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The facts suggest that I’ve left New York. It’s been a protracted, heartwrenching process, and until now, I didn’t understand that it would end. In my mind, I’m still a New Yorker, just… an expatriated one.  It’s the only place I’ve ever felt I belonged, and this is still true. When I go back, I’m a New Yorker again; I feel the startling relief of hearing my own language, and every block shimmers with a ghostly overlay of memories. And I was a New Yorker long before I got there — even as a ten-year-old, I dreamed of New York, the glittering metropole of movies and novels, and I couldn’t wait to live there. - shehab hamad

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“Once you know what you want, Google (GOOG) or Amazon (AMZN) will take care of it,” says Ben Silbermann, a founder. “But if you don’t know what you want and you want to discover, I don’t think there are very good solutions.” - shehab hamad

a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place. - shehab hamad

Every Siri query that’s answered by Yelp or Wolfram Alpha is a query that might otherwise have been answered by Google. - shehab hamad

“It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information,” quipped Oscar Wilde in 1894. He did not know the half of it. - shehab hamad

it stores the equivalent of around 82 objects for every person on the planet. - shehab hamad

Instead of collecting data in two dimensions using streamers and then processing the data to produce a 3-D image, they decided to move to three-dimensional acquisition. This approach, called a “wide-azimuth” survey, involves using hydrophones and multiple seismic sources on three or four vessels moving in parallel. The subsurface structures can then be probed from several different angles at the same time. Accuracy can also be improved by passing over the same region several times from different angles (a “multi-azimuth” survey). Additional techniques include “coil shooting”, which involves performing a wide-azimuth survey on a spiralling trajectory, and so-called “4-D” surveys, in which repeated wide-azimuth surveys are used to gauge the effects of production on a subsurface structure over time. - shehab hamad

“Did you know you can hire 100 servers from Amazon for $10 an hour? That just blows my mind. For me, that’s really the heart of the big data revolution.” - shehab hamad

You must change your mentality to build really scalable systems. Approach chaos in a probabilistic sense that things will work well. In traditional systems we present a perfect world where nothing goes down and then we build complex algorithms (agreement technologies) on this perfect world. Instead, take it for granted stuff fails, that'sreality, embrace it. For example, go more with a fast reboot and fast recover approach. With a decent spread of data and services you might get close to 100%. Create self-healing, self-organizing lights out operations. - shehab hamad

Out of 100 people, 1% will create the content, 10% will curate the content, and the other 90% will simply consume it. - shehab hamad

Great designers are great empathizers - shehab hamad

Walter Kriha, Scalability and Availability Aspects…, V.1.9.1 page 1 03/12/2010 - shehab hamad

Those digital sound files are currently stored on a combination of optical storage -- DVDR jukeboxes --and tape from various vendors, according to Wendy Aylsworth, vice president (VP) of technology and Steven Anastasi, VP of media archiving for Warner Bros. Right now, according to Anastasi, the software and hardware in the sound archive must be updated every seven to 10 years. Most recently, the archive was converted from the DAT tape it used in the 1980s and 1990s to DVDR and Linear-Tape Open (LTO). Within another decade, the media will need to be replaced again. "We're pushing very hard with companies that make optical media to figure out what technologies might last at least 50 years and targeting up to 100 years," Aylsworth said. At the very least, "our goal is not to have to replace technology more often than every 25 years." - shehab hamad

“In the trembling of a leaf,” says Baudelaire, “in the color of a blade of grass, in the shape of clover, in the buzzing of a bee, in the sparkle of a drop of dew, in the sighing wind, in the vague fragrance coming out of the woods, an entire world of inspirations is produced, a magnificent and colorful parade of disorganized and rhapsodic thoughts.” - shehab hamad

More data rich and analytically intense Reinforcing the importance of all these changes is an exponential increase in the volume of customer data and the intensity of the analysis required to process and act on it effectively. The sheer volume of data is extraordinary:  Zynga generates five terabytes (equivalent of about 1.5 million song files) of data on customer clicks every day. What’s more, “Marketing is going to become a much more science-driven activity,” says Duncan Watts of Yahoo! Research. : to send targeted e-mails to customers, retailer Williams-Sonoma, for example, analyzes an integrated database that tracks some 60 million households on metrics including income, housing values, and number of children. These e-mails obtain response rates 10 to 18 times as high as those sent randomly. - shehab hamad

A significant constraint on realizing value from big data will be a shortage of talent, particularly of people with deep expertise in statistic and machine learning, and the manager and analysts who know how to operate companies by using insights from big data. —McKinsey Global Institute report, "Big Data: The next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity," May, 2011 - shehab hamad

Amazon gives developers control with "services as a platform" approach - shehab hamad

"Even though Amazon taking on Apple is a bit like David taking on Goliath (compare the market cap, profits, and cash position of the two companies)" - shehab hamad

"(“The only problem with Microsoft” he said in 1996, before Apple’s rebirth, “is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste.”)" - shehab hamad

here's the short version: REST is a bit of a paradigm shift by focusing on "nouns", and restraining the number of "verbs" you can apply to those nouns. The only allowed verbs are "get", "put", "post" and "delete". This differs from SOAP where many different verbs can be applied to many different nouns (i.e. many different functions). For REST, the three verbs map to the corresponding HTTP requests, while the nouns are identified by URLs. This makes state management much more transparent than in SOAP, where its often unclear what state is on the server and what is on the client. In practice though most of this falls away, and REST usually just refers to simple HTTP requests that return results in JSON, while SOAP is a more complex API that communicates by passing XML around. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, but I've found that in my experience REST is usually the better choice because you rarely if ever need the full functionality you get from SOAP. - shehab hamad

An Amazon-Hulu deal would be a homecoming of sorts for Hulu CEO Jason Kilar. He worked for nearly a decade at Amazon, where he led its North American media businesses, before taking the helm at Hulu in 2007. - shehab hamad

s3.amazonaws.com. - shehab hamad

The print world ends not with a bang, but with price increase after price increase. - shehab hamad

Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst with Forrester Research, said eBay’s fulfillment play is an attempt to be competitive with Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon service, which stores and ships products for its third-party sellers. “We’ll see how competitive eBay actually is able to be,” she said. “Shoppers love Amazon because the merchant usually is forced to offer all the usual Amazon shipping promos when they use FBA, and that’s a difficult competitive point to match.” - shehab hamad

“You have to remember that Ticketron was around for 25 years,” Mr. Rosen said. “I made everyone change how they buy tickets.” - shehab hamad

A year in production, with nine countries visited and more than 80 musicians interviewed, this series by musician and documentary filmmaker Fermin Muguruza paints a 'soundscape' of the Arab music scene. - shehab hamad

Some sports teams, like the San Francisco Giants, have been experimenting with dynamic pricing for years, but the music industry has been slow to adopt it. Concert promoters and theater owners tend to favor it as a way to sell more tickets and squeeze out scalpers, but artists often worry that they would appear to be exploiting their fans’ loyalty by maximizing price. - shehab hamad

But, but, but what if they’re the next Amazon? First, Amazon spent the billions that bled their balance sheet digging an incredible moat. They built warehouses and distribution centers, and had to keep every fucking item in the world in inventory. That turns out to be very expensive too, but repaid at scale - shehab hamad

“Dubai is the New York for Africans now,” - shehab hamad