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Here is the flip side of my earlier chart on oil consumption trends from 1965-2007. This one is a dynamic look at oil production during the period. Don't forget to set the bubble size to "barrels", and you can hover over the key to see which color corresponds to which bubble.
Lots of interesting stuff pops out, including the backslide in U.S. production, the Saudi flatlining, the emergence and deline of Russia, etc.
U.S. Markets Are So-ooo ... 2004 [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]
Here is a nifty chart showing the declining percentage of global market capitalization made up by the S&P 500. I'd love to see something similar for trading volumes too, but this is still eye-opening.
Rent-A-Coder Fun - Follow Along [The Post Money Value]
read moreRick SegalThu, 12 Jun 2008 04:20:54 -0500
As I start my trek in Newfoundland chasing Icebergs, I thought I'd get a little coding project started: Cloning Windows Live Writer for the Mac. I've posted a job up on rentacoder.com which outlines a fairly easy requirement. I'm looking to get a native Mac application that is look and feel like Windows Live Writer. It doesn't have to share files or do anything particularly fancy, just the basics.
Assuming I can get it done where it can post stuff to this blog, I will release the source code into the wild and see what grows.
Stay tuned, should be fun.
As I start my trek in Newfoundland chasing Icebergs, I thought I'd get a little coding project started: Cloning Windows Live Writer for the Mac. I've posted a job up on rentacoder.com which outlines a fairly easy requirement. I'm looking to get a native Mac...
Quote du Jour: TV and the Comedic Housing Collapse [Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed]
If you, like me, watch in gob-smacked amazement at the continuing impressive ratings pulled by the fantasy-land real estate shows on TV, then read a piece in today's NY Times. Among other things, it contains this keeper of an unintentionally comedic quote from one producer:
“People loved comedies during the depression, too,” said R. J. Cutler, executive producer of “Flip That House.”
I haven't been mentioning books here as often as I used to, so I'll try to get back on track. I'm just finishing up Rick Perlstein's fast-paced Nixonland, and I highly recommend it. It is either a fascinating look at the rise of paranoia politics in America during the 1960s and early 1970s, or it's an entertainingly-written screed by yet another Nixon-hater.
Where do I come down? I think it's the former, but you can read it and make up your own mind.
Apple Puts A Few iPhone Apps Above The Rest (AAPL) [Silicon Alley Insider]
read moreAAPLVasanth SridharanThu, 12 Jun 2008 01:42:00 -0500
Every year Apple hands out design awards to the best applications made for OS X. So what makes this year different? The iPhone, of course. Apple added 5 iPhone apps to the award ceremony, and in addition to a cool silver cube trophy, the winning developers get a big recognition boost (and probably some choice placement in the app store).
One developer was nice enough to tell us the winners he could remember:
OmniFocus task manager: It's a location-based personal organizer. Store shopping lists, agendas, etc. And if you need to go shopping, the app will tell you where the nearest grocery store is.
Our Take: It's not a super flashy idea, but it's definitely useful.
MIMVista's Multi-modality Imaging on the iPhone: An app that lets you look at medical scans (like CT, MRIs, etc.). You can look at cross sections, rotate them, and basically manipulate them however you want.
Our Take: We were super impressed by this app when it was showcased at the keynote. But since we're not doctors, we didn't really know what we were looking at.
Remember The Milk: Another task management app. Where it differs from OmniFocus is that OmniFocus offered you more ways of entering in tasks (voice recording, take a picture, etc.). Remember the Milk seems like it offers better ways to organize and get notified.
Our Take: This app seems like it's more fun than OmniFocus (if task management can be fun), but we really can't say which one's definitely better until we get our hands on both.
Pangea Software's Enigmo: It's a game where you collect drops of water. Sound lame? Not really. It makes good use of the iPhone's accelerometer and just looks cool.
Our Take: This was another app that was showcased at Steve Jobs' keynote and it wowed the crowd (but it's going to cost $10).
There's one more app that won, but we're not sure what it is. When we find out, we'll let you know.
London, Cambridge, and Manchester: Tuesday and Wednesday, June 10-11 *
I am a day behind, so two days in one entry. We spent Tuesday morning at Imperial College London, then took an hour train ride to Cambridge for an evening event at St. Catherine’s College (one of 39 colleges at Cambridge). Wednesday, we were in Cambridge for the day before heading up to Manchester late in the day. It does not take more than a few hours traveling around England to figure out where nearly every town name in Massachusetts originates—the founders were either very homesick or not very creative. And we have taken to calling Cambridge, MA, “New Cambridge”…
Tuesday morning was focused on the U.S. contingent presenting a series of perspectives to a crowd of more than 100 folks gathered in a lecture hall at Imperial College London. Imperial is lesser known in the U.S. than Cambridge or Oxford, I would suspect, but it is very strong in engineering and science and has a strong cleantech orientation. It felt a bit like MIT in terms of the breadth of research and the commercial nature of the place. The Imperial tech licensing office actually “floated” (went public) on AIM, the Alternative Investment Market, a few years ago to provide capital to seed its more interesting projects, and it has done more than 70 such financings already. I found this very intriguing, but have not explored it enough yet to decide if it makes sense to replicate elsewhere.
Mid-afternoon Tuesday, we hopped the train up to Cambridge and I got to spend an hour or so talking with Tom Burton from Mintz Levin, who started and is leading their cleantech practice globally. I found it quite interesting to learn how he has thought about doing this and how that fits into the overall strategy of their firm. Mintz has a London office along with East and West Coast offices in the U.S., so is well-positioned for the global nature of cleantech. It reminded me how fortunate we are in the U.S. to have so much depth and dimension to our entrepreneurial clusters. This is a frequent observation from our U.K. hosts.
Tom and Patrick Kealy of Mintz were integral in setting up this trip and have done a great job of providing our U.K. hosts with perspectives on the U.S. regulatory and market dynamics. I have been talking about the capital flows and the New England innovation community (e.g., the New England Clean Energy Council) and Greg Watson & Karl Jessen have been laying out Massachusetts’s policies and initiatives to make it a world-class center of excellence in cleantech. Noel Brown, newly minted executive director of the MIT/Fraunhoffer Center was also with us until today when he headed over to Germany.
The day finished with a very special dinner at St. Catherine’s College dining hall with a large contingent of Cambridge University’s professors, tech transfer folks, and other U.K.-based cleantech leaders and government officials. The food was pretty good, but the setting and service were the highlights. We had an army of tuxedo-clad servers taking care of us in an obviously ancient dining room, and I found myself wishing I had worn a tie…
Every year Apple hands out 
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