1. Marc Andreessen: Build apps like it’s 1999.

    emergentfutures:

    “It feels like a lot of the work we put into building the PC industry and the Internet and now the smartphone industry, a lot of that work got us to the point where we have the Internet in everyone’s hands. It seems like now the game is really beginning, and we’re going to see what the great killer apps and the great Internet franchise businesses are that are going to be built. That was the conversation that everyone was having in 1999. We were all just early. Back then there were only 50 million people using the Internet versus two billion, and now and we’re on our way to five billion smartphones. Now we have the chance to build the businesses that we thought we were going to build in 1999.”

    —

    Marc Andreessen | Marc Andreessen Says Now’s the Time to Build Companies Like It’s 1999  (via courtenaybird)

  2. No credit for Uncle Sam in creating Net? Vint Cerf disagrees

    Vint Cerf, always a class act, takes Crovitz to task.
    Crovitz also writes approvingly of this blogger's quote (from 1999): "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring information, TCP/IP, but it languished...In less than a decade, private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most important technological revolutions of the millennia." Since you developed the TCP/IP protocol, I'd like to know your reaction.
    Cerf: I would happily fertilize my tomatoes with Crovitz' assertion.

  3. TV: You know how it feels. It feels … meh.

    Years ago, before the cable boom, before the rise of social media, before broadband and Apple TV and Netflix and ­iEverything were at our fingertips, “the ­future of TV” was the subject of endless Clinton-era gold-rush-fever speculation. We were told exactly what it would look like: One day soon, we’d be able to watch Friends or ER whenever we felt like it, simply by saying to our TV—or better still, our home computer, which would control everything—“Show me the latest episode.” Maximum consumer flexibility, maximum choice, maximum convenience. Tech nirvana.

    (Source: New York Magazine)