Derek E. Silva

I’m looking for your submissions on this one. If you could change just one thing about London, Strathroy, Kilworth, etc. (wherever you live in Middlesex County), what would it be?

Please reply in the comments, and I would really appreciate it if you would throw in whereabouts you do live. I’ll get it started.

If I could change one thing right now, it would be that Middlesex County/London owned and operated its own fibre-optic network and Internet service provider (ISP) with no bandwidth caps or throttling policies. It would be called MLfibre or FibreLDN and you could get a 100Mbps down (maybe 5Mbps up for residential and 50Mbps up for businesses) for under $100/month.

So… what would you change?

The first ever Ignite London took place on Wednesday night over at Gigs Grillhouse (great food and service!). It was a very interesting evening, to say the least. I got to meet more people, re-connect with some folks from high school that unexpectedly showed up (not on my behalf), and had my chance to stand up in front of the 100+ crowd to deliver my Ignite Talk about MuniFibre. (more…)

I’ll be doing an Ignite Talk at Ignite London tonight. It’s happening a Gigs’ Grillhouse – doors open at 6:30pm, things really start up at 8:00pm.

If you’re coming, I hope to see you there and I really hope my talk on MuniFibre gets you thinking about the possibilities!

Don’t kid yourself – Facebook cares very much about your data! They care about how much they can get their hands on, how easily they can index it, and then how much easier it becomes for them to target ads based on information you have on your profile and apps you use.

In fact, the defaults for Facebook’s privacy settings completely expose your profile not only to everyone on Facebook, but to the entire public including non-Facebook users. Meaning your current and potential employers, people you like and have pissed off, your parents – everyone – can see your Facebook profile. For a visual representation of Facebook’s expanding public defaults, click here. (more…)

Not good enough anymore

While researching innovative approaches to educating our children, I came across a pilot project that was run this past summer at a single school in New York City. It’s been dubbed “School of One,” and the approach is very similar to the types of things I mentioned as possibilities in “The Textbook of the Future?” To quote this New York Times article:

The program [...] consists mainly of students working individually or in small groups on laptop computers to complete math lessons in the form of quizzes, games and worksheets. Each student must take a quiz at the end of each day; the results are fed into a computer program to determine whether they will move on to a new topic the next day. (more…)

I came across a story on TechCrunch early this afternoon about Time Inc’s plans for a digital version of Sports Illustrated. What they’re doing here is really cool and it’s worth a look because a big part of my ideas here are based on what I saw in the video.

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Watch my video after the break to see my first vlog and a quick analysis regarding Barracuda’s acquisition of Purewire yesterday! (more…)