The Idea Man, written by Paul Allen and suggested by Jimmy Fallon
Posted on April 3, 2012 by jcullinane
It all started on a snowy day in December 1974, when he was twenty-one years old. After buying the new issue of Popular Electronics in Harvard Square, Allen ran to show it to his best friend from Seattle, Bill Gates, then a Harvard undergrad. The magazine’s cover story featured the Altair 8800, the first true personal computer; Allen knew that he and Gates had the skills to code a programming language for it. When Gates agreed to collaborate on BASIC for the Altair, one of the most influential partnerships of the digital era was up and running.
Jimmy Fallon loved Paul Allen’s book because he lived the personal computer revolution that Paul Allen helped create and describes so well in his book. For example, when Jimmy was in high school in Chatham, Massachusetts, he was using personal computers, spreadsheets, etc., to solve problems when many of his fellow students didn’t know what they were. Jimmy is now an entrepreneur and computer consultant. It’s fascinating to watch him take control of a computer, and its cursor, from anywhere in the world he happens to be at the moment and solve the problem, very fast. Also, he has some great fishing videos taken off Chahtam on his website.ÂÂ
Streaming Dreams
YouTube turns pro. written by John Seabrook and suggested by Jon Nackerud.   ÂÂ
Posted on January 16, 2012 by jcullinane
On a rainy night in late November, Robert Kyncl was in Google’s New York City offices, on Ninth Avenue, whiteboarding the future of TV. Kyncl holds a senior position at YouTube, which Google owns. He is the architect of the single largest cultural transformation in YouTube’s seven-year history.
Wielding a black Magic Marker, he charted the big bang of channel expansion and audience fragmentation that has propelled television history so far, from the age of the three networks, each with a mass audience, to the hundreds of cable channels, each serving a niche audience – twenty-four-hour news, food, sports, weather, music – and on to the dawning age of Internet video, bringing channels by the tens of thousands. “People went from broad to narrow,” he said, “and we think they will continue to go that way – spend more and more time in the niches – because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.”
John Cullinane was the Founding Chairman of the 