Four short links: 23 September 2009

Video Art, Synthetic Biology Futures, Crowdsourced Personality, and an 1890s Startup

1. Projections (YouTube) -- the incredible video projection onto an old English manor house by Kiwi Foo Camp alums The Dark Room.
Where Will Synthetic Biology Lead Us? (New Yorker) -- a thoughtful article about the possibilities and cautions of synthetic biology. . “A house pet is a domesticated parasite,” he noted. “ It is evolved to have an interaction with human beings. Same thing with corn”—a crop that didn’t exist until we created it. “Same thing is going to start happening with energy,” he went on. “We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”
2. Business Cards and Crowdsourced Personality Assessments -- we scanned images of a person’s business card and asked crowdsourced workers from the Amazon Mechanical Turk channel to write five kind words about the person based on what they saw. I like the idea of being able to crowdsource a quick impartial aesthetic judgement about a design.
3. When Sears Was a Startup (Pete Warden) -- one of the first catalogues from Sears (1897) inspires comparisons to Amazon and other web startups. On a mission with a new business model. They can't stop talking about how they're cutting out the middle men who've been gouging their customers, with pages devoted to messianic rants against the monopolies trying to put them out of business. They contrast their order fulfillment process (dozens of clerks dealing with tens of thousands of orders a day) with the inefficient country stores full of assistants being paid to idly wait for customers, explaining how they can offer such low prices despite the shipping.

Four short links: 21 September 2009

Bad Writing, Tech Immigration, Long Tail Fail?, and The Real McKoi

1. Dan Brown's 20 Worst Sentences -- awful awful writing, and glorious glorious mockery of it.

   Deception Point, chapter 8: Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.

   It’s not clear what Brown thinks ‘precarious’ means here.

2. From Australia to the World: The Story of Google Maps and Google Wave (PDF, HTML Cached here) -- history of Google Maps and Wave, from the creator. This particularly struck me: I know few matters more frustrating than finding funding for a start-up. Immigration tops the list.
3. Rethinking The Long Tail: How to Define 'Hits' and 'Niches' -- the argument comes down to absolute vs relative measurements of popularity. Anderson says that relative hides too much, because percentages are meaningless in a world of infinite inventory. Researchers respond that hits and niches are defined in absolute numbers (top 10, bottom 100). The real takeaway is that infinite inventory requires excellent discovery tools drawing upon collective intelligence systems (hence the Netflix recommendation contest). (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. The Mckoi Database -- MckoiDDB is a database system used by software developers to create applications that store data over a cluster of machines in a network. It is designed to be used in online environments where there are very large sets of both small and big data items that need to be stored, accessed and indexed efficiently in a network cluster. The focus of the MckoiDDB architecture is to support low latency query performance, provide strong data consistency through snapshot transaction isolation, and provide tools to manage logical data models that may change dramatically in physical network environments that may experience similar dramatic change. (via joshua on delicious)

Four short links: 16 September 2009

Data Sharing, Health Dashboard, DIY Repairs, Crowdsourcing

1. Data Sharing: Empty Archives (Nature) -- asking and answering the question "why don't researchers share their data?"
2. San Francisco Health Visual Dashboard -- Health Matters in San Francisco is a o­ne-stop source of non-biased data and information about community health in the City, and healthy communities in general. It is intended to help planners, policy makers, and community members learn about issues and identify improvements. (via the blog of the CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess and titine on delicious)
3. iFixit -- information on Mac, iPhone, etc. repair. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
4. Crowdflower -- labour as a service. Love the analytics. Don't miss the TechCrunch 50 demo. (via waxy)

Four short links: 11 September 2009

Healthcare Fellow, Javascript Math, Web PDF Viewer, Tweeting Kegerator

1. Healthspottr Fellow -- outstanding entrepreneurs will be awarded prizes of up to $250,000 to accelerate their innovative endeavours. Think MacArthur Genius Grant for healthcare. (via Gov 2.0 Summit)
2. jsMath -- Javascript for embedding Math in web pages. (via Hacker News)
3. Google's Undocumented Embeddable PDF Viewer -- Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online. (via Waxy)
4. Tweeting Kegerator -- network connected keg that tells you when it's about to run out.

Four short links: 7 September 2009

XMPP, Future of Web Frameworks, Infrastructure Stories, Better Email Client

1. App Engine Now Supports XMPP (Jabber) -- messaging servers, whether XMPP or PubSubHubBub, are becoming an increasingly important way to loosely join the small pieces. Google's incorporation of XMPP into GAE reflects this (and the fact that Wave is built on XMPP). (via StPeter on Twitter)
2. Snakes on the Web (Jacob Kaplan-Moss) -- The best way to predict the future of web development, I think, is to keep asking ourselves the question that led to all the past advances: what sucks, and how can we fix it? So: what sucks about web development? An excellent and thought-provoking talk about the possible directions for improvement in web framework design.
3. Ravelry (Tim Bray) -- We’ve got 430,000 registered users, in a month we’ll see 200,000 of those, about 135,000 in a week and about 70,000 in a day. We peak at 3.6 million pageviews per day. That’s registered users only (doesn’t include the very few pages that are Google accessible) and does not include the usual API calls, RSS feeds, AJAX. [...] We have 7 servers running Gentoo Linux and virtualized into a total of 13 virtual servers with Xen. [...]". Interesting technical and business discussion with an unexpected busy site.
4. So's Your Facet: Faceted Global Search for Mozilla Thunderbird -- email clients are LONG overdue for improvement. Encouraging to see an active and open research project to improve it from the folks at Mozilla Messaging.

Four short links: 18 August 2009

iPhone App Backstory, Cookie Resurrection, The Entrepreneuralism Lickmus test, and An Interesting Database

1. The Making of the NPR News iPhone App -- interesting behind-the-scenes look, with sketches and all. Station streams, however, presented a larger challenge. To begin with, NPR didn't have direct stream links for any of its stations, so we built a Web spider that identified and captured more than 300 iPhone-compatible station streams. After that first pass, we worked with our station representatives to manually test each stream. In the process they found enough new streams to double our database. All of these streams are delivered to the app from NPR's Station Finder API. (via mattb on Twitter)
2. You Deleted Your Cookies? Think Again (Wired) -- Flash keeps its own cookies, which are harder to delete. Several services even use the surreptitious data storage to reinstate traditional cookies that a user deleted, which is called ‘re-spawning’ in homage to video games where zombies come back to life even after being “killed,” the report found. So even if a user gets rid of a website’s tracking cookie, that cookie’s unique ID will be assigned back to a new cookie again using the Flash data as the “backup.” (via Simon Willison)
3. Would You Lick It? (Rowan Simpson) -- clever example of what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
4. FluidDB -- a shared "in the cloud" database built around tags: an object is a container for a set of tags which are name:value pairs, tag names have simple namespaces (e.g., "gnat/review" is the "review" tag in my namespace), all objects are world readable and writable but there are ACLs for tags, values can be any type (string, number, URL, Excel spreadsheet), and there's a simple query language. I'm curious to see what applications spring up around shared data. They're in limited alpha, controlling the # of users, so register now to play before everyone else.

Four short links: 4 June 2009

Google Wave, Education, Intelligence, and Twitterspawn

1. Wave Robot Ruby Client -- Sam Ruby ported the Wave Robot Python Client library to Ruby. He found that the wire protocol is full of Java classnames, and says, Overall, I feel that this Google Wave could benefit from earlier and wider reviews. In the comments, a Google employee replies The Java API was implemented first... We are working on de-Java-fying the wire protocol and making the python robot client library more “pythonic”.. Lovely to see Google actively cocreating with the wider web world, because the alternative (the old-school "we know better, use my sacred code you unworthy mortal" arrogance) does not lead to successful web-wide technology.
2. How Do I Remediate THAT? -- my favourite blogging teacher observes that his remedial math class don't engage as much, even with the fun videos he plays to start discussions. The comments are fascinating, and point to gems like the following:
3. Describing the Habits of Mind -- the habits that humans exhibit when they behave intelligently. E.g., Managing Impulsivity. Goal-directed, self-imposed delay of gratification is perhaps the essence of emotional self-regulation: the ability to deny impulse in the service of a goal, whether it be building a business, solving an algebraic equation, or pursuing the Stanley Cup. Effective problem solvers are deliberate: they think before they act. [...] They decrease their need for trial and error by gathering information, taking time to reflect on an answer before giving it, making sure they understand directions, and listening to alternative points of view. Often, students blurt out the first answer that comes to mind. Sometimes they shout an answer, start to work without fully understanding the directions, lack an organized plan or strategy for approaching a problem, or make immediate value judgments about an idea (criticizing or praising it) before they fully understand it. They may take the first suggestion given or operate on the first idea that comes to mind rather than consider alternatives and the consequences of several possible directions. Research demonstrates, however, that less impulsive, self-disciplined students are more successful.
4. The Spawn of Twitter Data (Jess3 + Brian Solis) -- visually-pleasing graphic of the different services and application areas built around the use of Twitter data. (via Flowing Data)

Four short links: 2 June 2009

Fonts, Medicine, Healthcare, Project Natal

1. TypeKit -- Jeff Veen's new startup, making typography on the web fail to suck. Every major browser is about to support the ability to link to a font. That means you can write a bit of CSS, include a URL to a font file, and have your page display with the typography you expect. While it’s technically quite easy to link to fonts, it’s legally more nuanced. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.
2. Talking With Jamie Heywood About PatientsLikeMe (Jon Udell) -- the creator of patientslikeme, a site that provides people with serious conditions a chance to report on the efficacy of their treatment, their unique symptoms, and (if they wish) to connect with the researchers in the drug companies who made the treatments. It's a new closure for the feedback loop of medical research.
3. The Cost Conundrum: What a Texas town can teach us about health care. (New Yorker) -- the lesson is that you tolerate bad ethics, bad business, bad behaviour at your own risk because the rogue you tolerate may become the anchor tenant for a mall of villainy you'll find very hard to dismiss.
4. Microsoft Announces Project Natal -- full-body motion capture for XBox 360, as game controller. I'm keen to see whether having nothing in your hand is as satisfying as having something to hold. Kudos to MSFT for bringing research to market as mainstream entertainment.

Welcoming Eric Ries to the Radar Team

The Radar blog is a community of thinkers organized around the O’Reilly mission to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. Some of the folks with posting privileges on Radar are O'Reilly employees: Brady Forrest organizes the ETech, Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 Expo events, Mike Loukides, Andy Oram, Brett McLaughlin, and Mike Hendrickson are editors of many of the books you know and love, Ben Lorica does data analysis in our research group, Andrew Savikas heads up our digital publishing efforts, Dale Dougherty is the publisher of Make:, Sara Winge runs the Radar group and organizes our annual Foo Camp.

Others work part-time with us, such as our open source maven Alison Randal, who co-chairs the Open Source Convention, and “Master of Disaster” Jesse Robbins, who co-chairs the Velocity conference on large scale web operations. Some are alumni such as Nat Torkington and Marc Hedlund, who have gone on to other jobs but remain very much part of the O'Reilly family.

But others are interesting people we have met along the journey like Artur Bergman, Jim Stogdill, and Nick Bilton. These are people who've stimulated our thinking and helped us reflect on areas we want to learn about. In each case the goal is the same - talk about "Stuff That Matters" and generate meaningful conversation. With that in mind, I wanted to welcome Eric Ries to the Radar community.

I met Eric a few months ago, and immediately realized that he was someone I could learn a lot from, and whose ideas I wanted to spread as widely as possible. Eric has been championing the concept of The Lean Startup; a methodology that helps startups learn and adapt faster than the competition. Startups get lean through a mixture of agile development, leveraged product development and implementing direct, tight customer feedback loops. The result is a new type of company - one that uses operational excellence to drive down costs and accelerate learning.

Eric’s methodology has been honed by running successful startups (and learning from running unsuccessful ones) along with experience gathered through consulting, mentoring, and advising entrepreneurs. The Lean Startup is deeply prescriptive and practical; it is a vision for a new way to start, build and grow your company—starting on day one.

One of the things that excites me about the Lean Startup is that it doesn’t just apply to the traditional “two guys in a garage.” The questions that I have seen technology startups face time and again are increasingly relevant to institutions of all kinds: Who exactly is my customer? What exactly do they want? How do I deliver my product quickly and effectively at lower cost? Lessons learned in the crucible of entrepreneurship are applicable to enterprise and to government as both struggle to do more with less, to grow to reach new markets, and to innovate.

You will find Eric here occasionally on Radar as well as on his blog. Additionally, Eric has partnered with O’Reilly to produce a series of upcoming workshops intended to help people master the concepts of The Lean Startup.

Here is a video that Radar’s Joshua-Michéle Ross shot with Eric recently.

Four short links: 15 May 2009

LIfe After socket(), Imminent Death of Web 2.0, Breathalyzer Lameness, and Open Source Science Publishing

1. Whither Sockets? -- ACM Queue article on how sockets as a model for network programming have become an obstacle to where networking is going. All of these calls have one thing in common: the calling program must repeatedly ask for data to be delivered. In the world of client/server computing these constant requests make perfect sense, because the server cannot do anything without a request from the client. It makes little sense for a print server to call a client unless the client has something it wishes to print. What, however, if the service being provided is music or video distribution? In a media distribution service there may be one or more sources of data and many listeners. For as long as the user is listening to or viewing the media, the most likely case is that the application will want whatever data has arrived. Specifically requesting new data is a waste of time and resources for the application. The sockets API does not provide the programmer a way in which to say, "Whenever there is data for me, call me to process it directly." (via Slashdot)
2. Game Web 2.Over? (Meg Pickard) -- update of the classic "wall o' Web 2.0 logos" showing which have folded or been bought. I'm glad to see how many have folded; many were the inevitable "me too"ing of initial successes, and many were simply bad ideas. Death is a natural part of the Darwinian marketplace, painful as it is to those who are naturally selected out of the meme pool. I'm glad to see how many were acquired, showing they had something someone wanted. The diagram's incomplete now, of course: it doesn't show the companies launched after the wall o'logos was made. (via Waxy)
3. Breathalyzer Source Code Sucks -- 2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings. Nonetheless, the comments say that the values should be averaged, and they are not... I periodically worry that I've been so long out of hardcore coding that my skills are rusty and I'd never survive at the coal face again. Then I see something like this and I punch the air and wheeze "I still got it!" as I reach for my cane. (via BoingBoing)
4. Bloomsbury Science Free Online -- Sir John Sulston, Nobel prize winner and one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has teamed up with Bloomsbury to edit a new series of books that will look at topics including the ethics of genetics and the cyber enhancement of humans. The series will be the first from Bloomsbury's new venture, Bloomsbury Academic, launched late last year as part of the publisher's post-Harry Potter reinvention. Using Creative Commons licences, the intention is for titles in the imprint to be available for free online for non-commercial use, with revenue to be generated from the hard copies that will be printed via print-on-demand and short-run printing technologies. (via Glyn Moody)

Web2Open: An Exciting Experiment

As I've written here recently, we've got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open--the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I'm particularly excited about is a new experiment, "Practice Your Customer Pitch."

We're bringing in five startups who will get two minutes each to give their customer pitch (not their VC pitch), as if meeting a potential customer at a cocktail party (i.e., no slides but OK to drink if you want). To give them feedback, we've assembled a top-notch panel of serial entrepreneurs and marketing experts. It's not a competition, so there's no judging or ranking—just discussion among the entrepreneurs, panelists and other session attendees.

We're trying this idea for the first time, so who knows how it will go? But in the entrepreneurial spirit, we've mitigated our risks: even if the format doesn't sing, the session can only be a hit given the participants. (Thanks to Sean O'Malley for helping us connect with a lot of these folks.)

The rather impressive panel:
*Rashmi Sinha, moderator. SlideShare CEO
*Robert Acker, panelist. LiveSpot CEO
*Michael Cerda, panelist. cc:Betty CEO
*Nilofer Merchant, panelist. Rubicon Consulting CEO

The smart startups:
*CrowdVine, social networks for conferences
*dbTwang, Dogster for guitars
*Doodle, online scheduling magic
*Maestro Market, a Web 2.0 speakers' bureau
*Magoosh, customized test-prep

The session is on Weds, April 1 from 10:50 - 11:40a. If you still need a free pass for Web2Open, you can register using the code websf09opn. There's more general event info on the Open website.

Four short links: 17 Mar 2009

Startups, databases, iPhone app marketplace, and how to launch:

1. Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own (NY Times) -- a story about a new tide of entrepreneurs forced into it by the economic times. The goal for many entrepreneurs nowadays is not to create a company that will someday make billions but to come up with an idea that will produce revenue quickly, said Jerome S. Engel, director for the center for entrepreneurship at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Mr. Engel said many people will focus on serving immediate needs for individuals and businesses.
2. Redis -- another key/value pair database, but this time with atomic operations to push and pop. The reinvention of databases continues apace ....
3. Gaming on the iPhone--Natural Selection in Real Time -- as the number of games has risen, the price has dropped. But that's where things have begun to settle, just a short time after the App Store started featuring games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Five bucks is to the iPhone what sixty bucks is to the PC: the high end of the price scale. And the expectation is that, if you're gonna tempt someone to fork over a Lincoln for your hard work, it had better be something special [...] The iPhone is a relatively easy platform for developing games, where you can generally create a game with a small budget and short development time, and be looking at potentially large returns. But the market has become so crowded with casual games that it has become incredibly hard to get your game noticed.
4. Don't Launch -- an eminently reasonable answer to the question I've often been asked. Don't chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don't scale. Don't marketing launch. I love everything this guy writes. If he ever publishes a collection of his laundry lists and telephone doodles, I'll preorder it on Amazon.

Four short links: 23 Feb 2009

1. Work in Small Batches -- I'm obsessed by the pursuit of quality, but at human scale and not in the stultifying ISO9001 process. The ever-wonderful Startup Lessons Learned blog ties together Toyota Quality, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment, with good explanations of why it works. (I'm reminded of "yes it works in practice, but can it work in theory?")
2. RSS Hits the Big Time -- the stimulus bill requires government departments to offer Atom or RSS feeds of how they spend the money. The "omigod wow RSS in law!" comments remind me of when I first saw a URL on a billboard: it was the all-digital world impinging on my real physical world (or vice-versa). Reminded of William Gibson talking about our fleeting separation of digital and physical worlds.
3. Objective C Internals -- talk by Kiwi Foo Camp alumnus and recent emigre (Pixar's gain is Australasia's loss) about the innards of Objective C. I always find that I understand language features better when I understand an implementation mechanism for them.
4. Prime Minister Delays NZ's Insane Copyright Law -- the delay isn't the important bit, it's the committment to abolish the bad law if the ISPs and the recording industry can't reach an agreement. I was at the press conference, twittering furiously, and it was quite clear that the PM felt the law was crap and if the two parties hadn't been mid-negotiation then it would have all been repealed. Optimism!

Four short links: 29 Jan 2009

Luck, craft, coding, and strategy today on Four Short Links:

1. Because -- After a NZ big-money low-success e-tailer closed, there was widespread "ha! about time!" in the blogosphere. This post, by one of New Zealand's most successful web entrepreneurs, is a fantastically humble reality check. "Build it and they won’t necessarily come, no matter how good you think it is and how much you try and tell them about it. Looking at a high profile failure, and thinking that you just need to do to the opposite to be successful can be quite misleading."
2. Ira Glass's Manifesto -- the man behind This American Life talks about the art and craft of creating great radio stories. I learned a lot from reading it, and not just about radio. "I'm not against manipulating feelings. The whole job is about manipulating feelings. If you don't get in front of that and embrace it with a big bear hug, you're not doing your job as a radio producer. You just don't want to be all corny about it." It's the great lesson I'm still learning from Sara Winge at O'Reilly, that humans are built of emotions and stories and if we want to reach a human then we must speak with emotions and stories.
3. Switching from scripting languages to Objective C and iPhone: useful libraries -- Matt Biddulph notes some libraries that made his first Objective C programming easier.
4. Three Freemium Strategies -- I've been looking for an excuse to link to this blog, Startup Lessons Learned. It's well-written and informative. "Strategy is all about what you're not going to do; for a freemium business, it's about which users you're willing to turn away. Knowing which model you're in can make these decisions a little less excruciating."

An ESB for the Web?

I spend a great deal of my time encouraging "enterprise people" to think more like "web people." Focus on adoption, use platforms to enable emergent capability, build the "generative enterprise," and that sort of thing.

So, imagine my surprise when I saw the web acting a bit like the enterprise with the launch of Gnip.

As the web moves toward a network of widespread transactional API's, each with it's own vocabulary, it is starting to look a lot like a legacy enterprise writ large or maybe like an industry eco-system. So we shouldn't be surprised to see web developers turning to solutions that their enterprise colleagues would find familiar.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes in the enterprise world talking about SOA in the last five years (or spent time building "trading platforms" for industry consortiums prior to that) has probably drawn a picture on a whiteboard that looks something like this (see, almost identical):

Whether you have integrated line of business applications inside the enterprise or connected trading partners within an industry, that N squared connection problem will resonate with your experience. Webs of poorly documented point-to-point integrations are expensive to build, expensive to maintain, and impossibly brittle when the business changes.

And now the N squared problem seems like it might be beginning to resonate with web developers too now that they have to integrate to an ever growing population of API's. Plus, on the web, the additional limitations of a port 80 based infrastructure add to the nightmare by throwing the expense of constant API polling into the mix.

So, what to do?

(continue reading)

Seesmic Starts Adding Features

Seesmic is a company built specifically to encourage asynchronous video conversations. We spent a few hours recently with Seesmic founder and CEO Loic Le Meur, who kindly gave us an update on the company. Four weeks after opening its service to the public, Seesmic recently announced a product roadmap heavily influenced by users.

After focusing on making sure the service scales, the company is now ready to add features including private groups, the option to block individual users from your Seesmic player, and letting users flag offensive content (e.g. porn). Search is a currently a big problem for them, and according to Loic they plan to address search in several ways: (1) give users the option of adding meta-data to their videos (description, tags, etc.), (2) employ automated audio-to-text software to create transcripts, and (3) since Seesmic videos are already on Google, use Google Video search. With apps for both Facebook and OpenSocial slated to be released in August, Seesmic hopes to draw more teen and college-age users.

One of the problems with following conversations on Seesmic is that unlike text, there isn't a way to skim through video. Some people just take longer to get their point across. Assuming a 2-minute per video average, a conversation involving 60 posts/replies would take two hours to view from start to finish. Board member Pierre Omidyar started a Seesmic thread on the possibility of limiting videos to 30 seconds (a la twitter), but for the moment, there are no plans to limit the length of videos. However, the company plans to provide tools to filter out long videos and to display limited portions for faster viewing.

One month after their public launch, here are some key metrics

• 23,000 unique users from 25 countries (about 50% are from the U.S.)
• 3,000 videos are uploaded each day (total of slightly more than 300K videos)
• average length of a video is 2 minutes
• 30 million page views (doesn't include videos viewed through their API)

The Seesmic community not only provides valuable input for their product team, some users have put together impressive mashups and visualizations. My favorites so far are a Youtube and Seesmic mashup for people conversing in sign language, and a visual of conversations related to the recently released French hostage, Ingrid Betancourt. If you download the PicLens Firefox plugin, a Seesmic user created a fun tool to help you quickly navigate all the videos posted by a particular user: try this sample search ("deepakchopra") and set options to 3D Wall.

As to the inevitable question of business models, Loic is mulling a few possibilities: text ads similar to Google AdSense, premium membership, white labels, and customized players for companies, just to name a few. For now, their recent round of funding gives them the luxury of focusing on growing their user base and improving their service. It remains to be seen whether or not asynchronous video conversations catch on in a massive way. Video may never appeal to the many netizens adept at communicating through text. However, the more time you spend on Seesmic, you start seeing why Loic believes that there will be a market for video conversations. By default, the Seesmic community is defining how that market evolves, and four weeks after launching, they seem to be doing just fine.

From the July NY Tech Meetup

I attended the New York Tech meetup last night with about 400 others in IAC's lobby on West 18th Street. Sort of like an Ignite but without the auto slide advance and proximate cash bar. Seven individuals or teams talked about their projects for five minutes each.

The lead off talk was from Transclick. Founded by an ex hedge fund manager (hedge fund managers leaving to do tech startups, things that make you go hmmm), Transclick does real time translation among 16 languages for IM, SMS, email for mobile devices. They are also beginning to leverage voice recognition tied to the translation engine. They've been around for a while and pretty widely discussed and feted so no need to add much more here. However, one interesting note came up during the Q+A. When asked about Twitter, Robert Levin, Transclick's CEO, claimed to be in negotiations to add language translation to the micro blogging service. Of course that will be great, as now native speaking spammers from all over the world will be able to follow me with less effort.

A few other quick mentions...

Pluribo is using natural language processing to summarize user reviews on Amazon.com. Delivered for now as a Firefox plugin, it analyzes a stream of user comments to find key words that relate to user concerns and automagically create a brief summary. Hovering over the key words in the summary brings up nice visuals that describe overall customer sentiment or issues to pay attention to for the item.

Daily Lit is either really great or mildly depressing depending on your point of view. Delivering books in bits and pieces via email or RSS, it is designed to fit literature into our harried lives through the channels we are already paying attention to. I can't decide if that is really cool or if it's like occasionally dropping a pearl into a Skinner box. Pellet, pellet, pellet, omg!!, Vronksy shot himself, pellet, pellet, pellet...

Cause Caller is a great example of the web's generativity in action. Fred Benenson's NYU thesis, it combines Media Wiki, Asterisk, and EC2 so that an individual citizen can describe a cause, link it to the politicians that might most readily influence the outcome, publish a call script, and automate the dialing. The most active cause on the site today is "say no to Telecom Immunity."

If you'd like to take a look at the rest of the projects that presented, they are Wakozi (a NYC-based delivery service), Cloudsmith (a cloud-spanning distro mapper), and Independence Year ("a workflow engine for taking the country back").

Hyperic CloudStatus service dashboard launches at Velocity!

Javier Soltero just launched CloudStatus during his Hyperic sponsor session today at Velocity. CloudStatus is a public health dashboard for web services like Amazon's EC2/S3, and Google's App Engine.

Javier called to tell me about this last week after I declared that "Service Monitoring Dashboards are mandatory". This comes right after Amazon and Google had visible outages, and couldn't have happened at a better time. I'm really excited to see this idea take off, as it's something that is critical to the broad adoption of web services and cloud computing.

Two new open source projects at Velocity

At Velocity next week there will be two significant open source projects debuting. The first is the Jiffy: Open Source Performance Measurement and Instrumentation tool created by Scott Ruthfield and his team at Whitepages.com.

Most tools for measuring web performance come in two flavors:

• Developer-installed tools (Firebug, Fiddler, etc.) that allow individuals to closely trace single sessions


• Third-party performance monitoring systems (Gomez, Keynote, etc.) that will hit your site occasionally and report back component-level metrics (for a fee)

Neither of these tools give you real-world information on what’s actually happening with your clients—how long are pages really taking to load, what’s the real cost of client-side execution, and what’s the impact of your loading or dependency chain. This is even more important when you don’t host all of your own assets, such as when you load ads or JavaScript from third parties, for example, and you need to monitor their performance.

Thus we built Jiffy—an end-to-end system for instrumenting your web pages, capturing client-side timings for any event that you determine, and storing and reporting on those timings. You run Jiffy yourself, so you aren’t dependent on the performance characteristics, inflexibility, or costs of third-party hosted services.

The second is project is EUCALYPTUS, the Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, presented by Rich Wolski from UCSB. This project has already started getting attention. (Many thanks to Surj Patel of Structure08/GigaOM for connecting us!)

Eucalyptus is an open-source software infrastructure for implementing "cloud computing" on clusters. The current interface to EUCALYPTUS is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain.

The talk will focus on the design, the implementation tradeoffs we have identified in implementing Eucalyptus as an exploratory tool, and the ways in which we have chosen to address these tradeoffs in the first version of the software.

Understanding Web Operations Culture (Part 1)

“You don’t choose the moment, the moment chooses you. You only choose how prepared you are when it does.” - Fire Chief Mike Burtch

(Note: I became a Firefighter-1 and EMT in 2000. My experiences in the fire service profoundly influence my efforts in technology. Much of my work over the past few years has been translating and distilling my knowledge from these two worlds, teaching others, and finding ways to apply it in the service of both.)

Last week I came upon a truck vs. scooter accident on my way home. I could hear a woman yelling in pain from underneath the truck (a good sign!) and could see a guy in the cab looking panicked and touching his controls. I stopped my car and “surveyed the scene” looking for things that might kill me (traffic, hazmat, downed power lines) or make the situation worse if undetected (additional victims, deflating tires, fires).

It looked like the driver was about to move his truck, which would have definitely made things worse. I used my ‘command voice’ to yell “Put it in park! Stop your engine! Set your brake! Get out and wait!” as I approached the truck.

A city crew came over, and one of them told me “We’ve called 911 and they are on their way.”

I asked them to handle traffic control as I approached my patient. I then introduced myself and asked her if I could help. (I have to obtain consent before assisting an injured person, and a response means I know they have still have their Airway, Breathing, and Circulation intact.)

Her legs were entangled in her scooter which was trapped underneath the truck. While she probably had broken her leg, it didn’t look all that bad. She was still wearing her helmet and it wasn't seriously damaged which meant her head was probably okay too. I did a quick check for bleeding and other serious injuries and did a “mental status check” by asking her name, where she was (“on my way to school”), and what had happened (“I was riding and that a**hole RAN OVER ME!”). This meant she was alert and oriented, which was good.

Now that I was sure there weren’t any other life threatening injuries, I prepared to hold her head for c-spine stabilization. (Once you start holding stabilization, you cannot move again until you are ready to put the patient on a backboard.)

As I positioned myself on the ground and took hold of her head, I explained “I’m going to hold your head now to protect your neck and back. Once the fire department gets here, they are going to get your legs unstuck and then we’ll get you on a backboard. Your job is to keep still and keep talking to us. There will be a lot of commotion and noise around you, and that’s okay. Everyone will be watching out for you and so there is no reason to be scared. We’ve got you.”

(continue reading)