A Businessman's View

In early August, I promised an interview with David Hersh "in a few weeks." It took me a while to prepare myself, but finally I was able to reach out to him. David, who co-founded the formerly (more below) social networking site Multiply , was kind enough to give me some of his time to answer a few questions. LS: At the end of my August 2 blog entry I briefly introduced Multiply, but I'm sure I didn't do it justice. Can you elaborate on what Multiply does, and what your role is within the company? DH: Multiply is a social networking site that has recently evolved into a social shopping site. The service was built to allow people to share photos, videos and blogs with friends and family on fully customizable personal web sites. We discovered that those tools as well as the social communication tools that underlie the media sharing also work great for someone looking to set up an online storefront and build an e-commerce business with little to no out-of-pocke...

Every year around this time, I take a few moments to think about the wonderful things in my life for which I am very thankful. This year the activity took on special significance because, 4 days ago, my mother suffered a cardiopulmonary attack (a heart attack coupled with respiratory failure) and has been in a coma since. Not surprisingly, I immediately came home to be with my father who has been her spouse for 43 years and has been profoundly affected by this. What is surprising is that this isn't the first time she's been comatose. In fact, I jokingly say to anyone who will listen that my mother has cheated death so many times she probably owes him money or something. The last time, my mother developed a sudden case of bacterial meningitis and was unconscious for 11 days before waking up and, in her characteristic fashion, complaining that she didn't have her makeup and similar implements with her to avoid looking like a fashion nightmare. The very wonderful Dr. Sam L...

I try to avoid religious diatribes. I recognize that religion is an intensely personal matter, and I can remember when people would canvas door-to-door, interrupting my family during dinnertime growing up. I also try to avoid political discussions. In my opinion, people either take a "half interested" view of politics or are rabid fanatics of everything that goes on in Washington D.C., their states, and their locales. Politically induced rabies tends to induce blindness and a general lack of common sense in people too, which is the reason why I avoid it. (I'll leave my general loathing of politicians and the tendency of them in general to put personal interests above the good of the people; lobbying ['nuff said]; and related topics out of this discussion.) Still, Tuesday saw the biggest swing in Congress since the 40's so it is my civic duty to comment: I'm glad it's over. I realize that the Republicans felt the need to recapture Congress given the tr...

Edit: ironically, this article on the latest security debacle at Facebook was released today on the Wall Street Journal. You can't script this stuff. Really. The subject for this blog entry is an oft-repeated mantra of mine. I'm not sure if I've discussed this here before, but I would argue that even if I have it is worth repeating. The inspiration for this subject is a recently reported "feature" of Facebook that any of your contacts that were kind enough to enter their phone numbers in their profile have that information visible to anyone in your network unless they were savvy enough to make that information visible to their friends only. Of course, when one of my Facebook friends found out that the had access to their friends' phone numbers they panicked. "ZOMGWTF!!1!11!!uno" was essentially the response, and all of their friends chimed in with similar ones after they confirmed it. Even Yours Truly responded in kind and dutifully reposted ...

Two weeks ago, I was at a large pharmaceutical client talking to a senior IT executive when the word "cloud" was mentioned in passing. He chuckled and responded that this was simply the nom du jour for something that has been in use for a number of years now. For example... Client / Server . When Microsoft DNA became popular with redundant web, application and database servers this was, in essence, a cloud albeit one that was limited in its ability to scale since you couldn't rapidly add new machines to the mix as demand required it. (And DNA wasn't the first time this setup was used either - Microsoft simply made it sound fashionable.) Application Service Provider (ASP). This was, in reality, a variant of Client / Server because essentially it was the exact same architecture run instead on another company's infrastructure. From a conceptual perspective, however, this was very similar to cloud computing as it's defined today: your application is deploy...

I'm sure this doesn't fall under the "quality blog entry" concept that I mentioned two entries ago, but I'm also not one to shy away from pointing out the good and the bad in customer service either. Here's the Executive Summary for you, which I am sure will hook you into reading the rest: I lost a hard drive that had no backup; recovered it completely using freeware ; fried my motherboard in the process of permanently installing the previously lost hard drive; replaced the motherboard and the CPU (just in case); and now have a working computer again 4 weeks later. How all of this happened is something I can't explain. (Well, maybe I can. More on that later.) Three years ago, I bought an external, 500G USB 2.0 Fantom drive from MicroNet . The reviews on NewEgg were positive overall; the price (at that time) was very good; and I was running out of disk space on my internal drive so I bought it. About a month before the really bad stuff occurred, the ...

I have had many (older) good friends pass away during my life, and invariably during the memorial service someone says that this is a time of joyful reflection and not mourning. It is okay to be sad at their passing, they continue, but we should be thankful that they are reunited with God. On this ninth anniversary of September 11, I'd like to think of this as a joyful occasion then. I am not talking about those who passed away on that fateful day, however; I am talking about those who survived that day, whether they were in the area on the day itself or had some relation to the events of that day. It is not my intention to trivialize the deaths of the many who were lost. Like you, I mourned them, even more so since I worked in the South Tower up until the year prior. In fact, on that day I was on the 31st floor of the tallest building on the lower East Side (save for those in the Financial District) and had a clear view of the events as they occurred including the planes'...