CRYPTOCHAOS

When I started my second company, in 1988, also in Silicon Valley -- the industry was approaching a level of maturity that, in tech, warns of a looming implosion. I was too young and inexperienced to know this, but the signs were everywhere. A few years before if you had a good idea, you could ship a product, promote it, build a user base, and find liquidity. Now the dominant companies had grown so big they were starting to choke the ecosystem. And the entrepreneurs who were showing up were less the bright-eyed engineers with big ideas, and more of the carpetbagging MBAs with pyramid schemes. Gotta say the VCs typically went for the MBAs. The era of the engineer, if it wasn't over, was certainly waning. 

All of these things are vying for attention and evangelism. Some of them are great, some of them are stupid, but they’re all clubbed together under this vague banner of ‘The Open Web’. It sets expectations and demands from developers, who are all the while being wowed by the efficiency and quality of proprietary application frameworks like Flash and Cocoa.

Wow!

According to multiple sources, a trader entered a "b" for billion instead of an "m" for million in a trade possibly involving Procter & Gamble [PG 60.75 -1.41 (-2.27%) ], a component in the Dow. (CNBC's Jim Cramer noted suspicious price movement in P&G stock on air during the height of the market selloff..)

Sources tell CNBC the firm in question that handled the erroneous trade is Citigroup [C 4.04 -0.14 (-3.35%) ]. The bank said it has no evidence of a bad trade but is investigating the situation

Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.

They are hoping they will put it behind them," said Matt McCormick, portfolio manager at Bahl and Gaynor. "They will have an actionable event. The costs will be defined. The risks will be quantified, and then they can go back to making money.

The reports also found that insurers' core system initiatives more often depend on internal resources for testing and conversion, while relying on vendor resources more heavily during deployment; that most projects take from one to three years, but that some have been completed in as little as six months; and that software license fees average less than 10 percent of the total cost of life/annuity/health projects but closer to a quarter of costs for P&C projects.