Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: iTunes | Android | RSS
Justin and Jason discuss possible referral models for Pluggio, Sebastien’s progress on the Swarm AI, using WebWorkers (the HTML5 spec for multi-threading) vs setTimeout or setInterval, Jason’s ideas for his machine learning library and business intelligence platform QuantFire, the benefits of collaborating on projects with friends, the status of AppIgnite, developing locally vs using a development server, ambient thinking, growing your willpower and managing your time, how not to lose your enthusiasm for a project, what can’t be stolen from you and why clones seem to almost always fail, the new iPad news app Flipbook, launching an app per week using AppIgnite, AppInventor as the VB for Android and a comparison between the Android and iPhone developer ecosystems.
STARTUPS AND ALIENS!
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh That’s the first and last time you’ll here that one 😉
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh Bams, you always make me laugh, but I don’t know if I could ever seriously consider the name Startups and Aliens until you at least reveal your true identity. 😉 You’re like the Deep Throat of TechZing. 😉
By the way, the numbers on the Richard Dolan interview are huge! While it’s an extremely risky subject to take on, it appears that people are finding it to be an interesting interview. I want to be careful not to do too much of it so as not to stray too far from our focus on tech, but ultimately I’d like to invite on the show some of the people mentioned in the interview like Leslie Kean, Nick Cook, Timothy Good and maybe even Stanton Friedman. I’m thinking one interview every few months might be okay especially if we stick to only the most credible and serious researchers in the field. I don’t know, what to you think?
So you guys keep talking about your consulting work and I’m wondering if the people you do the work for ever listen to your shows.. 🙂
Good to hear all the updates. Great motivation for those who are dragging their feet!
@Emrah I don’t think any of my clients listen to the show, but I’m fine with it if they do. I’ve told them all about it numerous times because I’m excited about it and I tend to talk about what I’m excited about. In fact, my wife complains that I have no filter between my brain and my mouth and she probably has a point. 😉
Also, since my clients all know my startup background and that I’m currently working on AppIgnite. I’m sure they wouldn’t find it strange or shocking that I’m not interested in being an employee or doing consulting work for the long-term.
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh By the way, I remember that a while back you commented that Buzz Aldrin claimed, while being interviewed by Howard Stern, that he and his fellow Apollo 11 astronauts, never saw anything unidentified. Well, check out this interview of Buzz Aldrin because that’s clearly not what he’s saying here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlkV1ybBnHI&feature=player_embedded
While he doesn’t come out and claim that they could tell exactly what is was, he does say that it didn’t appear to be a part of the rocket and that there were several reasons (which he mentions) for why they didn’t really want to (or were told not to) discuss it.
Anyway, while it’s not conclusive of anything, it is interesting.
Jason, how about when I create my next product, I reveal my true identity?
Should be any day… month… year.. now 🙂
As for Aldrin, I was referencing Wikipedia but the way that YouTube video is presented, it’s hard to reconcile the two. So, I dunno. I’d like to see the raw Aldrin interviews. Maybe right before the edit, the interviewer primed Aldrin to say things in a particular way or in debriefing, Aldrin was told it was a secret project and the moon landings were a cover.
I think your idea for having an off-beat topic once in a while is a good distraction.
@Jason Roberts that’s awesome
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh I assume the you’re teasing me about taking so long to release AppIgnite, which I suppose I deserve. I guess that initial deadline of Jan 1st, 2010 kind of slipped, huh? Oops. 😉
Actually, not at all… I have that problem right now but good to see you projecting 😉
@Jason The QuantFire product sounds like a very interesting use of your AI library. If your friend can get it in front of potential customers and get their feedback it could really help move it forward. What sort of effort do you think is required to get it to a MVP?
AppIgnite beta by the end of summer! Yay!
Yes! I want to contribute to App-a-week. I’ve got a ton of apps ideas to crank out.
Fun episode. I’d be interested in hearing more about the data analysis Jason has in mind with his javascript libraries. For instance, if his friend were using it to better understand startups’ user data, what sort of information would he like to draw out?
@soitgoes “What sort of effort do you think is required to get it to a MVP?” That’s a really good question. I can tell you this – it better be pretty damn minimal because if I don’t get something up pretty quick then I’m going to have to listen Justin complain about it and not without good reason! 😉 Let’s see … maybe I should just start by allowing it to simply build a neural net that will predict the values in the output column of the pasted/uploaded tabular data. The app would then just generate the learned neural net as a Javascript function that you could just copy and paste into your own code. That’s a start anyway. Now there are a million other things you could go with this. You could do all kinds of quantitative analysis with interesting visualizations, you could allow for the selection and parameterization of different prediction and clustering algorithms, you have it generate learned algorithms in all kind of different languages – C, Java, Python, etc. I don’t know – there’s just so much that could be done. Interestingly, I just happened across this article this morning:
Bringing Data Mining Into the Mainstream
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/26/bringing-data-mining-into-the-mainstream/
I guess I’ll just throw something up on the web, let you guys start playing with it, and build it out in the open. That would probably be the most fun and would give the project some momentum.
@Stuart Yeah, I’m interested in finding out more from Suman as well. We only talked about the quantitative analysis project for about 5 minutes last week, so I don’t even know who these clients are, what kind of data they have and what questions they would want answered. Anyway, it sounds like a very interesting project and I like the idea of collaborating with Suman.
@Neville You know how on the last show I talked about encouraging Mark and Taylor to collaborate on launching some simple apps using AppIgnite? Well, this morning I woke up to a long Mark and Taylor thread in my inbox and they’ve already hit upon what I think is a pretty clever business concept with a great domain name. If you have any app ideas that you’re excited about, then just send me an email (jasonr11 at gmail). Maybe we can figure out a way for you to use the pre-release version of AppIgnite like Mark is doing.
Jason, you might want to think about making your neural net a Google Docs spreadsheet function. That’s some good ish.
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh That sounds interesting, but I’m not sure what you mean exactly. Do you mean generate a custom function for Google Spreadsheets or are you referring to something else?
I have the Exact Problem you guys mention in this podcast. I have dozens and dozens of unfinnished projects. However i took it to heart, I’ve organised to meet with a guy i know, He’s living on his passive income from property. He’s a very Sharp mind. We’re planning on starting a mastermind group. Get some of these ideas out of the head onto the paper and then into the wallet.
Now i just need to find a talented programmer to complement my skills. 😀
@Jason
I meant you take tabular data as input, train your neural net on it, spit out a javascript function which computes the outputs and use that in your spreadsheet for prediciton?
So in Excel-speak, you would have a cell (say H1) with =FORM_NETWORK(A1:F30,G1:G30) which returns a javascript function (assuming G1:G30 is the data you are predicting), then to predict, =PREDICT_OUTPUT(H1,O1:O30) where O would be your observations.
Just a thought, probably not worth it
@Bopinder Abu Morpalinder Singh That may not be front-burner issue, but it is a good idea. I’ll keep it in mind. Thanks for the explanation.
@Jason Thanks for the feedback. AI is an area that I have very little hands on experience with, but I’m really enjoying learning more about it through the podcast.
Another good show – mainly cos I was mentioned 😉 Good stuff guys!
I’d happily come on the show to discuss stuff if you want!
I enjoyed the show too especially listening to the new developments related to Sébastien’s work on the AI for Swarm.
I very much agree with Justin that you can exercise your mind to help focus on the top ideas.
The idea of an-app-a-week for AppIgnite is a cool idea.