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Marc Hedlund

Biography

Marc Hedlund is an entrepreneur working on a personal finance startup, Wesabe where he is Chief Product Officer. (He also blogs at Wheaties for Your Wallet.) Before starting Wesabe, Marc was an entrepreneur-in-residence at O'Reilly Media. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Sana Security, co-founder and was CEO of Popular Power, a distributed computing startup, and founder and general manager of Lucas Online, the internet subsidiary of Lucasfilm, Ltd. During his early career, Marc was Director of Engineering at Organic Online, and was CTO at Webstorm, where he wrote one of the Internet's first shopping cart applications in 1994. He is a graduate of Reed College.

Articles

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App Growth, PalmOS vs iPhoneOS

June 24 2009

There's a chart I've been meaning to put together for a while to explain why I'm expecting the iPhoneOS to be the dominant mobile platform for at least the next decade. I've been thinking of the role third-party applications played in helping Palm maintain its mobile platform dominance for about… read more

Four short posts: 12 May 2009

May 13 2009

[Stealing Nat's "Four short" format again...] I went to Google and searched for a non-location-specific term today (I can't be more specific since the search was for a birthday present for my wife, but let's pretend it was "baseball cards," since that was the general form -- a noun with… read more

Four quick posts: 11 April 2009

April 11 2009

[I love Nat's "Four short links" format and am ripping it off to try to get myself blogging again. Instead of links, these are four blog posts I've been meaning to write but haven't.] It turns out Facebook is not completely useless if you're married! And no, I'm not talking… read more

Kindle Above the Level of a Single Device

March 04 2009

Hey, I'm happy to see this in the news today: Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple’s popular iPhone and iPod Touch. Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple’s App Store. The software will give… read more

Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight

February 19 2009

[A note to start. My company, Wesabe, is funded in part by a venture firm, Union Square Ventures, which is one of the funders of Boxee, a character in the drama described below. That said, I've never met or spoken with anyone from Boxee, and have only ever talked to… read more

The Kindle Hardware Tax

February 09 2009

There's a lot of news about Amazon's new Kindle 2 today, and it does look like a nice upgrade. I still don't want one, though. What I want is Kindle software. I'm hoping the early suggestions that Amazon is thinking that way prove true. I use my iPhone for ebooks… read more

Seeing political links in color

October 10 2008

Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter teamed up to create a totally interesting project for the political season: a way to immediately visualize the links from political blogs on Memeorandum based on how they tend to link -- to more conservative (shown with red tint) or more liberal (shown with blue… read more

Daylife's API for the News

June 24 2008

Several years ago, my friend Upendra Shardanand tried to get me to join him in starting a company that would remake the way news is created and understood -- overturning the worst, ambulance-chasing tendencies of modern journalism, and building tools to help people track and understand the topics and people… read more

Startup Camp Companies Selected

June 20 2008

Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp: We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Startup Camp which will be held prior to this year's Foo Camp. There were so many great submissions that cutting… read more

Waxy on "Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's" (playable samples included!)

April 18 2008

Andy Baio strikes again: From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and… read more

Waxy: "Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2"

April 14 2008

Andy Baio posts what might be a response to Tim's concerns about Google App Engine. Interesting! I loved Daring Fireball's one-line description: "So much for the lock-in argument." There's definitely still a concern if/when people find themselves addicted to the services Google provides beyond simple app hosting -- as Andy… read more

Review Board is good software

March 31 2008

After having tried and failed to have useful code reviews at several different companies, and after feeling deep envy for Mondrian, Google's web-based code review tool, I'd been looking for some tool that would help make code reviews more painless. I think I've found what I was looking for in… read more

Everybody gets the iPhone interface

March 28 2008

I noticed two new web applications doing something interesting: serving their iPhone interface to everyone. Muxtape uses an iPhone-style interface for its playlists, which works great on an iPhone but for the fact that the MP3s don't play (at least, for me -- doesn't the iPod app load MP3s from… read more

Multiuser Backpack

February 20 2008

Congrats to my friends at 37signals for their launch of multiuser Backpack, a great upgrade to a product I love. Their new features, which let you share calendars, notes, to-do lists, and reminders with other people in a group, look... read more

Fast Forward for December 29th, 2007

December 29 2007

I would buy more music if my iPhone held more music. I wonder how much demand is suppressed only by device capacity. I can't believe Leno and company aren't turning to the Internet for jokes. A little Digg-style interface... read more

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