Tim Marman's Loosely Coupled

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• Aloha, Mahalo.com

  I found this arrangement in my feed reader mildly amusing this morning: Fred Wilson's post on Mahalo.com directly above a post by Brad Feld entitled "The Computer Should Be Doing the Work for Us". (They are unrelated entries). Mahalo.com is, of course, a people-powered search engine that Jason Calacanis publicly unveiled yesterday (no longer "Project X"). I'll be honest: when I first saw that Jason announced a "people-powered search engine", I was underwhelmed. But the more I think about it, he may really be on to something. If you listen to CalacanisCast or read his blog, you'll know Jason has more than a slight obsession with Wikipedia. I'm certainly not the only one who noticed that Mahalo pages resemble Wikipedia entries more than they do Google results. And according to Dan Farber : Calacanis compared Mahalo to Wikipedia, which he said sucked in the first few years and then took off in year four or five. In the first few years, Mahalo will get to 25,000 search terms and then go into... Posted May 31 2007, 10:46 AM by Tim with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: Web 2.0, Innovation, Google, Entrepreneurship, Startup, Social Behavior, NextNY

• Streamburst offers innovative DRM for video

  I've already discussed the German music store using watermarks to discourage piracy , and now it seems another service is applying the same principle to video . Instead of handcuffing viewers who want to view films they purchase on multiple devices and otherwise use content legitimately in ways DRM blocks - Streamburst takes two steps to prevent movie piracy. The first is that every film begins with a 5 second display of the name of the person who purchased that copy, as it appears on their credit card. The second step is that Streamburst eliminates an undetectable but unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded. That idea is that the psychological barrier of being named will stop many people from illegally distributing the files and those whom it doesn’t stop can be identified by the unique series of bits stripped from whatever copies make it into illegal file sharing networks. These techniques are just as effective at preventing the bad guys as "real" DRM (that is, they... Posted Feb 28 2007, 01:46 PM by Tim with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: Technology, Intellectual Property, Security, Innovation, Video, Social Behavior, DRM

• Wisdom

  There is an important distinction between factual information and understanding how to apply it in context ( via Matthew ). Data is "the sun rises at 5:12 AM" Information is "the sun rises from the East, at 5:12 AM" Knowledge is "If you're lost in the woods without a compass, follow the direction of the sun to find your direction" Finally, wisdom is "Don't get lost in the woods" Posted Jan 25 2007, 04:40 AM by Tim with | with no comments Filed under: Innovation, Business, Social Behavior