I am sure I am stating the obvious that while there are probably many, the two primary reasons for the current environment include 1) The proliferation of relatively powerful, low cost  hand held communication devices (smart/feature phones,tablets), and 2) the relatively low capital outlay required for developing software to run on these devices. How low you ask?

Let’s walk through a simple scenario. Two folks decide to design and implement a mobile app, they need someplace to live/work, let’s say that’s 2k/month (bay area rents, but that doesn’t have to be), two laptops 3000 bucks , internet connection $600.00/year for a year, food 5K/year on food, other incidentals. All that adds up to south of $40k, and just to be generous, lets bump that up to 50K for a year of the time and space to enable a couple of people to develop a production quality application. That’s not a lot of money, and from where I come from in hardware development that’s easily an order of magnitude less than that what is required.

For some folks, self funding is an option, but a lot of people seem to believe the next step is to go out and get funding. That’s all well and good, but we are now hearing and seeing that doing so is not quite as cut and dry here in the valley if you are black. Some of that is for sure, due to our relatively short tenure here in the valley. That notwithstanding, let’s not diminish the importance of the fact that funding here in the valley is a network intensive process and at least for the short-termed future, that network is not populated with a lot of US.

I am not saying that ALL currently available funding opportunities are closed to us, the Kapors, and some others have shown a willingness to help out. However it seems that in the main, our own communities’ capital appears often times to be  beyond our reach, or at least, we don’t turn to our own community first before looking outside. Why is that ?

Well, it’s NOT entirely due to a lack of money. Various reports indicate the black community spends between 500 and 900 billion dollars annually. So what the hell are we doing with all that money ? Better yet, what aren’t we doing with all that loot ?

I suspect that some of the problem is due to the difficulties we manufacture when working with one another.That we lose sight of the long term objectives due to short term chatter and static. My fear is that if we don’t take on the challenge of working with one another successfully for sustained of periods time; As black folks in the states, we will continue to bring up the rear. And let’s be honest, the elephant in the room on this one is how strange we all get with one another when it comes to money and supporting each other’s ventures financially.

As I somewhat glibly described above, it is relatively cheap to get a venture going. This is an unprecedented time in the valley,it is so much so that in ten or 15 years, the valley may NOT be the only center of the universe for tech and/or non-tech entrepreneurship. If that is the case, imagine the other black communities across the country that could potentially benefit from early models of collaborative work both in starting businesses AND in our own sources of funding those very same businesses.

Let’s start to explore low individual cost crowd sourced seed and pre-seed fund development. How hard is it to really raise 50K ?, 100K ?, 200K ? For too long, what has stopped a lot of great ideas in our community is a lack of money. Maybe, instead of waiting for the torrent of pennies from heaven, the arrival of a super man (or woman),we should grow some wings and become our own angels…

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Trust me, in the preview mode of wordpress it works just fine, so please enjoy this video

Peace

I seem to be having more of these experiences where I do what I used to do; namely go out and randomly check out cultural events. And then realize, wow, there’s cool shit going on here in the bay area.

Tonight was no exception, I went to LaPena cultural center in Berkeley and caught a comic performing. His material was pretty good and poked my sensibilities in the side a bit. That was great. After the show I did the hang at the bar for a while and just watched people. Damn, there are some fun AND interesting folks out there. I seem to forget about this part of life during the work week. Aren’t we working to live, and NOT living to work.. Hmmm, I’ll have to do more of this…

And OBTW, I miss my mom…

Apple might have some sense of how the iPad will drive these “rich, new” apps. As arrogant as they  can be at times, Apple knows products, and  is smart enough not to try and impose an all-reaching narrative on the iPad/app story arc. The feature set for the iPad, at least the initial version seems reasonable. As usual, they’ll improve the hardware platform over time . I am also pretty sure, given recent history, they’ll use the App store to help nudge things in the “right” direction.

Google, a relative newcomer (compared to Apple), has a somewhat tougher task in that their offering is more a service augmentation than straight up new product. True to form however, their hubris, and formidable corporate developer intellect should help them overcome some of the pitfalls this deployment may encumber. What remains to be seen, however, is how much of their storied prescience was brought to bear on the long term effects of this deployment. If they are smart, they will have already put together, locked and loaded, a developer community outside of Google primed and ready to go, because 1G to the house is a large pipe and there is more than just good hi-def media that could be enabled.

This is an infrequent event in the tech industry. Two titans each bringing potentially disruptive products /and or services to the consuming public. Each product/service being somewhat underestimated in its potential effect. The iPad is more than just a big iPhone, 1Gbit to the home is an awfully big pipe.

Apple and Google have asked us to “wait and see”. IMHO, I think that true results from either of these plays is a little further out then either of them knows. Good counsel would  be to do as they have asked, wait and see, give this some time…

I don’t think the iPad is a complete replacement for my MBP (or the upgrade I intend this year) but when I am traveling for fun, it and my iPhone will travel with me and will pretty much cover all my online/communication/organizing needs. Not to

No, I won’t be able to fire up VNC, log into work and write some Systerm Verilog.No, there is no X11 server/client stack for it… yet

But I am pretty sure will be able to satisfy all my news/journal reading and offload my brain from stuff I have to remember. That’s good enough

I’ll be buying physical hard cover books though. Call me a luddite in that domain, I don’t care.

I won’t be buying one  one immediately. I’ll wait until the end of the year, when more of the production and design kinks are worked out. I suspect the price may drop a bit as well.

There you go,not nearly the epic tome you may have been inspecting. But then hey,

I am sitting here now, by myself, on Super Sunday reflecting on how adrift I have been since my mother passed (dad died in 1985) in 2004. I am not a momma’s boy or anything like that, but as an adult when you parents die you begin to note your own mortality and more importantly that you have no one to look to for answers. I don’t mean that in the literal sense, but that you have those moments where you could call home. I miss that.Soooo onwards I guess, next in line is doing something about my work.

I am so confused

Well as I am walking through the hall with her, it occurs to me that there are a fair number of other parents there with the same idea.What worries me however is that if all of these youngsters become techies, developing all kinds of neat protocols, and devices to push media around. Who will be left to generate the actually generate the content that these devices will push/carry across the “ether”

In most parts of the “industrialized world” it seems, at least from a metric that most societies understand, that the arts are not really valued. At least not nearly as valued as say, the Nth generation iPhone (full disclosure, I have one and we are exclusively a mac family). 

So here’s my plan (though my daughter I am sure will have other ideas). I want her to be able to bust out the solution for a non-linear fourth order differential equation….. when she needs to because…. it helps her figure out how to internalize the fact that Dave Holland’s Big band swings with a groove like nobodies bidness…. She does all this and then pays good money she earns as some creative type to see Dave Holland’s big band live…..

Now that’s a fathers dream

Peace y’all