J.R.McHale

“Paucity of Art in the Age of Big Data: A Dispatch from San Francisco:” At The Millions, Lydia Kiesling on the search for “the great San Francisco tech novel.”

Related:

Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge: reviewed at LA Review of Books, New York Times and The Paris Review.

Dave Eggers’s The Circle. Critiqued by Felix Salmon at Reuters – “How Dave Eggers Got Silicon Valley Wrong.“

At FastCompany: “Box’s 65-Year-Old Android Engineer Gives Your Startup Some Unsentimental Advice”

At The Walrus: “BlackBerry’s Boom: How the Canadian Smartphone Became a Nigerian Status Symbol” by Brianna Goldberg. Apparently, there is even a popular Nollywood film series ‘BlackBerry Babes’. According to Goldberg: “While North American business stories have been reporting on RIM’s spectacular decline, Africa has fallen hard for the Waterloo, Ontario, tech giant. RIM, now known simply as BlackBerry, is Africa’s number one smart phone vendor, and it is now the preferred brand in both South Africa and Nigeria, two cultural leaders for the continent. Second only to Asia’s mobile market, Africans already use 735 million cellphones.” Interesting read, but don’t be fooled: “BlackBerry 10 predicted to hold less than 5% market share through 2016”

Wired explains yesterday’s Supreme Court decision clarifying that the “first sale” doctrine of federal copyright law applies to foreign-purchase works imported into the United States: “Supreme Court Boosts Right to Resell Copyrighted Goods.” The Supreme Court’s opinion (pdf)

In Layman’s Terms: Spotify Technology: How Spotify Works (The Pansentient League)

In Technical Terms: “Spotify – Large Scale, Low Latency, P2P Music-on-Demand Streaming,” a paper by Gunnar Kreitz and Fredrik Niemelä, KTH – Royal Institute of Technology and Spotify Stockholm, Sweden (pdf: available here)

Some Recent Canadian Tech Links:

Toronto Life: How big wireless companies, the banks, and even the actors’ union are keeping [Canada’s] mobile bills the highest in the world

WordsByNowak: The world’s worst throttler (officially): [Canada’s] Rogers

Michael Geist: RIM’s Woes Partly Based on Canadian Telecom Policy

styckyd: How the Payment Processing Industry in Canada is Halting Innovation

Ars Technica: Law & Disorder: Canadian Supreme Court rules you can’t defame someone with a hyperlink

Mark Evans Tech: Do Canadian Startups Get Enough Attention?

tech vibes: Canada’s Top 100 Startups

Canadian StartUp Blogs:

StartupNorth

tech vibes

Maple Butter

StartupCFO

Photo copyright © 2011 j.r.mchale

“Innovation and Job Creation in a Global Economy: The Case of Apple’s iPod” by Greg Linden, Jason Dedrick, and Kenneth L. Kraemer from the Journal of International Commerce and Economics.

“Proceed at Your Peril: Crowdfunding and the Securities Act of 1933” by Joan Heminway and Shelden Hoffman.

“Click Trajectories: End-to-End Analysis of the Spam Value Chain” by fifteen researchers from four institutions—the University of California at Berkeley, University of California at San Diego, the International Computer Science Institute, and Budapest University of Technology and Economics.

The Globe and Mail: Toronto’s Transformation to Silicon Valley North: “’There’s a new emergent scene going on in Toronto,’ says David Crow, a strategist for Microsoft, and a long-time organizer of the city’s tech community. ‘We have great talent and great opportunity.’ After years of nurturing a tight-knit tech community, Toronto seems to be reaching a critical mass – not just of homegrown companies, conferences, and networks, but of ties to a global industry.”

See also:
Techcrunch: Canada Now Somewhat Less Anti-Startup: “Canada isn’t shy about making life difficult for startups … [b]ut a change in Canadian tax law last week is designed to spur U.S. venture investments in Canadian startups and make Canada less of a leper colony for tech entrepreneurs. The change allows foreign investors in most Canadian startups to avoid ‘literally hundreds of pages of documents’ to be filed and processed on a sale of a startup, sometimes by each limited partner in a venture fund. That burden meant that most venture firms simply ignored the Canadian market.”

VC Experts: Canada’s Federal Budget Scores in Overtime for the Technology Community

Photo © 2010 j.r.mchale.

Twitter Plans Technology to Prevent Censorship