think differently big

Skribit Finally Launches, Aims to Cure Your Writer’s Block

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 22:01:08 +0200

Skribit Finally Launches, Aims to Cure Your Writer’s Block:

Skribit, the startup that is trying to help cure writer’s block, has opened its doors to the public after being in beta since its inception at Startup Weekend Atlanta in November of…

Run It Back - How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 15:33:09 +0200

Run It Back - How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks:

Shared by alexpopescu
Interesting

How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:49:12 +0200

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools :

Flash, Flex, Ajax, and Silverlight tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines.

Franciza cu produse de unu, doi si trei euro

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:54:31 +0200

Franciza cu produse de unu, doi si trei euro:

Euro City este o retea de magazine care comercializeaza produse non-alimentare la pret fix - unu, doi sau trei euro. In prezent, exista doua cornere in franciza in Romania, dar reprezentantii…

iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 21:34:06 +0200

iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers:

Prepare your wallets for a long list of iPhone apps: 50!

The ones I liked from the post:

Source Viewer () or Web Source Viewer (free)
Analytics app ($5.99)

… so just a few from the long list. Maybe your wallet is safe though.

Crane: Clojure Library for Amazon EC2/Hadoop Provisioning

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:33:56 +0200

Crane: Clojure Library for Amazon EC2/Hadoop Provisioning:

Not sure it is a sign of how wide spread the Amazon AWS or Hadoop are getting or that Clojure is becoming hotter and hotter, but this project sounds pretty cool:

Crane solves the problems for people running hadoop clusters; write all your config in clojure maps, and simply call (launch-hadoop-cluster config). You can run hadoop jobs from your local REPL, including the provisioning. All the configuration is in clojure. Automated shutdown for clusters when cascading jobs complete is on the way.

What makes a Tweet Relevant?

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 21:33:57 +0200

That’s the question that both Microsoft and Google are trying to answer since they signed deals with Twitter, Facebook, etc. to have these small “snippets of knowledge” included in their search results.

Couple of days ago, Google has announced that they are starting to push out results from Twitter and Facebook (this hasn’t reached all accounts yet though), so you’d expect that they came out with an approach for measuring the relevance. And I have found the following slide (thanks to ☞ TechCrunch):

In case you cannot read it from the low quality picture, here are the 10 metrics, which are pretty cryptic though,

Language model (?)
Tweet quality (?)
Author quality (?)
Probability of relevance
Semantics
Real-time URL resolution (my comment: probably somehow similar to the old PageRank but reversed: the quality of the tweet is determined by the quality of the links included)
Query registration (?)
Query hotness
Query volume fluctuations
Topicality (my comment: isn’t this more or less the same with the above Semantics?)

Right now, I cannot read between the lines of this algorithm, but there seems to be 3 dimensions that are considered: the author, the tweet and the included links, the query. I guess we will have to wait a bit longer to find out more about it and to see if it works or not.

What apps are on the Apple’s VP iPhone?

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:31:55 +0200

Anyone using an iPhone must have heard already of Phil Schiller, the senior VP of worldwide marketing at Apple, the first Apple figure that went out and spoke about the iPhone AppStore admission process.

Such people are very careful about getting their names associated with any 3rd party tools, software or anything, so I have found it quite interesting when The New York Times published an blog article: ☞ What’s on Phil Schiller’s iPhone?

Unfortunately if you look at the list that’s extremely short:

Shazam: the app that tries to identify a song by “listening” to it
CNN app
MLB.com at Bat, NBA Game Time, ESPN ScoreCenter
Facebook app (nb the app with the largest number of installs)
Best Camera: a photo app
a couple of games:
- Eliminate
- geoDefense

So, no surprises or new discoveries here… You will find more interesting apps in my iPhone apps for geeks series.

A $15 External Battery for iPhone

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 21:31:15 +0200

A $15 External Battery for iPhone:

That’s what I’d call a perfect gift for the iPhone addicts out there. I just wish Santa is hearing me now!

Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:28:09 +0200

Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing :

Interesting piece of technology (a la Google Wave), but is it really useful? Remote pair programming maybe?

Focused: A Multi-platform Focused Editor

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:27:16 +0200

You know that in a way I’m a fan of WriteRoom and use it on a daily basis for improving my blogging habits. Anyway, I do understand why others may not like it ($24.95) or may not be able to use it (Mac only), so I have written about some possible alternatives: Ommwriter: a Mac writing tool or ☞ JDarkRoom.

Today I’ve learnt about yet another multi-platform focused editor: ☞ Focused. It is an Adobe AIR application so it will run on all platforms. And based on the following video below I’d say it supports all the features you’d expect from these focused editors:

Is This Still Google Chrome?

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:25:58 +0200

There have been a lot of discussions lately about the long awaited release of the Google Chrome browser for Mac platforms. And people seem to agree that it will arrive pretty soon, but it will miss some of the features:

no bookmark manager
no app mode
no task manager
no bookmark sync
no full extension support
no multi-touch gestures

If these are missing, can we still call this browser the Google Chrome? What exactly will it offer?

☞ Features Chrome For Mac Beta Will Be Missing (TechCrunch)

Myth Busters: Why No iPhone Videochat?

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:26:04 +0200

Myth Busters: Why No iPhone Videochat?:

The Gizmodo guys, disguised as the ☞ myth busters, are destroying all possible explanations of not having videochat support on the iPhone:

AT&T overloaded 3G network: make it work on WiFi first
limited processing power: nonsense
required VGA camera too expensive or big: other phones already have it

Conclusion:

My only guess: They just want to milk the hell out of their user base. They know their game, these Cupertino boys and girls. They know they have the market by the balls. They know they can keep churning out marginal upgrades …

And to confirm the conclusion I have found a ☞ videoconferencing kit for iPhone (nb: that’s a very good joke).

Social Networks: Males vs Females

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:24:52 +0200

Social Networks: Males vs Females:

Study shows that on non-geek social networks, females represent the majority. You could argue that this is according to the world population ratio, but I’m not sure that would be correct.

On the other hand, on ‘geeky’ social networks/sites the audience is predominantly males. Communication (females) vs geekness (males)?

Is There a Business Model for Open Source?

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:24:11 +0200

Is There a Business Model for Open Source?:

A New York Times article questioning the business model for open source. MySQL, RedHat, SpringSource are some of the company names mentioned in the article.

There’s only one company making real money out of open source, and that’s Red Hat

— Simon Crosby, CTO Citrix Systems

Makes you think twice in case you were planning to go with the open source business model.

useKit: A Different Kind of Bookmarklet Bar

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 09:24:09 +0200

useKit: A Different Kind of Bookmarklet Bar:

Interesting idea. It would become really useful if it would allow me to create my own bookmarklets (useKit calls them “missions”). In that case I can imagine how this would completely replace the bookmarks bar in my browser freeing some more space.

Steve Souders: Front-end or Back-end Optimizations?

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 21:23:58 +0200

From an interview with Steve Souders published on ☞ O’Reilly Radar:

The first thing I recommend website owners do is get a handle, get an idea of the overall page load time. And then the second thing I say is break that into two parts: the back-end and the front-end. And if you find that like most websites, your back-end time is less than 10 or 20 percent, then you’re correct in focusing on these front-end best practices. If your back-end time is 30 to 50 percent or more, then you should really start on looking at your back-end architecture.

And in case you are running a media company, you should also check the part of the interview focused on the degradation of performance due to non-optimized ad servers.

Microsoft Demos Silverlight on the iPhone

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:22:57 +0200

For a couple of seconds I really thought this is the announcement of the year. Don’t get me wrong, but there were a lot of things to be read between the lines from such a headline. But then I paused for another second and re-read the announcement… and I realized there isn’t much about it (like with most of PR these days).

Let me reformulate the title so everyone can see why it is not a big deal: Microsoft has demoed streaming video from a “Silverlight server” in the ☞ H.264 format. The video is available in web pages through the usage of the HTML5 tag which is supported by Safari for a while already. To make things even clearer: this is pretty much the way YouTube works on the iPhone. So, PR BS?

Resources

What Is the Best Multi-client IM for the iPhone?

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:23:07 +0200

It looks like the iPhone AppStore provides plenty of multi-client IM apps from where you can pick your favorite(s). Unfortunately as with Twitter clients, when there are too many choices picking the right one is quite difficult.

So, here is the list of multi-client IM iPhone apps I am currently running in parallel:

fring: Skype, GoogleTalk, MSN, ICQ, Twitter, Yahoo, SIP, AIM
Nimbuzz!: WindowsLive, Skype, Yahoo, Facebook, GoogleTalk, AIM, MySpace, ICQ, and a couple more
Palringo: WindowsLive, Yahoo, AOL, ICQ, XMPP, GoogleTalk, Facebook
eBuddy: MSN, Yahoo, AIM, GoogleTalk, Facebook, ICQ, MySpace

You can use different criteria to pick the right multi-client IM iPhone app:

support for the services you are using
push notifications
per-account advanced settings
price: most of the above apps are free. Palringo and eBuddy are the only one that have also a payed version offering a couple more features.

Anyway, I am wondering if you have any favorite(s) you’d like to recommend?

Resources

On Google and The Future of News

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:21:58 +0200

Google ☞ reacted pretty quick (Dec.1st) to the pressure news corporations put on them when mentioning delisting from the search engine. In case you missed this part see the resource section for a couple of links to give you more context.

What exactly are they offering? Nothing: 1/ a change to the “First Click Free” program (see link for more details ☞ Changes in First Click Free), whose implementation responsibility is still on the published side and 2/ crawling and indexing of preview pages, which is something that they were already doing.

Then, Eric Schmidt, Google CEO, has an article published on WSJ: ☞ How Google Can Help Newspapers in which he reinforces the Google benefit:

We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle.

Such a statement is a bit confusing to me as it sounds like the users generating this traffic were not looking to but they were convinced by Google to check the newspapers. And this sounds pretty incorrect. People are going to Google looking for something. If Google wouldn’t be there, they would go somewhere else to look for their answers and so those billions of visits will not be lost.

The only interesting part of the article is his perspective on the future of content consumption:

It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load.

Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. […]

Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I’d never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.

Resources

☞ Rupert Murdoch and Google Part 2 (Nov.10th)
☞ Microsoft Offers To Pay News Corp To “De-List” Itself From Google (Nov.22nd)
☞ Bing trying to get exclusive on Fox…Smart (Nov.22nd)
☞ News Corp. - If You de-Index Will They Still Come? (Nov.23rd)
☞ News Corp. Joined by Rivals Weighing Google Block (Nov.24th)
☞ Rival Magazine Publishers Plan to Launch iTunes for Magazines (Nov.24th)

think differently big

Skribit Finally Launches, Aims to Cure Your Writer’s Block

Run It Back - How we got 18,000 beta users in 4 weeks

28 Rich Data Visualization Tools

Franciza cu produse de unu, doi si trei euro

iPhone Apps for Web Designers and Developers

Crane: Clojure Library for Amazon EC2/Hadoop Provisioning

What makes a Tweet Relevant?

What apps are on the Apple’s VP iPhone?

A $15 External Battery for iPhone

Real-Time, Collaborative Code Editing

Focused: A Multi-platform Focused Editor

Is This Still Google Chrome?

Related

Myth Busters: Why No iPhone Videochat?

Social Networks: Males vs Females

Is There a Business Model for Open Source?

useKit: A Different Kind of Bookmarklet Bar

Steve Souders: Front-end or Back-end Optimizations?

Microsoft Demos Silverlight on the iPhone

Resources

What Is the Best Multi-client IM for the iPhone?

Resources

On Google and The Future of News

Resources