August 2009
114 posts
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Interview with Eric Schmidt - PR-esque Stories →
I love these PR-esque stories:
And so, we had a - Larry and Sergey and I had a strategy meeting five years ago…I said, OK, well, let’s write down our strategy. We never really had a strategy. And so Sergey basically got up and said, our job is to do things that matter to the world at scale and it should just boom, boom, boom like that. And that became our strategy.
Should someone tell Google...
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The Information Overload Era: TV by 2015 →
According to the Intel’s Chief of Labs, Justin Rattner:
You can imagine 15 billion consumer devices that will be capable of delivering TV content in that timeframe with 100’s of billions of hours of video. We’ll need much more sophisticated ways to organize content and provide it on demand.
Based on the tons of statistics about YouTube, Hulu, etc, we can safely say that video and TV...
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The Fight for the New Internet Buzzword is On
After Tim O’Reilly came up with the web 2.0 term — which as we know took a couple of years to get a definition ☞, Fred Wilson came up with freemium ☞, now there are a couple of people trying to create a new buzzword. That’s way too funny!
Om Malik: NewNet
Anil Dash: Pushbutton Web
(unknown): Real-Time Web
(unknown): Social Web
Are there any others?
While not related to thiz...
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Ideal First Round Term Sheet from The Funded
There are quite a few well known investors like Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon that are backing up initiatives that are supposed to bring standardization to the funding process. The advantages should be obvious to everyone. With a set of standardized procedures and docs things will be a lot easier for all parties involved and also there will be no tricky parts involved.
After Y Combinator open...
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How to Be Successful in the AppStore - The... →
Nothing seriously genius, but still worth crosschecking with your list:
In this race, the Hare beats the Tortoise. Develop fast, release often
Make sure the price is right
Show off your feathers. Back to the high school analogy: a nice pair of stilletos and some sexy lip gloss can definitely help you get noticed on the App Store.
Partner for success
PR isn’t all its cracked out to be....
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Redis vs MySQL InnoDB →
The article shows some awesome write performance on Redis:
The benchmarks I’ve done were for applications which is very update intensive with updates being pretty much random single row updates which are hard to batch. With MySQL/Innodb I got server being able to handle some 30.000 updates/sec on 16 core server with replication being able to handle 10.000 updates/sec. This was using about 5...
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How to Become a Startup Hub →
Not very long ago I was pointing to a very smart initiative on how to grow the local hackers’ community (partially as a possible solution to the issue Vladimir Oane was raising).
Another issue from the same article ☞ is that our market feels provincial. While that is probably true, I am pretty sure that we are not alone here and others are going through the same things and they are still...
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Get Your Daily Dose of The Unofficial Apple Weblog...
Well, I’m pretty sure that if you are reading this piece you are some sort of Apple fan. One of the best sources of information (rumors and gossips included) is The Unofficial Apple Weblog or TUAW ☞ which has launched their own iPhone app.
Photo credit engadget
The TUAW iPhone app is somehow similar to the NYT and WSJ iPhone apps — whose best features are saving for offline reading and...
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Amazon EC2 vs. Colocation →
Maybe a bit old, but definitely worth the read. Make sure you are checking the comment thread too, as it adds a lot of details.
In case you are reading Romanian (or you’d like to test the Google Translator service), here is another analysis done for a Ruby on Rails app ☞.
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The Information Overload Era: A Subscribers'...
Very interesting experiment for testing the behavior of potential subscribers:
[…] the Economist, at one time, showed three options for their potential subscribers: online-only for $59.00, print-only for $125.00, or online and print for $125.00. He designed an experiment, using his students, in which 84% chose the $125.00 for print and online, 0% chose print-only, and only 16% chose...
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So how can businesses enter an environment where... →
Kathy Bloomgarden:
we’ve identified intent as the key driver of social media. To use these tools more effectively, companies need to step back and look at why consumers are going online. Traditional notions of demographics no longer apply in the online space, where it doesn’t matter where you live or what you make or how old or young you are. Intents have become the new demographics....
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“when you get too focused only on the here and now, you lose the skill of...”
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Facebook 3.0 iPhone App Available Now
I’m not sure an iPhone app for a social network really qualifies as a geek app, but there have been way too much coverage of this app not to mention it.
While we can argue about the usefulness of the social networks, I think Facebook has innovated a lot in this space and I’ve heard that their iPhone app is a top notch. So even if you are not a Facebook user, maybe you should just...
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Yelp iPhone App Brings Augmented Reality Feature
I just got word that the latest version of Yelp iPhone app brings a very interesting new feature: augmented reality. Simply put, you point your camera to a location and Yelp will try to match that against their existing reviews database.
Activating this feature seems to be quite geeky or magic though:
So you shake your iPhone 3 times. That activates a feature called Monocle. A message should...
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Free: Twit and Run - Basic Twitter iPhone app
Twit and Run seems to be the most basic Twitter app for the iPhone. It only gives an input screen to send out your message (normal, reply, direct). There’s no access to your timeline or friend lists or anything like that.
When thinking of how many other iPhone apps for Twitter are available, the only reason I can find for using this app is for extremely special cases when you are over a...
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How Big Is the Apple iPhone App Economy? The... →
According to Admob, a mobile advertising company, the Apple AppStore is a $2.5bil/year market, while Android is just around $60mil/year.
You can get the report from here (PDF)
Related:
O’Reilly Radar: The Most Popular iTunes Apps Aren’t Always The Cheapest ☞
TechCrunch: iPhone Users Share Download Behavior With Android Users, But Buy More Apps ☞
Mashable!: CHA-CHING: iPhone...
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WatchWhy Angels Invest
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Me and Blogger
I didn’t know me and Blogger were born on the same day:
Sunday, August 23rd came and went without a peep from Google’s Blogger Team, despite the service celebrating its tenth anniversary from its initial founding at Pyra Labs.
— louisgray.com
I have a long and quite complicated relationship with Blogger. I’ve started over there, after years moved to Wordpress, got back to...
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Yummy: Delicious iPhone App Special Offer
I just found out about this special offer for the Yummy Delicious iPhone app which is celebrating 1 year from its initial launch and is now available for €.79/$.99 (normal price: €1.59/$1.99).
By looking at Yummy’s description page, it looks like it is offering almost all the features that are needed to interact with your Delicious account.
add/edit/delete bookmarks
special Safari...
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Parallels to make switching to the Mac easier,... →
Even if Parallels is just a small contender on the desktop virtualization market, I think they are proposing a very Mac-like experience to Windows users:
It includes a universal serial bus (USB) cable that you connect between your older Windows computer and a new Mac. It automatically starts a utility that transfers all of the programs and important data from the old computer to the new one. It...
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Save typing with TextExpander - iPhone app
Please raise a hand if you are using a text expander on your machine. You know, that little piece of software sitting quietly in the background waiting for you to enter predefined short text sequences just to trigger great text expansions that are saving you a lot of typing. And in case you are not already using one I’d say you should check the available solutions for your OS.
I’ve...
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Tumblr founder David Karp's Response to "Look What... →
David Karp, Tumblr founder, has responded to Look What Tumblr’s Done With All Its Money article
Sorry, Joe. This piece is dumb, and it would have taken a five minute phone call to get right.
— via lunchfood
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Are these the tech bloggers we should pay...
I’m still amazed when reading tech bloggers that do not get even the basics.
Sam Diaz (ZDNet) about RSS:
But my sources of for reading material are scattered across the Web, not in one aggregated spot.
I catch headlines on Yahoo News and Google News. I have a pretty extensive lineup of browser bookmarks to take me to sites that I scan throughout the day. Techmeme is always in one of my...
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Y Combinator Open Sources Angel Funding Docs →
From the post:
Their goal is to make angel funding rounds for startups easier for both sides.
These documents were originally created for YC-funded startups to use when raising angel rounds.
— via echolot
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When to Call Yourself an (Angel) Investor
I have had this discussion a couple of times with and about the people on the Romanian online business. Now I’m happy to see that somebody with experience in the field confirms what I’ve always said:
I’d like to suggest that to “qualify” as an angel investor, you have to have made at least one equity investment of at least $25,000 in the past 12 months. If you haven’t done this,...
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Superfeedr.com →
Via Mark Cuban:
Cloud infrastructure: give us urls, and we will push you new entries.
Realtime: By combining different technologies we can notify you of new entries in less than 15 minutes (or it's free)
Multi-channel: receive the notifications by XMPP, on a local JID or your own external JID, or using PuSubHubbub
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“In situations in which we may have no positional authority — we’re not the...”
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Google Reader Gets Into A-Lists →
Instead of experimenting and innovating on better recommendation algorithms, Google Reader has joined the hoards of services relying on A-lists.
Where does Arianna Huffington go to get different perspectives on the news? When Paul Krugman surfs the web, what are his favorite economics sites? What blogs do tech, foodie and fashion bloggers read? Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and...
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Skype Raising Prices for Non-Global Rate Countries →
Om Malik:
From what I understand, the phone connection charges pretty much remain stagnant or trend lower, but not higher, so the “market conditions” argument doesn’t quite wash. Anyway, this price increase is a nice way to goose up Skype’s revenue […]
And as you could expect Romania is a non-global rate country. As is India or Japan or Brazil or…
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Look What Tumblr's Done With All Its Money →
From the article:
Perhaps Tumblr wants to remain a niche platform, mainly designed for spreading memes among a core set of urban users
While still new to Tumblr (I’ll celebrate 2 months only in a couple of days), what I think I’m seeing in Tumblr is more like a photo and music bookmarking service.
Tumblr has a couple of interesting features to help memes grow up pretty fast, but...
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MongoDB Getting Closer to 1.0 Release
Update: MongoDB 1.0.0 is production ready and available for download ☞.
MongoDB is getting closer to the 1.0 release. From mongodb:
MongoDB 0.9.10 has been released. This release fixes a few minor bugs in 0.9.9 in preperation for 1.0. Please give it a try and let us know if there are any issues.
Downloads: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads
Jira change log:...
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PDF Good Reader iPhone App on Sale
I just found out that Good Reader, one of the two iPhone apps that won the PDF iPhone apps for geeks category, is having a summer limited promotion and is now available in the AppStore for only €.99.
While I payed €3.99 for Good Reader and I can tell you that I don’t regret it a bit, I’d be happy to know that you’ve benefitted of this promotion and got a great iPhone app for...
The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool →
Go here and put your name in the box. Just do it. It’s awesome.
The project, called Personas, comes from the MIT Media Lab built by Aaron Zinman. Basically, it takes your name and…
6 Gorgeous Facebook Visualizations →
Like every complex network, Facebook offers unlimited possibilities of visual representation of the various connections between its users. We’ve chosen six beautiful visualizations that…
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iPhone WriteRoom Free: Hurry up to the AppStore
The iPhone note taking apps is probably one of the most reviewed categories. While preparing to contribute my share to these reviews, I have discovered that WriteRoom.iPhone is free for this weekend. So hurry up and hit the AppStore!
According to Jesse (the developer of the app), the reason for this offer is
I wanted to test my sync server with a higher load. So that was one reason behind this...
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WatchI think this app should be in the top 10 iPhone apps for geeks. By using the sonar principle, Sonar Ruler app is providing an estimate of the distance to the object your are pointing your iPhone at.
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Cassandra Data Model Terms →
From Evan Weaver (@evan):
Ok, here are the common Cassandra misconceptions, and their sources, gleaned from experience and talking to various people.
Some are saying that the best way to understand Cassandra data model is to look at the Twitter model mapped in Cassandra:
Make sure you check
myNoSQL a NoSQL blog featuring the best daily NoSQL news, articles and links covering all major...
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Alternative Data Storage Status Quo
There is a lot of innovation happening now in the alternative data storage space. People working on these projects have started a NOSQL community already and those not being part of it yet are trying to come up with schema-less approaches on top of relational databases.
There are a few things I am concerned about though. It looks like each of these solution is inventing its own API and is using...
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Commodity Hardware →
Interesting remark about what means commodity hardware:
When I first heard the term, I (and many others I know) considered this to be on the order of desktop-grade machines - the machines I’d purchased were Dual Core 2+ Ghz Dell Desktops (purchased on eBay for $350 a piece). Well, you can definitely do certain
tasks within the framework with these types of machines, but an ideal...
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A Project Voldemort Benchmark →
It looks like the performance is degrading with the size of the data and its amount:
If my data size is 2K then I get awesome performance.
It starts getting worse at about 5M Keys. […] So looks like as the overall database size increases beyond to what
can fit in the cache the performance starts degrading.
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Leverage asynchronous execution in the Google... →
From the project description page (link in title):
asynctools is a library allowing you to execute Google App Engine API calls in parallel
For the rationale behind this library there’s a blog post.
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Future-proofing your company’s vision →
From 2 Thoughts on Competition:
A feature set is just an implementation detail. What you need is a problem to solve and a vision on how to solve it.
Sean OMalley from VentureBeat expands on the idea:
Successful visions bring a unique perspective and are delivered with enough clarity and conviction to ensure they stick.
Without clarity of vision, your company is on a journey with the...
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Build Your Own iPhone Apps →
Need a way to build your iPhone app? Like an iPhone Apps Factory? There is an app for that.
From RWW:
A company called Sweb Apps has just launched a new service which lets anyone build iPhone apps, even if you don’t have a technical background. […] Instead, using the Sweb Apps website, business owners can create their own iPhone application themselves in as little as five minutes,...
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How to Grow the Local Hackers' Community
From VentureBeat:
A group of entrepreneurs have created a new community center for hackers in the heart of Silicon Valley called Hacker Dojo, where coders can come together and work on projects any time of the day or week.
I think this is purely a brilliant idea! And a good answer for one of the problems my friend Vladimir was mentioning about the Romanian tech stage (n.b. my translation...
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New iPhone Apps for Geeks
I read that a couple of interesting new iPhone apps have been or are to be launched soon.
GPush: push notifications for GMail
The arrival of push notification in Apple’s 3.0 iPhone software whipped up excitement, though its real-world application still left users wanting more.
Reviews:
Gmail push on iPhone? Meet GPush (cnet)
Push Gmail comes to the iPhone through GPush (ZDNet)
GPush...
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2 Thoughts on Competition
Rob Go:
Suggestion # 1: Think About the Job to be Done, Not the Feature Set
Suggestion # 2: Don’t Underestimate Any Competitor
A feature set is just an implementation detail. What you need is a problem to solve and a vision on how to solve it.
If all you have is a feature set that will make your service/product just an enhanced “me-too” . It doesn’t always mean it cannot become...
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AppVee's Best iPhone Apps List
I have found a list of best iPhone apps according to the review site AppVee and I thought to include it in the iPhone Apps for Geeks series.
While I cannot say I’ve found the list is extremely useful as a large part of it is being made of games, I hope you’ll find at least a couple of apps to make things either more productive or more relaxing while using the iPhone.
The 35 Best...