Posts
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March Mobile Monday
The announcement for the March Mobile Monday is up. The topic this time is Mobile Gaming, inspired in large part by the Game Developers Conference being in town at the same time. We’re going to be over at Dimension7 again, cause that’s right down Folsom from Moscone and should be convenient for all the conference goers. Here’s the essential info:
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GeoURL is Back!
Just a few minutes ago Fagan popped up on IM and said “http://geourl.org/ back up.” Woohoo!!!! Music to my ears. GeoURL is a service that keeps track of physical locations to go along with web resources. So thanks to GeoURL you can see web resources near me in the real world. Apparently Ask Bjoern Hansen is responsible for the resurrection. Thanks Ask! Of course, being the mobility wonk that I am, I would love a neighbors lookup function based on coordinates rather than existing resources. Tie something like TagSurf (which allows tagging based on URLs) into the GeoURL lookup. Pull your GPS coords, find URLs of nearby sources, use URLs to pull comments out of Tagsurf. All we need is a layer of FOAF filtering on those results and we’ve got a decent componentized recommendation system. And I think everyone knows how much Mike hates the silo. Multiple services, acting together, with liberty and justice for all.
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iPod Shuffle with GNUpod Under Linux
Chris pointed me to an interview today, and I downloaded the MP3 and tossed it onto my Shuffle almost without thinking about it. Why was I able to do this action naturally and in the manner I choose? Without switching off my main desktop machine? Because the 0.98rc1 release of GNUpod includes the necessary changes to support the iPod Shuffle. It was crippled for a while, and I had to use this attrocious bag of drivers misnamed an operating system in order to do so. But now I can download audio when I want and put them on my device using the programs I choose to. Yay! Thank you GNUpod authors, you rock!
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March 106miles
The March meeting of 106miles has been announced. The guest is Jeff Winner, former VP of Engineering at Friendster and current principal in venture accelerator Alacrity Partners, the topic is “Fundamentals of Financing for Founders: the current funding climate in Silicon Valley”. The last meeting was fantastic, definitely check it out if you get a chance. They need to make sure they capacity plan correctly, so if you’re planning to come email jpark at commerce.net. I’m not putting the location in here so that people don’t just show up, like they do with the Future Salon events. But I will tell you it’s on March 9th at 7:00pm and on the peninsula.
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Biomimetic Software
I’ve had this post sitting around for a while, but seeing as Elle has declared this Blogger Fort Weekend I’ve decided to get it out now.
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Morning Beverages
I was talking to Russ this morning, we’re both home sick, and he mentioned he posted a picture of his morning coffee, in response to the link I gave to The Year of Coffee a few days ago. Great idea! It’s not just coffee, but here are my morning beverages as well:
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Search, Subscribe, Advertise
Feedster was awarded Best Overall Presentation at the Bay Area Interactive Group (BIG) Technology Shootout last night. The main message presented was the future of XML based formats such as RSS and how they lead to a model that can best be summarized as “Search, Subscribe, Advertise.” Search is of course a very broad topic, and subscribe very general. The first thing that pops to mind is of course searching for all posts related to Linux, and having a feed for new posts that appear on that topic. But RSS search is the kind of thing that can be applied in layers, almost like a recursive operation. For instance we can provide a search for FEEDS related to Linux, and a feed of new feeds that appear. No matter how it’s applied though, the general model of “Search, Subscribe, Advertise” best describes how to slot into the desired user behavior. Great job Chris!
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Feed of the Day
So there was massive feedback from putting up The Year of Coffee as the Feed of the Day, people really liked it. Happy I could help out! So tonight was my turn to pick the feed again. I’m a geek at heart. Serious geek. My natural inclination is to put up something about programming languages and getting them to all kinds of strange and spooky things. But that’s just not interesting stuff for most people. So instead I took a random walk for a while and happened across this gem: Bicyclemark’s Communique. Check this out:
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Feed of the Day for Wed
I didn’t have time to post about it when I put it up, but I want to talk about the last Feed of the Day I put up: The Year of Coffee. I ran across it cause I have a subscription to a vanity feed for Feedster so that I can see when anyone is talking about us. Fantastic idea, I recommend it for anyone, it’s amazing the stuff you’ll find. At first when I looked at it I thought “hey, is this a stealth blog for Peet’s?” (notice that when I think to myself I insert hyperlinks, sometimes that makes my head hurt). If that’s a marketing piece it’s a fantastic effort! The basic premise is that Lloyd, the person running the site, is taking a picture of each cup of coffee for a year and posting it online. Here’s the post that kicked it off. But it’s not just coffee cups that go up there, it’s commentary and bits of stories. The consistent serial nature of the updates, along with the nuggets of larger stories placed next to quick notes, really make the blog feel more like a continuous flow than a series of disconnected updates. It’s weird, it’s interesting, it’s a slice of life, and it’s made me laugh more than once. Thanks Lloyd!
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Notes from Jeff Clavier Presenting at BMA
Here are some notes from the talk Jeff Clavier gave at BMA this morning. A lot of the talk was about the enterprise side of the equation. “What does it take to get an enterprise software play to market” type of questions. But the discussion started out with a preface not to take generalizations too seriously. People will say “VCs don’t really do that” or “you’re never going to see that from a VC”, but that needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Normally these statements are overgeneralized. Different VCs act differently, and behavior that you would never see from one group may not be that uncommon from another. So pay attention and make sure to contextualize the information you get.
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