in fact i invested in avantgo right before the crash. i like to think it was the $500 or so i invested that truly precipitated the original year 2000 dot com bubble crash.
I think his vision of smartphones has held up well. From page 74 of my hardcover copy of The Road Ahead:
What do you carry on your person now? Probably at least keys, identification, money, and a watch. Quite possibly you also carry credit cards, a checkbook, traveler's checks, an address book, an appointment book, a notepad, reading material, a camera, a pocket tape recorder, a cellular phone, a pager, concert tickets, a map, a compass, a calculator, an electronic entry card, photographs, and perhaps a loud whistle to summon help.
You'll be able to keep all these and more in another information appliance we call the wallet PC.
Great comment and I guess he really did see more of it coming than I was aware of. It seems like the main thing he miscalculated, ironically, was how people would use these devices -- it turns out that all that functional stuff is totally dwarfed by being a Facebook zombie, in terms of total eyeball hours.
It's like we all had this innate drive (or susceptibility?) to zombification that we weren't aware of until the smartphone actually appeared
I started with a manually-packaged Python function and credstash [1] to store credentials for non-AWS services. It gets invoked nightly by CloudWatch and has been bulletproof for months. I recently built a microservice [2] for Election Day with Flask and deployed it behind API Gateway with Zappa [3]. Lambda isn't for every use case, but for those it is, I'm bullish.
