Sircam virus 45, 49 Sirkin, Hal 120, 140 “six sigma” methods 128 SK 169 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 302 Sky 205 Skype 103–4, 110 Sloan School of Management, MIT 30 Slovakia 120 small screens 100 Smalley, Richard 311 smallpox 265–6 smart power grids 233, 285–90 smartcards 64, 69 smartphones 150–3, 157–61 see also mobile phones SMES devices 289 Smith Barney 37 Smith, George 307–8 Smith, Lamar 75 Smith, Vernon 17 SNP 243–4 SOAP 25–7 355 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY social issues mobile phones 177–8, 182–3 music players 220–1 social outsourcing 143 software see also information technology ASPs 19–20, 91–2, 109 bugs 20–1, 54–6 Cell chips 198–200 commoditisation issues 10–16, 25, 132–5, 159, 203 complexity issues 14–15, 78–81, 82–110, 117–22 firewalls 52–3, 58, 86–7 hackers 51–3, 58–63 Java programming language 21–2, 25, 86 management software 13–16, 21–2, 88, 117–18 mobile phones 158–9 natural-language search software 339–40 operating systems 9, 10, 23–5, 31, 38, 85, 101, 109 outsourcing 38, 115, 138–9 patches 56–7, 76 premature releases 20–1 shelfware phenomenon 20 viruses 45, 47, 49–56, 59–60, 67, 74, 89 solar power 275–6, 286, 289, 301–2, 310, 315, 325 Solectron 112–13, 119 solid-state storage media 204, 207, 219 SOMO... project, mobile phones 177–8 Sony 95, 108, 156, 191–3, 198–200, 203, 206–7, 217, 228, 231, 282–4, 332, 334, 338 Sony Ericsson 156, 158, 159–60, 171 Sony/BMG 222–3, 227, 229 Sood, Rahul 38 Sorrent 187 South Africa 309, 319, 334 South Korea 156, 158, 163–5, 167–9, 170–1, 181, 319 soyabean crops 252–4 spam 76, 89, 118 Spar, Debora 32–3 speculation vii speech recognition 102, 121, 336 SPH-V5400 mobile phone 208 Spider-Man 189–90 Spinks, David 60–1, 63 Spitzer, Eliot 223 Sprint 167–8, 180–1 SQL 53 @Stake 54 Standage, Ella 316 standards green buildings 300–4 open standards 7, 10, 22–7, 31, 38, 43, 85–7, 115, 118–19, 152 356 security issues 71–3 W-CDMA standard 163–4, 168 web services 90–1 Wi-Fi 210–13 Stanford University 82, 137 Star Wars (movie) 186 steam power ix, 5, 134 steel industry 134 steering committees 31 stem cells 268–9 Steven Winter Associates 302 Stewart, Martha 249 STM see scanning tunnelling microscope stop-start hybrid cars 293–4 storage problems, electricity 275–6, 289–90 StorageTek 85 strategy 30 stress-resistance, biotechnology 254 Studio Daniel Libeskind 302 Sturiale, Nick 45 Sun Microsystems 9, 13–15, 21–2, 25, 27, 37–8, 43, 56, 58, 78–9, 83, 85, 87, 91, 102 supercomputers 199–200 Superdome machines 21 supply chains 8, 37–40, 155 surveillance technology 35, 74, 179–83, 309 Sussex University 5, 220, 310 Sustainable Computing Consortium (SCC) 27 Sweden 109 Swiss Army-knife design, mobile phones 171–2 Swiss Re Tower, 30 St Mary Axe 299, 301–2, 304 swivel design, mobile phones 171 Symantec 39, 46, 50, 62–3, 67 Symbian 158 Symbol 210 synthetic materials 258–64, 317 systems analysts 137 T T-Mobile 167–8 Taiwan 156–7, 160 Talwar, Vikram 144 Taylor, Andy 226 Taylor, Carson 287 TCP/IP 25 TCS 132–5, 145–6 Teague, Clayton 314 TechNet 33 techniques, technology 17–18 techno-jewellery design, mobile phones 172–4 technology see also individual technologies concepts vii–x, 4–7, 17–18, 23–7, 32–3, 82–4, 134, 326–9 cultural issues 93–4, 142 INDEX geekiness problems 83–4 government links 7, 18, 27, 31–5, 43–8, 123–4, 179–83, 209–10 Luddites 327 surveillance technology 35, 74, 179–83, 309 Tehrani, Rich 105 telecommunications viii, 23, 26, 103–6, 134, 164–5 telegraph 32–3, 108 telephone systems 84, 103–6, 109–10, 212–13, 214 Telia 109 terrorism 35, 42, 43, 50, 65, 74, 75–6, 265–6 Tesco 168 Tetris 12 Texas Energy Centre 287 Texas Instruments 125–6, 217 text-messaging facilities 165, 167 Thelands, Mike 164 therapeutic antibodies 249–50, 256–7 Thiercy, Max 339–40 thin clients 102 third-generation mobile phone networks (3G) 151, 162–9, 212 Thomas, Jim 318 Thomson, Ken 59 Thornley, Tony 164 3G networks see third-generation mobile phone networks TIA see Total Information Awareness TiVo 203, 205–6 Tomb Raider (game/movie) 187–8 Toshiba 156, 198–200, 203 Total Information Awareness (TIA) 35 toxicity issues, nanotechnology 316–17, 319, 328–9 Toyota 291–5, 297, 300–1, 334 toys see also gaming robotics 334 transatlantic cable 36, 39 transistors 4–7, 8–12, 85–7, 109 see also computer chips Transmeta 313 Treat, Brad 84, 98 Tredennick, Nick 10–11 Treo 150, 153 “Trojan horse” software 51–2 True Crime (game) 187 TruSecure 52, 60, 63 TTPCom 155–6 Tuch, Bruce 210 TVs see also video recorders flat-panel displays ix, 94, 147, 202–3, 230–2, 311 hard disks 204–8 screens 202–3, 230–2 set-top boxes 203, 205–6 UWB 214–18 Wi-Fi 212–18 U UBS Warburg 31, 45, 80–1, 89, 170, 174 UDDI 25–7 ultrawideband (UWB) 96–7, 214–19 UMTS see W-CDMA standard “undershoot” stage, industries 9, 109 UNECE 332–4 Ungerman, Jerry 52 Unimate 332–3 United Airlines 27 Universal Music 222–3, 226–7 Unix 9, 25, 85, 108 USB ports 78 usernames 59 USGBC 300–2 utility companies, cyber-terrorism threats 75–6 utility factors 7, 16, 17, 19–22, 42–8 UWB see ultrawideband V V500 mobile phone 157 vaccines 265–6 Vadasz, Les 33 Vail, Tim 290 value added 5–7, 37–40, 133, 138–9 value transistors 11 van Nee, Richard 211 Varian, Hal 24 VC see venture capital Veeco Instruments 324 vendors complexity issues 84–110 consumer needs 94–7 Venter, Craig 262–3, 271 venture capital (VC) 12, 31, 45, 79, 92, 107, 126–7, 238, 308, 321–6 Verdia 254–5, 261 Veritas 39, 85 Vertex 247 vertical integration, mobile phones 156–61 Vertu brand 173–4 Viacom 224 video phone calls 84, 103–6, 164–5, 167–8 video recorders see also TVs DVRs 205–6 handheld video players 206 hard disks 204–8 PVRs 203, 205–6 Wi-Fi 212–13 video searches, Google 11 357 THE FUTURE OF TECHNOLOGY Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, America 180 video-game consoles see gaming Virgin 95, 160, 167–8 Virgin Mobile 160, 167–8 virtual private networks (VPNs) 54, 68, 86–7 virtual tissue, biotechnology 248 virtualisation concepts 15–16, 88–92 viruses 45, 47, 49–56, 59–60, 67–8, 74, 86, 89 anti-virus software 50–1, 60, 67–8 concepts 49–56, 59–60, 74 costs 50–1 double-clicking dangers 59–60 Vista Research 46, 62, 67 Vodafone 164–5 voice conversations internet 103–6 mobile phones 165–9, 171 voice mail 104–6 voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) 103–6, 167 Vonage 104, 110 VPNs see virtual private networks W W3C see World Wide Web Consortium W-CDMA standard 163–4, 168 Waksal, Sam 249 Wal-Mart 95, 114–15, 131–2, 140, 224, 228 Walkman 192 warfare AI 338 biotechnology 265–6 gaming comparisons 195–7, 339 nanotechnology 319 Warner Music 222–3, 226–7 Watson, James 236, 247, 271 web services 21–2, 25–7, 31, 80, 88–92, 109, 203 see also internet; services... complexity issues 88–92, 109 standards 90–1 Webster, Mark 211 WECA see Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance Weill, Peter 30 Welland, Mark 318 Western Union 33, 108 Westinghouse Electric 332 wheat 253 white page 99–100 Wi-Fi 34–5, 66–7, 93, 95–7, 153, 203, 209–18 concepts 209–18 forecasts 209, 212–13 historical background 209–13 hotspots 211–12 mobile phones 212 standards 210–13 358 threats 212–13 UWB 214–18 Wilkerson, John 237 Williams, Robbie 222, 226 Wilsdon, James 318 WiMax 212–13 WiMedia 213 Wimmer, Eckard 265 wind power 275–6, 286, 289–90, 302 Windows 15, 24–5, 55–6, 96, 101, 108, 152, 203 Windows Media Center 203 WinFS 101 Wipro 112, 115, 120–1, 125–9, 131–5, 138, 145–6 Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance (WECA) 211 wireless technology ix, 11, 34–5, 39, 66–7, 93, 95–7, 109–10, 147, 150–3, 167, 168–9, 171–3, 203, 209–13, 334 see also Wi-Fi Bluetooth wireless links 171–2, 173, 214–15, 218 concepts 209–13, 334 historical background 209–13 Wladawsky-Berger, Irving vii, 5, 19, 22, 25, 38–9 Wolfe, Josh 323 Wong, Leonard 195 Wood, Ben 156–7, 160, 174 Woodcock, Steven 338–9 Word 84, 107 work-life balance 80–1, 94 see also employees World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) 25 worm viruses 49–50, 59, 86, 89 Wright, Myles 118 “ws splat” 90–1 WSDL 25–7 X x-ray crystallography 247–8 Xbox 189, 206–7 Xelibri mobile phones 170, 172, 174 Xerox 108–9 XML see extensible markup language XtremeSpectrum 216 Y Y2K crisis 76, 126, 128 Yagan, Sam 229 Yanagi, Soetsu 84 Yurek, Greg 288 Z ZapThink 91 

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System
by Chet Haase
Published 12 Aug 2021

63 Chris eventually completed his bachelors as well as a master’s degree much later, while working at Google. 64 Google still has that same text-box-and-two-buttons search page, although there are now a large variety of other projects that Google is known (and rumored) to be working on that attract a wider variety of software developers. But in 2005, search, ads, and web apps were about it. 65 PDA = Personal Digital Assistant. This type of device, of which the Palm Pilot was probably the most successful incarnation, carried useful information like a calendar, contacts, and note-taking apps. PDAs basically went away once smartphones became common and provided a superset of PDA functionality plus communications. 66 OEM = Original Equipment Manufacturer, a company that makes the actual hardware. 67 Mathias said, “Actually the 6 years were expired.

…

One of Android’s unique and powerful features, since the very beginning, was its system of notifications, alerting the user to information from their installed applications, even if they weren’t using those applications at the time. Before smartphones, notifications were simpler (and less useful). Early data devices, like the Palm Pilot PDAs, had alert features in calendar and alarm apps. The user could configure these applications to play a noise, show a dialog, or illuminate an LED. Alerts of this sort were therefore limited to things the user thought to enter. All of the data on the device was created and synced by the user; there wasn’t information coming out of the ether onto the device.

Talk Is Cheap: Switching to Internet Telephones
by James E. Gaskin
Published 15 Mar 2005

Packets in, packets routed, packets delivered. When intelligence is expensive, such as nearly 100 years ago when AT&T started building the network, centralizing the intelligence makes sense. But now intelligence, in the form of processing power, is cheap and portable. Somewhere, no doubt, someone has measured the processing power of a Palm Pilot against the collective intelligence of all the switches in New York City in 1912 or some such. The point is clear: intelligence and processing power is now extremely inexpensive, and the capabilities of the basic telephone connected to the telephone network was long ago surpassed by intelligent devices attached to the Internet.

…

Packets in, packets routed, packets delivered. When intelligence is expensive, such as nearly 100 years ago when AT&T started building the network, centralizing the intelligence makes sense. But now intelligence, in the form of processing power, is cheap and portable. Somewhere, no doubt, someone has measured the processing power of a Palm Pilot against the collective intelligence of all the switches in New York City in 1912 or some such. The point is clear: intelligence and processing power is now extremely inexpensive, and the capabilities of the basic telephone connected to the telephone network was long ago surpassed by intelligent devices attached to the Internet.

Working the Street: What You Need to Know About Life on Wall Street
by Erik Banks
Published 7 Feb 2004

They don’t care much for each other, but, like their trading brethren, they need each other, so they try and tolerate each other’s differences. Bankers come in a few different flavors: relationship managers, corporate finance generalists, and industry/deal specialists. The relationship bankers are the big-big-big-picture folks who have very contact-rich Rolodexes/Palm Pilots and know how to charm and impress their clients. They can wax eloquent for hours about a lot of general business and The Right Match: Finding Your Ideal Job | 51 banking topics, but can’t talk for more than a minute about the nuts and bolts of a complicated banking product or deal. They play lots of golf with chairmen and CEOs, CFOs and finance ministers, talking high-level strategy about what the client needs to do to get ahead.

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
by Cory Doctorow
Published 15 Sep 2008

But the record industry's > credibility on the subject wasn't exactly enhanced. Patrick and I have a long relationship, starting when I was 18 years old and he kicked in toward a scholarship fund to send me to a writers' workshop, continuing to a fateful lunch in New York in the mid-Nineties when I showed him a bunch of Project Gutenberg texts on my Palm Pilot and inspired him to start licensing Tor's titles for PDAs [PEANUTPRESS SCREENGRAB], to the turn-of-the-millennium when he bought and then published my first novel (he's bought three more since — I really like Patrick!). Right as bookwarez newsgroups were taking off, I was shocked silly by legal action by one of my colleagues against AOL/Time-Warner for carrying the alt.binaries.ebooks newsgroup.

One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter
by Scaachi Koul
Published 7 Mar 2017

Why should I have to dress up when guys can wear whatever they want?” I listened to Avril Lavigne and recited the lyrics as if they were my own thoughts; I watched CNN because I didn’t want to be a frivolous teen; I had crushes on adult men like Jon Stewart and Rahm Emanuel and hot dads at the mall with salt-and-pepper hair and Palm Pilots. But in truth, I just didn’t know if I was allowed to look like a “cute girl” if my body was bigger than the other girls I knew, if my skin was darker, if I was more sullen than sugar. I hid in muted drapery hoping no one would notice or, better yet, they would assume I was just a very tough, genderless sphere.

Hey Nostradamus!
by Douglas Coupland
Published 1 Jan 2003

He almost hummed with relief in the mornings when he learned we could talk at breakfast. Apparently, that was forbidden growing up. Reg must have been pretty gruesome back then. Jason also had this thing called the glory-meter. A glory-meter was an invisible device Jason said almost everybody carries around with them, a Palm Pilot-ish gadget that goes ding-ding-ding whenever we come up with a salve to try to inflate our sense of importance. Examples would be “I make the best sour cherry pie in Vancouver” “My dachshund has the silkiest fur of all the dogs in the park” “My spreadsheets have the most sensibly ordered fields” “I won the 500-yard dash in my senior year.”

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

The Economist did an article, saying that Apple was going to decline: “We haven’t seen anything revolutionary out of them since the iPhone.” I happened to know the guy who wrote the article. I had lunch with him, just to kind of educate him. So I laid out all of these on the table . . . He starts laying out devices: a Sony Walkman, a Sharp organizer, a Palm Pilot V, an early generation BlackBerry, a Motorola Razr (one of the first flip phones), a DoCoMo phone, and a lineage of iPods and iPhones stretching from 2002 to the present. Now, if you look at this whole thing—and I said this to the journalist—“Is this incremental improvement? Or is it revolutionary?”

Time Management for System Administrators
by Thomas A.Limoncelli
Published 1 Jan 2005

Let's take a look at each one of these principles in greater detail. One "Database" for Time Management Information The central tool for time management is your Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or Personal Analog Assistant (PAA), which you will use to store your to do list, calendar, and life goals lists. I'm sure you know what a PDA is: a Palm Pilot, Zaurus, or similar product. A PAA is the paper equivalent. You've seen these in many shapes and forms and by names such as organizer, binder, planner, datebook, or even Filofax. Whether you choose to use a PDA or PAA, it will become the platform for just about every technique in the rest of the book.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

How do you adjust for improvements in quaHty? If the price of an item goes up, but its quality improves, did it really get more expensive? If the price of apples goes up, and that of pears goes down, what does that do to the price of fruit? The problems multiply over the long term: there were noVCRs or Palm Pilots in 1965; what does their development mean to the changed cost of Hving thirty-five years later? A relative measure avoids all these problems. And second, relative measures comport much more closely with the way people perceive themselves. As no less revered an authority than Adam Smith (1976, bk.V, chap. 2, pt. 2, art. 4) defined it in 1776, poverty was characterized by the want of "necessaries," which he in turn defined no After the New Economy as "not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of Hfe, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without

Free as in Freedom
by Sam Williams
Published 16 Nov 2015

About half of the audience members wear khaki pants and logo-encrusted golf shirts. The other half seems to have gone native. Dressed in the gaudy flowerprint shirts so popular in this corner of the world, their faces are a deep shade of ochre. The only residual indication of geek status are the gadgets: Nokia cell phones, Palm Pilots, and Sony VAIO laptops. Needless to say, Stallman, who stands in front of the room dressed in plain blue T-shirt, brown polyester slacks, and white socks, sticks out like a sore thumb. The fluorescent lights of the conference room help bring out the unhealthy color of his sun-starved skin. His beard and hair are enough to trigger beads of sweat on even the coolest Hawaiian neck.

The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less
by Barry Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 2004

Second, when we establish these deep connections, we have to devote time to maintaining them. When family, friends, fellow congregants need us, we have to be there. When disagreements or conflicts arise, we have to stay in the game and work them out. And the needs of friends and family don’t arise on a convenient schedule, to be penciled into our day planner or Palm Pilot. They come when they come, and we have to be ready to respond. Who has this kind of time? Who has the flexibility and breathing room in life’s regularly scheduled activities to be there when needed without paying a heavy price in stress and distraction? Not me. Time is the ultimate scarce resource, and for some reason, even as one “time-saving” bit of technology after another comes our way, the burdens on our time seem to increase.

On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense
by David Brooks
Published 2 Jun 2004

He admitted that there was little discussion about intellectual matters outside of class. “Most students don’t like that that’s the case,” he said, “but it is the case.” So he and a bunch of his friends formed a discussion group that meets regularly with a faculty guest to discuss serious subjects. If they can get it scheduled into their Palm Pilots, they can get it done. One finds students applying time-quadrant techniques to maximize their mental efficiency. They read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens. In 1985, 16 percent of freshmen told researchers at UCLA that they frequently felt stressed at school. By 1999, 30 percent of the respondents reported feeling “frequently overwhelmed by all I have to do.”

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Published 1 Jan 2000

It is acceptable to display sacred items in an educated person’s home so long as they are from a religion neither the host nor any of his or her guests is likely to profess. We educated elites surround ourselves with the motifs of lives we have chosen not to live. We are busy meritocrats, but we choose goods that radiate pre-meritocratic calm. We march into the future with our Palm Pilots and cell phones, but we surround ourselves with rootsy stuff, the reactionary and the archaic. We guiltily acknowledge our privileges but surround ourselves with artifacts from the less privileged. It’s not that we’re hypocrites. It’s just that we’re seeking balance. Affluent, we’re trying not to become materialists.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Also, Deborah Halber, “Stephen Heywood, Son of Prof. John Heywood, Dies at 37,” MIT News, November 28, 2006, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/obit-heywood.html. 32 Hawkins’s dissertation was on recognizing handwriting, so he had the satisfaction of seeing that work successfully commercialized in the Palm Pilot that he invented. 33 Interview with the author, October 25, 2010. 34 Alexia Tsotsis, “Attempt at P ≠ NP Proof Gets Torn Apart Online,” August 12, 2010, TechCrunch, http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/12/fuzzy-math/. See also Vinay Deolalikar’s blog at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Vinay_Deolalikar/. 35 Tsotsis, “Attempt at P ≠ NP Proof Gets Torn Apart Online.” 36 Richard Smith, “The Power of the Unrelenting Impact Factor—Is It a Force for Good or Harm?”

Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America
by Giles Slade
Published 14 Apr 2006

It is difficul for the establishment to accept a change in culture or procedure.”29 Gradually, during the late 1970s, calculator technology slipped off the cutting edge. Unit costs for calculators shrank to insignifican e, and the brightest lights of the semiconductor fi ms moved on to newer challenges in and around Silicon Valley—at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Xerox-PARC, Apple Computers,and Atari.A quarter of a century later,when Palm Pilot inventor Jeff Hawkins left Palm to found Handspring, he described his decision as analogous to this shift in the calculator industry: “The organizer business is going to be like calculators. There is still a calculator business but who wants to be in it? They’re cheap, and sort of the backwater of consumer electronics.”30 Palm’s founder was contemptuous of calculators because they had become low-cost complimentary giveaways at the local credit union.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability
by David Owen
Published 16 Sep 2009

Not long ago, I piled some useless possessions in the entryway of my apartment and invited each passing recycler inside to see what everything was worth. A stack of old magazines sold for sixty-two cents; a burned-out computer cord went for a nickel. Two broken lamps were seven cents, total. A worn-out pair of shoes: twelve cents. Two broken Palm Pilots: thirty-seven cents. I gave one man a marked-up manuscript of the book I’d been writing, and he pulled out a scale, weighed the pages, and paid me fifteen cents.7 Refuse that can’t be recycled is left on the ground, outside the front door, for collection by other tricycle carts. Such trash piles are usually tiny—a handful of cucumber peelings, a few egg-shells, a couple of burned-out coal cylinders—because anything of conceivable value has already been reused or set aside for the recyclers, and because hutong commerce employs very little disposable packaging.

Zeitgeist
by Bruce Sterling
Published 1 Nov 2000

All mahogany, Turkish tile, slanting light through the shutters, and Sidney Greenstreet’s drinking arak in the bar. It’s perfect for you, Wiesel. You’re gonna love this assignment.” Wiesel produced a pair of reading glasses from his vest. He set to work on them with a patch of high-tech lens cloth. “What’s the pitch, Leggy?” “I’ve put the itinerary here on this diskette for your Palm Pilot.” Leggy handed over a fresh square of data-soaked plastic. “But here’s the executive briefing, man. You call your paparazzi contacts. And I don’t mean the good ones. I mean the worst and scabbiest freelancers you know. Guys with no brakes. Guys who bribe waiters and hide inside trash cans. Guys who bust into rest rooms with shoulder cams.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

Rather than challenge the science that is occurring in neuroscience today, Data Brain advocates are increasingly willing to hand off mysteries and weaknesses to the supposed magic of data AI. It’s to these neocortical theories we turn next. Chapter 17 NEOCORTICAL THEORIES OF HUMAN INTELLIGENCE A popular theory of intelligence has been put forth by computer scientist, entrepreneur, and neuroscience advocate Jeff Hawkins. Famous for developing the Palm Pilot and as an all-around luminary in Silicon Valley, Hawkins dipped his toe into the neuroscience (and artificial intelligence) waters in 2004 with the publication of On Intelligence, a bold and original attempt to summarize the volumes of neuroscience data about thinking in the neocortex with a hierarchical model of intelligence.1 He has since formed a company, Numenta, dedicated to unlocking the secrets of intelligence as computation.

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution
by T. R. Reid
Published 18 Dec 2007

The tangible product of that idea, known to engineers as the monolithic integrated circuit and to the world at large as the semiconductor chip, has changed the world as fundamentally as did the telephone, the light bulb, and the horseless carriage. The integrated circuit is the heart of clocks, computers, cameras, and calculators, of pacemakers and Palm Pilots, of deep-space probes and deep-sea sensors, of toasters, typewriters, cell phones, and Internet servers. The National Academy of Sciences declared the integrated circuit the progenitor of the “Second Industrial Revolution.” The first Industrial Revolution enhanced man’s physical prowess and freed people from the drudgery of backbreaking manual labor; the revolution spawned by the chip enhances our intellectual prowess and frees people from the drudgery of mind-numbing computational labor.

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance
by Emanuel Derman
Published 1 Jan 2004

The book had been manufactured in Pennsylvania and was very American middle manager, with its one-month spiral-bound inserts with space for lists of Appointments and Things To Do. It looked very unprofessorally businesslike, an early precursor of soon-to-arrive European Filofaxes and, a decade later, American Palm Pilots. David clearly thought big. In those days he was planning what he called "NonVon," a parallel-processing computer comprised of many small processors and memory units. It was to be the antithesis of the standard computer with one large central processor, a design that had prevailed since John von Neumann and the ENIAC computer of the 1940s.

Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 18 Aug 2014

Dowton offered this piece of advice: “Keep a simple value system. Work out what things in life you care about, the beliefs you hold near and dear, and stick to them. You are about to go through a most tumultuous time. What are you willing to accept? What are you willing to fight for?” I’d written it down in my Palm Pilot: “Figure out a value system.” It occurred to me that warm evening in Atlanta, walking out of the Georgia Center in a flowing black gown, that I’d never really done so. * * * In my first year as a heart failure specialist, I often took care of patients near the end of their lives. I was sometimes asked to predict how long someone was going to live.

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story
by Michael Lewis
Published 29 Sep 1999

Whenever Doerr's name came up, Clark's mouth went into full-pucker mode. When Clark had offered Doerr the chance to invest in Netscape, Doerr had been rather down on his luck. Between 1991 and 1993 Doerr had persuaded a lot of people, himself included, that the future of the Valley was in pen computing. Pen computing was a version of the Palm Pilot, ahead of its time. Doerr had burned tens of millions of capital on a dramatic failure to stuff computers into ordinary people's pockets called GO. After GO, Doerr seized on interactive television. He took to mak- Page 103 ing futuristic speeches the theme of which was that interactive television would transform the world.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

Throughout the twentieth century, supply and demand looped together in an unceasing Möbius strip, technology always increasing the radius of contact: the pay phone, car radio, battery-powered radio, transistor radio, remote-accessible answering machine, fax machine, car phone, laptop computer, Walkman, airplane and train phone, portable CD player, beeper, mobile phone, Palm Pilot, Internet access, PCD, GPD, and so on ad acronym. Once “interactivity” by machine became feasible, the hallmark of so many communication inventions was nomadicity, which, according to the Internet pioneer who coined the term, “means that wherever and whenever we move around, the underlying system always knows who we are, where we are, and what services we need.”

Cultureshock Paris
by Cultureshock Staff
Published 6 Oct 2010

.  Micro King; 33 rue Dautancourt, 75017; tel: 01.53.06.65.10; website: http://www.micro-king.com. On-site emergency repairs, Internet and network installations, upgrades and repairs.  Sourys; tel: 01.40.82.90.92 or 06.25.05.64.70 (mobile); http://www.sourys.com. On-site emergency computer repairs for Mac and PC, networks, Internet, ASDL, Wi-Fi, Palm Pilots; training in hardware and software usage. COSMETICS/PERFUMES Department stores sell international brands of perfumes and cosmetics, and some carry their own brand names. Hypoallergenic beauty products can be found in pharmacies, and parapharmacies have an even wider selection. Fashion houses such as Chanel and Dior develop their own perfumes, and a few parfumeries, for example, the well-known Annick Goutal, create their own fragrances. 278 CultureShock!

Joel on Software
by Joel Spolsky
Published 1 Aug 2004

At one end of the scale, there are the unwashed masses, lacking even the most basic skills for this job. They are easy to ferret out and eliminate, often just by asking two or three quick questions. At the other extreme you've got your brilliant superstars who write lisp compilers for fun, in a weekend, in Assembler for the Palm Pilot. And in the middle, you have a large number of "maybes" who seem like they might just be able to contribute something. The trick is to tell the difference between the superstars and the maybes, because the secret is that you don't want to hire any of the maybes. Ever. At the end of the interview, you must be prepared to make a sharp decision about the candidate.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

According to a report dramatically titled, “Black Flag Over Seattle,” by Paul de Armond: The cohesion of the Direct Action Network was partly due to their improvised communications network assembled out of cell phones, radios, police scanners and portable computers. Protesters in the street with wireless Palm Pilots were able to link into continuously updated web pages giving reports from the streets. Police scanners monitored transmissions and provided some warning of changing police tactics. Cell phones were widely used. Kelly Quirke, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, reports that early Tuesday, “the authorities had successfully squashed DAN’s communications system.”

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

In a pivot, the target market for, or feature set of, the product might change without changing the overall vision for the problem. Each pivot creates a new series of hypotheses, and the process begins again. Startup history is filled with legendary pivot stories. Among them are PayPal, which went from a money transfer mechanism for Palm Pilots only to the web-based version we now have; Netflix, which moved from mailing DVDs to customers to streaming; and some of the companies whose stories I told in The Lean Startup, such as Wealthfront (which began as the online gaming business KaChing) and Groupon. But pivots aren’t just for startups.

Lunar Park
by Bret Easton Ellis
Published 15 Mar 2005

Everything seemed different now in the light of morning: bright, clean, sane.) “Terby’s okay” is all she said, but it worked: she forgot about the Christmas list and moved over to finger paintings she’d made yesterday for show-and-tell and carefully started sliding them into a manila envelope. Robby was checking his palm pilot while swaggering around the kitchen—his way of acting tough. I suddenly noticed a paperback of Lord of the Flies in the mass of school gear on the table and picked it up. Opening the cover I was shocked to find Sarah’s name handwritten on the first page. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I can’t believe they’re letting first-graders read this.”

Geography of Bliss
by Eric Weiner
Published 1 Jan 2008

In one study, people who found a dime on the pavement a few minutes before being queried on the happiness question reported higher levels of satisfaction with their overall lives than those who did not find a dime. Researchers have tried to get around this quirk of the human psyche through something called the experience-sampling method. They strap little Palm Pilot–like devices to research subjects and then ping them maybe a dozen times a day. Are you happy now? What about now? Here, though, the Heisenberg principle rears its head. The mere act of observing something alters it. All of that pinging, in other words, might affect the subjects’ happiness. Also, most people want to present a happy face to the world.

Atrocity Archives
by Stross, Charles
Published 13 Jan 2004

This is not stuff we should be talking about in public; I pull out my palmtop and tap away at it until a rather useful utility shows up. "What's that?" she asks interestedly, as the background clatter and racket diminishes to a haze of white noise. "Laundry-issue palmtop. Looks like an ordinary Palm Pilot, doesn't it? But the secret's in the software and the rather unusual daughterboard soldered inside the case." "No, I mean the noise--it isn't just my ears, is it?" "No, it's magic." "Magic! But--" She glares at me. "You're not kidding, are you? What the hell is going on around here?"

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet
by Charles Arthur
Published 3 Mar 2012

By 2005, Palm had survived splitting into two companies (Palm and Handspring), then merging, then splitting into a hardware and software company and then reuniting. The Treo smartphone was popular in the United States, although Palm’s struggles with an outdated operating system (OS) – which had worked fine for unconnected handheld personal digital assistants (PDAs), such as the Palm Pilot – meant that, by January 2004, Ed Colligan, Palm’s chief, had decided that the company could not develop its way forward; Palm’s mobile OS was, effectively, put on the shelf. The market for PDAs without phone connectivity was shrinking; standard mobile phones were beginning to absorb their functions, such as calendars and even e-mail.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

It has played a leading role in putting together the program for action on climate change championed by U.N. secretary general Ban Ki-moon and got involved with UNESCO in a project to further engage the private sector in the conservation of World Heritage Sites. With the World Health Organization, it has formed a partnership with Vodafone, Palm Pilot, Salesforce.com, and Google to track public health data, which is input into handheld devices, wirelessly transmitted to a database, and mapped online; after testing this in three countries starting in 2006, the plan is to roll it out in thirty countries. In all these initiatives, a key challenge for the foundation has been “to find the right people within the U.N. who can get things done,” says Wirth.

Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity
by Edward Tenner
Published 8 Jun 2004

While the movement ended in a wave of failures, notoriously of the original Apple Newton, pen-based computing never actually died, and both Apple and Microsoft are doing their best to revive it. Yet the smaller the portable device, the more likely it appears that someone will find a way to plug a portable QWERTY keyboard into it. Several are available for the Palm Pilot personal digital assistant (PDA). Even graphically oriented Apple included a detachable keyboard with the last version of its Newton MessagePad—as well as a Unix-based text command option in its latest Macintosh operating system. And PDAs without plug-in keyboards are routinely connected to conventional computers for keyboard-entered data.44 Voice control was as exciting in the late 1990s as handwriting recognition had been ten years earlier, and with similar results: a wave of marketing and financial troubles that has failed to shake underlying optimism about the technology’s future.

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research
by Michael Shearn
Published 8 Nov 2011

Although, the skyscraper will generate huge returns for its investors over long periods of time, the flipped five-story building, although profitable to the lone hyena, will generate more limited returns for outside investors. Tan explains further: “How did Apple catapult from $5 billion in market capitalization in early 2003 to a market cap of $220 billion?” Tan contrasts Apple with Palm, which brought out the pioneering Palm Pilot product. Why was Palm, with a $90 billion market cap at its peak, bought out in 2010 by Hewlett-Packard, as Seng Hock asks, “for a mere $1.2 billion?” The difference was that Apple was run by a Lion manager: Steve Jobs. Most competent early-stage companies do not cross the chasm to an established business because they lack the lion manager’s infrastructure—the teamwork, the know-how, the necessary institutional structures, and the culture.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

We ourselves are no different: some of us prefer the certainty of transacting with the world via discrete, dedicated objects, just as some still prefer to deal with a human teller at the bank. But as the smartphone has come to stand between us and an ever-greater swath of the things we do in everyday life, the global trend toward dematerialization is unmistakable. As a result, it’s already difficult to contemplate objects like a phone booth, a Filofax or a Palm Pilot without experiencing a shock of either reminiscence or perplexity, depending on the degree of our past acquaintance with them. However clumsy they may seem to us now, what’s important about such mediating artifacts is that each one implied an entire way of life—a densely interconnected ecosystem of commerce, practice and experience.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
by Leslie T. Chang
Published 6 Oct 2008

The woman selling stuffed animals returns to the room to collect, but the colleague of Ben’s who had showered a sulky young woman with attention all night long does not want to spend money on her now that the night is over. She relinquishes a stuffed bear reluctantly—another daughter, this one a little spoiled. The DJ punches her contact information into another customer’s Palm Pilot for future room reservations, and everyone leaves the karaoke room together. The men, accompanied by the mami, head toward the elevator, and the girls disappear down a different hallway. * * * Occasionally a woman hit the jackpot. Ah Ning, Chunming’s recently divorced friend, started dating a wealthy local Dongguan man.

This Machine Kills Secrets: Julian Assange, the Cypherpunks, and Their Fight to Empower Whistleblowers
by Andy Greenberg
Published 12 Sep 2012

A few weeks later, Mudge invited Clarke back to the L0pht. It was a strange scene: one of the country’s top “feds,” with four members of the National Security Council at his side, in the digital lion’s den. But Clarke’s endless curiosity charmed and flattered the young hackers. He pulled out his Palm Pilot and asked what sorts of security flaws it might have. Kingpin plugged it into a device he’d created that could quickly crack the device’s password and siphon off its files in seconds. Clarke quizzed them about vulnerabilities in the country’s critical infrastructure. Soon they were deep in a discussion about BGP hijacking, a then-theoretical trick: BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol, is the language used by the routers that connect major carriers like AT&T and Qwest.

Competition Demystified
by Bruce C. Greenwald
Published 31 Aug 2016

Anheuser-Busch’s Delta, Kmart Octel, PC manufacturers Pepsi Polaroid retail industry soft drink industry United, Wal-Mart’s Operational efficiency cooperation for differentiation by distribution exploitation of, importance management marketing market segments need for, viii niche markets outsourcing Research and development textile industry Other Guy Blinked, The: How Pepsi Won the Cola War (Enrico) Outsourcing Oxford Health Plans Packard Bell, Paley, William Palm Pilot Pan American Paramount Pictures Patents advantages compact disks gasoline additive Intel lawsuit limitations photography PCs. See Personal computer industry PD. See Prisoner’s dilemma PDAs (Personal digital assistants) People Express Pepsi-Cola Coca-Cola v. cooperation customer captivity economies of scale history initiatives, market share stability operating margins price competition prisoner’s dilemma taste testing Performance gap.

Jennifer Morgue
by Stross, Charles
Published 12 Jan 2006

And it would be real unfortunate if you slept with me and died, because then we couldn't do that." "Really? How interesting. And what exactly is it you think I do?" She puts her glass down and removes her hand from her bag. It's deja vu all over again: instead of a gun she's holding a three-year-old Palm Pilot. It's inferior tech, and I feel a momentary flash of smugness at knowing I've got the drop on her in at least one important department. She flips the protective cover open and glances at the screen. "I think you work for Capital Laundry Services," she says matter-of-factly. "Nominally you're a senior scientific officer in the Department of Internal Logistics.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

Soon enough, X.com had a major competitor. A couple of brainy kids named Max Levchin and Peter Thiel had been working on a payment system of their own at their start-up called Confinity. The duo actually rented their office space—a glorified broom closet—from X.com and were trying to make it possible for owners of Palm Pilot handhelds to swap money via the infrared ports on the devices. Between X.com and Confinity, the small office on University Avenue had turned into the frenzied epicenter of the Internet finance revolution. “It was this mass of adolescent men that worked so hard,” Ankenbrandt said. “It stunk so badly in there.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics
by Richard H. Thaler
Published 10 May 2015

The interesting problem Owen had spotted was a blatant violation of the law of one price involving a company called 3Com. 3Com’s main business was in networking computers using Ethernet technology, but through a merger they had also acquired Palm, the maker of what at the time was considered a very spiffy handheld computer called the Palm Pilot. In the summer of 1999, when the stock of any respectable Silicon Valley technology company seemed to double every month or two, 3Com was being neglected, and its stock price was flat. 3Com management adopted a plan of action to increase its share price, and the plan involved divesting itself of its interest in Palm.

Underground
by Suelette Dreyfus
Published 1 Jan 2011

When we released an early e-book version in 2001, I was astonished to see more than 400,000 downloads of the book in the first two years alone. Enthusiastic readers kindly volunteered to port the text version into all sorts of early e-reader formats – more than 20 different formats in all. This led to some interesting email exchanges. One reader told me that he read all 475 pages of the book on his Palm Pilot in the bathtub. Rather than write a catalogue of all the hackers’ stories of this early internet era, we were keen to focus on a few key hacker stories and do them well. I wanted to capture the technical aspects of their lives, but also the humanity behind the bravado. Most of all I wanted to take you, the reader, into the mind of the hackers.

Computer: A History of the Information Machine
by Martin Campbell-Kelly and Nathan Ensmenger
Published 29 Jul 2013

At its peak in 2007, two-thirds of smartphones, often called handsets, were based on the Symbian platform. Competitors’ handset features and software applications, however, quickly eroded Symbian’s early market lead. Silicon Valley–based Palm, Inc. stumbled along with handwriting-recognition PDAs in the early 1990s before achieving success with its Palm Pilot in 1996. Though Palm’s cultivation of a modest ecosystem of third-party applications developers foreshadowed what would become critical in the smartphone market, memory was too small for truly compelling applications. Palm never achieved more than a 3 percent market share and was quickly overshadowed in its primary market—business users—by Research in Motion (RIM), a Canadian specialist in paging, messaging, data capture, and modem equipment that launched the PDA “Blackberry” in 1999.

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59
by Douglas Edwards
Published 11 Jul 2011

I watched the shadow army of laptop-toting factotums come and go, speaking in dry cellular whispers. Inside, I imagined our directors laying out visions, making revisions, moving, acting, arguing, and trying to keep their egos in check. Hours later they would emerge as the factotums checked their Palm Pilots and scuttled off to fetch their cars. At that point, I would start scanning my email very carefully. I never dealt with our board face-to-face, but I always read the notes distributed after their meetings. Why? Well, of course I wanted to know about major shifts in our strategy, and announcements about significant executive hires, and...

Army of None: Autonomous Weapons and the Future of War
by Paul Scharre
Published 23 Apr 2018

The fear that AI could one day develop to the point where it threatens humanity isn’t shared by everyone who works on AI. It’s hard to dismiss people like Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates, and Elon Musk out of hand, but that doesn’t mean they’re right. Other tech moguls have pushed back against AI fears. Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, has said AI risk “doesn’t concern me.” Jeff Hawkins, inventor of the Palm Pilot, has argued, “There won’t be an intelligence explosion. There is no existential threat.” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said that those who “drum up these doomsday scenarios” are being “irresponsible.” David Brumley of Carnegie Mellon, who is on the cutting edge of autonomy in cybersecurity, similarly told me he was “not concerned about self-awareness.”

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Apple secured the rights to sell millions of downloadable tracks at 99 cents each through the iTunes Store, and launched the iPod in 2002. ‘One thousand songs in your pocket’, Jobs proclaimed. The iPod prepared the ground for something much bigger still – the handheld computer. High-end portable devices for business people had been available since the turn of the century; the Palm Pilot was succeeded by the BlackBerry. But Apple aimed its products at consumers and then opened its systems to enable developers to provide ‘apps’. Combine the music player with the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone, add a screen, and you could devise almost unlimited applications for a gadget that would fit in your pocket.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism
by Joyce Appleby
Published 22 Dec 2009

Now the largest ad seller in the world, Google continues with seeming effortlessness to improve its proliferating features.28 One of Intel’s founders, Gordon Moore, announced—with remarkable accuracy—that the number of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit would double every two years, greatly expanding computer and phone capabilities. Cell phones became smart phones; functions of PCs squeezed into Palm Pilots and iPods. Though no one predicted it, but equally impressive, the price of computers decreased annually by 20 percent.29 Yet nothing quite compares with the price history of cell phones. In 1987 a Motorola cell phone was a luxury that cost $3,996; today cell phones are given away for two-year contracts with telecommunications companies.

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (And What It Says About Us)
by Tom Vanderbilt
Published 28 Jul 2008

It’s like driving on ice, literally.” Nolan says people have long been predicting, because of ground sensors and in-vehicle probes that can detect the speed of traffic, that there will no longer be a need for aerial traffic reports. Indeed, on his instrument panel he has attached a TrafficGauge, a Palm Pilot–sized device fed by Caltrans data, that shows congestion levels on L.A. freeways. But he says that data rarely tell the whole story, or the correct story. “In my mind there’s no substitute for looking out the window and telling people what you’ve got,” he says. “The sensors in the road are delayed, they’re inefficient.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

These are quantifiable or observable violations of efficient markets or the law of one price and are much less subjective. There were multiple examples of this in 1999/2000. The most famous is when 3COM spun off 5% of PALM91. The hot thing at the time was handheld gadgets so everyone wanted to own PALM and their awesome Palm Pilots. Nobody cared about poor old 3COM and their dial-up modems and PCMCIA cards. The day of the PALM IPO, PALM closed at $95, giving it a market value of $54B. 3COM’s closing price of $81 gave it a market value of $28B. So even though 3COM owned $50B worth of PALM stock, it was trading at a market value of $28B.

The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda
by Ali H. Soufan and Daniel Freedman
Published 11 Sep 2011

[157 words redacted] After Abu Zubaydah described that interaction, [97 words redacted] [10 words redacted] [10 words redacted] [2 words redacted] [1 word redacted] [39 words redacted] asked [1 word redacted] to get me a picture of him, to double-check that Abu Zubaydah was talking about the same person. [1 word redacted] didn’t have any of [1 word redacted] FBI photo-books with [1 word redacted], because [1 word redacted] were only meant to be supporting the CIA and hadn’t brought [1 word redacted] own interrogation materials. So [1 word redacted] downloaded on his Sony device, similar to a Palm Pilot, the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. The list, published for the first time after the attacks of September 11, 2001, contained the names of twenty-two terrorists indicted by grand juries for terrorist crimes. [13 words redacted] [1 word redacted] repeatedly tapped on his device to zoom in and handed it to [1 word redacted] as it was still loading. [22 words redacted] [7 words redacted] [43 words redacted] [18 words redacted] [21 words redacted] [14 words redacted] [53 words redacted] [37 words redacted] [7 words redacted] recalled a video [1 word redacted] had found after 9/11 of bin Laden describing the plot and bragging about his expertise in putting it together.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

However, we have excellent reason to believe in its accuracy, because other elements of this narrative have been tested rigorously and confirmed many times over—a testament to the extraordinary power of human intelligence. This notion of intelligence as successful narrative prediction is very close to the definition proposed by Jeff Hawkins, the Palm Pilot inventor turned neuroscientist. In his book, On Intelligence, Hawkins argues that intelligence consists of two features: memory and prediction. Most of the human brain, Hawkins believes, is devoted to these two activities. The micro-anatomical structure of the human cortex, composed of millions of very regular cortical columns, each made up of a small number of neurons, reminded Hawkins of the very regular architecture of the electronic memory and logic circuits on a silicon chip.

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
by Lawrence Wright
Published 26 Sep 2006

But Atlantic City was part of his life that he shared with very few. Because the women in his life sensed that they could never trust him, they couldn’t give him the unqualified love and devotion that he sought. He remained isolated by his compulsive deceptions. Inevitably, the complexity took a toll. He left his Palm Pilot in Yankee Stadium; it was filled with police contacts from all over the world. Fortunately, the Yankees security force found it. Then he left his cell phone in a cab. In the summer of 1999, he and Valerie were driving to the Jersey shore when his Buick broke down near the Meadowlands. His bureau car happened to be parked nearby at a secret off-site location, so O’Neill switched cars, although the bureau bans the use of an official vehicle for personal reasons.

Four Battlegrounds
by Paul Scharre
Published 18 Jan 2023

Like any new technology, you struggle at the beginning to show return on investment versus the capability you’re replacing.” Many new technologies are clunky and awkward at first, and their immaturity often stands in stark contrast to the “game changing” claims made by wild-eyed believers. I recall a friend enthusiastically showing me a Palm Pilot in the late 1990s, and I was so unimpressed by the device that I couldn’t share his vision that one day we would all have handheld computing devices. Yet by 2021, nearly half the world’s population had a smartphone. Shanahan’s perspective was far from wild-eyed. He gave a sober and frank assessment of the military’s progress on AI.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

It's often said that the brain works differently from a computer, so we cannot apply our insights about brain function into workable nonbiological systems. This view completely ignores the field of self-organizing systems, for which we have a set of increasingly sophisticated mathematical tools. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the brain differs in a number of important ways from conventional, contemporary computers. If you open up your Palm Pilot and cut a wire, there's a good chance you will break the machine. Yet we routinely lose many neurons and interneuronal connections with no ill effect, because the brain is self-organizing and relies on distributed patterns in which many specific details are not important. When we get to the mid- to late 2020s, we will have access to a generation of extremely detailed brain-region models.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

One of the items on Dutton’s list of the universal signatures of art is impracticality. But useless things, paradoxically, can be highly useful for a certain purpose: appraising the assets of the bearer. Thorstein Veblen first made the point in his theory of social status.37 Since we cannot easily peer into the bank books or Palm Pilots of our neighbors, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste them on luxuries and leisure. Veblen wrote that the psychology of taste is driven by three “pecuniary canons”: conspicuous consumption, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous waste. They explain why status symbols are typically objects made by arduous and specialized labor out of rare materials, or else signs that the person is not bound to a life of manual toil, such as delicate and restrictive clothing or expensive and time-consuming hobbies.

Principles of Corporate Finance
by Richard A. Brealey , Stewart C. Myers and Franklin Allen
Published 15 Feb 2014

But scholars who have studied the topic have found that investors generally greet the announcement of a spin-off as good news.14 Their enthusiasm appears to be justified, for spin-offs seem to bring about more efficient capital investment decisions by each company and improved operating performance.15 FINANCE IN PRACTICE ● ● ● ● ● How Palm was Carved and Spun When 3Com acquired U.S. Robotics in 1997, it also became the owner of Palm, a small start-up business developing handheld computers. It was a lucky purchase, for over the next three years the Palm Pilot came to dominate the market for handheld computers. But as Palm began to take up an increasing amount of management time, 3Com concluded that it needed to return to its knitting and focus on its basic business of selling computer network systems. In 2000 it announced that it would carve out 5% of its holding of Palm through an initial public offering, and then spin off the remaining 95% of Palm shares by giving 3Com shareholders about 1.5 Palm shares for each 3Com share that they owned.