The Stacks, they are a pain. If you've never heard the term, it is in reference to the walled gardens controlled by Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Credit goes to sci-fi author/futurist Bruce Sterling who used it in his closing SXSW keynote this year. Here it is from the horse's mouth:

"[There's] a new phenomena that I like to call the Stacks [vertically integrated social media]. And we've got five of them -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. The future of the stacks is basically to take over the Internet and render it irrelevant. They're not hostile to the Internet -- they're just [looking after] their own situation. And they all think they'll be the one Stack... and render the others irrelevant.

While I whole heartedly agree with his characterization of the Stacks's intent, I am not sure they are all equally bad or competent at locking everyone else out. Witness the greatest offender: Apple. For me iTunes is so broken these days that its core functionality has been completely unbundled by better alternatives. I get my music from Spotify or Pandora. I listen to podcasts via iCatcher. In both cases the network has enabled a different kind of design center which allows third parties to beat the native apps on the Stack.

In some cases you truly are stuck on the Stack. I use iCloud (which is in most ways terrible) because it backs up my iDevices in a way nothing else can. I also use iCloud to sync my bookmarks and photos. I could use Chrome and rely on Google's Stack to sync my bookmarks but I don't because it is not "better enough" than what is native to the Stack (Safari). However I'd gladly use something to sync my photos if— like iPhoto— it could sync natively the photos taken from all of my devices.

In case it is not clear, I love the concept of the Stacks. I just think we ought to get a lot more granular about the places in the different Stacks that are still viable attack surfaces for the creativity of third parties. These may change quickly as the Stacks grow and extend into popular use cases but one thing that can't be denied is that the folks that exploit the openings (Dropbox, Evernote, Instapaper as examples) create tons of value along the way.

The Girls Around app fiasco is breaking a story (long in coming) about the implications of the data exhaust we create on social networks being something that could be put to somewhat questionable use. Four Square, the primary vector for location in this particular case, has shut them down already and the news cycle is such that this broke at a point where it will probably fail to jump from the tech press to the mainstream early next week, but this is by no means the last we've heard of this particular story. For the best summary of both it and its implications, there is no one better than Charlie Stross, not only one of the best sci-fi guys around but a particular shrewd commentator on all things technology as well.

While we will see it come up again (especially before Facebook's IPO) the need to bring privacy to the forefront of the discussion with regular users will not go away if most of this data gets hidden behind the application silos and removed from the API. In fact, as the "Target knowns if you are pregnant before you do" scandal showed, it turns out that this kind of thing can happen even when you don't realize that you are "the product" because your primary relationship with the business is one where your eyes are sold to ad units. Even if you are buying something you walk out of the store with, if what you do generates database rows, it can be used against your best interests.

Data exhaust will likely be one of the most important externalities we'll have to deal with in the coming decade and whether we like it or not, the advances in predictive analytics and "big data" is only likely to exacerbate the problem. It's good to keep that in mind as we give up vertical pixels to Google's attempts to mine who we are on their front page (yes that is the heinous bar at the top) and fork over loads of preference/curation/purchase data to some of the other web stacks.

The iPad 3 adheres to the old saw in technology that there is magic in version 3. While it is true that this is in part due to how wonderfully rich the app ecosystem has become, from a pure hardware perspective, the combination of a 264 dpi display and a lightning fast cellular network is about as magical as the many reviews have claimed.

At HP, the ink and paper crowd was always obsessed with what was known as the "300 dpi barrier," the thought being that until affordable displays got there, there would still be plenty of room for consumers printing the stuff that wasn't going to get stuck to the refrigerator. From my perspective, the pre retina iPad had already eliminated that for most of the universe of printable disposable content, but this new display has killed one of the last bastions of the printed page: the mixed content (text & graphs), multi-column, full page (usually) PDF document. Just this weekend I was reading a Comscore report with a number of tables & graphs and for the first time ever, I didn't feel the need to print any part of it out. Incidentally, this was the market for the Kindle DX but unfortunately that device was never general purpose enough to merit its price tag.

And on the network side, it is hard to explain the improvement until you experience it. Or rather, it is easy to conceptually understand the impact of more bandwidth, and slightly less easy but still possible to grok lower latency. But LTE feels ever better than the sum of those two factors. Quite simply it just feels more immediate. Struck by what the cause might be for this, I spent a little time poking around the Qualcomm site and came across this paper (consumed on the retina display of course) that argued that startup time from a "cold modem" (one which starts from an idle state) is quite a bit faster on an LTE connection than on a HSPDA (3G) one (about 3X), driven largely by improvements in signaling. And while it is true that most tablets live and die on wifi (92% of data traffic according to Comscore is coming from Wifi connections as opposed to 25-50% for smartphones), I think the speed of this modem may be about to begin to change that particular "leave at home" use pattern.

In fact, for the first time since the launch of the original iPad, I am now convinced that we've got a fundamentally different platform for which a new class of productivity applications ought to emerge. Something like the new iPhoto but on steroids since it should go way beyond leveraging the direct manipulation interface to using both the resolution of the display and the network in new and unexpected ways. It's too early to tell but my money is on new types of collaborative applications that leverage the high pixel density to navigate large datasets and the realtime nature of persistent and lightning-fast connectivity to put the collaboration in environments where users have been forced on "batch" mode for compute resources. Architects, field folks, and even presenters at conferences are a few of the examples I can think of for starters.

Finally, it bears mentioning that the iPad3 will likely not remain the only entrant (nor even necessarily the dominant entrant) in the market now that it has defined the spec that everyone else needs to hit now that it has, at least in my mind, validated the category as more than a portable television crossed with a poor man's laptop.

I am sold. Down with laptops and up with the strokable slates!

Over the holidays, I wrote myself a link shortener to take advantage of the fact that I've been paying for a vanity domain (an.ton.io) and to refresh my memory of HTTP redirect etiquette and the Googlebot. Watching the stats over the last month, I've been amazed at what I had erroneously perceived as amazing Twitter juice as I would easily get 1-3K clicks on any link I shared with was even mildly interesting. This morning though, I became suspicious when within 1 minute of an un-Godly early morning moment, I had received over 200 distinct clicks on my Twitter link.

A quick sampling of this first minute shed some light on just who listens that early in the morning:

What is most fascinating about this is the sheer number of bots (software programs written by humans) wired into my feed (you can tell that these are what are visiting by the "useragent" column which usually identifies one of the main browsers but here identifies hand-written scripts). I expect that a couple of these are from Twitter itself and perhaps a handful of blessed partners (LinkedIn for instance) with access to the firehose, but for the most part, the bot melee must be comprised of software agents that have been written to at some point explicitly follow my account.

Given the sheer number of bots now authoring tweets, I wonder how long Twitter would continue to function bot-to-bot if every human being on the planet stopped tweeting instantly with software agents posting links that other software agents would dereference and then reply to. In Battlestar Galactica the Cylons were big toaster-like robots but maybe our artificial overlords will show up in a much more subtle way. Let's just hope if that is the case that they end up being less self-promotional than their human progenitors when it comes to Twitter!

I attended a panel last night nominally on the topic of whether the local startup ecosystem was best seen as the M&A feeding grounds of big west coast technology companies. Because it was an interesting group of panelists, we wandered a bit and never really dug into the core question of whether this is true and what its implications might be for the overall technology industry in Cambridge and Boston. Having been Twitter taunted by Scott Kirsner to come prepared for a fight, I was disappointed we mostly avoided the topic.

The short answer is that while we do indeed have plenty of liquidity events tied around large technology companies from the west coast as acquirers, we could use more to ensure an even healthier ecosystem and that as such I think we should be thrilled to have more companies exit to the big tech companies of out west, not stressed. While there is one nuance about what we are missing today (particularly when it comes to web companies), overall this is a good thing.

First, my take on the necessary virtuous cycle of the startup ecosystem:

It starts with "founder material," the engine of the entire machine. As a general rule, New England has always done well in producing founders but a macro trend which has helped us disproportionately in the last five years has been the plummeting age of the typical founder, a factor which plays very well in a university-rich geography. Whereas the 1980s saw the median founder coming out of a minicomputer company on the 128 riviera, today that founder is just as likely to be 22 and fresh out of MIT, Harvard or any of the sixty odd colleges and universities in Massachusetts alone.

To get the engine started, most founders need a little fuel in the form of a few hundred thousand dollars, something which until this latest boom in seed activity was a weakness of our region, or more likely, a unique strength of Silicon Valley. Back in 2001 when the venture dollars dried up, the only place one could get money at this scale in Boston ($100-1000K) was from one of a few rather onerous angel groups. However, using the new StartupDataTrends (a very cool new tool I highly recommend you try out for what it achieves in terms of startup funding transparency), you can see the differences in average seed round amount raised and valuations below:

Once the engine has started, the startups that find product/market fit then often go on to need scaling capital, the job of traditional early stage investors and a segment where New England has been over represented on a per capita basis for a long time, so we certainly have no problems there. Entrepreneurs may argue that VCs are too conservative or don't get the Internet but it's hard to argue that there are too few of us, and more importantly, not enough dollars in this geography.

Where we have suffered a bit, especially in this latest wave of Internet companies has been in finding "scaling employees," or the folks that, trained at large companies in a similar sector, can quickly ramp a few hundred thousand dollars of run rate revenue or unique visitors into millions and tens of millions. In the 1990s we didn't have this problem because everyone was new to the web and we were all making it up as we went but over the last 10 years there has been a legion of middle managers that have gone from Yahoo to eBay to Google to Facebook (and a few other relevant chains) and learned how to skillfully scale engineering, sales, marketing, operations, etc. for ever larger web businesses. My mental image of this is a set of Russian dolls surrounding the same core group of management talent with each subsequent generation of a "pole tech company" being more massive at scale than the former (e.g. Yahoo->Google->Facebook).

While we've got some of those folks here (hidden away at companies like TripAdvisor, VistaPrint and Kayak), the density is too low for all of the interesting startups that need this type of talent. This is the one place where not having the big pole companies in the web (unlike say systems companies in networking and storage which we've got plenty of) has hurt us. Though again, time and success should fix this.

Finally, a lot of liquidity is necessary to recycle founders (who will swing harder the next time), create new sources of startup capital, and most importantly, provide a way for startups that won't ever be able to turn into billion dollar standalone companies to find a home, thereby releasing raw materials back to start the cycle.

This last point on too much "selling out" was meant to be at the core of last night's panel and my core argument was going to be that we need more not less of it and that by having companies like Google, Microsoft, VMWare, and Amazon, establish meaningful presences (not just sales offices) in Cambridge, we were likely to see more of this type of activity.

I believe Scott Savitz said it best last night when he talked about the key metric being the number of "at bats" that we get as a region to create monster companies here. No matter how you think of it, accelerating this startup ecosystem virtuous cycle— be it in e-commerce, mobile adtech, infrastructure software, robotics, ed tech, or any other of our emerging tech clusters— can only help that particular statistic.

Postscript: In a related sign of the virtuous cycle being accelerated, Brad had a very nice piece after his visit here this week on entrepreneurial density that is worth reading.