We have all seen an e-mail with that ends with “Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry” or “Sent from my iPhone”. These signatures are there to let you know the e-mail was sent from a mobile device (with some not-so-subtle advertising courtesy of the network and/or manufacturer). But isn’t it time we come up with [...]

I am killing time on a twelve-hour plane trip from Tokyo to Toronto and I feel compelled to share some of the reasoning behind a few of my recent life decisions. If you don’t know me, I left my job in Seattle two months ago to move back to Canada. Was it hard work? Yes, [...]

Growing up, we all read Dr. Seuss (i.e. Theodor Giesel). Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax and quite a few more are all sitting in a bookshelf somewhere in parent’s my home. As a child, I remember them as being easy-to-read funny stories, but reading about him as a (youngish) adult I realize there was [...]

Graphs can tell us our history. At Amazon, small hiccups in our graphs would serve as a funny reminder of a bad deployment or a broken feature, but in the real world they can sometimes be a sobering reminder of history we would rather forget. I was playing around with Google’s Public Data Explorer some time back. [...]

As announced in TechCrunch today, Japanese e-commerce site Rakuten just acquired Canadian e-reading company Kobo for $315 million. With rumors of Amazon launching a Kindle store in Japan, Rakuten being the leader of the Japanese e-commerce market, and Kobo facing an obvious uphill battle for e-reader dominance against Amazon and B&N, I think this is great step [...]

Have you ever noticed how price formatting can vary from restaurant to restaurant? While one menu might list the price of a dish as ‘$12.00′ another might list the price as simply ’12′. Although this is usually done for aesthetic reasons, a research paper by Cornell has shown that this small design decision can actually [...]