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Photo Desktop allows you to put photos on your desktop, instead of having to
choose one photo to use as your wallpaper, you can now add as many little pictures to your
desktop as you want.
Photo Desktop 2 adds too much to the previous version to describe, below you'll find a summary of
some of the more significant changes and additions.
Multiple photosets
With Photo Desktop 2 you're no longer bound to a single composition, with an unlimited amount
of photosets you can create different desktops for different moments.
Use Smart photosets to let Photo Desktop create and update Photosets for you, based on a
folder you point out or on the iPhoto album of your choice.
Use the changer the automatically switch between different photosets. You can also use the
changer to shuffle the Photosets, including Smart photosets, so your Desktop will never look the
same.
iSight support
Photo Desktop 2 now comes with built-in iSight support. Allow you to create photos in the
PhotoChooser simply as one of the many photo collections you have.
Use the snapshot feature to instantly create a photo using your iSight camera and add it to
your desktop.
Also new is the Photo Desktop Spy, the Spy can automatically create snapshots and add them to
your current desktop or a designated other photoset.
Core Image Quality & Animation
Photo Desktop 2 is built utilizing Apple's Core-Image technology. For Photo Desktop 2 this
means that your resulting Desktop will have a far greater quality than before. Also this means
that fun effects could be added to the Editor.
With a new engine powering Photo Desktop 2, a screensaver has been added to complete the
Photo Desktop package. The Photo Desktop Saver makes your desktop come to live by animating the
photos off your current photoset.
Utilizing your videocards power also enables the 'Live-updates' feature, when turned on your
Desktop gets updated instantly without the delay you saw in Photo Desktop 1.
Much more customization
Photo Desktop 2 add many other functions to further customize your photos. The photo info
panel has been extended with frame-shape, shadow, effect and additional options.
Existing functionality like the caption functionality has been further extended to allow for
caption on the photo as well as using shadow or 3D effects.
The Photo Desktop preferences have also been further extended to adjust the application to
your wishes.
WHAT'S NEWVersion 2.3.2:
Fixed issue where pd would sometimes draw on top of the icons in Snow Leopard
Ben Horowitz has a post called The Case For The Fat
Startup on the All Things D blog. I don't agree with
Ben's take on this issue but I have enormous respect for Ben and his partner Marc Andreessen.
They have started and built multiple successful businesses and all I do is write checks. So take
everything I have to say with that in mind.
I'd also like to say that my comments are only related to software-based businesses. I don't
think it is applicable to greentech or biotech. Those sectors are much more capital intensive
than software.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Documents in Viacom's three-year-old, $1 billion suit against YouTube,
unsealed today by U.S. District Court Judge Louis Stanton, paint a fascinating picture of the
intertwined relationship between the video site and the conglomerate that owns MTV, BET and
Comedy Central.
For example: YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were in a race early on
to build traffic at the site in hopes of getting acquired, and knew full well that illegally
uploaded TV clips might help.
TechCrunch50
startup CrowdFlower has been attracting a lot of attention,
even raising $5
million in funding recently. CrowdFlower is a labor as a service startup that helps
businesses outsource mundane or repetitive tasks to the cloud. Now the startup has attracted a
competitor, recently launched CloudCrowd, which also
promises increase efficiency and lower costs to companies by breaking large projects into smaller
tasks, and distributing them to its virtual workforce.
Once a client assigns a task to CloudCrowd, the company will distribute tasks its work force of
more than 100,000 workers. With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that
determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don’t have a rating yet are
assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each
separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal.
Tasks range from content moderation, internet research, audio and video transcription to data
entry. Since the company’s launch a few months ago, CloudCrowd has completed over 500,000
tasks for a variety of clients, including USC and RentCycle.
As I wrote above CloudCrowd will face competition from CrowdFlower, but it seems that the model
is attracting the attention of businesses to perform mundane tasks, so there should be room fr
several players in the space.
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on
moderated online
collaboration has unveiled a synchronization
tool that allows the group administrators on Yahoo
Groups to sync with GROU.PS. So Yahoo Groups admins can incorporate functionality such as,
location-based services and chat, into their platforms from GROU.PS.
The new tool doesn’t require the Yahoo Group owners to shut down their existing group. They
can still continue using their email list. Instead, a GROU.PS group surrounds their old Yahoo
Group list and will add additional functionality such as collaboration, deep customization tools
and integration with Facebook. GROU.PS will essentially create a whole new social network
tailored particularly to that specific list, and augments its functionality with typical social
networking features that can be found on any GROU.PS group.
And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives
publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the
highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the
publisher could only change the skin of their site. Now publishers can actually modify the
backend of the social network they’ve created.
The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your
group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system
supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups
– each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules
also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Facebook, Digg,
blogs, etc).
The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform and
2.5 million users, also added
ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network
measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to
members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that
will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees
charges).
GROU.PS raised $1
million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But
while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the
space, Ning, which hit
37 million users with 1.6 million social networks in November.
RunKeeper, a startup that lets you track your fitness activity via
an iPhone app, is rolling out a new service called RunKeeper Live that lets you share your runs, well,
live.
Founder and CEO Jason Jacobs says this is useful if you want to race a friend or join him in an
activity, or for safety, allowing your spouse to track you. It's also useful to brag: you can
tell your friends "Hey, watch this Google Maps mashup of me doing this awesome run." He says this
has been a heavily requested feature from their "growing" userbase.
Location and social real-time sharing are very hot spaces right now, and RunKeeper obviously
wants to tap into that. One problem might be that, although the sharing features are opt-in, once
you activate them they're available on your public page, showing people when you're outdoors.
This might raise security concerns for users. For women in New York especially, is it such a good
idea to tell the world: Hey, I'm all alone in a park right now!
Still well below most people’s radar, the company raised $24 million in venture capital and recently released
its first app for the iPhone after nearly a
year of development.
But that doesn’t mean the startup has a lack of ambition: they’ve just hired Gummi Hafsteinsson, who has led several of Google’s
most successful mobile product initiatives as Senior Product Manager for the past 5 years, as
their new VP of Product. Hafsteinsson originally joined Google’s mobile group in July 2005
and first managed the Google Maps for Mobile product.
More recently, he led development of Google’s voice-powered search
app for all the major mobile platforms – iPhone, Android, Blackberry and Symbian. He
reported directly to Vic Gundotra,
Google’s VP of Engineering.
Prior to joining Google, Gummi founded and ran a company called Dimon Software that produced
mobile enterprise connectivity software designed to enable enterprises to access corporate IT
systems from any mobile device.
His experience in developing scalable applications for multiple platforms tells us Siri is
working on making its virtual personal assistant product cross-platform. Its proposition was
compelling enough to bring home the award for
most innovative Web service at the Microsoft BizSpark
Accelerator at SXSW, by the way.
In other news, Siri is now available for
iPod touch devices, integrated Twitter into
the service last week and is closing in on a quarter million early users.
When booting up, I get the following error message:
Quote: Can not connect to low level driver.
Please reinstall ATI Tray Tools under administrations rights with UAC disabled. I researched this,
and the only option seems to be disabling UAC. On a forum, someone
playfully said to the program author:
Quote: Well how about you just get that driver signed like RivaTuner has these days, instead of
telling people to turn off UAC, hack bootsettings and what not And he responded:
Quote: Give me 500$ and I will get it. :) Seriously? His program won't function properly on bootup
unless he forks $500 over to Microsoft?!?!?
Notifo est une startup qui se lance dans les notifications en push, c’est à dire la
possibilité de recevoir automatiquement en temps réel des notifications de tout
type. Le système repose sur une API qui permet d’envoyer facilement n’importe
quel type de message vers un terminal mobile. Pour le moment Notifo ne fonctionne qu’avec
l’iPhone, mais une application pour Blackberry est en cours de développement
d’après la page d’accueil du site, et la startup veut étendre au fur et
à mesure son système à d’autres smartphones.
A noter que contrairement aux concurrents existants,
Notifo est totalement gratuit, y compris pour l’application à installer sur
l’iPhone.
Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer
Joseph Smarr late last year, but
it’s Yahoo that’s finally adding the 8-year old idea of turning the address book
model upside down and letting people subscribe to it rather than keep their own quickly outdated
lists. They’ve launched a new feature called “Share my
info” in Yahoo Contacts that is, like the old Plaxo product, a way to subscribe to
contact information and have it automatically updated.
Instead of updating your friends’ contact information when it changes, your friends just do
it for themselves and then everyone with permission to get that information automatically has
their address book updated.
It saves a lot of hassle and it was brilliant when Plaxo launched it in 2002.
But it never really caught on with the masses and most people today are stuck with address books
that are little better than they had a decade ago. Plaxo’s spamming problem
probably didn’t help gain user trust, which was part of the problem. But Plaxo also lacked
other features like email to make it a really useful place hold your address book.
Syncing products bring the promise of contacts Shangri La, but they never quite seem to work. I
still maintain a desktop address book synced with Mobile Me as well as Google Contacts synced
with my phone, and it’s a huge mess of duplicate contacts and outdated information.
There’s also a bunch of independent contact information for some of my friends over on
Facebook. And in fact that’s often the most reliable data for older contacts because they
keep it updated themselves. It’s very similar, in fact, to the Plaxo model. I’m
“subscribed” to them via mutual friendship and it can be turned off at any time.
I hope Google starts doing this soon as well, simply because that’s the closest thing to a
master contact list that I have in the cloud. And at some point someone has to solve the problem
of syncing contact information and other data across company platforms. Yes, I know a ton of
startups have tried this, but no one has quite gotten it dead simple and right.
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a
unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion,
please see the details here. The series is made
possible by
Microsoft BizSpark.
Quick Pitch: Trada’s online marketplace boosts Google and Yahoo search ad
results by crowdsourcing search expertise for small and medium businesses.
Genius Idea: Trada takes a lot of the complexity of running SEM (search engine
marketing) campaigns by letting advertisers or agencies take advantage of lots of different
search experts who can execute campaigns for them quickly and efficiently.
Trada is officially launching today, after being in private beta since January, 2009. The idea is
pretty simple: Have advertisers or agencies lay out the parameters for a campaign, like the
landing page, a budget, maximum cost per click, etc. and then have search experts work in tandem
to generate keywords and ad groups that can be submitted to various ad networks like Yahoo and
Google AdWords.
Once a campaign has been submitted, advertisers can monitor the keywords to see how different
things are performing and to make sure that the keywords are clear and accurate. Search experts
get to keep the difference in what the advertiser is willing to pay per click/conversion and what
it actually cost to generate. In other words, they have a very real incentive to get as many
conversions or clicks for your campaign as possible.
Trada is essentially acting as the liaison between the two groups — which means that they
also offer some stability and checks and balances for both parties. Search experts have to pass
an entrance exam before being accepted into the program.
Trada is free for advertisers or agencies to use — their budget and total advertising cost
will vary depending on the parameters of the campaign. Search experts get to keep 75% of their
profits, with 25% going to Trada.
Trada sounds like a low-cost way to try different SEM strategies and to take advantage of people
that are actively working to get you conversions because it benefits them. Likewise, it might be
a low-noise opportunity for search experts who don’t want to have to be tied to certain
campaigns or companies and can choose what projects they work on and so-forth.
Have you ever run any search engine marketing campaigns? How did you figure out your approach?
Let us know!
Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark
BizSpark is a startup program that gives you three-year access to the
latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of
investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned,
less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can
sign up today.
Not so long ago, calling something “Web 2.0″ increased its value. It meant fresh,
new, interactive, responsive. Now, if someone uses that term you know they’re woefully out
of touch.
For me, it’s been a trip to re-adopt my former web beat on GigaOM after spending a few
years writing for our sister site NewTeeVee. I made the leap
to the world of web video in the fall of 2006, when YouTube had just been bought, Facebook had just opened to the general
public, and only a few people cared about a little service called Twittr.
Since then, one thing that’s gone by the wayside is the term “Web 2.0,” which
got its start as a marketing phrase to build a conference around, and spawned both a new class of
companies and sites dedicated to writing about them, such as TechCrunch and Mashable. TechCrunch,
whose original tagline was “tracking Web 2.0,” itself declared the death of the term
in February 2009, citing a perceived drop in the number of pitches mentioning it. Indeed, while
the AJAX-y web services and user-generated content at the core of Web 2.0 haven’t gone
anywhere, now the preferred term seems to be “social media.” Google Trends says that search volume for “social
media” surpassed “Web 2.0″ right in the middle of January this year, though the
new hotness has yet to reach the heights of “Web 2.0″ circa 2007.
Feel free to chalk it up to a matter of trendy semantics, but here are the material differences I
see between these two mini-eras:
Building for the Mainstream
These days, starry-eyed entrepreneurs are building for the mainstream, not just for themselves.
One of the reasons I was happy to leave the GigaOM Web 2.0 beat the first time around was that I
didn’t want to write about yet another social bookmarking service trying to copy the
innovative but narrowly used Delicious (then spelled del.icio.us, which kind of says it all).
Sure, one of the best ways to come up with something truly useful is to build something you
yourself want, like a repository for saving all the web sites you visit — and as Twitter
has proven, niche products can evolve to satisfy the needs of those beyond just early adopters.
But some of the most exciting new services online today are aimed at serving broader interests,
such as the search for deals (Groupon, Gilt Groupe), and procuring real physical products and
human services (Alice.com, Sears’ ServiceLive).
I think MySpace
and Facebook deserve a lot of credit for bringing the Web 2.0 era to the mainstream, helped along
by major portal offerings like Gmail. Those services and products continue to provide value to a
broad audience. On the flip side, startups like Foursquare and the many folks who pitch us on,
say, tweaks to Google Reader aren’t building with Middle America in mind. They may get
there eventually, but not just yet.
All the World’s a Platform
The rise of platforms, app stores and mobile makes web applications better, more accessible and
more useful. Facebook, with its platform launch in 2007, showed the value (and eventually, the
dangers) of building on top of someone else’s pre-existing audience, making use of inherent
viral channels and the continuity of experience provided by a popular platform. The distribution
power of the platform was huge.
Then the iPhone App Store came along, offering far more functionality and exposure to developers
(if they could get through its approval process). On the user side, just about every web app is
better when it rides along in your pocket, ready when you need it. The iPhone and all the
knock-offs and competitive one-ups it has inspired are tremendously popular. And
as a corollary, the benefits of the mobile app platform model is now so obvious that the number
of them grew to 38 from eight in the span of 2009 alone,
according to new research.
The Most Obvious Answer
Of course, the one thing
that affected every business, web or otherwise, was the economic downturn. However, Web 2.0
startups — until of course their funding ran out and/or they had to layoff employees
— seemed woefully out of touch with the rest of the world.
Valleywag, which never missed a chance to declare something dead, might have actually been right
when in it ran
with the headline “It’s the end of Web 2.0 as we know it” in reference to a
carefree music video released by Web 2.0 entrepreneurs cavorting in Cyprus to the tune of
Journey. It was October 2009. Their timing was pretty bad.
Meanwhile, one of the sectors hit hardest by the downturn was the media, which was already being
brought to its knees by its failure to adapt to the web. Now, your Facebook newsfeed really is
your hometown paper (though its investigative reporting skills may be limited to relationship
status changes), and Twitter really is your personal real-time newswire. And accordingly, social
media referrals from sites like Digg and Twitter are increasingly important to media business
models — and sites like Facebook and YouTube are among the most-trafficked,
and therefore most powerful, on the web.
Maybe “social media” just sounds less like a buzzword or a brand name than “Web
2.0,” while at the same time pointing to a sort of social facelift for all content —
a feature that can be included or integrated into everything on the web, rather than being
segmented in its own category. Or perhaps it was the futile attempts to brand disparate things
“Web 3.0” that
made people realize how silly the naming convention was. But “social media” has its
issues, too. As Aliza argued earlier this
month on WebWorkerDaily, many new web tools are just useful, not necessarily social. Perhaps what
was wrong with “Web 2.0″ was that the term implied a fixed version — while
it’s cute, the metaphor of a software upgrade doesn’t carry over very well in
reference to something that changes every day. Innovation on the web is fluid and builds on
itself, and that naming convention just got stale.
Middle photo and post thumbnail courtesy of Flickr user chegs.
Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my
bio.
There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the
bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created.
Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up
at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause,
and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.
That’s partially a good thing, of course. A room full of 2,000 people all shouting their
opinions on a topic isn’t much of anything except chaos. But sometimes there are people in
the audience who have a really interesting perspective on a topic, or even know more about the
topic than the people on stage.
The idea of an unconference has evolved over the years with Foo Camp and BAR Camp (and others)
where the audience and the speakers are one. Those types of events are really rewarding, but they
don’t work on a large scale single track event. Again, it would just be chaos.
A couple of years ago Dave Winer had the idea of putting people from the audience, literally, on
stage (there’s a link out there somewhere but I can’t find it). As far as I know no
one has ever really experimented with this yet. But we’re going to try it out at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York on May 24-26.
We’re going to leave an empty seat on stage for many of the group panels at TechCrunch
Disrupt and invite someone from the audience to come up and participate. I’m not sure how
exactly we’re going to do this yet. We could just ask for a volunteer from the audience
right before the panel, for example. But a better way might be to take volunteers for the panels
early on in the event and pre-screen them for interestingness, passion for the topic, knowledge,
etc.
I particularly like the idea of including audience members in the group of experts who judge and
comment on new startups launching.
I’m guessing some of the smartest things on stage will be said by these audience members.
And it will certainly freshen the format. And I really like the idea of a
panel of top experts in a field along with someone who may not have the resume, but certainly
has the knowledge and opinions, to be up there too.
We’ll expand the discussion of this on the Disrupt blog over the coming weeks, and announce firmer
plans closer to the event.
I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately,
the
system is flawed, in that the more notifications you get, the worse the experience is because
it can be hard to manage them all. And one reason I always have the iPhone on me, even when
taking around an Android phone, is that there’s no good way to get my notifications on
another device. A new startup may offer a solution for both of those problems.
Notifo is a Y
Combinator-backed company launching today. While it’s currently only available as an
iPhone app, the plan is to eventually roll out to all the major mobile platforms, starting with
Android and BlackBerry soon. And while the current app may seem pretty barebones, the power
resides underneath; it’s a platform.
Notifo’s API makes it very, very simple for any site
to insert a few lines of code in their site and offer Push Notifications very quickly. There is
no approval process, you simply insert the code and you’re good to go; your site is now
notification-ready.
What’s great about this solution is that it’s creating a way to get all the
notifications in one place, rather than having to manage a dozen (or in my case, more) apps all
with their own notifications. This way, when you load up the Notifo app, you get a stream of all
the notifications you’ve chosen to subscribe to. You could get notifications about new
TechCrunch posts, or even when someone responds to a comment you made on TechCrunch, for example.
The idea is similar to
one of my favorite iPhone apps, Boxcar, but again, this is more about the underlying idea of
notification syndication. Boxcar is more about setting up and managing notifications across a
range of services they choose — and it’s iPhone-only. Notifo should let
you fairly easily set up notifications for just about anything, on any device.
While they wait for others to adopt the idea (so far, Listia
has), Notifo set up a few services so people can use it with the iPhone right now. For example,
Push.ly allows you to get notifications for all Twitter
mentions of your name. And there is a simple March Madness final score notifier that has been
giving me updates all day as tournament games end, with their final scores. You can also set
alerts for when individual stocks hit certain prices.
And the service also allows you to send yourself timed alerts, which are easily set up from the
Notifo website.
Notifo is the work of Chad Etzel, a developer who was
formerly doing some work for Twitter.
Formspring.me, the fascinatingly simple and popular
personal Q&A site, has raised $2.5 million from a top-shelf list of angel investors: Baseline
Ventures, Freestyle Capital, SV Angels, Maples Investments, Chris Sacca, Dave Morin and Kevin
Rose. The site, which launched exactly 113 days ago, as Formspring.me President John Wechsler
tells us, has had 50 million unique visitors in the last 30 days and facilitated the answering of
more than 300 million total questions.
Formspring.me was spun out of
FormSpring.com (which is now rebranding itself as FormStack to avoid confusion) last fall, after
the Indianapolis-based company noticed 30,000 people had signed up for its free accounts in order
to invite people to ask them questions. “We set out to give these users a product that
would do what they were already doing, but make it simpler to do it,” said Wechsler, who
along with the company’s four other employees is moving out to San Francisco to pursue the
startup. (“The moving trucks are literally in town now.”)
The Formspring.me product is still quite simple, enabling users to create a page inviting people
to ask them anything, even anonymously. Wechsler said the company’s first priority is
keeping up with infrastructure demands; it currently has some 200 quad-core servers and is adding
more all the time.
Wechsler described Formspring’s value proposition as such: “We’re bringing
conversation to the social web. Instead of putting the onus on you to think of something to say,
our platform really lends itself well to a conversation.”
Next up on the company’s product road map, as soon as it gets its infrastructure under
control: an API, a mobile app, an Adobe AIR app and a web-based app, said Wechsler.
More
often than not, an entrepreneur with a great idea looking for funding will pitch his or her
startup dozens, if not hundreds of times to potential investors. There is an endless amount of
resources out there for entrepreneurs looking to learn the best practices for their pitch,
including what to include in their decks, how long to speak, and what pitfalls to avoid. By the
time an entrepreneur actually gets funding, they've probably mastered their pitch to a point
where they could recite it in their sleep and provide advice of their own to newcomers. The
problem with this is they can get stuck in their pitch mentality and it can creep into areas of
their business that need the ole straight talk express.
Sponsor
Michael Hirshland of Polaris Venture Partners, who
blogs under the name VCMike, wrote today about a
problem he often sees when in board meetings with startups. The issue is that entrepreneurs are
so used to speaking a certain way to VCs that they sometimes have a pitch-like tone that gets in
the way of board room progress. As Hirshland points out, don't try to
beat around the bush when it comes to bad news.
"VCs hear bad news all the time -- it is part of the startup process and part
of the VC job description," says Hirshland. "Any VC worth his or her salt should respond to bad
news, provided it is shared in a timely fashion, by helping the entrepreneur figure out the best
way to respond rather than dwelling on what went wrong."
He advises CEOs to stear clear of attempts to placate their board members by spouting off excuses
for whatever their bad news is, or by claiming that they are already fixing the problem in hopes
of avoiding any impending wrath. From what Hirshland says, board members are not schoolmasters
there to punish you and whip you into shape; they are there to help, so don't isolate yourself,
he says. If you speak openly and honestly about your issues with your board, chances are you will
preserve your most valued asset as an entrepreneur and as a startup: credibility.
"Early stage ventures are filled with ambiguity. Entrepreneurs and their investors need to make
quick decisions based on information that is far from complete," says Hirshland. "This
necessitates relying to a very substantial degree on the entrepreneurs' interpretation of the
situation and prospects."
In other words, you are the eyes and ears for your board, and if you aren't being open and honest
with them, bad things will happen. Worst of all, speaking with fluff and rounding out the rough
edges of your company will destroy your credibility, which Hirshland calls "toxic" to your
partnership and "not a happy place for either the entrepreneur or the investor."
As we mentioned earlier this week, credibility
is your best friend when trying to get funded, so make sure you carry it with you and
preserve it in your board meetings and into your company's future. Save the pitching for future
rounds of fundraising, and when it comes to your board members, don't try to win them over,
simply treat them like equal members of your team.
Blippy is always fun to write about because so many people
are enraged by its very existence. But all that rage apparently hasn’t stopped the company
from getting lots of investor attention. In addition to landing a bevy of top tier angels and
venture capitalists in their first
round of financing, we’ve now heard that Blippy is preparing to close on a new round.
August Capital
partner David Hornik is leading the
round. And the valuation is “totally absurd” says one source. Another puts it at $50
million, although that may be a little on the high side. Regardless, that’s not bad for a
site which only launched publicly two months ago. Update: Yet another source
says “high 30s” on valuation, and we think that’s about right.
Blippy wouldn’t comment on this story. I reached David Hornik (he seemed to regret having
answered the phone). All that he’d say is that he loves Blippy, but he would neither
confirm nor deny an investment.
If you’re not already familiar with it, Blippy is a Twitter-like service where users post
everything they purchase. You can hook up your credit cards and various online services (Amazon,
iTunes, Zappos, etc.), and details about everything you buy are posted. You can see my account
here – I’ve linked it to my iTunes. See our
Blippy launch post for more details.
Lots of people love posting and discussing their purchases on Blippy. But lots of other people
just hate the idea of the service as an insane invasion of privacy (albeit one that people
voluntarily enter into). Read the comments on any of our Blippy posts to see examples of that
indignation.
Putting all that aside, though, if enough people start using Blippy they are going to be able to
monetize the heck out of it. Advertisers will see exactly what users are buying and be able to
target them with ridiculous precision. In fact, the data is so deep and rich that Amazon is already threatened by
the young startup.
President Dmitry Medvedev on Thursday announced that Russia would build a high-tech hub near
Moscow to spur modernization of the economy and reduce its dependence on oil and gas.
The center, designed to develop five priority sectors -- energy, IT, telecommunications,
bio-medical and atomic technologies -- will be built near Skolkovo, a new private-sector business
school in the Moscow region.
(It would be tempting to call it "Silicon Steppes" if it were in Asiatic Russia...)
I had a very small part to play in this story. In late 2007 I met with a large Russian delegation
that had come over to Silicon Valley to learn some of its lessons. Their goal was to use Russian
oil money to establish several Silicon Valley-like regions.
They asked me lots of good questions. They made it clear that they did not want to replicate
Silicon Valley, they wanted just the best bits.
I told them I would tell them the secret of Silicon Valley's success. They went silent, and
leaned in closer to hear what I had to say. "Failure."
(This was before the EPIC Fail craze of recent times...)
Silicon Valley tolerates, and funds, massive amounts of failure. Only about one out of twenty
startups succeed.
Probably no other culture allows people to fail as many times as Silicon Valley. Inside every
successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur is a failed entrepreneur.
No other culture in the world, (except for maybe Las Vegas), tolerates and celebrates as much
failure as Silicon Valley. This is the "best bit" of Silicon Valley, and its also the part that
can't be exported.
They nodded. And they made some notes.
I asked them about how they would structure their VC funds, and about the Russian entrepreneurs
that they hoped to attract.
One of them, the head of a quasi public/private VC fund, said that they had a problem finding and
funding startups. It was an exasperating problem. The Russian entrepreneurs won't tell them about
their business ideas.
They don't trust them. "I'm running a VC fund, I'm not going to run off with their business
idea!"
- - -
By the way, did you know that Tim Draper, one of our most successful VCs, penned a song called
"RiskMaster" to welcome the Russian delegation?
I have no idea what the tune is, obviously something stirring, I can imagine something between
Red Army choir and Welsh choir:
Hey! You want to start a business?
Russia seems to show some promise
While weighing all your choices
"Go to Moscow!" you hear voices
Google founder came from Russia
Parametric? - Not from Prussia!
Genesis and PayPal too
SVOD and what is new?
With luck you'll become a
Master!
From Soviet biology
Comes really cool technology
Software immunology
From Nukes we get ecology
Ukraine's Orange Revolution
Good for all-freedom solution
And then political pollution
Now it's all in execution
Chorus:
With luck you'll become a
RiskMaster!
All you need is a faster chip
A million rubles
A couple of engineers
RiskMaster!
Guru3D - Driver Sweeper is a fast tool to remove driver leftovers from your system. It's very
important to remove your drivers on a proper way, because driver leftovers can cause problems
like stability and startup problems. You can use it if you want to update/remove drivers from
your system.
1sockchuck writes "Are data center operators ready to abandon hot and cold aisles and submerge
their servers? An Austin startup says its liquid cooling enclosure can cool high-density server
installations for a fraction of the cost of air cooling in traditional data centers. Submersion
cooling using mineral oil isn't new, dating back to the use of Fluorinert in the Cray 2. The new
startup, Green Revolution Cooling, says its first installation will be at the Texas Advanced
Computing Center (also home to the Ranger supercomputer). The company launched at SC09 along with a
competing liquid cooling play, the Iceotope cooling bags."
It's human nature - we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our
lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but
if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For
startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and
then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the
previous version of a product.
Sponsor
Anyone who uses Facebook knows that even the slightest changes
in UI or the shuffling of features can create a cacophony of public outcry in the form of "I Like
The Old Facebook Better!!" groups. But the interesting thing about those groups is that they
eventually fizzle out and people get used to the new version of the site. Change takes time.
So what are startups to do when an updated version of their product or service sets
off a firestorm of hate mail from previously pleased users? Well, for starters, make sure you're
not taking a Borg-like approach by assimilating customers into submission; forcing things on
people never goes over well. Secondly, as crowdSPRING
co-founder Ross Kimbarovsky advises, take the time to
listen to your users; after all, they are the ones using your product day-to-day and they
probably have a few good ideas.
"You have to be patient, you have to give your customers and your community some room, some time
to react, to criticize, to discuss, to debate," says Kimbarovsky in a recent video
blog. "You can't harshly tell them 'this is the way it is and that's it', because it will
close off communications and make it sound like you don't care what they say."
There also may be a chance to bring about the change gradually as to not upset your customers
with sudden drastic changes. Kimbarovsky recounts an example in which eBay wanted to change its background color from yellow to white, so
instead of flipping a switch, they slowly changed the background to a lighter shade of yellow
day-by-day until the background was white. But for the most part, changes can't always be long
and drawn out like eBay's color choices, so Kimbarovsky simply says to engage with your customers
when they react and let their voices be heard.
"After a short amount of time, if your change is good, if it's reasonable and if it's meant to
improve as you believe it is, then your customers and your community will understand it," says
Kimbarovsky. "And if it's not, then you will understand that it just isn't working."
After its 2007 acquisition, it doesn’t seem like CBS (NYSE: CBS) has been able to get the most from its $280 million Last.fm outlay.
There’s been no TV scrobbling, no profit, the site’s key execs have left and fitting
the trendy Silicon Roundabout, London, startup in to a U.S. megacorp appears to have been a
challenge generally.
But now CBS has reined Last.fm in to its interactive music group, with direct oversight from
president David Goodman. Speaking to me after we came off a panel at MediaGuardian’s Changing
Media Summit on Thursday, the unit’s product VP Fred McIntyre offered some new
insight…
Chris Hughes, who co-founded what became one of the world’s largest social networks and
then just a few years later orchestrated a social-media campaign that helped put Barack Obama to
the White House, has launched a new, non-profit startup that he says will create an “online
platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.” He launched
the new entity, called Jumo, not on Facebook but through a post on his Tumblr blog and on Twitter. He didn’t provide many
details about the venture or what it intends to build, but said:
To do this well, I’m firmly of the mind that we have to foster relationships between
everyday people and issues and organizations that are personally relevant to them. It’s now
possible to provide each person with information and opportunities for meaningful action tailored
specifically to who they are. If Jumo can make sure that happens and offer opportunities for
meaningful engagement alongside it, I think we can speed the pace of global change.
Hughes told The Huffington Post in a
phone interview that he was looking for something to do after the Obama campaign ended, and
knew that “I wanted to do something at the nexus of what I call global development and
technology.” By global development, he said he meant a “broad umbrella including
everything from health care and education to agriculture. He said he spent the past year
“traveling and talking to people — researching, studying, learning everything I could
in the space.” Jumo is opening an office in Soho next week, Hughes said on his blog, and is
also looking to hire a developer, a design director and an “outreach director” who it
says will require a “wide-ranging, nearly unparalleled command of the global development
field and the ability to see through ideological constraints fairly and analytically.”
To some extent Jumo — whose name means “together in concert” in a West African
language called Yoruba — may wind up competing with Hughes’ former company once it
launches. Not only do many charitable groups use Facebook pages to gather support for causes, but
former Facebook president Sean Parker has a Facebook application called
Causes that has attracted millions of users. There are also several other Web-based platforms
that are trying to connect people interested in global development, including Ushahidi, which pulls together information to help in crisis situations
such as the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.
Hughes left Facebook, which he co-founded with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and fellow classmates Dustin
Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin, in 2007 to lead the social-media efforts for the Obama campaign,
including helping to develop My.BarackObama.com, and was the subject of a number of flattering
profiles in mainstream media outlets such as Fast Company magazine — which
called him a “boy wonder” — and
the Wall Street Journal. After the campaign ended he became entrepreneur in residence at
General Capital Partners in Cambridge. It’s not clear whether General Capital has funded
Jumo or not — a spokesperson said it is “a non-profit venture and we’re raising
funds from both foundations and individuals.” Hughes told Fast Company he is
looking to raise about $2.5 million.
Hughes said in an email sent to friends that he believes Jumo can “leverage the
participatory web to foster long-term engagement with the issues and organizations that are
relevant to each individual. Jumo has the potential to unlock a great deal of time, skills, and
financial resources previously unavailable to organizations around the world.” After the
“soft launch” of the startup, Hughes got a number of congratulations on Twitter,
including one from Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital in New York, who said that he was “excited
@chrishughes is back in the making the world a better place business.”
After its 2007 acquisition, it doesn’t seem like CBS (NYSE: CBS) has been able to get the most from its $280 million Last.fm outlay.
There’s been no TV scrobbling, no profit, the site’s key execs have left and fitting
the trendy Silicon Roundabout, London, startup in to a U.S. megacorp appears to have been a
challenge generally.
But now CBS has reined Last.fm in to its interactive music group, with direct oversight from
president David Goodman. Speaking to me after we came off a panel at MediaGuardian’s Changing
Media Summit on Thursday, the unit’s product VP Fred McIntyre offered some new
insight…
YouTube yesterday touted the fact that it now processes
about 24 hours worth of video content each minute — a milestone for the site. But while
that number is impressive, there are a few others that say they can beat it. Without having the
advantage of being owned and operated by Google, live streaming startups Ustream, Livestream and
Justin.tv all claim to encode more video per minute than the
largest video site on the web.
In an email to NewTeeVee, Livestream CEO Max Haot said that his company ingests an average of
1,600 concurrent streams each day. That 1,600 minutes of recorded or uploaded video translates
into about 26.6 hours of video being processed every minute. Justin.tv also bests YouTube, with
users reportedly uploading about 30 hours of live video content per minute, according to a
recent
article in High Scalability.
But Ustream might have them all beat. The site claims some 120 million live video streams
uploaded each month. But according to a spokesperson, the site had an average of 3,200 concurrent
streams at any given time, equal to about 53.5 hours of video that is encoded and processed every
minute. Ustream attributes that increase to a high amount of live streaming that its users have
been uploading through the iPhone ever since the company’s Broadcaster app was approved by
Apple.
Despite the large amount of video that needs to be processed, the live streaming startups have,
for the most part, decided to take such processing in-house rather than go with a third-party for
encoding. Justin.tv and Livestream both started on Amazon Web Services, but transitioned to their
own infrastructure to encode and stream user videos. In an email to NewTeeVee, Haot said that his
company moved to its own infrastructure due to a lack of guaranteed bandwidth and the cost of
cloud computing. In the High Scalability article, Justin.tv’s founder and VP of engineering
also cited cost and lack of performance guarantees as reasons for moving out of the cloud.
A certain someone was talking to me about how they find it interesting that node.js, the
JavaScript server framework du jour which loves all things async, starts life with a bunch of
synchronous require() calls. Now, this is actually quite fine since the startup of the server is
not the issue at hand.
However, if you are running require()-esque loader code in the browser you want to avoid blocking
calls else Steve Souders will come over and beat you up.
I have seen a couple of interesting items in this area:
RequireJS
James Burke of Mozilla Messaging has spent a lot of time in the depths of dojo.require(). He has
taken another look at the problem and RequireJS a solution
that offers:
some sort of #include/import/require
ability to load nested dependencies
ease of use for developer but then backed by an optimization tool that helps deployment
He walks through the problem and why other
solutions like LABjs, CommonJS require, and Dojo itself don't cover all of his bases.
// code that runs asynchronously when the library is loaded
require(["some/script.js"], function() {
//This function is called after some/script.js has loaded.
});
// defining the module and dependencies
require.def(
// The name of this module
"types/Manager",
// The array of dependencies
["types/Employee"],
// The function to execute when all dependencies have loaded. The
arguments
// to this function are the array of dependencies mentioned above.
function (Employee) {
function Manager () {
this.reports = [];
}
// This will now work
Manager.prototype = new Employee();
// return the Manager constructor function so it can
be used by other modules.
return Manager;
}
);
Google Analytics "async add to []" Pattern
When talking to Davis Frank of Pivotal about some Google Analytics code, he pointed me to
details about the new GA asynchronous loader that we very excitedly blogged about
since GA was such a blocking offender on the Web.
Part of the asynchronous API is that you, the developer create an array, and use the push()
method to put commands on a queue. This means that you can start pushing commands immediately.
Then, when the GA code loads asynchronously, it takes over that array and wraps those standard
methods. Now it can take the commands and fire them back to GA and push() can do more. Freaking
brilliant.
Last week I had an urgent support call to attend to as an e-commerce site I'd developed for a
customer had stopped taking payments. You can imagine I jumped on to it pretty sharpish.
The problem soon became apparent - the payment-processing terminal wasn't running. The server had
been re-booted and, although Domino re-started as a Service, as expected, the payment terminal
didn't. This is because I (stupidly) had put a shortcut to the program in the "All Users" Startup
Folder and assumed it would load if ever the machine re-started for any reason.
It turns out programs in the Startup folder only launch if a user logs in. In this case
nobody did and so they never launched. Seems so obvious. What was I thinking!
As a quick fix I had them log in to Windows. I then went about finding a way to have the terminal
launch without them needing to log in.
Launching Programs When Windows Boots
It turns out it's not as easy as you might imagine to run a program when Windows starts but
before a user logs in. The only solution I found was to create your very own Service.
However, it only allows you to run one BAT file and it has to be called AutoExNT.bat. Whereas, in
my case I wanted to run two different BAT files. One for each payment terminal (one live and one
for testing). It turns out you can do this by calling the two (or more I guess) batch files
directly from inside the AutoExNT.bat file.
The first line tells the existing command prompt to launch a new instance and load the first
batch file in it. The second line then goes on to run the other batch file. The result being two
command prompts running the code in the relevant batch file. Et voila.
Don't forget to install the Service with the /interactive flag set to On if you want to see the
prompts yourself when you log in. Oh, and to check the Service is set to Automatic.
Hacene a créé son entreprise dénommée Them à Pékin il y a 4 ans. Il
n'y croyait pas trop au départ, et puis...
Il évoque pour nous la vie de sa Web Agency qui travaille à la fois pour des
entreprises chinoises qui veulent s'implanter en Occident et des entreprises occidentales qui
veulent s'implanter en Chine. Il est en quelque sorte, au milieu du gué multiculturel.
Comment est la vie à Pékin ? Où en est l'Internet chinois ? Quid des réseaux
sociaux ? (Facebook est bloqué). Quid de la "neutralité" (les Chinois n'ont pas
conscience que leur Gouvernement bloque des sites).. Them travaille-t-il plus pour des
entreprises occidentales que pour des entreprises chinoises ? Quels sont les secteurs en Chine
qui sont les plus demandeurs des services de Them ? Quid de la mobilité ? (pénurie de
iPhone actuellement). Quid de la monnaie virtuelle (kiukiu) ?
Pourquoi Google quitte la Chine ? La vraie raison selon Hacene. Sont
terribles ces Chinois !
Les Chinois ont d'abord créé des usines qui travaillaient pour des marques
occidentales. Puis ils ont créés leurs propres marques (Lenovo, Haier..)... Maintenant
les usines se mettent à vendre en direct en Occident. Pour l'Internet, selon Hacene il va se
passer la même chose... Beaucoup, beaucoup de startups en Chine... On ne va pas tarder
à les voir arriver... Et il faut aller à China City en mai à
Pékin : la grande conférence entre VC/business angels et startups (conférence
d'ailleurs organisée par un Français..)
Commentaires. J''ai reçu il y a quelques jours un mail d'une startup
chinoise me proposant ses services pour développer mes applications iPhone. Et ce matin j'ai
reçu un autre mail me proposant de devenir concessionnaire de voitures chinoises (Great Wall Motor
Company). J'ai aussi "billautshooté" Frédéric Levy à Manille
(bientôt sur mon blog). Même son de cloche. La roue tourne. Après la Silicon
Valley, c'est en Asie qu'il faudra aller... Cela tombe bien. Les Chinois vont mettre en oeuvre un
TGV mondial de Londres à Singapour en
passant par Pékin...
In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly on tools that fly under the radar of more
conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a
trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but
once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without
them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the
cheap, make yourself, or refurbish.
In 1994, I wrote a book called Mosaic Quick Tour: Accessing and Navigating the World Wide
Web. It was, arguably, the first book dedicated the the World Wide Web. The publisher,
Ventana, wanted it to be the first, so they wanted it fast, really fast. I wrote it in 30 days. I
did literally nothing but eat, sleep, and write that book for a month, all in a very crappy,
bottomed-out, office store "task chair." I like to tell people that I sacrificed my right hip to
that book. I have bad arthritis and my hip was already shot, but I had a hip before the book, and
it was pretty much history by the time I was done. I had to have a replacement. It was stupid to
not get a better chair during the writing marathon, but I had tight deadlines every day and
didn't feel like I ever had the time to go shopping. But literally the day the book was finished,
I went to a "bed and back" story and blew about $1300 of my book advance on an amazing chair with
crazy amounts of adjustability and lumbar and neck support. From then on, I've never skimped on
my seating. And neither should you.
We asked a bunch of our readers and staff, through mailing lists and our Facebook page, for input on chairs and work stools.
Here's some of what they had to say. Hands down, the chair-of-note is still the Herman Miller
Aeron. But there were a few others. And one suggestion for no sitting at all.
Chairs
For the past ten years or so, I've had a Herman Miller Aeron Chair ($920) for desk
work and I love it. I'm not alone. Lots of people responded with enthusiastic thumbs-up for the
Aeron. Andrew Righter, of Q Labs, said: "I'm a simple man.
And there's nothing better than this chair." ChopSey, of HacDC,
adds: "it's all about the air flow, configurability, and easing of any pressure points." Dorkbot DC Overlord Alberto Gaitán says: I concur.
I've used an Aeron for almost 15 years and wouldn't buy another chair that isn't fully and
adjustable, with lumbar support, and a mesh seat so one doesn't eventually end up bottoming out."
MAKE contributor Alden Hart writes: "In the tech bubble days, we used an "Aeron Count" as a
predictive indicator of startup failure. The more Aerons, the greater the likelihood of failure.
That said, I love my Aeron, and so does my wife. Got cheap from a failed startup!" HacDC member
Ben Stanfield writes: "As the token fat geek, it might be good to include a couple of options for
those of us who are, euphemistically speaking, "big boned." Of course, that would require
actually finding a decent chair for us, something I've yet to come across. The Aeron is probably
the closest in terms of comfort."
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TechCrunch50
startup 
Google may have hired Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer
This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a
unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion,
please see the details 
Name: 
There are good things about conferences and there are bad things about conferences. One of the
bad things is how little the audience gets to participate directly in the content being created.
Sometimes there’s a question and answer period at the end of a panel where people line up
at a microphone to ask questions. But that’s usually it. Other than booing and applause,
and of course the back channel on Twitter, there’s not much of a feedback loop.
I’m hopelessly addicted to Push Notifications on the iPhone. Unfortunately,
More
often than not, an entrepreneur with a great idea looking for funding will pitch his or her
startup dozens, if not hundreds of times to potential investors. There is an endless amount of
resources out there for entrepreneurs looking to learn the best practices for their pitch,
including what to include in their decks, how long to speak, and what pitfalls to avoid. By the
time an entrepreneur actually gets funding, they've probably mastered their pitch to a point
where they could recite it in their sleep and provide advice of their own to newcomers. The
problem with this is they can get stuck in their pitch mentality and it can creep into areas of
their business that need the ole straight talk express.
"VCs hear bad news all the time -- it is part of the startup process and part
of the VC job description," says Hirshland. "Any VC worth his or her salt should respond to bad
news, provided it is shared in a timely fashion, by helping the entrepreneur figure out the best
way to respond rather than dwelling on what went wrong."
It's human nature - we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our
lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but
if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For
startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and
then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the
previous version of a product.
So what are startups to do when an updated version of their product or service sets
off a firestorm of hate mail from previously pleased users? Well, for starters, make sure you're
not taking a Borg-like approach by assimilating customers into submission; forcing things on
people never goes over well. Secondly, as 
Recommandations
)
and reject those that you are not interested in
(
)
