Archive for November 2007
How Long Has This Been Going On?
I have my high school reunion coming up, so I have been reminiscing a lot lately. I keep feeling like life is moving in fast-forward, particularly in the technology world. In the midst of all the web 2.0 hype and plans for world domination, it is interesting to look back and reflect about the pace of change. Some examples:
1. Its almost three years (back to March ‘05), since Paul Graham gave his talk “How to Start a Startup“ to a standing-room-only audience at Harvard. This talk led to the founding of ycombinator, and now something like 50 startups. I was there for the talk, loved it, but haven’t applied any of the wisdom. Time to get going.
2. It its just over three years (summer ‘04) since Ruby on Rails was released. I first discovered the framework in December ‘04 and have used it to create a few sites in my spare time. It truly is a joy to use, and I am also inspired by the underlying philosophy that drives it forward.
3. It has been almost four years since Gmail was released. Think of all the ways in which this product re-defined e-mail: conversations, tags, search, massive storage, targeted advertising, and AJAX. Truly groundbreaking.
4. Back in my grad school days, almost five years ago (spring ‘03), I heard Bob Metcalfe give a talk on “The Video Internet”. He laid out a grand vision for internet-based video, and described the technical challenges that would be required to enable it. Of course, that is well underway now.
At another talk in grad school, John Gage put forth a theory of how technology evolves: not as something driven by great breakthroughs, but as a series of incremental innovations that, combined together, enable new applications. (He demo’ed Keyhole, a breathtaking new mapping program that combined 3-D graphics, and streamed sattelite images to demonstrate his point. This of course, was an early version of Google earth.) Things sure are moving fast… what’s next?
23AndMe Launches
Here’s one to watch: 23AndMe, a California startup co-founded by Anne Wojicki, Sergey Brin’s wife, has launched its initial Personal Genome Service. (NYT Coverage, WIRED Coverage)
To use the service, customers submit a saliva sample, which is analyzed for a set of SNP’s on a microarray by Illumina. Then, the data is analyzed by 23AndMe’s software. The initial offerings from the service include a Gene Journal that provides personalized risk assessments, analyses of one’s ancestry and family tree, and general visualization tools to browse your genome.
It will be interesting to see if this can get any traction in the marketplace, given the $999 price tag, and the positioning toward general interest in genetics, rather than therapeutic applications. I for one, would love to do this. But I can’t quite afford it. Someday.
