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The original Napster made it easy to share digital music among friends In June 1999 a US teenager wrote a computer program that turned the music industry on its head, and created shockwaves that are still being felt by the global entertainment business a decade later. His name is Shawn Fanning and the program was Napster.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Napster: 10 years of change
Update | 8/8/09 11:45 a.m. Here’s a link to the Times story that goes into greater depth on what happened. A massive denial-of-service attack that disabled Twitter for much of Thursday continued on Friday.
Twitter Service Spotty as Attacks Continue - Bits Blog - NYTimes
If Execution Is What Matters, Where Does That Leave Ideas?
There’s a cliché statement about entrepreneurship that says ideas are nothing without execution , rendering the former virtually worthless without the combination of hard work and luck that can transform unmaterialized concepts into viable businesses. Some have described ideas to be a mere multiplier of execution , which is close to how I personally think about them, and I would add that the process of getting a great product out there is a vital part of what constitutes innovation in the first place. In my view, it’s not that ideas are worthless per se, it’s that they’re never more than a starting point, a launchpad. I’ve been thinking about this all day after I read this blog post by Marjolein Hoekstra (who I consider to be a friend) about the original idea for Tweetmeme , a service that aggregates the most discussed and retweeted stories on Twitter (we use their retweet button at the bottom of blog posts, and you should use it).
Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn
Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn. Here’s the presentationSlideShare , a Mountain View-based startup that lets you upload and embed PowerPoint presentations on the web, appears to have stirred the red dragon last week. About ten days ago the company began receiving anonymous requests to delete slideshows that were deemed “illegal” by the requesters. The SlideShare staff checked out these slideshows and discovered them to be quite innocent. While some described ways to fight corruption in China, none of them violated the company’s terms of service, and so SlideShow did nothing to fulfill the requests. SlideShare soon began receiving a different type of request from the same people, who could now be identified by their email addresses. This time they were pretending to be users who had lost their passwords.
