Technology Evangelist went to Tech Cocktail 2006 in Chicago, IL to interview some of the interesting people attending. Dan Green is a widely-recognized mortgage expert among national press and his wildly popular mortgage industry blog, The Mortgage Reports, has been featured by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Full transcript after the jump
Technology Evangelist went to Tech Cocktail 2006 in Chicago, IL to interview some of the interesting people attending. Eric Olson and Frank Gruber are the two behind the event and in this video we get a quick little peek into their mind.
Full transcript after the jump
Technology Evangelist went to Tech Cocktail 2006 in Chicago, IL to interview some of the interesting people attending. This video is the first in our series on Christopher Monaghan from Time59.com
Christopher Monaghan, a Chicago-based self-employed programmer/analyst, developed Time59 in response to his own timekeeping requirements. "I needed to track hours for each client so that I could produce invoices each month," he recalls. "My goal was to create a timekeeping system that was as quick and easy to use as e-mail."
Full transcript after the jump
Benjamin Higginbotham takes a look at the remote desktop and file sharing tools from LogMeIn.com including LogMeIn Free, LogMeIn Pro and LogMeIn IT Reach. Higher resolutions available in iTunes, Democracy and FireAnt, subscribe below or watch via Flash
Full transcript after the jump
1 year ago today the Technology Evangelist blog was born. It has been a great amount of fun thanks in no small part to our readers and everyone who helps contribute through comments.
We have a very exciting 2nd year planned with a lot more great content. To celebrate we will be releasing a video every day from now until the end of the month.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
1 year ago today the Technology Evangelist blog was born. It has been a great amount of fun thanks in no small part to our readers and everyone who helps contribute through comments.
We have a very exciting 2nd year planned with a lot more great content. To celebrate we will be releasing a video every day from now until the end of the month.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
1 year ago today the Technology Evangelist blog was born. It has been a great amount of fun thanks in no small part to our readers and everyone who helps contribute through comments.
We have a very exciting 2nd year planned with a lot more great content. To celebrate we will be releasing a video every day from now until the end of the month.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
Back in January, I experimented with selling digital cameras on Ebay that I didn’t own. I’d simply list a camera for sale at a price I knew I could find it for online. If someone purchased it for that price or higher, I’d order it from an online retailer and have it shipped directly to the buyer. Figuring out the right price to list the cameras at proved harder than expected though, due to inconsistent data on comparison shopping sites. For example, a comparison shopping site may list a camera as available for $350 from a given merchant only to find out that it’s out of stock.
Over time, I found Shopping.com to be the most reliable service I tried and found myself using Shopping.com or going directly to Amazon for price checks. Shopping.com’s comparison shopping site is the best I’ve found from both a consumer and merchant standpoint. On the merchant side, it’s relatively easy to upload products into their store, bidding for position in rankings is pretty straightforward, and the site drives traffic that converts at a very high rate. As a consumer, it’s a great place to go to find retailers offering the best price for a specific item. They seem to have tighter controls over merchant inventory and their merchant ratings system seems credible compared to what I’ve seen elsewhere.
Shopping.com could further improve the relevancy of their data with a few additional features. For example, there are times when the site falls short when calculating fully loaded prices. The site asks visitors to their shipping zip code, then adds shipping and tax into product prices so you know what to expect when clicking through to merchant sites. While this can be information for consumers who won’t face shipping surprises and equally valuable to merchants who will see higher conversion rates from visitors who know what to expect price-wise, the system missed a couple key metrics in the buying decision:
1. Minimum order incentives: A product selling for $24.99 could ship for $7.00, yet could also ship for free if you through a second item into the cart, bumping the total over $25.
2. Amazon.com Prime and other membership programs: Accounting for preferred shipping would make Shopping.com more valuable. If they don’t, Amazon Prime members will probably be better off just going to Amazon for purchases under $50 rather than price comparing on Shopping.com.
3. Category Coupons: Stores often offer coupons for certain categories within their online store. Those offers aren’t displayed on Shopping.com.
My goal as an online shopper is to be both frugal and fast. If comparison shopping sites don’t enable frugality - or take too much time to determine the true costs of orders - I’ll focus on fast by going directly to Amazon.
This week we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004 customer programmable microprocessor. It was the first processor on a chip and was the beginning of the revolution in personal computing, ultimately impacting practically every electronic device made. Curiously, it was almost by accident that it happened at all. Intel had no plan to design and build a microprocessor so how did it happen?
Intel was started by two semi conductor engineers, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, in 1968. They wanted to use large scale integration to build solid state memory devices. At the time this was a very novel idea since computers were using magnetic cores as random access memories. Their first product was a 16 bit, yes 16 bit, memory chip and their vision was to use LSI to build larger and larger arrays of memory chips that would ultimately replace magnetic cores. The primary advantages of this approach being speed and density. Hundreds and thousands of storage cells could be built into each chip in the space used by a single magnetic core. To give you an idea of size, a magnetic core is shaped like a doughnut and is about the size of the tip of a ball point pen. Each core constituted one bit and three to five wires had to be threaded through each one - a manufacturing challenge to say the least.
About this time the electronic calculator made its appearance using custom integrated circuits coupled with a keypad and small display. It is hard to imagine today that there was a time in the recent past when there were only desk mechanical calculators or room size computers and nothing in between. In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corp. asked Intel to design several custom chips for its new Busicom 141-PF printing calculator. The Intel engineers assigned to the task were Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor. The original plan was to use 12 custom chips for the device, but as the work progressed they decided that it would be so much more efficient if one of those chips could be programmable. The final design used only four chips: the processor, a read only memory, a random access memory and an input/output chip. As the work progressed Busicom ran into financial trouble so Intel agreed to absorb most of the development cost in exchange for the rights to the design. Little did anyone realize how important this step was. Busicom sold about 100,000 of the calculators and Intel decided to take the product to market. It was announced on November 15th, 1971 to little fanfare Slowly the realization of the potential for a programmable chip dawned on the company even though the primary focus of Intel remained on the memory business. Several generations followed, each one more powerful and larger than the last until the 8088 and 8086 arrived on the scene in 1978. The 8088 was the processor selected by IBM for the IBM Personal Computer that was announced in August, 1981. In less than 10 years an accident of opportunity was transformed into the beginning of a cultural and engineering revolution. The IBM PC was so successful that by 1983 Intel decided to abandon the memory business that had become extremely competitive with low margins and focus all its energy on the microprocessor business. Andy Grove, the then CEO, is credited with making this prophetic decision. It propelled Intel into becoming the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world, driven by an almost fanatical drive to build faster and faster and more powerful but upward compatible microprocessors.
The original Intel 4004 comprised 2,300 transistors as shown below. Today’s products the Core 2 Duo has more 200,000 times the number of transistors. Moore’s Law of doubling the number of transisters per chip every two years is still in place as Intel promises to ship chips with 4 processors on each one within the next few months.
Where else but in this great country could this have happened?
This week we celebrate the 35th anniversary of the Intel 4004 customer programmable microprocessor. It was the first processor on a chip and was the beginning of the revolution in personal computing, ultimately impacting practically every electronic device made. Curiously, it was almost by accident that it happened at all. Intel had no plan to design and build a microprocessor so how did it happen?
Intel was started by two semi conductor engineers, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, in 1968. They wanted to use large scale integration to build solid state memory devices. At the time this was a very novel idea since computers were using magnetic cores as random access memories. Their first product was a 16 bit, yes 16 bit, memory chip and their vision was to use LSI to build larger and larger arrays of memory chips that would ultimately replace magnetic cores. The primary advantages of this approach being speed and density. Hundreds and thousands of storage cells could be built into each chip in the space used by a single magnetic core. To give you an idea of size, a magnetic core is shaped like a doughnut and is about the size of the tip of a ball point pen. Each core constituted one bit and three to five wires had to be threaded through each one - a manufacturing challenge to say the least.
About this time the electronic calculator made its appearance using custom integrated circuits coupled with a keypad and small display. It is hard to imagine today that there was a time in the recent past when there were only desk mechanical calculators or room size computers and nothing in between. In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corp. asked Intel to design several custom chips for its new Busicom 141-PF printing calculator. The Intel engineers assigned to the task were Ted Hoff, Federico Faggin and Stan Mazor. The original plan was to use 12 custom chips for the device, but as the work progressed they decided that it would be so much more efficient if one of those chips could be programmable. The final design used only four chips: the processor, a read only memory, a random access memory and an input/output chip. As the work progressed Busicom ran into financial trouble so Intel agreed to absorb most of the development cost in exchange for the rights to the design. Little did anyone realize how important this step was. Busicom sold about 100,000 of the calculators and Intel decided to take the product to market. It was announced on November 15th, 1971 to little fanfare Slowly the realization of the potential for a programmable chip dawned on the company even though the primary focus of Intel remained on the memory business. Several generations followed, each one more powerful and larger than the last until the 8088 and 8086 arrived on the scene in 1978. The 8088 was the processor selected by IBM for the IBM Personal Computer that was announced in August, 1981. In less than 10 years an accident of opportunity was transformed into the beginning of a cultural and engineering revolution. The IBM PC was so successful that by 1983 Intel decided to abandon the memory business that had become extremely competitive with low margins and focus all its energy on the microprocessor business. Andy Grove, the then CEO, is credited with making this prophetic decision. It propelled Intel into becoming the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world, driven by an almost fanatical drive to build faster and faster and more powerful but upward compatible microprocessors.
The original Intel 4004 comprised 2,300 transistors as shown below. Today’s products the Core 2 Duo has more 200,000 times the number of transistors. Moore’s Law of doubling the number of transisters per chip every two years is still in place as Intel promises to ship chips with 4 processors on each one within the next few months.
Where else but in this great country could this have happened?
Recent Comments