Vacuum

On non-disclosure and keeping trade secrets

Is a non-disclosure agreement the right agreement to draft for a first meeting with a potential partner, investor, or venture capitalist?

There might be a much more straightforward approach to this, one that does not require as much resolution of ambiguity between the entrepreneur and the VC. Consider the approach where you treat the key information to be protected as a trade secret. The entrepreneur impresses upon the VC the value of the trade secret and the efforts maintained to protect the trade secret by carefully marking all documents which would disclose the trade secret and visibly restricting their distribution. The VC in turn provides value by vetting the value of the allegedly valuable trade secret and is prepared to say "that's not a secret, Paul Baran started a company doing that in 1985".

A crafty tradesman is perpetually disclosing some relevant fragments of their trade knowledge at all times, in part to demonstrate competence, and in part to test whether what they know is really true.

As far as disclosure of trade secrets goes, I'd be much more worried about details leaking out inadvertently via ill-considered partners and subcontractors than via an investor.

Originally posted as a comment on Summation, in a story on Why Entrepreneurs Should Ask VCs to Sign NDAs.

Snowtober: power outage maps for Halloween 2011 storm

THIS WEEK IN MAPS, for Sunday, October 30, 2011: A late October snowstorm is heading up the East Coast of the United States for Halloween. Here's maps of the affected areas, showing what parts of the electrical grid have had the worst impact from the heavy, wet snow in the forecast.

New Hampshire

As of 2:00 a.m. Sunday, 32% of PSNH customers are without power.

Massachusetts

NSTAR list of power outages by town (PDF) for midnight, Sunday; no map. The NSTAR outage center lists contacts. Over 52,000 customers without power out of 1.1 million served (5%).

National Grid at 1:30 a.m. on Monday shows substantial outages statewide.

Connecticut

Connecticut Light and Power, a Northeast Utilities company, has a map that shows that the outages from the storm are worse than from Hurricane Irene. Over 700,000 of CLP's 1.2 million customers are without power (56%) as seen on this map as of 1:38 a.m. Sunday, October 30. Area codes affected include 203, 475, and 860.

The Ridgefield Press storm live blog notes trees down, power outages, traffic accidents, electrical fires due to trees falling on live wires, and other storm-related damage in Ridgefield, CT.
More local news coverage of southwestern Connecticut news from papers in the Hersam Acorn Newspapers chain. Power consumption, actual and forecast, from CT Energy Info.

New Jersey

Eastern Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

The PhillyBurbs.com story about the outages has photos of the tree damages in Bucks and Montco counties. PECO spokesman spokesman Ben Armstrong told the paper that Saturday’s storm was the worst October storm in the utility’s history.

West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania

Is Your Power Out? Call 1-800-Allegheny (1-800-255-3443) and let us know.

Map as of 8:06 a.m., Saturday, October 29, 2011.

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== Updates == * Tue 8:30 a.m. PA, NJ, CT updates * Sun 2:25 a.m. More CT including Hersham Acorn news chain for SW CT * Sun 2:00 a.m. Connecticut Light and Power * Sat 8:21 a.m. start work on map collection for Sunday "publication"; Allegheny Electric

Northern lights visible from Ann Arbor, Michigan, October 24, 2011

ANN ARBOR, October 25, 2011, 6:00 AM.

Did you see them?

The Northern Lights were visible from Ann Arbor at about 10:30 p.m. on October 24, 2011, described by Julie Weatherbee as "giant red areas like someone had set off a red smoke bomb".

This epic time lapse was captured by lakefxnet as seen from East Martin, Michigan, north of Kalamazoo.

Eric Hines captured the aurora over Lake Michigan, near the Indiana Dunes.

Aurora over Lake Michigan by Eric Hines

Discovery Magazine notes that this was an unusually active event, and that the aurora was visible into the southern United States including Missouri (via KSPR).

The Michigan Tech Aurora page is a good starting point for the science. The POES auroral activity map shows geomagnetic activity.

In terrestrial weather for Ann Arbor, this is shaping up to be a three layer day. Wear a shirt, sweater, and fall jacket, and you should be good for a chilly morning and a nice day with a slight chance of rain. Forecast graph is from Weatherspark.

More Space weather for October 25, 2011 from spaceweather.com.

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• 6:05 a.m. fix lede to be clearer
• 6:00 a.m. Eric Hines photo, KSPR Missouri sighting. needs a map too.
• 5:26 a.m. time lapse video. now, need exact timestamps for storm
• 5:15 a.m. aurora map
• 5:00 a.m. Space Weather site
• 4:45 a.m. Weatherbee quote, Discovery Magazine

Regarding the overnight storm of October 24 2011

ANN ARBOR, October 24, 2011, 5:00 a.m. - I wasn't expecting to be woken up by lightning, but there you are. The map is from StrikeStar, and a zoomed in power outage showing the north shore of Base Line Lake.

500a woken up by thunder and lightning

522a localized power outage

Google Analytics real time vs. mybloglog

We are writing to inform you that you have now been added to the beta for Google Analytics Real-Time! As we announced the Real-Time reports show you what is happening on your website as it happens.

Once upon a time, there was mybloglog. It was great, and then Yahoo bought it, gave it the big purple Yahoo squeeze of love, and then killed it.

Google now has a real time version of Google Analytics, which does some of the things that mybloglog once it. It tells you in real time what pages are being looked at, where people are coming from to look at them, and which keywords and referring sites are driving traffic. It scratches some of the same itch that mybloglog used to scratch, when there's some kind of burst of news and you want to know what's going on in real time and not on tomorrow's reporting.

mybloglog had something that GA doesn't have and really hasn't had: tracking of clicks not to the site you're looking at, but to something out there in the world that you linked to. That was great to use - and something that made it easy to see that you were successful as a blogger because you were driving traffic elsewhere. That's gone; maybe someone will build it, but maybe they won't.

As for the big purple squeeze of love, see also delicious, mangled by carpetbaggers after being abandoned by Yahoo. I have to wonder whether there's a web 3.0, the clipped corner remake of web 2.0 properties that were acquired and then sunsetted.

Typepad on iPad, edited elsewhere

No support for rich text editing in safari, but otherwise performant. Kind of nice.

I'll need to really learn markdown for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it descends from setext.

Ann Arbor

A2B3 lunch is Thursday as always. Ann Arbor Parks did trick or treat today, Sunday, noon to 4pm on the Huron River.

Arborwiki makes a good companion as you go for errands around town. Ann Arbor City Council elections and a millage are coming up. The Ann Arbor Chronicle has characteristically thorough coverage of the League of Women Voters forums. Some project, not yet identified, has North Main torn up at Catherine. A second project has North Division down to a single lane. Expect delays.

No one was hurt in last week's fire on Harpst. I'm trying a neighborhood LinkedIn group to see what kind of density I need to get enough people to make a group worthwhile; it might make sense to grab people closest first and then out by distance.

Metro Detroit

Tigers lost in the ALCS, and I'm looking forward to spring training.

Power outages from the Saturday windstorms were worst in Warren.

National

Occupy Chicago has had a lot of protest, via the Chicago Tribune which was on the scene.

Occupy Wall Street took over Times Square.

Living

I am tracking steps with a pedometer again, thanks to Paul Resnick and a research group at UMSI. Statler and Waldorf have taken over the Muppets twitter account. New movie due for Thanksgiving. Cue the Muppets.

Recipes

The wind on Saturday made farmers market blustery. Squash of all sizes and varieties were there, and there's nothing like a big old Hubbard squash to keep the corner of a table down. A farmer was doing the frost dance but said they had none at the last full moon. Traditionally, it's said that the best way to open a Hubbard is to take an axe to it, or to throw it down into the cellar.

Working

It's hard to have great weird ideas when you are closing trouble tickets. My new employer Nutshell has an office where my former employer Pure Visibility used to have it's offices.

Obituaries

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, Einar Steffrud.

Books

Books moved recently include Kawabata's, Snow Country, to be shelved on the Heikki Lunta shelf to prepare me for winter.

Tech

Pinboard now supports Gopher urls in bookmarks.

Sports

Michigan football lost to State. It was as good an excuse as any to call my aunt who went to East Lansing.

Meta

Wow, I have a lot of categories.

Pinboard now supports gopher:// URLs

from @pinboard

@Pinboard: @vielmetti @doctorlinguist alright, extremely proud to announce Pinboard now supports the gopher:// scheme

To test, go to https://pinboard.in/u:vielmetti/b:7fb419764b79 and examine what you get, following the link to its logical conclusions. To really test, get a Gopher client; I am using Overbite Chrome from Floodgap Systems.

Thanks to Cameron Kaiser for noticing, and to Maciej Ceglowski for making it happen.

For more coverage of Gopherspace, I occasionally write something at http://vielmetti.typepad.com/vacuum/gopher . 

Dennis Ritchie creator of the C programming language dies

The creator of the C programming language and the co-author of the book of the same name has died.� Dennis Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 and in addition to developing C was one of the developers of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in the late 60s and in the 70s written almost entirely in C.C grew out of B which was derived by Ken Thompson from BCPL, developed at Cambridge University in 1966 by Martin Richards.

I started programming in Fortran66, then played around with Ratfor, which was Fortran made to look like C, before buying my first copy of K&R C.� For a Fortran programmer who also had to program some chunks in assembler to get around the limitations of Fortran, C was a liberation.

via geospatial.blogs.com

North Burns Park Association fall 2011 meeting at Ann Arbor Friends Meeting House

ANN ARBOR, October 11, 2011. Residents of North Burns Park gathered at the Friends Meeting House on Hill Street for the annual North Burns Park Association meeting this evening.

The organization announced its new web site, northburnspark.org , which includes a neighborhood calendar, history, photographs of notable homes and a directory of city and civic resources. The webmaster, (who?), was generous in recognizing volunteers who had helped compile and edit text and photography for the site.

Residents expressed their concerns about municipal and neighborhood issues to each other and to several area elected officials who are residents of the neighborhood, including Mayor John Hieftje, Councilman Christopher Taylor, Washtenaw County commissioner Yousef Rabhi, and the recently appointed city administrator Steve Powers. (Does Steve live in the neighborhood?) (Links to names?)

Noise was a concern shared by several citizens, who expressed their frustration that nearby religious services, University functions, special events and construction activity generated noise far beyond ordinary noise limits yet were exempted by permits or the University's special relationship as an autonomous body. (Link to noise articles?) (mention Big House run by name?)

Mayor John Hieftje addressed citizen concerns regarding crime, noting that overall crime statistics as measured according to the FBI's standard reporting criteria are down across the board. Hieftje was critical of the media's portrayal of crime issues and perceptions of crime. It was noted (by whom?) that the increased awareness of near-campus crime was due in part to the University's direct dissemination of crime information and alerts. (Explain the Cleary Act? Link to municipal maps?)

Residents in North Burns Park (who, specifically?) expressed specific concerns about parking in near-campus apartments, noting that landlords have converted back yards into parking lots in excess of the city standard of 4 on-site spaces for a (which, specifically?) apartment unit. 

(Who? A couple of petanque enthusiasts) described the courts which they had helped in getting installed at the northeast corner of Burns Park (on some date) and invited neighbors to join in their enthusiasm for the game. Petanque is a French game similar to (boules) or bocce, played with metal balls on a gravel court. Students at Burns Park Elementary School learn petanque as part of their PE classes, and (the couple) are looking forward to a June 2012 event to raise money for ALS (as part of A2A3).

Long term residents were happy to see each other again at this annual meeting event, and new residents were welcomed. About (how many, 35?) were in attendance. The meeting adjourned at about 9:00 pm and residents ate some but not all of the cider and cookies provided before walking home.

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10:23p Initial edit with lots of blank spaces and missing names.

Nobody can compete with rapid, smart giving. It is a space seldom occupied

Smart and fast giving and sharing makes a good network.

Credit the quote to Kevin Doyle Jones, as part of an exchange on Twitter with Jerry Michalski, questioning why someone would go to the trouble of putting out a big, interesting, free newsletter and then not expose some of its insights to the network beyond that of its current subscriber base.