I saw this on Dave Winer’s Friendfeed stream yesterday. It’s just too good not to post, although its staged. Some adult language in there, and one NSFW image at the end. The website for this show is usually at www.thewebsiteisdown.com, which is currently down and redirecting visitors directly to the video on Blip.TV. Crunch Network: […]
I saw this on Dave Winer’s Friendfeed stream yesterday. It’s just too good not to post, although its staged. Some adult language in there, and one NSFW image at the end.
The website for this show is usually at www.thewebsiteisdown.com, which is currently down and redirecting visitors directly to the video on Blip.TV.
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Whoisi is a central site that grants users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa […]
Whoisi is a central site that allows users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa and any Atom or RSS feed. Once you’ve added a number of people that you follow, it presents their feed activity in a time-based interface similar to FriendFeed and MugShot, making it easy to track a large number of feeds.
In Whoisi, any visitor to the site can define a person or an identity, and add the feeds associated with that person for other users to find and follow. To prevent vandalism, there’s a revision history so that changes can be reversed. The database already has a massive number of names within it - and when you search for a friend or feed you’d like to follow, if they are not already on the site, you can add or edit their feeds easily. Users don’t need to signup for an account with Whoisi, as user data (such as followers) is all session-based using a browser cookie, which means you can’t move your follower list between browsers.
You can edit and customize any persons profile with “aliases” to provide alternate names or groups. What this means is the TechCrunch feed can be tagged “Michael Arrington” or “Mike Arrington.” You can also have a TechCrunch group, so Nik Cubrilovic’s feed could be tagged “techcrunch:nik.” The grouping feature is very simple and it could be developed further by users and used for other purposes.
Whoisi is a very clean site, as there is tiny on the site except for data. An open API is provided that publishes RSS feeds for each defined user, so that the data can be integrated into other applications.
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By David Ponce So yeah, I know, this concerns a paid campaign by Microsoft. But, you guys should know I wasn’t specifically asked to speak about it here at all. It’s not part of the deal. It just happens that this campaign is a little different, and really sort of interesting. […]
By David Ponce
So yeah, I know, this concerns a paid campaign by Microsoft. But, you guys should know I was not specifically asked to talk about it here at all. It’s not part of the deal. It just happens that this campaign is a tiny different, and really sort of interesting. If you visit the I’m Talkathon page, you’ll notice the blog is getting some traction, with some articles getting over 70 comments. The reason (IMHO), is that it actually has some solid production values. The videos the guys are making are really funny, and the entire thing is playing out like some sort of bloggy soap.
It turns out that the business behind it is as follows: if you IM with Windows Live Messenger (”IM”… “I’M”… get it?) or Windows Live Hotmail in a specific fashion (more here [link to video]), Microsoft will be giving to the charities we mentioned in our previous article. The more you use them, the more they give. What with Bill Gates leaving the company today and seemingly moving into full time philanthropy… this campaign sort of makes sense. Sure, in the end they’re trying to get you to use Microsoft products, but at least they’re giving back in the process.
Next up, I’m going to try and hunt down that Parker’s hair stylist. That ‘do is rockin…
By Jonathan Kimak DXG has come up with the DXG-567V, a High Definition digital video camera that’s just over 4 inches long and comes in four different colors (red, blue, black and pink). It records 720p using H.264 Video Compression (using the MOV format) and also has a built-in retractable USB cord and a web-upload […]
By Jonathan Kimak
DXG has come up with the DXG-567V, a High Definition digital video camera that is just over 4 inches long and comes in four different colors (red, blue, black and pink). It records 720p using H.264 Video Compression (using the MOV format) and also has a built-in retractable USB cord and a web-upload feature that makes it easy to upload your videos to sites like YouTube.
The price is fairly good too, just $179 US. But of course with the low price comes some serious sacrifices, like no optical zoom. Instead it has a measly 2X digital zoom, along with the extra-low flash memory of 32MB (it can take SD cards) and a 2 inch display on the back.
It seems rather crazy to have a High Definition Camera with 2X digital zoom. But hey, you’ll have the ideal looking blurry home movies on the block.
VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to purchase semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company. Our sources have been saying this deal is highly likely since May, but hasn’t actually been signed yet and could still be disrupted by the […]
VentureBeat is reporting that Microsoft has agreed to purchase semantic search engine Powerset for somewhere around $100 million, which is the price we previously reported was being offered to the company.
Our sources have been saying this deal is highly likely since Might, but hasn’t actually been signed yet and could still be disrupted by the ongoing Microsoft-Yahoo negotiations. Dave Wehner, a Managing Director at investment bank Allen & Co. (he’s the guy who sold Bebo for $850 million to AOL), is representing Powerset in the deal.
Powerset debuted at TechCrunch40 last fall and opened a showcase of its technology to the public just last month.
Powerset has raised around $12.5 million in venture capital, and is rumored to have taken another $8 million or so in convertible debt as bridge financing.
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By Luke Anderson Have you ever been rushing through the airport trying to catch your flight whilst dragging your luggage behind you? Despite how much easier rolling luggage has made our lives, it’s still no fun to lug around, which is why someone has designed a motorized bag that’ll help ease the hassle. This piece of […]
By Luke Anderson
Have you ever been rushing through the airport trying to catch your flight whilst dragging your luggage behind you? Despite how much easier rolling luggage has made our lives, it’s still no fun to lug around, which is why someone has designed a motorized bag that’ll help ease the hassle.
This piece of luggage is rather simple to operate. Simply tilt the handle so the bag is at between a 15 and 35% angle, and the wheels will begin turning, however, if you let go, they’ll stop. A combination of pancake wheel technology and an Anti-Gravity handle places most of the weight on the wheels, rather than at the handle.
The motors are powered by 12V NiMH batteries which promise a good mile and a half of trekking before they need recharging. If you’re constantly finding yourself in an airport, this might be worth looking into. Then again the $1,365 price tag might be a bit of a deterrent.
MySpace was the first of the Massive Three to announce tools for third celebration sites to integrate MySpace user data into their services (called, collectively, Data Availability). A day later Facebook announced Facebook Connect, then came Google Friend Connect three days after that. Today MySpace is fully launching Data Availability (look for it this afternoon at […]
MySpace was the first of the Large Three to announce tools for third party sites to integrate MySpace user data into their services (called, collectively, Data Availability). A day later Facebook announced Facebook Connect, then came Google Friend Connect three days after that.
This day MySpace is fully launching Data Availability (look for it this afternoon at developer.myspace.com), and any third celebration developer can now build applications using their APIs. Google’s product remains in a test phase with a handful of sites (example), and we won’t likely hear more from Facebook until their F8 conference in late July.
MySpace is taking a much more interesting approach than Google, which controls data sent to third party sites via an iframe. MySpace is actually streaming data to these sites, which allows for true integration between the services, not just a bolted-on social tool.
Developers can access any publicly available profile data from a MySpace user and integrate it into their site. This includes a user’s name, picture, bio, social graph (list of friends), and other information. Users authorize the data transfer via a one-time secure OAuth login to MySpace from the third party service. The service is then granted to access the data.
Since actual data is being streamed out of MySpace, they’ve a strict terms of use policy that forbids third party sites from storing or caching the data, other than the unique MySpace user id of the user. Each time a page is rendered the third celebration must re-request the data from MySpace via a set of APIs. That means any changes by the user to their MySpace profile data or friends list will be instantly applied across third celebrations who access the data.
Like Google and Facebook, users will be able to revoke access by any third party via a privacy control panel on their MySpace account:
Actual Data Portability, But No Syncing
This is a real move towards data portability, since MySpace is actually allowing data out of its server vault. The fact that third parties can’t store that data isn’t a perfect solution, since MySpace retains ultimate control of it (I discuss this problem in my Centralized Me post). True data portability requires constant syncing of data so that the users remain in control. But until real standards emerge on just how to do that (and there are some big hurdles), MySpace’s approach seems more than reasonable. This is a real step forward in terms of user data rights, and I anticipate we’ll see a ton of very creative implementations of Data Availability.
We’re building a test application now and should have it live within a few hours. Look for lots of implementations over the next few days.
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Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit. Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps […]
Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit.
Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps on message lengths. But instead of directing users to a regular webpage, a TinyPaste’s URL sends its clickers to a simple page displaying the poster’s message.
Who would use this? Perhaps those who don’t maintain blogs but who still want to expound on their thoughts from time to time. It’s common practice for bloggers to adopt Twitter as a marketing tool that drives traffic back to their sites. This could begin a reverse trend of sorts, one that introduces tweeters to the art of blogging. Or maybe I’m just extracting too much.
In any case, TinyPaste also comes with a Firefox extension for when you want to pass along a clip of text you found on the web. The service and plugin come from the same guys who brought you ControlC.
Crunch Network: CrunchGeardrool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Google employees are so special that they even get Japanese space toilets on which to rest their stock options. SFist found these sexy Japanese Toto toilets in Google’s headquarters. They feature front and rear cleansing along with a dryer and some sort of insane wand cleaning system that might be part of Google’s 80-20 projects […]
Google employees are so special that they even get Japanese space toilets on which to rest their stock options.
SFist found these sexy Japanese Toto toilets in Google’s headquarters. They feature front and rear cleansing along with a dryer and some sort of insane wand cleaning system that may be part of Google’s 80-20 projects policy. The toilets are fairly common in Japan - heck, there are even toilets that offer birdsong to cover up humiliating noises - so perhaps they’re these were installed as a treat for their Asian employees.
The real question, however: Is there an API?
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Today, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation. More than any other single person, Gates defined the Personal computer era. His products touch almost every computer user on the planet. And he created what is still the biggest technology wealth machine in Microsoft. […]
This day, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation. More than any other single person, Gates defined the Personal computer era. His products touch nearly every personal user on the planet. And he created what’s still the biggest technology wealth machine in Microsoft. But now that he is leaving, who will fill his shoes?
I don’t mean who will fill his shoes at Microsoft. Gates stepped back from day-to-day management years ago, handing his business responsibilities to CEO Steve Ballmer and technology responsibilities to chief software architect Ray Ozzie. What I mean is: Who will carry on his legacy and define the current Web era of computing?
It is unlikely there will ever be another Bill Gates if for the only reason that Gates’ influence stemmed from his control of the computing platform of choice (the Personal computer, through Windows). The computing platform of choice this day is the Web, and no single person or company can control that. But there are plenty of Web company founders out there—from massive companies to small startups—that are turning the Web into a platform for applications and creating new kinds of software as a result.
In fact, there are several application platforms emerging on the Web. There’s Facebook and Open Social for social networking apps. Salesforce.com AppExchange for enterprise apps. And more generic cloud computing services such as Amazon’s Web Services and Google’s App Engine for any kind of app. And soon these will be extended to mobile devices as well with the iPhone and Google’s Android.
The resulting software being built on top of these and other Web platforms is qualitatively different than Personal computer software. It is connected to other software and other people. That makes it inherently social and driven by communications rather than productivity. It can also be taken apart and spread to other Websites, or even put back on the desktop, in the form of widgets.
So who is filling Gates’ shoes? Lots of people are collectively, starting with Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Slide’s Max Levchin, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. These are some of the names we came up with for Reuters, who asked us to put together a list of “Entrepreneurs to watch” box, which you can read on Reuters as part of its Bill Gates coverage (it’s the interactive box at the bottom of the page).
Below after the break are the people we selected, along with why we selected them. This is just a representative sample, and was written for a general audience. Add your own candidates in comments along with why you think they deserve to be recognized.
The two people most prone to carry on Bill Gates’ legacy also happen to be his biggest nemeses. Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are already nerdy, brainy billionaires and are taking on Microsoft on multiple fronts—from search to on the internet applications. And, in fact, when it comes to making money on the Web, it is Microsoft that is trying to catch up to Google.
Just like Windows is the starting point for everything people do on their PCs, for many people Google’s search engine is the starting point for everything they do on the Web. Brin and Page are building on top of that with online applications and other products aimed directly at Microsoft’s other businesses such as Gmail (Outlook), Google Docs (Office), and Android (Windows Mobile).
Jeff Bezos, one of Seattle’s other billionaires, is ideal known for bringing shopping online with Amazon.com. But over the past few years, Bezos has started selling something besides books and digital cameras. In his eyes Amazon.com is just a massive Web application that sits in the cloud.
He is now offering Amazon’s “cloud computing” infrastructure to other companies that don’t want to have to build their own data centers to store data or run a Web applications. Through a series of “Web services,” companies can purchase data storage, calculate cycles, and database access from Amazon, and pay only for what they use. In this way, Bezos is helping to define the next era of Web-scale computing.
If there is one person who reminds people the most of the young Bill Gates, it is Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The 24-year old is a Harvard drop-out (like Gates) and is building his company with the focus and singular vision of making it the operating system for social applications.
The rise and success of Facebook is largely due to the fact that it is a platform for Web applications created by other developers (just as Windows is a platform for Computer applications). And Zuckerberg has created a mini-economy around Facebook. Maybe these similarities are what convinced Microsoft to invest $240 million in Facebook last fall.
Marc Benioff (Salesforce founder and CEO) Just like consumer applications, enterprise software is moving to the Web as well. One of the first entrepreneurs to capitalize on this shift is Marc Benioff. His company, Salesforce.com, began by selling browser-based customer relationship management (CRM) software as a subscription service over the Web.
Taking a page from the Bill Gates playbook, he’s extended his pay-by-the-drink concept to other areas of enterprise software and opened up Salesforce.com as platform for other companies to build and distribute their own Web-based software.
A Ukrainian-born programmer, Max Levchin started his career as the co-founder and CTO of PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Two years later he founded Slide, which pioneered a new type of software known as a widget. Slide’s widgets typically draw data from the Web and are geared towards self-expression. They have the ability to appear on your desktop or added to other Websites such as Facebook.
Slide’s Facebook applications, which include FunWall and SuperPoke, boast more active users than any other company’s. In January, Levchin raised $50 million for Slide, giving the company a valuation of half a billion dollars.
If software is becoming social, there is no superior example than Digg. The popular news site attracts 15 million visitors a month, according to comScore. Digg relies entirely on its readers to submit headlines and links to articles, and vote them to the homepage.
Digg is the brainchild of founder Kevin Rose, who has mastered the art of teasing wisdom from the crowd. It isn’t so much about the underlying algorithms that power Digg as it is about setting the right conditions to give people the incentive to contribute.
The Web at its core is a communications medium, and Evan Williams keeps coming up with new ways to for people to communicate over it. He founded Blogger, one of the original and largest Web-based blogging services, which he sold to Google in 2003. More recently he co-founded Twitter, a micro-blogging service that lets people broadcast short text messages of no more than 140 characters.
By limiting the length of the messages, Twitter effectively lowers the barriers to communicating. After all, it is much easier to send a Tweet than to write an entire blog post.
The service is growing so fast that it is hitting serious scaling issues and if often down. But the company raised $15 million to help solve those issues. One of the investors: Jeff Bezos
Husband-and-wife team Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake created the most successful photo-sharing site on the Web with Flickr. By default, each pic uploaded to the site is public to encourage sharing and can easily be displayed on other sites as well. Flickr shows what can happen when you take personal media and put it online. Instead of being forgotten in a shoebox, a photo you took two years ago can be discovered and enjoyed by someone halfway around the world.
After it was bought by Yahoo in 2005 for an estimated $35 million, Butterfield and Fake stayed on. The service kept growing and eventually replaced Yahoo Photos. It now attracts 54 million visitors a month worldwide, according to comScore. Both recently departed Yahoo, which is undergoing management turmoil, but keep an eye on them to see what they do next.
On the Web, it can be hard to keep track all the information and services that are available. FriendFeed, a startup that launched publicly earlier this year, helps you manage the information overload by pulling together the on the web activities of all your friends in one place. You can see all of your friends’ blog posts, Twitters, Flickr pics, stories they vote up on Digg, and YouTube videos they like, among other things, all in one feed. This turns out to be an effective, and addictive, information filter.
Two of FriendFeed’s co-founders are ex-Googlers Paul Buchheit and BretTaylor. Buchheit was the 23rd employee at Google, where he created Gmail and implemented many of its innovative features. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense, and was responsible for Google’s famous “Don’t be evil” motto. Taylor led the development of Google Maps and Google Local.
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This day, 
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