clouds&web2.0

Get started with managing Facebook App ads through OpenX

2009-12-06T11:13:00.001-08:00

To manage your Facebook App ads through OpenX Hosted, you must have an OpenX Hosted account. If you don't already have an account, it's free to sign up.

Once you have logged into your OpenX Hosted account, follow these steps:

1. Add a website to represent your Facebook App.

2. Add a zone. A zone represents a location on your Facebook App page where ads will display.

3. On the zone's Invocation Code tab, select the type "Facebook App Tag" then follow the directions to
get the demographic targeting script and the OpenX zone tag for your Facebook App ad.

4. Add an advertiser.

5. Add a campaign. A campaign represents the collection of ads you will be delivering.

6. Add a banner. To add demographic targeting to your banner, select the desired targeting criteria on
the banner's Delivery Options tab. For your Facebook App ads, you will be able to select demographic
targeting criteria such as Age Group, Education, Gender and Relationship Status.

7. Link your banner to your zone. Go to your banner's Linked Zones tab and select the zone you created in step #2 to display your Facebook App ad.

That's all it takes to start serving Facebook App ads through OpenX.
Sign up for your free OpenX Hosted account to get started!

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That's all it takes to start serving Facebook App ads through OpenX.
Sign up for your free OpenX Hosted account to get started!

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Paa

2009-12-05T18:44:00.001-08:00

Is intelligent and entertaining

The one crew member from Paa I hurried to look up on the internet, apart from the make-up artists, was the dialogue writer. Turns out, it’s director R Balki (of Cheeni Kum fame) who’s written the film’s crisp conversations.

Talking about the internet, there is a charming dialogue in the movie when 11-year-old Auro (Amitabh Bachchan) looks up an errant politician on the computer saying ‘Google se bach ke kahan jaoge’ (you can’t run away from Google).

It’s difficult then, not to fall for Auro, the possessor of a dry humour that consistently produces gems like the one above. We flashback to his mother, medical student Vidya’s story (Vidya Balan), who, after an affair with a political science student, Amol (Abhishek), gets pregnant and is disappointed when she is asked to get an abortion.

She speaks to her mother (Arundhati Naag, superb) who had brought up Vidya all alone after her husband’s demise. When plainly asked whether she wants to keep the baby or not, Vidya decides to go ahead with the pregnancy. Already wondering how she’ll bring up a child all alone, she’s shattered to know her newborn is suffering from progeria, a rare disease causing premature ageing in children.

At that moment, when you see Vidya Balan’s expressions on learning that her child is likely to have a life-span of only 13 years, you feel every bit of her anguish. All grown-up now and studying in a school, how an adolescent Auro rediscovers his Paa after 11 years forms the rest of the story.

The finest quality of the film is its refusal to coax pity out of the viewer - either for Auro or for single mother Vidya. A successful gynaecologist, Vidya is shown to provide Auro with all the comforts - from a nice car to a computer and even a play station. Together with Vidya’s mother, they form a cosy unit always good-naturedly ribbing one another. The inclusion of the Paa happens only after the interval, reminding you of Taare Zameen Par where Aamir enters the story around the middle.

You adore Amitabh Bachchan’s performance while applauding his commitment to his craft. Reportedly, it took a 60-plus Bachchan five hours to wear the prosthetic make-up for six hours of shooting, with another two hours to take it off. So truthful is this performance, you begin recognising Auro as an existing character with flesh and blood and forget you’re watching Amitabh Bachchan.

Abhishek Bachchan is also excellent as the do-gooder politician, who never agrees with his father’s (Paresh Rawal) seasoned opportunism. The story is as much Vidya’s as Auro’s and Vidya Balan is fabulous as the proud, independent single mother. Kids playing Auro’s friends, especially Pratik as his best bud, are fabulous.

In the technical department, the first mention must go to make-up artists Christien Tinsley and Dominie Till for painstakingly and expertly converting Amitabh Bachchan into Auro. Cinematography by P C Sreeram, editing by Anil Naidu and art by Sunil Babu are top-notch.

Styling, too, deserves special mention. Vidya Balan’s lovely saris are matched by a thick-strapped ‘working-woman’s’ wrist watch and subtle earrings. However, it's a little odd that the foreign-educated doctor doesn’t have any contemporary western clothes in her wardrobe. Abhishek’s clothes are delightful as is Auro’s oversized hooded shirt that he picks up for a special occasion.

Music by Illayaraja and lyrics by Swanand Kirkire make for hauntingly beautiful songs. Just for the Ittefaq song and its wonderful picturisation, this writer intends to watch the film again.

Some might fear Paa would be a depressing, melodramatic film or a shadow of 2005’s heavily emotional Black. It’s not, and neither does it have any link to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

For a couple of moments, the film does turn your eyes moist, but there are dozens where you’ll enjoy Auro’s antics. Of course, you wonder about the film’s anti-abortion stand and it’s propensity to encourage child-bearing - in a rather awkward scene, Dr Vidya tells a couple, who confess they’re too busy to have a child, that they ought to have one as life changes for the better after a baby.

The melodramatic finale, too, seems unnecessary and it appears that the director, who had so boldly shown a mother raising her child without getting married, cops out towards the end.

These are minor complaints still, in a film that holds you from the first scene to the last. R Balki outdoes himself with a film that’s intelligent, entertaining and visually arresting.

It’s indeed a pleasure presenting four stars to a film after years. You don’t want to miss this one.

Rating: Four stars

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Developer tools: what's in your box?

2009-12-05T05:19:00.001-08:00

Hey software/web developer friends,

I've been keeping a list of the software that should come standard on our developer boxes (ya know, on the off chance Dustin and I ever get around to hiring someone), but I'm curious what tools other people are using that are sweet/useful. Here's what we've got (excluding SDKs and Unixy tools):

Windows and Mac
gvim
Firefox 3.0, Chrome 1.0, Safari 4
Firebug
FireScope [great find by Star]

Windows specific
cygwin
IE6, IE7, IE8 (is there something better than MultipleIEs for this?)
Microsoft Script Editor (for IE<8 debugging)
PuTTY
SharpKeys by RandyRants (for remapping Caps Lock)
Pixie by Nattyware (for determining the color of a pixel on the screen)
PrintScreen by Gadwin (for screenshots)
Free Extended Task Manager by Extensoft (task as in "OS process," not "project to-do")

Mac specific
Parallels (for IE testing)

Any additions? Any substitutions, cases where there's a better tool for the thing we're trying to accomplish?

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Name Our Company (1000 dolla bounty)

2009-12-05T05:13:00.001-08:00

NOTES OF FACEBOOK "http://www.facebook.com/rosenstein"

I'm quite serious. Dustin and I have been trying for months, and it turns out we're just not very good at naming things.

If you successfully name our company, we will give you (a) our undying gratitude and admiration and (b) $1000, if you're into that sort of thing. Here's everything you need to know:

Desirable properties

- Can unambiguously determine spelling from pronunciation
- Can unambiguously determine pronunciation from spelling
- Shorter is better
- Doesn't sound "Web2.0"-y
- .com doesn't have to be available, but can't be a well-established website/brand

Brand qualities we'd like to convey

- Solid, but not heavy
- Professional, but not stodgy
- Dependable
- Deliberate
- Powerful (as in "powerful tool", not "powerful President")
- Empowering
- Transparent / honest / straightforward
- Pervasive / invisible (like the telephone)
- Background / invisible (like the piece of paper on which something's drawn)
- Progressive
- A new way of doing business, a breath of fresh air
- Fast (as in responsive)
- Bringing people together
basically the qualities of Barack Obama

What does your company do again?

Our startup is developing an extensible productivity suite that we'll sell to organizations, and make free to consumers, to solve the group collaboration problem. We're addressing the same problem space as Microsoft Office/Exchange/Access/VBA

, but our solution is tightly integrated, focused on structured data, and built for the Web from the ground up.

Our product will ship with a set of core applications -- including project management, calendaring, discussion lists, sales CRM, customer support ticket management, and others -- as well as a development toolkit in which third-party software developers (and even power users) can add new applications and functionality seamlessly.

Though our business model is focused on enterprises and other organizations, there will also be a free consumer version that we hope will become a natural part of every day life, just as productivity tools of the past (email, spreadsheets, etc.) have made their way from the office to the home.

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Can You Be a Web Designer

2009-11-26T18:20:00.001-08:00

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What is Copyright? for small business

2009-11-26T08:35:00.001-08:00

Prior to crowdSPRING, I was a lawyer for 13 years - focusing on complex commercial and intellectual property litigation. This is the first in what will be a regular feature in our blog discussing important legal issues that impact every small business.

What is Copyright?

Copyright is a form of legal protection provided to those who create original works. Under the 1976 Copyright Act (United States), the copyright owner has the exclusive right to reproduce, adapt, distribute, publicly perform and publicly display the work. Any or all of these rights can be licensed, sold or donated to another party. One does not need to register a work with the U.S. Copyright Office for it to be automatically protected by copyright law (registration does have benefits - but we won’t be covering those in this article).

Copyright laws around the world can differ in significant ways. Most countries are signatories to various International treaties and agreements governing copyright protection (such as the Berne Copyright Convention). Under the Berne Copyright Convention, if your work is protected by copyright in your own country, then your work is protected by copyright in every other country that signed the Berne Copyright Convention.

What does Copyright protect?

Copyright protects works such as poetry, movies, writing, music, video games, videos, plays, paintings, sheet music, recorded music performances, novels, software code, sculptures, photographs, choreography, and architectural designs.

To be protected by copyright, a work must be “fixed in a tangible medium of expression.” This means that the work must exist in physical form for at least some period of time. A tangible medium includes paper (even a napkin will do!) and digital forms of storage. Additionally, the work must be original. It doesn’t matter if the work is similar to existing works, and copyright law is blind to whether the work is good or bad - so long as the work is original, it is protected by copyright. Finally, a work must be the result of at least some creative effort by the author.

Copyright doesn’t protect an idea, system or process (you would need to obtain patent protection for those). So, for example, if your small business is creating software programs, you would generally be unable to protect under copyright law the algorithms, methods, systems, ideas or functions of software (your code, however, is protected – nobody can sell or distribute your code without your permission).

How Long Does a Copyright Last?

For works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work or a work made for hire (we’ll talk about that in a later post), the copyright lasts for 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on a number of factors.

What Should Small Businesses Do To Avoid Violating Copyright Law?

Here are five practical things you should do to make sure you don’t violate copyright law:

1. Don’t copy material just because you don’t see a copyright symbol. Since 1978, U.S. copyright law has not required that the copyright owner post a copyright notice with their work. That means that any work reduced to a tangible form (paper or digital, for example), is automatically protected by copyright.

2. Respect Creative Commons licenses. Creative Commons is a powerful framework that works alongside copyright law, but don’t confuse Creative Commons with “free for the taking.” There are a number of different types of Creative Commons licenses and you should review the specific license before you use something protected by Creative Commons. For example, when searching for images on Flickr to include in my blog posts, I always search for images licensed under Creative Commons and available for commercial use.

3. Don’t use works created by someone else merely because you can’t find any copyright restrictions or the author’s identity. Merely because you don’t know who created a work doesn’t give you the right to use that work. This is commonly abused when people do a search - on Google, for example - for images and use an image they’ve found in an article, blog post, or design.

4. Define Copyright Ownership. When you hire independent contractors to create work for you, consider including “work-for-hire” provisions in your legal agreement with your independent contractor (more about this in a later post) or provisions that transfer the ownership of the work created by those contractors - or at the very least, a license to use - to you and/or your company.

5. Understand the Permitted and Prohibited Uses Under a Copyright License. When you buy or use stock photos or other materials protected by copyright in your marketing materials, advertising, or as part of your website, pay attention to what you are and are not permitted to do with that work. For example, stock photos from sites like iStockphoto and Shutterstock are protected by specific licenses which restrict the uses for those photos and prohibit, among other things, use of stock for logo design. Don’t assume that a license gives you unlimited rights - it most likely does not.

In a later post, we’ll talk about more advanced copyright issues, including what to do if someone violates your copyright. And If there are other small business legal issues you’re interested in reading about, please leave a comment and let me know.

Please remember that legal information is not the same as legal advice. This post may not address all relevant business or legal issues that are unique to your situation and you should always seek legal advice from a licensed attorney.

image credit: MikeBlogs

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9 Things I Learned from Reed Hastings @ Netflix

2009-11-26T08:07:00.001-08:00

At a private CEO event a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of seeing Reed give a powerpoint-less presentation. His way of looking at business is quite inspirational, and there’s now doubt it’s a major reason why Netflix succeeded where many others have not. I’ve been thinking about which of these ideas fit for BzzAgent…regardless, every company could add a little bit of his wisdom. Here’s what I jotted down (note much of this is paraphrased):

When outlining a strategy, instead of just articulating what you’re going to do, always add what you’re NOT going to do. To know what your strategy will force you to not do will make things much clearer.
If you can grow within your market by 10x, then stay in that market. If you can’t grow by 10 times, then expand into other markets where you can.
Companies aren’t like families. Families provide unconditional love and are highly dysfunctional. Companies, rather, are high performance teams. Sports teams make their players try out for their job every year. If you need a great left tackle, you shouldn’t just keep someone because they were there last year.
A great company is not sushi at lunch; it’s working with incredible people.
Don’t optimize for people who follow process, optimize for people who think and are mavericks. Flexibility is more important than efficiency.
Coordinate team on strategy but avoid buy0in on tactics. Think: Highly aligned, loosely coupled. Occasionally stuff goes wrong, but this allows for much better speed to execution.
Managers need to ween selves from crutch of an employee’s time in seat vs how they’re succeeding.
If a smart person does something dumb, figure out the problem in the context that you set, not the tactic that they failed at.
Value is what you hire and fire on. Forget the bs flowery stuff. Your values are based on what makes you decide to hire someone.

When I caught up with Reed after his speaking gig, we talked a little bit about some of his other ideas on compensation. I’m not sure I buy into those yet, but he’s got me thinking…

Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix

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Thanksgiving‏ wishes from Barack Obama

2009-11-26T07:35:00.001-08:00

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, Americans across the country will sit down together, count our blessings, and give thanks for our families and our loved ones.

American families reflect the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share.

Our families are bound together through times of joy and times of grief. They shape us, support us, instill the values that guide us as individuals, and make possible all that we achieve.

So tomorrow, I'll be giving thanks for my family -- for all the wisdom, support, and love they have brought into my life.

But tomorrow is also a day to remember those who cannot sit down to break bread with those they love.

The soldier overseas holding down a lonely post and missing his kids. The sailor who left her home to serve a higher calling. The folks who must spend tomorrow apart from their families to work a second job, so they can keep food on the table or send a child to school.

We are grateful beyond words for the service and hard work of so many Americans who make our country great through their sacrifice. And this year, we know that far too many face a daily struggle that puts the comfort and security we all deserve painfully out of reach.

So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy.

It seems like a lifetime ago that a crowd met on a frigid February morning in Springfield, Illinois to set out on an improbable course to change our nation.

In the years since, Michelle and I have been blessed with the support and friendship of the millions of Americans who have come together to form this ongoing movement for change.

You have been there through victories and setbacks. You have given of yourselves beyond measure. You have enabled all that we have accomplished -- and you have had the courage to dream yet bigger dreams for what we can still achieve.

So in this season of thanks giving, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to you, and my anticipation of the brighter future we are creating together.

With warmest wishes for a happy holiday season from my family to yours,

President Barack Obama

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Opera 10.10: Web Browser and Web Server In One

2009-11-24T19:36:00.001-08:00

17Share

With such strong competition from Mozilla and Microsoft, the only thing Opera can do to stay competitive is to innovate. And one has to hand it to them: although it doesn’t have a huge user base in the desktop web browser space, Opera is always one step ahead of the rest, for better or for worse.

With version 10.10, Opera () has taken its biggest step into the unknown so far, marrying the web browser with the web server. It definitely makes it unique in the world of web browsers, but there’s always the lingering question whether all these new features are really something we need, or is it just confusing the users?

With Opera Unite integrated into the browser, the web becomes a read/write affair. You can share photos (10 GB of them), stream music, serve a chat or even an entire web site directly from your browser. At Opera, they have high hopes for the technology. From the official site:

“Our devices will evolve. From in-dash computers in trucks to entertainment systems in airplanes, and from a netbook in North Dakota to a phone in North Africa, every device is both a consumer and a provider of content.”

The idea is certainly interesting, but the web has been moving in another direction in the past couple of years: the cloud. Instead of having stuff run on your computer, your applications and your data reside in the cloud, with all the resources and the know-how provided by a company like Google (). So yes, with Opera Unite, you can host a web site on your own home computer, but you might run into bandwidth issues; with Google Sites, you can easily create a web site without worrying about bandwidth, but you’re at Google’s mercy, so to say. So far, despite possible privacy and security issues, cloud computing has been taking over, and it’s hard to imagine Opera turning the tide in the other direction. Some Unite applications, however, like the media server or the chat, are quite useful and might win over some converts for the Norwegian browser.

Other interesting features in the new Opera 10.10 include Opera’s Turbo technology, which speeds up browsing by compressing web pages on Opera’s servers and delivering you the “lite” version, Opera Link, which lets you synchronize data across several computers, a slick new look with a resizable tab bar, and a BitTorrent-enabled download manager. See the full list of features here.

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Re:hi q

2009-11-23T11:59:00.001-08:00

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Their contact Email: sanhuany@188.com . MSN: sanhuany@hotmail.com

Hope you have a good mood in shopping from their company !
Regards

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Miley Cyrus - 7 Things

2009-11-22T22:28:00.001-08:00

I probably shouldn't say this
But at times I get so scared
When I think about the previous
Relationship we've shared

It was awesome but we lost it
It's not possible for me not to care
And now we're standing in the rain
But nothing's ever gonna change until you hear, my dear

The 7 things I hate about you

[Chorus:]
The 7 things I hate about you (oh you)
You're vain, your games, you're insecure
You love me, you like her
You make me laugh, you make me cry
I don't know which side to buy
Your friends they're jerks
And when you act like them, just know it hurts
I wanna be with the one I know
And the 7th thing I hate the most that you do
You make me love you

It's awkward and silent
As I wait for you to say
But what I need to hear now
Is your sincere apology
And when you mean it, I'll believe it
If you text it, I'll delete it
Let's be clear
Oh I'm not coming back
You're taking 7 steps here

[Chorus]

And compared to all the great things
That would take too long to write
I probably should mention
The 7 that I like

The 7 things I like about you
Your hair, your eyes, your old Levi's
And when we kiss, I'm hypnotized
You make me laugh, you make me cry
But I guess that's both I'll have to buy
Your hand in mine
When we're intertwined everything's alright
I want to be
With the one I know
And the 7th thing I like the most that you do
You make me love you
You do (oh)

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Grappling with a wealth of guilt

2009-11-22T06:27:00.001-08:00

Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 20, 2009

Young heirs seek moral balance between inherited windfalls, social responsibilities

One night in Adams Morgan, the sons and daughters of lawyers and corporate executives padded into a friend's rowhouse for a kind of group therapy session about their families' wealth.

They are young people who have inherited or stand to inherit big money, and they are spending their post-college years living modestly and working to address the needs of the poor, hungry and politically disadvantaged. But the privilege they grew up with and the money coming their way nag at them in ways few people not in their position can fathom.

Burke Stansbury, 33, a nonprofit administrator who inherited $1 million in stock three years ago, opened up about how his newborn's breathing problems were forcing him to reconsider how much of his fortune he should use for his family and how much to give away.

"Those of us with wealth and progressive values resist the privilege and actually deny it because of this inequality that exists in society," said Stansbury, who has spent his time since college working for a nonprofit organization devoted to labor issues in Latin America.

"We're not going to accept that form of privilege," he said. "But when it comes to [my son's] health care, we're not going to mess around. You're going to take advantage of [the money]. It's a real blessing, but it's not fair."

The dinner in Adams Morgan was held at the home of a private school teacher who inherited $1.5 million. It was a rare chance for members of the Resource Generation, a nonprofit group whose 35-and-younger members devote themselves to philanthropic work for social justice, to talk about their guilt and their views on social inequalities without fear of eye-rolling from people who might view them as spoiled rich kids playing at helping the downtrodden.

"Can I share something on my mind?" asked Liz Goldberg, 25, a nonprofit development associate whose father is a partner at the consulting firm KPMG. "I have epilepsy, and I require certain things over the year. Most recently, it was an MRI, and I can't afford it on my own, so I am forced to rely on my parents. I think of myself as independent, but I am not able to reconcile that payment."

Janelle Treibitz, 28, a part-time waitress who performs with the Puppet Underground performance group, which raises money for grass-roots organizations, could relate.

"In Vermont [this year], I broke my finger and didn't have insurance," said Treibitz, whose father is chief executive of a Colorado company that designs visual presentations for court trials. "I got my X-ray and gave [the hospital] a fake name and walked out. Is that okay that I am doing that -- taking up resources because I am refusing to take money from my parents?"

Inspired and challenged

The young wealthy are keenly aware that there is little public sympathy for the moral doubts they struggle with. In a harsh economy, few people worry about the insecurities of heirs in their 20s and 30s who choose to work in social change philanthropy.

But these young people represent a huge amount of money, and some feel not only inspired but also challenged by the choices they face.

Since the late 1990s, after a Boston College study concluded that $41 trillion would be passed from one generation to the next over the first five decades of the 21st century, several banking and nonprofit organizations have initiated programs catering to the emotional and financial literacy needs of young heirs. (The tally of wealth that will be inherited has since risen to about $50 trillion, according to the college.)

This year, the Council on Foundations started a Next Generation task force to explore ways to support young philanthropists.

Washington's chapter of the Resource Generation, many of whose members work in the arts, education and other nonprofit groups, has forged connections by giving young heirs a place where they can divulge their insecurities. At the recent dinner, those who have not inherited their wealth grappled with their decisions to live a low-wage existence in Washington.

"I definitely feel like I am at war between my desires instilled in me to eat out at nice restaurants and my better sense and principles," Treibitz said in an interview. "If I make different choices when I am older, I hope to God they're coming out of principles. Everyone changes. My great-grandmother was a communist in her 20s and a total conservative in her 90s. I won't rule out anything."

The stratosphere of wealthy Americans of any age has shrunk in the past two years. The number of children of millionaires has decreased from 26 million in 2007 to 19 million, according to the Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College. The number of millionaire homes in which the head of household is 35 or under has also dropped, from about 370,000 in 2007 to about 250,000, according to the center.

Juggling ambivalence

For Stansbury, who works at the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, housed above a Mount Pleasant church, his $1 million inheritance at age 30 triggered crosscurrents of ambivalence.

He grew up in Seattle, the son of a lawyer and interior decorator, went to private school, played lacrosse and enrolled at Georgetown University. But he disliked the college's preppy scene, so he dropped out after a year and traveled around Mexico with a friend in an orange 1974 Volkswagen pop-top van.

"In Mexico, I saw really extreme poverty," said Stansbury, who lives in a $1,600-a-month one-bedroom basement apartment in Mount Pleasant with his partner, Krista Hanson, and their newborn, Lucas. "I saw deforestation. I saw more problems in the world than I saw in my private school. I saw an uprising in Chiapas of indigenous people -- corn farmers -- against trade policies, and I discovered solidarity activism."

When he returned, he transferred to the University of Montana. After graduating, he began working on behalf of Salvadorans. He was making $25,000 a year at the Solidarity Committee and now works there part time. At 30, he inherited $1 million in a trust set up by his grandfather, John G. Molz, who made his money in real estate and a wine business.

Stansbury has invested his inheritance in "socially responsible" mutual funds, he said, and monitors his investments closely.

When he learned that Costco was opening a store in Mexico that would entail cutting down trees and displacing a "sacred community, I put together an action at a shareholders meeting," he said. "They opened the store but made concessions. People were still upset, but the company clearly got the message."

At Resource Generation meetings, Stansbury vents about politics and critiques his inheritance, which he says perpetuates social inequalities and what he views as an insulated upper class. (He supports increasing estate and capital gains taxes.)

Life's complications

When Nigel Greaves joined Resource Generation, he found the members' hand-wringing about inherited money a bit much.

"The conversations were hard for me to hear at first," said Greaves, 32, a filmmaker who does not come from wealth but joined the group because he believes in its social change mission.

"This idea of guilt and not understanding or knowing what you can do with the money can be frustrating for someone who doesn't have a familiarity with the group. But I have more of an appreciation of that journey now."

But for those with money coming their way, the questions seem to get harder. Now that he has a child, Stansbury said he can no longer view his inheritance as a pot of money to be donated to causes. "We've just started thinking about it. I want to provide the best health care for Lucas, which is going to be a real need."

What about nannies and private school?

"I'd like to have my kids be exposed to more diversity, something less sheltered than where I went to school," said Stansbury, sitting in his living room and surrounded by books on subjects such as Karl Marx and the farm crisis in Mexico. "It depends on where we live."

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How to get local results on ShopSavvy

2009-11-22T06:14:00.001-08:00

The most compelling feature about ShopSavvy is NOT the ability to scan a barcode, instead it is the ability to expose inventory and pricing information from local retailers. In the Android version of ShopSavvy our standard screen had a Web tab and a Local tab that exposed the number of results for each. If the user scans an item that we don’t have a local result for we show “0″ as the number of results. Over the past year we have regretted this decision as users will email us letting us know they aren’t pleased we don’t have local results. In our iPhone version we fixed this issue.

In the iPhone version of ShopSavvy if you scan an item WITHOUT local prices we simply show a tab that says “Prices”. If we have local prices we show the two tabs, i.e. Web and Local price. By not calling attention to the fact that we don’t have a local price for an item we don’t get many emails from annoyed users relative to local results. Of course, in our world, not many is hundreds so I thought I would explain how to get local results on ShopSavvy.

Most new users (i.e. the vast majority of support emails) download ShopSavvy at their house and begin scanning items they already to own. Many of these items are grocery related and we don’t cover groceries very well (read more here). The rest are old books and DVDs – many of these are still available online, but they are no longer in local stores. These ‘DEMO’ scans often yield poor results, a) the items are no longer sold in local stores, b) they are of groceries and c) the barcodes are hard to read. We have received hundreds of negative ratings from these users even though they have never actually tried to use ShopSavvy to shop. My advice? Use ShopSavvy when you shop – you will be surprised how helpful ShopSavvy can be.

The reason ShopSavvy performs well in retail stores is fairly obvious. First, the items sold in one retail store are likely sold in other retail stores – meaning we will have local inventory and price. Major local retailers carry between 10,000 and 100,000 items – this is out of millions of items. Second, the lighting in retail stores is often far better than the lighting in your house – this means scanning will be faster. Third, the barcodes are almost always printed on flat surfaces – this means scanning will be faster. Trying to scan items in your house means you are scanning items that might not be currently sold, might have hard to read barcodes and scanning in low light. Before you give us a poor review or rating, please actually use ShopSavvy when you are shopping for Christmas.

http://www.biggu.com/

via: http://www.biggu.com/2009/11/21/how-to-get-local-results-on-shopsavvy-2/

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Untitled

2009-11-21T07:46:00.001-08:00

A Balanced Assessment of the Criticisms of Engaging Social Media:

Determining the advantages and disadvantages of particular activities for people and organizations is an important task. Why else would education, books, think tanks, and presidential debates exist. I thought fleshing out my personal experience with the advantages and disadvantages might be instructive in determining “the truth” about social media, web 2.0, and blogging technologies.

Advantages of Social Media

• Democratization of media.
• Relationships and conversation.
• Creativity and re-mix culture.
• Embrace your passion and identity.
• Community, sharing, and connecting.
• Increase transparency in government and organizations.

Criticisms of Social Media

• Lots of great content still gets overlooked. Current lack of good filters creates problems finding the best content.
• Writers have problems delivering content consistently.
• Anonymity can engender polarization and hate.
• Information overload and social networking overload.
• Work/Life balance is hard to achieve.

As society and technology moves forward we stand at a watershed moment and history, so it is vitally necessary to stop and think about our societal trajectory. Thoughts? Did I miss an advantage or disadvantage?

How you can learn more or learn how to make your corporate blogging efforts more strategic and productive:

If you liked this post you might be interested in a more comprehensive criticism of social media which suggests that its a little early to drink the social media and web 2.0. Alternatively, if you want to strategically blog or productively use social media and web 2.0 tools which addresses many of these concerns, you should check here. Finally, the problems with the traditional social media agency.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Media Part II: The Risk of a Web 2.0 Bubble

This presentation by Dave in January of 2008 outlines the economics and cultural stresses which might cause one to be wary of the web 2.0 wave, and as a very astute venture capital investor he ultimately concludes with a happy future for the world of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is Dead; Long Live Web 2.0!<div style="font-size:11px;font-family:tahoma,arial;height:26px;padding-top:2px;">View more presentations from Dave McClure.</div></div>

(image credit: pikkus)

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The girl who silenced the world for 5 minutes

2009-11-21T07:44:00.001-08:00

via: http://compassioninpolitics.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/the-girl-who-silenced-the-world/

Humanity in Focus recently featured “The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes“:

This was 16 years ago, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, also known as the Rio Summit, Earth Summit (or, in Portuguese, Eco ‘92), a major conference held in Rio de Janeiro from June 3 to June 14, 1992. the UN international Environmental Conference.

Did anybody listen?

(hat tip: technology health and development)

This is a great speech by Severn Suzuki to the United Nations. More recently she wrote a book called “Notes from Canadian Young Activists: A Generation Stands Up For Change” and spoke out on the issues of responsibility and social change in an interview with the Tyee in Canada:

There are … so many amazing things happening right now…..

I’ve met a couple of people lately who have a very interesting attitude. They [said], “How lucky are we? How exciting is this time? How lucky are we to be alive when the forces of good and evil are just so clear, when we’re undergoing such a massive time of shift and when our actions really, really matter, for good or for bad?”

This is a really unique period in history and it’s a time when an individual can have more impact than ever before in our human history because of the Internet, because of communication, because of how easily we can travel. … We really have to realize how empowered we can be, how much we actually matter.

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Top 50 downloads: music

2009-11-21T07:27:00.001-08:00

http://beemp3.com/images/02.jpg http://beemp3.com/images/03.jpg

Top 50 downloads:

1 Jay-Z - Run This Town Feat. Kanye Wes..

2 David Guetta - Sexy Bitch

3 Pitbull - Hotel Room Service

4 Teriyaki Boyz - Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious)

5 Pussycat Dolls - Hush Hush

6 New Boyz - Tie Me Down

7 Beyonce - Sweet dreams

8 robbie williams - bodies.mp3

9 Rihanna - Te Amo

10 Green Day - 21 Guns

11 Pitbull - I Know You Want Me

12 Pitbull - Hotel Room Service

13 Linkin Park - In The End - Linkin Park

14 Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow

15 Paramore - Ignorance

16 Sean Pual - So Fine - LMP

17 Nelly Furtado - Manos Al Aire

18 cascada evacuate the danceflo..

19 Lenka - The Show

20 Usa For Africa - We Are The World

21 Dorrough - Ice Cream Paint Job

22 The Lonely Island - I'm On A Boat

23 Jay-Z Ft Rihanna & Kanye .. - Jay Z Ft Rihanna Kanye West R..

24 alexandra burke & flo rida - ..

25 Fabolous ft. The Dream - Throw It In The Bag

26 spankers sex on the beach

27 Linkin Park - In The End - Linkin Park

28 importiert - Pitbull - I Know You Want Me (

29 A.R. Rahman - Jai Ho

30 Lady Gaga - Paparazzi

31 Jay Sean - Down

32 Justin Bieber - Favorite girl

33 black eyed peas - i got feeli..

34 Muse - Uprising

35 Hoobastank - The Reason

36 Lily Allen - Fuck You

37 SIDEKICK - Deep Fear

38 Inna - Hot

39 Jeremih - Imma Star

40 Pitbull - Hotel Room Service

41 Taylor Swift - Love Story

42 Keri Hilson Ft Kanye West &am.. - Knock You Down

43 Jay-Z Feat. Kanye West and Ri.. - Run This Town

44 Shakira - Hips Don't Lie

45 WwW.BiG.aZ - Sean kingston - Face Drop

46 Shakira-She wolf

47 Jordin Sparks - Battlefield

48 MGMT - MGMT - Kids

49 Aerosmith - I Don't Want to Miss a Thing

50 Sean Kingston - Fire Burning The Dancefloor

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Designing CSS Buttons: Techniques and Resources

2009-11-21T06:27:00.001-08:00

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Buttons, whatever their purpose, are important design elements. They could be the end point of a Web form or a call to action. Designers have many reasons to style buttons, including to make them more attractive and to enhance usability. One of the most important reasons, though, is that standard buttons can easily be missed by users because they often look similar to elements in their operating system. Here, we present you several techniques and tutorials to help you learn how to style buttons using CSS. We’ll also address usability.

Links vs. buttons

Before we explain how to style buttons, let’s clear up a common misconception: buttons are not links. The main purpose of a link is to navigate between pages and views, whereas buttons allow you to perform an action (such as submit a form).

In one of his articles, Jakob Nielsen writes about command links, which are a blend of links and buttons. But he recommended that command links be limited to actions with minor consequences and to secondary commands. To learn more about primary and secondary commands (and actions), check out Primary and Secondary Actions in Web Forms by Luke Wroblewski. To learn more about the differences between links and buttons, read Creating Usable Links and Buttons at UXBooth.

Basic Styling

The simplest way to style links and buttons is to add background color, padding and borders. Below are examples of the code for the link, button and input (”Submit”) elements.

Sample button
  <button class="button" id="save">Sample button</button>
  <input class="button" value="Sample Button" type="submit" />

.button {
  padding:5px;
  background-color: #dcdcdc;
  border: 1px solid #666;
  color:#000;
  text-decoration:none;
}

This simple code minimizes the visual differences between links and buttons. And here are the rendered examples of the code above:

The important thing to note is that these three elements render differently with the same CSS. So, you should style these elements carefully to ensure consistency across your website or application.

Images

Adding images to buttons can make the buttons more obvious. Sometimes the image itself clearly communicates the purpose of a button; e.g. a loupe icon for searching or a floppy disk icon for saving. The easiest way to add an image to a button is to use a background image and then position it accordingly. Below are our examples with a checkmark icon.

.button {
  padding: 5px 5px 5px 25px;
  border: 1px solid #666;
  color:#000;
  text-decoration:none;
  background: #dcdcdc url(icon.png) no-repeat scroll 5px center;
}

Button States

In addition to their default state, buttons and links can have two other states: hover and active (i.e. pressed). It is important that buttons appear different in different states so that users are clear about what is happening. Any element in a hover state can be styled by invoking the :hover CSS pseudo-class.

a:hover {
  color:#f00;
}

Though very important, the active state is rarely implemented on websites. By showing this state, you ensure that your buttons are responsive and send a visual cue to users that a button has been pressed. This is called isomorphic correspondence, and it is “the relationship between the appearance of a visual form and a comparable human behavior” (Luke Wroblewski, Site-Seeing). The article Pressed Button State With CSS elaborates on the importance of the active state.

a:active {
  color:#f00;
}

There is yet one more state, one that is seen when navigating with the keyboard: the focus state. When the user navigates to a button using the Tab key, it should change appearance, preferably to have the same appearance as the hover state.

a:focus {
  color:#f00;
}

The examples below shows the common way to style button states. The hover state is a bit lighter than the normal state, while the active state has an inverted gradient that simulates a pressed action. Although you need not limit yourself to this styling, it is a good place to start.

We should talk about how to handle the outline property for the :active and :focus states. Handling this property well is important for the experience of users who employ the keyboard as well as the mouse. In the article Better CSS Outline Suppression,” Patrick Lauke shows how buttons and links behave in different combinations of states and explains why the outline property should be invoked only with the :active state.

The blue “Buy now” button on Apple.com has a slightly lighter background for the hover state and an inset style for active state. Even the main navigation button on Apple’s website implements all three states.

Although it doesn’t implement the active state, this fancy button on Tea Round has a nice fading effect on hover.

The “Read more” button on UX Booth turns green on hover and moves down one pixel in the active state, which simulates the effect of pressing a button.

Useful Reading

The article Rediscovering the Button Element shows the differences between links and buttons and explains how to style buttons easily.

Styling Form Buttons covers the basics of styling buttons, with many examples.

Beautiful CSS Buttons With Icon Set shows how to style buttons using background images. Although not scalable, these are really nice buttons.

Recreating the Button is a very good article that explains how Google ended up with the buttons that it uses on majority of its websites.

Scalable CSS Buttons Using PNG and Background Colors explains how to create really stunning buttons for all states. Although it uses jQuery, it degrades gracefully if JavaScript is turned off.

Sliding Doors: Flexible Buttons

One important consideration needs to be made when styling buttons: scalability. Scalability in this context means being able to stretch a button to fit text and to reuse images. Unless you want to create a different image for each button, consider the “sliding doors” technique. This technique enables you to create scalable, rich buttons.

The principle involves making two images slide over each other, allowing the button to stretch to the content. Usually, this is done by nesting a span element within a link. As shown in the image above, each element has its own background image, allowing for the sliding effect. The two code snippets below show the structure and basic styling for this effect.

Typical sliding doors button

a {
  background: transparent url('button_right.png') no-repeat scroll top right;
  display: block;
  float: left;
  /* padding, margins and other styles here */
}
a span {
  background: transparent url('button_left.png') no-repeat;
  display: block;
  /* padding, margins and other styles here */
}

The advantages of this technique are that it:

Is an easy way to create visually rich buttons;
Ensures accessibility, flexibility and scalability;
Requires no JavaScript;
Works in all major browsers.

Useful Reading

The “Sliding Doors of CSS” article on A List Apart (part 1 and part 2) covers the basics of this technique. Although a bit old, these articles are a must-read for every Web developer.

Also a bit old, Creating Bulletproof Graphic Link Buttons With CSS is an excellent article that shows how to create bulletproof, resizable, shrunk-wrap buttons. Also a must-read.

Filament Group has a variety of excellent articles and tutorials. Its second article on CSS buttons, Styling the Button Element With CSS Sliding Doors,” explains how to create buttons by combining techniques. Although it doesn’t support the active state, it can be easily extended.

How to Make Sexy Buttons With CSS is one of the best and simplest explanations of the sliding doors technique. It also contains a little fix for the active state in Internet Explorer.

If you want Wii-like buttons, the article Simple Round CSS Links (Wii Buttons) provides all the necessary resources and explanation on how to style them.

The common way to achieve the CSS sliding doors technique is to use two images. However, the article CSS Sliding Door Using Only One Image shows that it is possible to achieve the same effect with only one image.

CSS Oval Buttons and CSS Square Buttons from Dynamic Drive are two other articles that show the effectiveness of CSS sliding doors.

CSS Sprites: One Image, Not Many

With CSS Sprites, one image file contains multiple graphic elements, usually laid out in a grid. By tiling the image, we show only one Sprite at a time. For buttons, we can include graphics for all three states in a single file. This technique is efficient because it requires fewer resources and the page loads faster. We all know that many requests to the server for multiple small resources can take a long time. This is why CSS Sprites are so handy. They significantly reduces round-trips to the server. They are so powerful that some developers use CSS Sprites for all their graphics. The Holy Sprites round-up on CSS Tricks offers some very creative solutions.

The example below shows the simplest use of CSS Sprites. A single image contains graphics for all three button states. By adjusting the background-position property, we define the exact position of the background image we want. The image we’re choosing to show here corresponds to a background position of top: -30px and left: 0.

a {
  background: white url(buttons.png) 0px 0px no-repeat;
}
a:hover {
  background-position: -30px 0px;
}
a:active {
  background-position: -60px 0px;
}

For general information and resources on CSS Sprites, check out The Mystery of CSS Sprites: Techniques, Tools and Tutorials.”

Useful Reading

In this easy-to-follow tutorial How to Build a Simple Button with CSS Image Sprites,” Chris Spooner explains how to create a CSS Sprites image in Photoshop and use it with CSS.

Transforming the Button Element With Sliding Doors and Image Sprites shows how to enrich a button element with a combination of sliding doors and image Sprites. It implements the active state in a very interesting way, not by using different images or colors but rather by positioning.

CSS 3: Buttons Of The Future

CSS 3 allows us to create visually rich buttons with just a few lines of code. So far, this is the easiest way to create buttons. The downside of CSS 3 is that it is currently supported only by Firefox and Safari. The upside is that buttons styled with CSS 3 degrade gracefully in unsupported browsers. By using the browser-specific properties -moz-border-radius (for Firefox) or -webkit-border-radius (for Safari), you can define the radius of corners. Here are a few examples of what can be done with the border radius property.

For better results, you can combine CSS 3 rounded corners with the background image property. The example below shows a typical button with a gradient image, the first without rounded corners, and the second with.

Compared to sliding doors, this technique is far simpler. However, if you want to maintain visual consistency across all browsers, then use sliding doors, because it works in all major browsers, including IE6. To learn more about the capabilities of CSS 3, read CSS 3 Exciting Functions and Features: 30+ Useful Tutorials.” And here are a few good tutorials on styling buttons with CSS 3 features.

Useful Reading

Super Awesome Buttons With CSS 3 and RGBA shows the power of CSS 3 with rounded corners, Mozilla box shadows and RGBA, which is a color mode that adds alpha-blending to your favorite CSS properties. This is one of the best examples of CSS 3 buttons.

Create a CSS 3 Button That Degrades Nicely is a good example of CSS 3 buttons that degrade gracefully in browsers that don’t support CSS 3.

Creating buttons without Images Using CSS 3 explains the drawbacks of using images for buttons and shows several options for creating image-less CSS 3 buttons.

Emulating Google-Syle Buttons Using CSS 3 & dd_roundies JS is a fantastic article that shows how to create Google-like buttons. It goes even further and shows how to create the button pillbox commonly seen on Google pages.

Instant Tools: Are They Useful?

Tools exist for creating buttons, such as Easy Button and Menu Maker and My Cool Button, and for creating CSS Sprites, such as CSS Sprite Generator, but the question is, do they really help you create buttons that fit your needs. Although they are configurable and easy to use, your creativity and control over the results are limited, which makes for average-looking buttons. Using one-size-fits-all buttons is not a good idea.

The solution is to use Photoshop (or a free alternative) and the proven techniques described in this article. If you are a beginner with Photoshop, here are several excellent tutorials on creating amazing buttons.

If you don’t know where to start, iPhone-Like Button in Photoshop is the perfect choice. In only 10 to 15 minutes, you will be able to create the kind of buttons seen on the iPhone.

How to Create a Slick and Clean Button in Photoshop is a very detailed tutorial that guides you through 30 simple steps and helps you learn the Photoshop basics. In addition, the article explains how to use these graphics in combination with HTML and CSS to create fully functional CSS buttons.

Photoshop Button Maker is a fantastic tutorial from PSD Tuts that shows how to create fancy oval buttons (or badges).

Buttons And Usability: Instead Of Conclusion

The techniques described above can help you create stunning buttons. However, because they play a critical role in website usability, the buttons should meet some key principles:

First consider the labeling. Always label buttons with the name of the action that the user is performing. And always make it a verb. A common mistake is to label buttons “Go” for various actions such as searching, sending email and saving. Labels should also be short and to the point; no need to clutter the user interface.
As mentioned, include all button states (default, hover, active) to provide clear visual cues to the user as to what is happening. Button outlines should remain in the active state only.
Clearly distinguish between primary and secondary actions. The most important action should be the most prominent. This is usually done by giving primary and secondary actions different colors.
Pay close attention to consistency. Buttons should be consistent throughout a Web application, both visually and behavior-wise. Use CSS sliding doors for reused buttons or CSS 3 rounded corners to maintain consistency.
Though obvious, we should note that the entire button area should be clickable.

The articles below provide even more usability guidelines and best practices for designing buttons.

Make Complete Button Surface Active and Enhance Usability is an in-depth article that shows mistakes in button design and that explains why the entire button surface should be clickable.

Creating Usable Links and Buttons explains why users expect buttons sometimes and links other times. It also shows how to choose between the two elements.

How to Design Buttons to Help Improve Usability explains some usability principles that should be considered when designing buttons. It covers the basics of icon usage, appearance, behavior, hierarchy and consistency.

(al)

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lyrics of couples retreat sajna

2009-11-19T21:00:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=574324C6FED2368F

When you smile, I smile with you,
When you cry, I feel it too,
You are my soul, my heart coming out to you,

Be my eyes when I can’t see,
Be my voice when I can’t speak,
Be my life when darkness creeps on me,

Hoo, sajna sajna sajna re,
Hai just sajna sajna sajna re

Sajna sajna sajna re
Hai just sajna sajna sajna re

Throw the stars that shine so bright,
Cross the sky and cross the night,
Making ways to be right by your side

Hold me close don’t let me go
Hold me tight don’t you say no
Save the love we have for ever more

Ho, sajna sajna sajna re,
Hai just sajna sajna sajna re

Sajna sajna sajna re
Hai just sajna sajna sajna re

Save me, when my dream catches fire
(Spare?) me, in my only desire
Wake me, when the pain is over
Take me, now (Take me, now) ...2

When you smile, I smile with you,
When you cry, I feel it too,
You are my soul, my heart coming out to you,

Be my eyes when I can see,
Be my voice when I can speak,
Be my life when darkness creeps on me,

Through the stars that shine so bright,
Cross the sky and cross the night,
Making ways to be right by your side

Hold me close don’t let me go
Hold me tight don’t you say no
Save the love we have for ever more...

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HashCube Bets on Social Cash, Innovative Fundraising

2009-11-19T07:56:00.001-08:00

iAccelerator 2009 has announced its first startup for this season — Bangalore-based HashCube which develops online games for social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. I chatted briefly on the ‘phone this morning with co-founders Deepan Chakravarthy (black T-shirt) and Ramprasad Rajendran (white T-shirt) about their first two weeks at the incubator programme. So far, the programme has helped the founders address several basics — registering the company, assigning revenue and expense projections and polishing the business plan. Chakravarthy says 50% of the business plan has changed since then. Here’s more on them:

Starting Up

Deepan and Ram, as they are known, have been friends since school (Sainik School Amravathi in Tamil Nadu) and developing online games has always been a hobby. Before starting HashCube in January 2008, the two also toyed with web security solutions as a business. The hobby won. Games for social networks came after a brief experiment with general online games. “We deployed Sudoku and got some traction but revenues were slow. The general space is very crowded whereas the opportunity in social networks is just emerging,” says Chakravarthy. Their first Facebook game, Sudoku, was launched in March 2008.

Revenue Model

At present, 100% of the company’s revenues come from advertising. It claims 150,000 visitors (users) per month, of which 99% are via Facebook. Its bouquet currently consists of three games — DotGame, Loop the Loop and Sudoku — which are available on Facebook, Orkut and recently, MySpace. The founders expect revenues in future to come primarily from the trading of virtual currency for real cash. The company’s current cash burn is low. “The only money we spend now is on servers, about $80 per month,” says Chakravarthy. Incidentally, 99% of its current user base is non-Indian, primarily in the US, Turkey and Latin America.

Funding

Has raised Rs 5 lakh in angel funding from iAccelerator, which the founders expect to sustain them for the next six months. They are also in talks to raise additional seed capital from other angels and are currently trying to work out innovative fundraising models. “Since they are a gaming company it is hard to use the regular equity or convertibles-based funding. They are exploring two methods. One is to get in ‘movie-style’ funding wherein the investor is like the producer of a set of games and HashCube is the director, etc. Once the game is launched, the producer and HashCube share the revenue,” says Pranay Gupta, joint CEO at CIIE and one of the experts involved in the selection of HashCube for iAccelerator 2009.

Photo Courtesy: iAccelerator

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 00:17 and is filed under Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Stanford Plugs Into B’lore

2009-11-19T07:51:00.001-08:00

Many of you must be familiar with the role that Stanford University has played in the evolution of Silicon Valley. History lesson: Back in 1939, Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard started a company in Packard’s garage. They called it Hewlett-Packard (H-P). In the mid-fifties, H-P moved to the Stanford Research Park, a patch of land that the University had started leasing out to high technology companies after World War II to meet growing expenses. H-P was the first startup to lease premises at the Park. H-P went on to become one of the world’s largest personal computer makers. Stanford, meanwhile, broadened its association with technology startups and went on to incubate a few famous ones as well. It remains a close association.

The present: the venerable institution, like many Valley-based VCs and technology companies, has begun to see India has an emerging hub for technology-driven innovation. VC friends in Bangalore tell me there’s a delegation of Stanford academia and students in the city almost very quarter. They talk to local entrepreneurs, network with VCs here and some students even come back to start companies. I’ve met a couple of guys who are setting up startups at this moment but can’t disclose details.

What I can tell you is that Stanford University has incubated its first Indian tech startup — 3D Solid Compression — it is an interactive 3D modeling company. Some of you may have already met them. I stumbled upon them about a year ago when I met the CEO, KK Venkatraman, at a VC-startup networking do at SVB Global’s premises in Bangalore. Venkat had joined them in July that year and explained to me that the 3DSoc had started off as a joint initiative between Stanford University and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. Translation: it was incubated on-campus at IISc and seed funded by the two institutes. The founders are academics — Fritz Pinz, professor of mechanical engineering and material sciences at Stanford, Krishnan Ramaswami, research consultant at IISc, and B Gurumoorthy, professor or mechanical engineering and product design at IISc. The company’s patented products are out now under the names VISViewer and VISTrans.

I’m not a technology expert so will not be able to explain what these products do. You could visit the website to find out more. I’m going to invite Venkat to write in a little explanatory piece, if he’s game. Not sure if they’ve managed to rope in funding yet. When I spoke to Venkat last October, he was in the market for funding. Hope they get there.

Update: Venkat explains what 3D Soc does:

Today 3-Dimensional (3D) Computer Graphics is restricted to the realms of the high end and specialized world of CAD/CAM and Animation software. 3DSoC’s vision is to extend the power of 3D to pretty much everyone who wants to visualise in 3D. It could be many things – like someone wanting a 3D walkthrough of their architectural plans or to exchange 3D greetings or maybe an aspiring sportsman wanting a 3D analysis of his personal performances or a consumer shopping for a product like say a mobile phone or a laptop, wanting a virtual experience. And importantly, you’d prefer to have these 3D experiences right from your web browser, rather than having to install any custom software.
One of the primary challenges here lies in the large files size of 3D models – today you’ll need dedicated bandwidth to transmit them over a network. 3DSoc has addressed this challenge by coming up with a patented file format (called VIS), which could potentially compress 3D models by about 100 times – this implies: (a) the models can be squeezed enough to go over even low bandwidth pipes,(b) you could have an interactive experience & (c) the models could be received on ANY device connected to the internet through a standard web browser. Its’ a bit like what MP3 is to Audio. Hope that helps!

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Ten Tips for Startups to Ride Out the Slowdown

2009-11-19T07:49:00.001-08:00

The US Silicon Valley’s venture capital industry, the primary source for venture capital in India, is in crisis with exits via initial public offerings down to a trickle — only six worth $470.2 million in the first nine months of 2008 (Source: NVCA). Trouble with exits implies that investments in new companies also slow down. Indian startups will find it tough to raise fresh funds and the environment will get tougher as growth slows down in the Indian economy. What can startups do to ride out these difficult times. Suvir Sujan, co-founder and CEO of Nexus India Capital, a Mumbai-based venture capital firm that manages $320 million in funds, shares some tips. Sujan has been an entrepreneur who lived through and survived the difficult dotcom crash era (he co-founded and led online marketplace Baazee, now known as eBay India).

Ten Tips for Startups to Ride Out the Economic Slowdown

By Suvir Sujan

Don’t panic! Economic cycles are a part of life. The best companies are built in the worst of times. If you panic, your employees will panic.
Conserve cash: Delay spending on non-critical things that do not result in revenue generation. Renegotiate vendor contracts, rental contracts, etc.
Improve productivity: Get more out of your team.
Differentiate between high and low performers: Reward high performers. Counsel out low performers.
Optimize the organization: Hire critical talent as they may be available at a reasonable cost. Transition or re-deploy non critical resources.
Continue selling or marketing your product or service: Being in front of customers or vendors builds confidence that you are a long term player.
Focus on growth with an eye on profitability: Since the cost of capital is high today, be cautious on how much capital you raise to invest for growth. Avoid over-investing in the business in the hope for exponential growth in the future.
Communicate with your team internally: Make sure that your team understands that you’re building a lasting and successful enterprise and that some of the cost cutting measures, including layoffs, are necessary for the health of the company. Anxiety levels can be high in tough times.
Act swiftly: Try to deliver any bad or tough news at one shot to the company. Continuous bad news can affect morale and instill fear.
Have fun! Make sure your team is having fun. A happy environment builds loyalty and performance for the long term.

Photo Courtesy: Nexus India Capital

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Narayana Murthy’s Gift to Indian Startups

2009-11-19T07:38:00.003-08:00

http://startupcentral.in/2009/10/narayana-murthys-gift-to-indian-startups/

Successful entrepreneurs, they say, make the best venture capitalists. While there are several venture capitalists who have never been entrepreneurs but hold stellar records as investors, the premium attached to an investor who has been down in the trenches himself is understandably higher. Also, when such entrepreneurs turn to investing in new entrepreneurs, the startup eco-system gets enriched in a way that is altogether unique. NR Narayana Murthy brings that much sought after unique value to the Indian startup eco-system with the launch of Catamaran Venture Fund.

Murthy turning venture capitalist in itself is not exceptional. India already has a small but fairly influential band of successful entrepreneurs who have brought their experience to bear on venture capital.

Not surprisingly, so far, most have been from the consumer Internet space – the first sector to create venture-backed entrepreneurial successes here. Online marketplace Baazee (acquired by eBay) founders Avinsh Bajaj and Suvir Sujan now lead investments for Matrix Partners India and Nexus Venture Partners respectively. Jobs portal Jobsahead (acquired by Monster) c0-founder Alok Mittal heads India investments for Canaan Partners. Naukri founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani, who staged India’s first successful Internet IPO (initial public offering) in 2006, is currently experimenting with the corporate venturing model – read more in the Outlook Business story here.

The BPO (business process outsourcing) adventurers have not done too badly either. Sanjeev Aggarwal, co-founder of Daksh eServices (acquired by IBM), now runs Helion Venture Partners with his friends. Raman Roy, founder of Spectramind (acquired by Wipro), dabbles in angel investments through the Indian Angel Network. Krishnan Ganesh, founder of CustomerAsset (acquired by Firstsource Solutions), is also an active angel investor. All these gentlemen have put part of their own resources, earned from the success of their entrepreneurial ventures, to work in their venture capital activities. There are many more examples.

But, what makes Murthy stand out is the magnitude of what he has achieved as a first generation entrepreneur. The Internet and BPO czars came long after this software engineer (and six other colleagues) broke free of the shackles of a salaried middle class existence to scale unimaginable heights as an entrepreneur. Infosys Technologies, the startup he co-founded in 1981, is India’s second largest information technology services exporter at over $5 billion revenues today. Along the way, it has created millionaire employees, spawned entrepreneurs and generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. And all this while surviving a couple of economic recessions.

It is not clear yet as to how hands-on Murthy himself will be as a venture capitalist with Catamaran. He is still very closely associated with Infosys as its chairman. Reports suggest that a four-member team is being put in place to manage the fund. However, the fact that he sold shares worth $37 million – The Economic Times story here – to seed Catamaran could be an indication that backing entrepreneurs will be more than an off-the-cuff financial interest.

This commitment is critical for India’s fledgling entrepreneurial eco-system. This market has not yet produced enough successful entrepreneurs to inspire and back new entrants. In the US Silicon Valley, for instance, most iconic venture capital funds are helmed by former entrepreneurs. This has helped create and consistently invigorate the vibrant startup eco-system in the Valley. Where volume lacks, stature can somewhat compensate. Given Murthy’s sheer stature, his entry into venture capital is a big step foward for the startup community here.

We will be watching Catamaran’s future moves closely.

Photo Courtesy: Infosys Technologies

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Narayana Murthy’s Gift to Indian Startups

2009-11-19T07:38:00.001-08:00

http://startupcentral.in/wp-content/themes/startupcentral/thumb.php?src=http://startupcentral.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/narayanamurthy1.jpg&h=173&w=230&zc=1&q=95

http://startupcentral.in/2009/10/narayana-murthys-gift-to-indian-startups/

We will be watching Catamaran’s future moves closely.

Photo Courtesy: Infosys Technologies

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11 Britons that changed the face of technology

2009-11-18T04:54:00.001-08:00

The UK innovators that helped shape the world of tech

By Dan Grabham

20 hours ago | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Well, we couldn't exactly leave him out now, could we?

Britain may no longer be in thepowerhouse of the world's technology industry, but we sure did some pioneering work in days gone by - and we're still pushing back the barriers in certain areas too.

To celebrate Britain's major contributions to the world of innovation, here are eleven Brits that have changed the face of technology - and some of them are still at it, too.

1. Sir Clive Sinclair

Sinclair may be looked back on with slight amusement because of the 1985 C5 electric tricycle, but we shouldn't forget his formidable contribution to the UK home computer market. He started with the ZX80, but it was with 1981's inexpensive ZX81 (which cost less than £50 for the kit version or £70 fully built) and the follow-up ZX Spectrum that Sinclair became an indelible part of computing history.

Read: Clive Sinclair was 'a cross between Einstein and Willy Wonka'

Sinclair had also released the world's first pocket calculator in 1972 – the £80 Executive which ran on hearing-aid batteries. He now concentrates on folding bicycles.

2. John Logie Baird

Although Baird died in 1946 and never saw television come to major fruition, he changed the world forever with his electromechanical system. It was in 1925, after years of experiment, that he transmitted the world's first television picture – the head of a ventriloquist's dummy at five images per second – after having transferred moving silhouette images two years previously. In 1926 he held the first public demonstration for a reporter from The Times in Soho at a scan rate of 12.5 pictures per second and the year after he performed the same between London and Glasgow. Colour, using three light sources, followed in 1928. In the same year he began making programmes for the BBC. He truly was a pioneer like no other.

[Image credit: bairdtelevision.com]

3. Chris Curry

Alongside Sinclair, Curry was the subject of the 2009 BBC docu-drama Micro Men. A former employee of Sinclair, Curry went on to co-found Acorn Computers, the company who went up against Sinclair to carry out the early-1980s BBC Computer Literacy Project and put a microcomputer into every school in Britain. Together with VLSI, Acorn developed the first ARM silicon chip for Acorn in 1985 – derivatives of which we still use today in smartphones such as the Apple iPhone. Curry and his co-founder Hermann Hauser did a deal for Olivetti to take over nearly half of Acorn in 1985. ARM was spun off. At the same time, Curry founded GIS (General Information Systems) who make contact and contactless smartcard products. Below are Acorn founders Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry.

[Image credit: stairwaytohell.com]

4. Alexander Graham Bell

Bell was a prolific inventor who experimented with acoustic telegraphy in the early 1870s in the US and Canada using vibrating steel reeds. After a period in which Bell had struggled with his invention (despite getting financial backing), he teamed up with Thomas Watson. Working in collaboration it quickly became clear that different tones could be transmitted via a single reed. Despite a wide interest in the field, Bell was first to the patent office in 1875 – with an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". Although advancements were made by others – especially Elisha Gray – it was Bell who went on to develop apparatus commercially and show it publicly in 1876 and 77.

5. Jonathan Ive

As the Senior Vice President of Industrial Design at Apple, it's fair to say Ive has landed on his feet. But you have to hand it to him – he designed the look of the iMac, iPod and iPhone among others. Born in Chingford, he later studied Industrial Design at Northumbria University (as is now) and spent a short time in London before moving to the US in 1992. Although the eMate showed signs of the Apple we know today, it was with the pioneering first-gen iMac that Ive really came to the fore, with translucent finishes and colourful touches before moving toward the aluminium designs we know today.

6. Charles Babbage

Babbage was a mathematician and inventor who thought up the original concept of a computer as a device being able to solve mathematical problems to drive out human error. First thinking up the principles in the early 1820s, he came up with the idea of the difference engine. The Science Museum has since built a fully functioning machine from his design, but the original was never completed. Instead, he designed an improved version, again completed by the Science Museum in 1991, which performed calculations to 31 digits. Babbage then thought up the Analytical engine which was designed to use punch cards and could be described as the first programmable computer. And his influence is still being felt in diverse fields like nanotechnology.

7. Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt

Saying Watson-Watt is the inventor of radar is a bit like saying Bill Gates invented the home computer. But Watt, along with assistant Arnold Wilkins, designed a radio detection system that became crucial in winning the Battle of Britain in 1940. It tracked aircraft at distances of more than 100 miles from stations all along the East and South coasts of England. He had been deployed to the Bawdsey Research Station near Felixtowe in 1936 and gained a patent for radar in 1935. He later advised the US on air defence before moving to Canada and finally to Scotland.

8. Alexander Bain

Bain was a clockmaker who moved to London from Scotland. There he invented the electric clock, patented in 1841 using a pendulum kept moving by electromagnetic impulses. Bain also worked on an experimental facsimile machine in the 1840s and patented the chemical telegraph, which could print 282 words in 52 seconds.

[Image credit: nms.ac.uk]

9. Sir Frank Whittle

Although German Dr. Hans von Ohain was also involved, Whittle is credited with inventing the jet engine. Whittle took three attempts to enter the RAF due to his physical stature. In his RAF course he had to write a dissertation and decided to write on future developments in aircraft design. Here he wrote about flight at high altitudes and speeds where propeller engines would not be sufficient. In the late 1930s he joined with retired RAF engineers to form a company to produce the jet prototype. In 1944 the company was nationalised.

10. Dr Lyn Evans

CERN's Large Hadron Collider may continue to have problems (with bread), but it's hardly a recent project – Welsh miner's son and particle physicist Dr Lyn Evans began working on the LHC project in 1994. He cites his French O Level – a requirement for him to go to university – as his biggest hurdle, telling the BBC that it's ironic as "since joining CERN, I spend half of my time working in French".

[Image credit: CERN]

11. Tim Berners-Lee

One of the greatest British tech pioneers of all, Tim Berners-Lee made the first proposal for the World Wide Web in 1989. His work was to change the lives of billions. After spending most of the 1980s working for technology companies in Dorset and a consultant software engineer at CERN, he wrote the first web server and initial specifications for URLs, HTTP and HTML. In 1990, he and Robert Cailliau established communication between an HTTP client and server. Berners-Lee founded the World Wide Web Consortium in 1994 where he remains Director.

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Liked this? Then check out 5 technologies to thank the 1950s for

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science is a religion

2009-11-16T04:52:00.001-08:00

The vast majority of people are religious. Science is a religion. Religions can be better or worse. Religions differ by focus. The ultimate way to judge a religion is by outcomes. Science is a good religion. So is Christianity, in a different way. So is Judaism, in an entirely different way. So was Islam in a way very similar to Christianity (something became broken in Islam after the defeat in Spain and I am not sure what). So was the Egyptian cult of Amon-Ra, etc. On the other hand, the Semitic cults of Ba`al and Ishtar as well as the Greek and Roman religions were not so good. Pagan cults of place spirits and such were quite lousy.

While religions can be good or bad, religious fanatics are almost always harmful. The traits of religious fanatics are (i) fixation on their religion and (ii) claims that all other religions are false. Richard Dawkins, for example, is a religious fanatic of atheism. (Atheism is distinct from science [science has nothing to say on supernatural beings, but atheism does], also a religion, and a rather useless one, about the level of the cult of Ishtar.)

To answer your original question: the tendentious history of science that you refer to is what the New Testament is to the history of Christianity. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s not where you’d look for an unbiased examination.

Practice science by all means, but not religious fanaticism of science. I’m afraid it may be the latter that informs the sentiment of this post.

What may have been different about the Greeks is an unusual extent of religious tolerance they had. Their basic view was diametrically opposed to religious fundamentalism—instead of treating other religions as false by default, they treated them as true. To reconcile, they mapped every religion to their own with much flexibility. (Most affected religions were enlightened by this attitude of tolerance. But, for example, the exclusionary Judaism, inherently fundamentalist [look at the first commandment again] was less ready to embrace the Greek mapping.)

(Because I also don’t believe in unbiased analysis, for the context: Personally, I consider myself an agnostic. This includes my attitude towards science. Or perhaps I’m a math cultist. I’m also culturally Jewish.)

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75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks

2009-11-16T04:42:00.001-08:00

Facebook users fall into two categories: giggly and serious. Facebook user experience could be better if Facebook took this dichotomy into account. Ignoring the difference pushes apps to be giggly and serious users to be unhappy.

Giggly 75% like pokes, quizzes, pic forwarding, fun games, selling friends, glitter on profiles. They express themselves through style and interact with friends using the mouse.

Serious 25% like bookmark import, utility apps, discussions. They express themselves with text and pictures containing them and interact with friends using the keyboard.

Because you’re reading this, and made this far, you’re serious. (Giggly users tend to not read much at all, certainly not blobs of text, and quite certainly not my blog.) Let me tell you a few things about the giggly majority and propose how to make Facebook better for both giggly and serious users.

Giggly users are

younger
less educated
lower-income
less likely to have credit cards
far less likely employed
more suburban and rural
more frequently female.

Giggly users love to have fun with their friends, love to chit-chat and giggle, forward things easily and without a second thought. Giggly users generally don’t review applications because it requires typing. They don’t visit the about pages much. The prototypical giggly user is a female teenager who might later go to a party school to major in English.

You’re far more familiar with the serious users. Serious users are Harvard students, Silicon Valley types who use Facebook for professional networking, young professionals, etc. Serious users vote in primaries, care about privacy, understand the importance of financial planning, and are somewhat hesitant about the exposure of personal information by social networks. Serious users dislike the apps, infrequently use them, but write many of the reviews. Their notion of fun on Facebook is Scrabulous. Serious users are a bit boring. They make up for it by extreme sports and odd personal styles. The prototypical serious users are you and I. (Facebook employees and shareholders are also serious Facebook users.)

Problems:

Giggly users send a bunch of giggly communication to the serious users, for whom it’s annoying noise that drowns the signal from serious friends
Giggly users want more self-expression tools, which Facebook won’t create because of concern about serious users, who will hate them and cry “MySpace”

Solution: Have each user and each app self-elect into giggly or serious categories and treat them differently.

API calls returning list of friends, friend selectors, etc., should, by default, only return giggly friends for giggly apps and serious friends for serious apps. There should be a way to override this with some difficulty and user involvement.

Giggly users should be given tools to create different backgrounds for their profiles with different text colors and an option to play music on load. The default text color for giggly users should be pink, on a purple background with starbursts. Facebook should partner with RockYou to enable displaying the profile owner’s name in her favorite style of glitter, and a larger font. Latest photo album should start playing as a slide show on load. Applications should be given hooks into these extra self-expression tools, allowing iLike to set the song to play on load, etc. Self-expression should reign supreme.

Serious users should continue to see profiles of any users, including giggly, as they do today, minus the app boxes. Utility and uniformity should be emphasized.

The division of the app ecosystem will be particularly valuable. Giggly users will continue to have their silly apps, but the silly apps will stop bothering the serious users.

This will create an opening for serious and useful apps, now squeezed out of the ecosystem by the higher virality of the silly apps. This will allow engaging and useful apps to flourish in the subset of Facebook users whom Facebook clearly values the most, who are far more valuable for monetization, without spoiling the fun the giggling girls are having over in the other corner of Facebook.

It is in the apps’ interests to be classified correctly, therefore self-classification will be sufficient. The division will reduce Facebook’s need to police the apps, because serious apps will treat serious users more in line with their expectations and giggly users are more tolerant of highly viral tactics.

The 75% and 25% numbers are my approximations, based on polls about the Beacon program and forced invites, on the demographics, review of statistics, and a great dose of guess. The dichotomy is not firm, and the numbers may not be exactly 75/25. There is, however, a giggly majority and a serious minority, there’s greater conversion to inviting among the giggly users, there’s Facebook’s desire to be a social utility and thus to appeal to the serious minority, and there’s the problem of higher virality of the silly apps on Facebook, combined with the desire to have serious apps.

There are two ways in which Facebook would enable engaging useful apps:

change the distribution model from viral to directory and
segregate the users into groups.

Directory-based distribution would be bad news as it would replace competition with arbitrary choice, reducing the overall quality of apps. I believe Facebook understands this, as they have resisted this route thus far.

Segregation of users and apps into groups is the next natural choice, and I do not believe it has been explored. The minimum useful number of groups is two, and two groups might well be sufficient.

Facebook already has good data that separates the giggly users from the serious ones. I expect that serious users have been far more likely to change their privacy settings from the defaults. Why not start from there?

Update, July 24, 2008: Facebook has made a choice. Apps will no longer compete on a level playing field. Instead, Facebook will separate them into three tiers of preference. The replacement of competition with arbitrary choice by Facebook employees will obviously lower the overall quality, except as perceived by the particular employees making the choice. Yet it’s Facebook’s platform and their choice how to run it.

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10 useful Facebook apps

2009-11-16T04:36:00.001-08:00

Most Facebook apps are giggly. But serious apps exist even today when they cannot spread.

A comment on my earlier post 75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks asks if there are, indeed, any serious Facebook apps. Here are some of the serious apps that I have installed:

Analytic Polls — opinion comparison/sharing.
Antlook — news. Personalized recommendations from AI.
Causes — charity. The only popular serious Facebook app.
Dopplr — business travel. Tells when contacts are in the same place as you.
Feedheads — tool for importing Google Reader shared items and RSS in general.
Mento — bookmarking tool that tells you when friends click. Firefox extension that takes screenshots.
Neighborhoods — meet your neighbors on Facebook. I’ve become friends with two great people this way.
PayPal — fundraising.
SeenThis — news. All WSJ content for free.
Truemors — tips and rumours.

You’ll notice that no-one uses these excellent apps, with the exception of Causes. Because serious apps are not used, developers have no incentive to create more. If my proposal were implemented, there would be more, and better, serious apps.

But before then, you can still enjoy these apps that developers made against their best interest and judgment.

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Influencing an Election with Crowdsourcing

2009-11-16T04:29:00.001-08:00

An article in the New York Times highlighted an interesting new political tactic: campaign resources are being used to promote certain newspaper articles online, such that they appeared at the top of a Google search for a candidate's name.

This makes for a powerful propaganda tool. For example, a Democrat could promote a negative article on her Republican challenger, such that it appeared #1 in Google for that person's name. Anyone searching for info on that Republican would get an eyeful of criticism, giving them something new to think about. The fact that a newspaper article (a supposedly objective source) is used as the target makes its impact even more compelling.

This is a great example of crowdsourcing - not just because many people were involved, but because many people's websites were being used for a focused task.

Miserable Failure

You might recall the story a couple years back, where Bush's White House profile became the #1 result for the search "miserable failure." (Yes - it's still there.) This is an example of Google bombing: a mischievous version of a marketing practice called search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO is a technique used by companies to get more visibility in search engine listings. One interesting aspect of SEO has to do with links between websites.

Search engines add-up links from other websites as a form of reputation scoring: CNN.com has a "better" score than NPR.org - not because it has better news, but because more websites link to CNN articles than NPR articles. Link scoring is Google's search sauce, and it's become standard practice for all search engines.

Link scoring is crowdsourcing at its best, because the crowd (the universe of websites) is largely unaware that their actions are being analyzed and used to serve some secondary purpose.

Gaming the System

Google bombing (and SEO in general) introduces a new twist: the idea that this "crowd" can be contacted, requested to link to a specific website in a specific way, and create an intentional outcome.

All of this brought to mind a discussion I recently had with one of the Amazon reps working with Mechanical Turk. They have a provision in their terms of service that prevents companies from using their workforce for promotional work. So you can't hire an army of Turk workers to build links from other websites.

I thought this seemed unduly restrictive, because I'm a search engine marketer and saw Turk's potential as a useful tool in my work. The rep explained that Amazon was trying to avoid having someone come-in and use their workforce as part of some "gaming" effort.

Given the New York Times article, I'm inclined to agree with the wisdom of that logic... if somewhat reluctantly :)

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Crowd Computing and 6 steps to make it work for you

2009-11-15T07:25:00.001-08:00

http://codehandyman.com/2009/03/crowd-computing-and-6-steps-to-make-it.html

I have a lot of people coming to me for advice on their websites. Here is my personal philosophy on the topic and what drives my advice to pretty much everyone these days.

First of all, websites as we generally think of them, are dying or dead. The idea of a static page with some sharp graphics, perhaps a fancy flash logo animation etc. has largely become irrelevant to most people in the past few years.

I like to correct people and say web presence instead of website. Web presence means just that, your presence on the web, in all forms. Your emails, your facebook pages, profiles and groups, your blogs, your pages on other social networks like ning.com, linkedin, twitter, second life, myspace, wikipedia, and your AIM/MSN/Yahoo chat handles. That list seems to be getting longer and longer, but essentially its all just where you're at on the web.

It may seem intimidating to have all these things out there and feel like you HAVE to be on all of them. The good news is, you dont. You only have to participate where you feel most comfortable, and where you get the most "bang for your buck". Buck in this case translates to time and effort.

I watched from the outside for 10 years this blogging and social networking phenomenon, really staying out of it and focussing on my job of building dedicated flash applications for online training. I stayed out because what I saw was millions of people with what I would characterize as a very shallow web "presence" in a wide range of media. I would call it spamminating, or just dipping your toe in a lot of different pools. That sort of thing didnt mesh well with my personality. I like to get into something and go very deep, explore it to as far as its limits, and master it, THEN move on to the next thing.

As the technology evolved, I did too. With the advent of more and more cross linking between them, badges, open application architectures, and flexibility, I saw a new opportunity to dive deep. With all the cross linking done automatically by things like badges, you can now write once, publish everywhere. That exicites me.

I read this line in a book called What Would Google Do by Jeff Jarvis that talked about how linked in disseminates the hundreds of millions of photos by using algorithms that monitor the cross promotion and cross talk between members about photos, and basically could use the wisdom of the crowd(crowd computing?) to determine interestingness.

Now, like the new ad companies, my audience gets my content not by how good my SEO skills are, or my raw willingness and lack of social life to post to thousands of networks all day, rather...and this is important so I'll bold it...my content automatically goes to people who are interested in what I have to say.

This is game changing. I've always thought that the internet was the dawn of a collected conciousness, but now with vastly more intelligent search thanks to google and the like, everything we say can and will be said to the people who need to hear it.

It effectively turns everyone's brains into one giant brain, with computers as the connectors between brains.

For now, we have to post our thoughts in writing to things like blogger, but eventually I think thanks to voice recognition, our every thought, our musings, will bring us kindred spirits to develop those thoughts either into new thoughts, learning journeys, personal catharsis, and evolution.

Crowds have always been feared by people, as angry mobs with pitchforks, but in What Would Google Do, Jeff Jarvis talks about the wisdom of the crowd. If properly analyzed and understood, a crowd is vastly intelligent, it is the sum of all its parts. If you take an individual neuron, its not capable of much, but put them all together and you have the most complex thing in the known universe, the human brain.

For the first time in history, sites like Flickr and Google have begun to speak to the crowd in its language (or even give it a language for it to articulate itself) And its talking. It has a lot to say. Democratic ideals have always tried to make this a reality, but voting never really captured the true meaning of what the crowd wanted, only grunts and warbles. With AI and computing however, the crowd now can finally talk with unprecidented precision.

What will we say to the crowd? More specifically what will you say to the crowd? Here is where we get out of the clouds and return to earth with actionable items:

1. Make sure you have and control your personal brand on as many social networks as you can find. This means own your own domain www.myname.com if you can. Own your company name www.mycompany.com, myproduct.com etc.

2. Create a facebook fan page for your product or service. Get everyone you can to join. If there already is one, become an active and leading participant. Always Give Value in everything you do.

3. Create and own your facebook profile, before someone else does. Facebook is used by 150,000,000 people as of this post, and by default is quickly becoming the defacto identity source. If you dont own your facebook profile, you are wide open to someone else taking it for you. And that is still legal.

4. Create your profile on everything else. Ning.com, Linkedin.com, blogger.com, myspace.com. All these can be more or less empty but just grab and own them.

5. Now that you've experimented with all these things and learned all these new skills... :) Pick which one you like the most and dive deep. In linked in, get all your friends in there, find new contacts, find opportunities, recommend people you respect. In facebook, post funny and entertaining things to your status, make people smile daily. Tell people things they can use, share your ideas, your concerns, your hopes.

6. Watch the comments roll in, tweak what you are doing based on them. If one thing you do gets no fans or comments, but another thing does, do more of the other thing.

That is how you can, right now, capture the wisdom of the crowd.

Good Luck!

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A good cofounder is…

2009-11-13T21:54:00.001-08:00

A good cofounder is:

1. A pillar. This person is nearly impossible to replace because you trust them and they add incredible value to the team. It’s even more so if you’ve built a friendship and/or working relationship with them over time. Imagine starting from square one and going to a cofounder’s mixer.. I can’t.

2. Full of faith for the vision. They are not only motivated by the outcome but also by the work and the vision. They want to be a part of that vision because it’s something they fundamentally and philosophically believe in.

3. Someone who is not competitive with you. Many people start companies with their best friends, but sometimes this is exactly the wrong approach. Human relationships are complicated and someone you’ve known for years might seem like a good person to start a company with, that is until you start a company with them. Just remember to keep an open mind and that if you’re competitive with your cofounder, it probably won’t work out.

4. Someone you would trust with your life.

5. Complementary. If you have an idea they expand on that idea. If you’re a bit too liberal they’re a bit too conservative. Complementary should not be confused with diametrically opposed. There is such a thing as too different to get a long. A good example of a complimentary founding team would be the two Steves of Apple fame.

6. Unexpected. The cofounder should impress you. Not because they want to or are trying to but because you just happen to be impressed with the quality of their work/ideas/direction or whatever.

7. Challenging. They don’t blindly follow every word and they don’t challenge you on every point. They challenge you when you need to be challenged. After all, you can’t always be right even if you’d like to be.

8. Easy for you to get along with on some other level than just work. Either you have similar political views/principals or you both love Family Guy.. Whatever it is you should easily be able to find stuff to talk about. If you can’t even have a conversation with this person, they probably shouldn’t be your cofounder.

9. Someone who sticks around even when the going gets tough. Real tough. As I’ve experienced first hand startups are extremely trying for spouses, partners, friends, family and everything else. It takes its toll and no one can cross the finish line without paying that price. No one. You’re going to need someone who doesn’t just shine in the initial stages, they also need to shine when shit hits the fan and you’re losing hair, sleep, sanity and whatever else..

10. Someone who puts their money where their mouth is. You’ll know what this means when the time comes.. But the true test of character is when people start putting their own money into the project and they do it with both feet.

11. Well grounded with their ego. I’ve run into this one a few times. You obviously want someone brilliant to cofound your startup with.. But at what price? Some of the most brilliant people I’ve worked with also happened to be paranoid and/or kind of crazy. Not in a good way. Don’t go for the guy with 2 PhDs and the nobel prize in Physics just because his IQ is 270. You have to first make sure they fit into your universe and in a good way. God does not play dice with the universe and neither should you with your startup. Take that Niels!

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How to pick a co-founder

2009-11-13T21:27:00.001-08:00

Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. It’s more important than your product, market, and investors.

The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. One is good at building products and the other is good at selling them.

The power of two

Two is the right number — avoid the three-body problem. Think Jobs and Wozniak, Allen and Gates, Ellison and Lane, Hewlett and Packard, Larry and Sergei, Yang and Filo, Omidyar and Skoll.

One founder companies can work, against the odds (hello, Mark Zuckerberg). So can three founder companies (hello, @biz, @ev, and @jack). In three founder companies, the politics can be tough — gang-up votes, jockeying for board seats, etc. — but it’s manageable. Four is an extremely unstable configuration and five is right out. When 4-5 founder companies work, it’s because two founders dominate.

Two founders works because unanimity is possible, there are no founder politics, interests can easily align, and founder stakes are high post-financing.

Someone you have history with

You wouldn’t marry someone you’d just met. Date first. Guess which pair of famous co-founders is in this photo:

Go through something difficult, like a Prisoner’s Dilemma or a Zero-Sum Game. If being ethical was lucrative, everyone would do it!

One builds, one sells

The best builders can prototype and perhaps even build the entire product, end-to-end. The best sellers can sell to customers, partners, investors, and employees.

The seller doesn’t have to be a “salesman” or “business guy”. He can be technical, but he must be able to wield the tools of influence. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs aren’t salesmen, but they are sellers.

Aligned motives required

If one founder wants to build a cool product, another one wants to make money, and yet another wants to be famous, it won’t work.

Pay close attention — true motivations are revealed, not declared.

Criteria: Intelligence, energy, and integrity

It’s not the kid you grew up next to. It’s not the person you like the most. It’s not the hacker most willing to work for free.

It’s someone of incredibly high intelligence, energy, and integrity. You’ll need all three yourself, and a shared history, to evaluate your co-founder.

Don’t settle

If it doesn’t feel right, keep looking. If you’re compromising, keep looking. A company’s DNA is set by the founders, and its culture is an extension of the founders’ personalities.

Pick “nice” guys

Avoid overly rational short-term thinkers. There are bounds to rationality. Partner with someone who is irrationally ethical, or a rational believer that nice guys finish first. Be especially careful with the “sales” guy here.

What you don’t know

Business founders who don’t code use bad proxies for picking technical co-founders (”10 years with Java!”). Technical founders who don’t sell also use bad proxies (”Harvard MBA!”). Learn enough of the other side to have an informed opinion. If you’re not seriously impressed, move on.

FAQs

What if the right guy already has his own startup? Convince him to work on yours part-time — he’ll drop his idea once yours gets traction.

Breakups are hard

If you’re going to fall out with your co-founder, do it early, recover the equity into the option pool to keep the company going, and recruit someone else great to fill the missing slot. Build in founder vesting (a.k.a. the “Pre-Nup”) to keep the breakup from getting messy. Building a great company without a partner is like raising kids without a…

Nearly everything I’ve written on this topic applies to dating and marriage. Coincidence?

Go forth and multiply.

This post is by Naval Ravikant. If you like it, check out his blog and Twitter.

Learn more about: Co-Founders

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Finding the fear and love of God inside the brain

2009-11-11T05:25:00.001-08:00

Scientists have long mused about the evolutionary significance of religion and its place in the brain. New research shows that the behaviors and beliefs we associate with religion may be associated with variability in specific neuroanatomical features.

By Jeremy Jacquot | Last updated October 1, 2009 11:00 AM CT

NIH

Why do some embrace religion and others reject it outright? For a long time, scientists have been trying to answer this question by probing the neural roots of religion. Until fairly recently, many thought the answer lay in a "God-spot"—a small region of the brain that has been linked to the mystical experiences associated with faith.

Thanks in large part to the growing sophistication of brain-scanning techniques, which let neuroscientists peer into the brain’s inner workings, that concept has largely been rendered moot; there is now widespread agreement that religious behaviors are modulated by well-defined neural pathways. Indeed, several studies have indicated that the feelings of joy, doubt, and self-reflection that are evoked by intense religious experiences can be correlated with specific patterns of brain activation. Earlier this year, a group of researchers led by the National Institute on Aging’s Dimitrios Kapogiannis identified several of the cognitive mechanisms and brain circuits that seem to be engaged during the processing of religious belief.

Their findings showed that, far from being an inscrutable phenomenon, religion could in fact be experimentally addressed and that its emergence may have been driven by changes in the neural capacity for language, logical reasoning, and other evolutionarily significant processes. In a follow-up study, the same group investigated whether the expression of religious beliefs could be tied to variability in the brain's architecture. Their results, which reveal that differences in regional cortical volumes correlate with key aspects of religiosity, were reported in PLoS ONE.

In their first study, Kapogiannis and his colleagues developed a three-dimensional psychological framework that incorporated their subjects' differing perceptions of God in order to explore the neuroanatomical underpinnings of religion. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), they were able to associate these religious beliefs with activity in areas of the brain associated with memory retrieval, imagery, emotion, and abstract semantics. For instance, a subject who claimed to feel God’s love experienced higher levels of activity within the right middle frontal gyrus, a region associated with positive emotions.

For their new study, the authors had the same group of subjects complete a survey about their religious behaviors, their upbringing, and about particular aspects of their worldview. Whereas the intent of their first study was to illuminate the neural and cognitive activity associated with religious experiences, their objective here was to determine whether slight variations in gray matter volume correlated with different facets of their religiosity.

From the survey results they collected, they identified four components of religiosity: experiencing an intimate relationship with God and engagement in religious behavior; having a religious upbringing; doubting God’s existence; and experiencing fear of God’s anger. They then paired these findings with the results of structural MRI tests to see what relationships existed between brain volume and these components.

Confirming some of their earlier conclusions, the authors found that both religious belief and religious practice seem to be associated with networks in the brain involved with social cognitive processing. The robustness of the networks varied on an individual basis, reflecting each subject’s distinct religiosity, and seemed to fluctuate over time in response to changing stimuli. None of the networks they identified were found to be unique to religion.

The MRI results revealed that a stronger sense of intimacy with God correlated with an increase in the cortical volume of the right middle temporal gyrus (MTG). The MTG plays a key role in establishing and maintaining intimate relationships, such as the one between a mother and her child, so the authors reason that its evolution gave rise to the sense of intimacy with God that some devout individuals share.

At the other end, subjects with low MTG volumes displayed little interest in God or religion. (Schizophrenic patients, who often struggle to differentiate self from God and display aberrant religious behaviors, had the lowest volumes.)

They also found a pronounced negative correlation between the cortical volume of the left precuneus, an area involved in empathy and emotional response, and fear of God's anger. Those who felt a stronger connection with God, and thus were better able to relate God to their selves, had larger precuneus volumes and tended to be the most devout practitioners. Individuals with smaller volumes who did not form strong emotional bonds with God typically prayed out of a sense of fear, rather than out of a sense conviction or love.

Because the study only considered adults, the obvious next step would be to analyze younger age groups. Being correlational rather than causal, these findings don't really address the question of whether certain individuals were more predisposed to particular patterns of religiosity because of their brain development. The fact that no region of the brain corresponded with religiosity of upbringing rules out the contention that religious nurture alone contributes to neuroanatomical variability.

The sum total of their results suggests that religious belief may have arisen as a natural extension of evolutionary advances in social cognition and behavior. Over time, the changes in brain volume that enabled humans to show empathy towards others may have also made it possible for some to develop intimate personal relationships with a supernatural entity, thus laying the foundation for the emergence of religion.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall: perceptions of the past

2009-11-11T04:16:00.001-08:00

via:

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Professor Mary Fulbrook (UCL German) explains the rise of nostalgia for life in the East.

The opening of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was greeted with virtually universal acclamation. It was even an official spokesperson for the GDR’s ruling communist party, the SED, who conveyed the momentous Politburo decision that the Wall would no longer serve the function, exercised for 27 years, of keeping people inside the GDR against their will. The unification of Germany on 3 October 1990 was far from anyone’s imagining at this time; but the fall of the Wall came to symbolise the end of the Cold War that had divided Germany and Europe since the defeat of Hitler. It was a historic moment of which Germans like to be proud (and they have precious few such in recent history).

But longer term reflections have cast the East German past in a different light; both more bitterly contested, and more yearned after, than one might have thought possible.

Condemnation of course continued. Lengthy parliamentary commissions of inquiry focused on ‘overcoming’ the SED dictatorship; the media shone a spotlight on the State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi), bringing devastating stories to public attention; so too did dramatic representations such as Anna Funder’s journalistic Stasiland and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s box office success, Das Leben der Anderen. Contested landscapes of commemoration provoked heated debates over who and what should be remembered, and at what cost to other ‘sites of memory’, both physical and emotional. Such condemnations naturally provoked angry responses from the expected quarters on the far left, with political debates continuing.

More surprising, however, was the registration of a growing sense among ‘ordinary’ East Germans that their past was being misrepresented. While they had played a major role in bringing down the old regime, many now started to defend aspects of GDR society. In part, such yearning focused on food and consumer items, the ‘furniture’ and ‘taste’ of the past, in a wave of ‘Ostalgie’ (nostalgia for the East), readily exploited by capitalists cashing in on a new tourist trade. In part, it was encouraged by films such as Thomas Brussig’s and Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee and Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin! – the latter unleashing an unlikely run on Spreewaldgurken (a GDR brand of sour gherkins).

Many commentators dismiss such nostalgia as ‘tainted memories’ of a mythical past seen through ‘rose-tinted spectacles’. But should one really dismiss people’s memories of their own lives? Was the GDR really only sustained by repression and fear? My own research suggests a more complex picture.

Many east Germans express longing for what, in contrast to the competitive individualism of western capitalism, they retrospectively see as a more ‘peaceful’ society, living ‘ordered lives’ in which it was possible to combine work with time for family, friends and affordable leisure activities. Weighing up the merits and disadvantages of two different systems, some wonder whether the availability of oranges and bananas really makes up for the loss of social security, a sense of community, ‘togetherness’ and warm social relations; and whether ‘freedom to travel’ really means very much when eking out a marginal existence on unemployment benefits.

Different generations have varying experiences. Those born in the late 1920s and socialised entirely under Nazism ironically became the backbone of the communist system; the ‘best times’ in their lives were the 1950s, when they founded new families as well as building up the new ‘anti-fascist state’. In 1989, they were able to retire. Their problems were not so much economic as existential: they were forced, in a sense, to re-evaluate the whole of their lives. Those born in the early 1950s were disillusioned by the gap between ideals and realities, and at the forefront of the movements leading to the fall of the Wall. But they were also the greatest ‘losers’ of unification: many found it difficult to retrain or to retain their old positions. Having achieved a long-term aim of ‘arrival in the West’, they now found it held little by way of future prospects; accordingly they revised their views of the past. Those who were children or teenagers in 1989 had generally ‘happy memories’ of GDR childhoods; they were, moreover, relatively cosmopolitan, growing up in a period of global youth culture. After unification, they were best placed to take advantage of new opportunities and enjoy the new present.

There is, then, a more fundamental way in which perceptions of the past are intimately bound up with a sense of self. And it is this deeper, anthropological aspect that approaches focusing solely on force and repression, the Stasi and the Wall, ignore. But without understanding the ways in which people lived through the GDR, we cannot understand how nostalgia for aspects of East German society has risen so remarkably since the people themselves helped to bring down a hated state.

Image: The Brandeburg Gate section of the Berlin Wall, 9 November 1989

Listen to Professor Fulbrook discuss her research into this phenomenon further on ABC Radio National in the programme ‘The Fall of the Berlin Wall: the cultural differences’.

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How Did I Ever Live Without IMified?

2009-11-09T22:07:00.001-08:00

This week I discovered the most useful IM integrated Web 2.0 application that I've seen, IMified. This sleek little application is actually an IM gateway to dozens of other applications that you already use. It allows you to send your self notes, tasks, calendar items, and much more, all from your IM client on your computer or phone.

It integrates nicely with Google Calendar, which is the main reason I tried it out - I wanted to be able to take my Calendar with me on my laptop and my smart phone without having to log in to the web page every time I needed to update the calendar with an event or check my agenda. Using IMIfied, I simply type a series of codes and am taken to my current agenda over the next week, or allowed to add an event to the Calendar. It's much faster than logging in, as I'm usually on IM even when I'm not surfing the web.

Sign up for IMified is simple. All you have to do is log into your preferred IM client out of the four currently compatible with IMified: AIM, Yahoo, Gtalk/Jabber or MSN. Type in the IM contact name for IMIfied under that client (see the list below). IMified will reply with a link telling you sign up was successful and taking you to your account page. From that account page link you can add as many IMified widgets to your account as you want. It gives you several applications as defaults (Notes, Tasks, and more) which you can remove if you'd like.

Google Calendar isn't the only Web 2.0 application IMified brings to your IM client. With the click of a mouse, IMified lets you access your accounts with nearly 30 Web 2.0 applications so far, and they add new ones frequently. They also encourage their users to develop new applications for IMified, putting the keys to their API front and center for developers.

Right now you can use IMified with your accounts at 30Boxes, BackPack, BaseCamp, Old Blogger, New Blogger, Braingle, BudgetBot, Delicious, Google Calendar, Jaiku, LiveJournal, Movable Type, NetLookUp, Pownce, Remember The Milk, Stikkit, Toodledo, Tumblr, Twitter, TypePad, urlTea, WordPress and more.

So far the Google Calendar application is the one I'm using the most. I'm starting to use the IMified developed Notes and Tasks applications more and more as well - its a handy way to remember the shopping list, jot down ideas I have for my writing and other quick notes while I'm on the road with only a cell phone.

I also added the Twitter application, which works ten times better than Twitter's own IM application, and has had zero down time so far. Other applications I've added include Pownce, Braingle and WordPress. As I find more and more friends using the other Web 2.0 apps, I'll be adding them as well. You can see the Google Calendar application in action on my IM client, Adium, below:

The IMified "My Account" page where you can add and remove apps is below:

All in all I'd say IMified is a useful, solid Web 2.0 and IM integration application. It has a simple user interface and nice, clean traditional Web 2.0 design. It is easy to install, taking less than two minutes to install and customize. I highly recommend it for people who want to access their Web 2.0 universe on the go, without having to haul out the laptop or spring for an iPhone to do so.

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PayPal Seeks New Ways to Use Its Payment System

2009-11-09T04:51:00.001-08:00

By Claire Cain Miller- NYT.COM- BITS

PayPal, which transformed the way people pay on the Web, is about to have much bigger reach online.

On Tuesday, PayPal held its first developer conference in San Francisco to officially open its platform to software developers wanting to include payments in their Web or cellphone applications.

With the new platform, any software developer can embed PayPal’s technology in an application. An application could be as simple as ordering and then paying for a pizza with one click on a cellphone. Or it could be as intricate as a way for corporate accounting departments to pay vendors without mailing checks.

Osama Bedier, the vice president for platform at PayPal, predicted that cash would soon be the payment of choice for only “tooth fairies, drug dealers and senators paying their household staff.”

The conference was a big deal for PayPal. EBay’s payments business is driving the company’s growth, and John Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, reiterated that PayPal would soon be a bigger business than eBay’s marketplaces. To get the crowd as excited as PayPal’s executives were, there were free netbooks for all registered attendees, white-clad violinists to serenade people upon entry and roaming candy carts.

In the past, when someone wanted to use PayPal to check out, they generally had to open a new window and enter their PayPal log-in information. As a result, PayPal has missed out on a lot of the virtual goods business, which has instead gone to start-ups like Zong that let people enter their cellphone number and avoid interrupting a virtual game. Now, a PayPal pop-up box will open within a game or Web site.

PayPal has also been missing out on microtransactions, the small sums paid for a product online, like a single article or a day-long subscription to an online publication. People did not want to log in to their PayPal accounts to pay such small amounts of money. Now, a buyer can agree to give the seller a certain amount and the seller can collect the money at any time, so a reader could buy a $50 subscription and subtract 50 cents for each article.

Mark Glasberg is using PayPal for his start-up, iCents.net, which will offer online publishers a way to charge viewers. “Before today, there wasn’t a way to do this because it would disrupt the user experience if we were always asking you to go to PayPal and type in all your information,” he said.

PayPal’s new technology also lets Web sites take cuts from PayPal payments as they happen, which was not possible before. Clayton Bain, founder of a company called MedPayOnline.com that lets patients pay medical bills on the Web, used to have a complicated system to collect his transaction fee from hospitals. Now, PayPal will automatically deduct it.

Using the new technology, developers can now also let buyers send money to multiple people with one payment. This could be useful on sites like eBay and Etsy, where a shopper might make purchases from several people at once, or for a company using PayPal for payroll. A start-up called Payvment is using PayPal to let shoppers move from one virtual store to the next, add items to their carts at each stop and check out once.

“In order to break into new businesses that have been dominated by paper money, technology is not enough, we heard loud and clear,” Mr. Bedier said. Fees also had to be lower than 3 percent for people to use PayPal for things like rent or payroll. PayPal reduced the fee for paying for services out of a bank or PayPal account to either 50 cents or 0.75 percent.

Stu Andrews, a developer from Sydney, Australia, is taking advantage of this feature to build an application for a real estate company that would let tenants log on to the landlord’s Web site to pay rent, something that would have been prohibitively expensive before.

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Intro to Amazon's Mechanical Turk

2009-11-08T23:53:00.001-08:00

Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing network set-up by Amazon. The service gives you access to a network of freelancers, who log-in to an online system and can pick and choose tasks to work on. The key distinction: unlike Elance and other outsource portals, Mechanical Turk is aimed at piecework, not entire projects.

There's an e-commerce set-up on both ends. Tasks are uploaded by "requesters" - companies and individuals that define the work to be performed. Requesters deposit funds and set pricing for the tasks, while workers who perform tasks get funds transferred to their accounts. These are conventional Amazon.com accounts, so they can be linked to bank accounts or used for purchases on Amazon.

Real world experience

That's the long-story-short version - what's it like to actually use Mechanical Turk? I've assembled some of my experiences below, as well as links to tools and info I've stumbled upon along the way.

What tasks can be performed by Mechanical Turk workers?

MTurk is ideal for any task that involves the manipulation of small amount of information: data entry, analysis of written or photographic materials, research, and transscription of audio recordings are common tasks.

So far, I've assigned work in two areas: writing content, and doing web research. As a web marketer, I'm always looking for ways to generate useful content for websites, and I've been impressed by the high quality of writing that I get from Turk workers.

Related Post:
Mechanical Turk Workers Mostly US-Based

Typically, I'll send out sets of 50-500 tasks. A set of several hundred tasks typically gets done in a day or two, although this will vary depending on the complexity of the task, the time of day they're posted, etc. Some requesters launch thousands of tasks at a time, which I've seen workers churn through with a week.

Why use Mechanical Turk?

As a solo consultant, MT gives me access to a very flexible, always-on labor pool. I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts and have access to college students in a wide range of disciplines - they're smart, in plentiful supply, and generally inexpensive. But MT is an easier resource, a more reliable resource, and (at least for now) a much cheaper resource.

What are the advantages, versus employing a traditional subcontractor?

From the requester (employer) standpoint, it has several advantages: not having to scout for talent, file paperwork, keep track of invoices or timesheets. Mechanical Turk automates HR, and allows you to structure freelance work in a way that isn't otherwise possible.

The key to using MT profitably is to recognize what types of projects can be diced into the taskwork that MT can digest easily. MT is best for tasks that are easy to define, and can be clearly expressed in a text message without any back-and-forth clarification. It takes a bit of upfront work to define the tasks, and prepare instructions that can't be misinterpreted - this is crucial to ensuring that the results are accurate, and returned to you in a usable format.

One aspect of the system that helps improve results is the ability to pre-screen workers using a test. If they pass the test, they receive a "qualification" which then allows them to perform tasks available only to them. I have a copywriting qualification set-up for my tasks, and other companies have created dozens more, focusing on areas like language translation or technical expertise.

Finally, it's incredibly scalable. If you have thousands of tasks, so much the better - the upfront cost of preparation work can be spread across those tasks. And workers tend to swarm on larger groups of tasks, realizing that they can settle-in for a few hours and make larger amounts of money.

What are the wages like?

Amazon sets a very low floor of 1 cent per task, so it's left to the free market to decide what rates are fair. At the moment, there are only a few companies participating on a regular basis, so there's a tendency to price tasks very, very cheaply: they know that someone, somewhere will eventually pick-up the assignment.

Wages have become a contentious matter among workers, especially now that the system has been operating for over a year. The overall sentiment expressed on MT forums and blogs is that pricing is too low, and the most active workers seem to be expressing the most dissatisfaction. I think effective wages have to go up to retain workers of the caliber that I've dealt with.

Related Post:
Beer Money: Mechanical Turk on Campus

Some companies are trying to remedy this by assigning bonuses or awarding prizes to the best workers, but this creates its own inequities. It also creates a gold-rush mentality, as workers swarm-in to perform tasks that are linked to a bonus.

Eventually more companies will enter the system, and competition for workers' attention will drive prices to a more equitable level. But that depends on how well Amazon will succeed in attracting companies with large workflows to perform. If free market activity can't float a higher wage, and workers begin to drift off, then a more hands-on policy may be necessary.

What tools are available to access the system?

To access the system via any method, you first must sign-up for an Amazon account at Mturk.com.

The web interface at Mturk.com is pretty rudimentary, and is useful only for a few initial experiments.

True power users will want to take advantage of the API - developer resources can be found at the Amazon Web Services site.

Intermediate users may want to check out HIT Builder, a web-based interface for piping tasks into the system. It's a bit kludgy at times, but allows you to do bulk uploading of assignments without touching code.

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CLOUD COMPUTING, MEET CROWD COMPUTING

2009-11-07T06:16:00.001-08:00

If you stay up past 10 on any given night, chances are you will eventually run across a TV infomercial promising riches beyond your wildest dreams. You'll be able to stay at home, it says, making thousands of dollars a day; in fact, you'll be able to buy a new home, like Susie did, just from your part-time, stay-at-home job.

Sure.It's really a shame, too, because the sheer workforce potential of stay-at-home moms, college kids and retired baby boomers is overwhelming.

But let's not throw the crazy fox out with the bath water. There are plenty of computer-centric, home-based jobs available that don't promise a new Ferrari and a live-in housekeeper. These more down-to-earth—and significantly less promoted—jobs also happen to be legitimate.

Take, for example, Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Based on the simple idea that computer's can't do everything (yet), Amazon is attempting to tap in to the highly lucrative market of idle human intelligence.

The premise is that some data manipulation requires human intervention. A good example would be a business looking to expand its email database. While it has thousands of records on customers it has collected over the years, no one ever thought to ask for email addresses. With Mechanical Turk, the process is quite trivial: the business creates a HIT, or Human Intelligence Task, that is uploaded with the data file to Mechanical Turks' servers along with the amount the business is willing to pay per email address found.

Magically, a global workforce springs to life, wrangling email addresses. For each HIT that is completed, a worker is paid a commission, typically in the 5-50 cent range, depending on the difficulty of finding the answer and the level of skill involved.

And, within a set time frame, Mechanical Turk sends the company new customer records, complete with email addresses. And, of course, a bill. Meanwhile, someone gets a check. The process is similar for tagging photos on online commerce sites to improve searchability; screening comments and reviews; and keeping Facebook and Twitter accounts appearing active.

It?s a little bit of money per job, but with a potentially huge crowd benefitting from, an completing, those jobs. With all the talk about cloud computing these days, it's nice to see a service tapping into the growing potential of the crowd.

For more information about HITs and Amazon's Mechanical Turk, visit their website at www.mturk.com .

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IBM and SAP introduce… Crowd Computing?

2009-11-07T05:38:00.001-08:00

For those of you who missed this announcement IBM Research and SAP Demonstrate New Cloud Technology: Real-Time Application Mobility

In this innovative merger of company values and large scale product offerings IBM and SAP are coming to market with a very clear Crowd computing solution.

In this technology demonstration, IBM and SAP show how users can run enterprise applications in the cloud, in particular demonstrating the migration of workloads across physical servers and across data centers. This demonstration is another instance of IBM working with partners across the IT industry to gain insights about creating and configuring workloads, and help companies move to the clouds as smoothly as possible.

This opens the door to a ‘if the big guys can do it, so can we’ methodology and mentality which means the Cloud will not only get to be more innovative faster, but it definitely looks like we can be looking forward to a pretty aggressive and crowded set of Cloud offerings in the Enterprise space.

In this demonstration, the migration of SAP workloads across the cloud is supported by IBM’s POWER6 systems, which enable users to run separate applications on different virtual machines, called logical partitions, on the same physical server. The IBM POWER6 system’s Live Partition Mobility capability further allows for the movement of a partition from one POWER6-based server to another POWER6-based server in the data center with no application downtime, resulting in better system utilization, improved application availability, and energy savings.

Application mobility, often one of the top of mind discussions around ‘Where does my app go” and “is it portable” is becoming more of a reality and less of a concern with the big as well as the small players.

Don’t think that the big blue getting involved will in anyway squelch the opportunity in this exploding market. Infact quite the opposite. IBM’s steps here today have likely increased the opportunity 100fold and that’s only touching on the surface of the offerings which so far are present in this otherwise very immature market.

…Are you ready for Crowd computing? Your enterprise will be

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IBM and SAP introduce… Crowd Computing?

2009-11-07T05:37:00.001-08:00

For those of you who missed this announcement IBM Research and SAP Demonstrate New Cloud Technology: Real-Time Application Mobility

In this innovative merger of company values and large scale product offerings IBM and SAP are coming to market with a very clear Crowd computing solution.

In this technology demonstration, IBM and SAP show how users can run enterprise applications in the cloud, in particular demonstrating the migration of workloads across physical servers and across data centers. This demonstration is another instance of IBM working with partners across the IT industry to gain insights about creating and configuring workloads, and help companies move to the clouds as smoothly as possible.

In this demonstration, the migration of SAP workloads across the cloud is supported by IBM’s POWER6 systems, which enable users to run separate applications on different virtual machines, called logical partitions, on the same physical server. The IBM POWER6 system’s Live Partition Mobility capability further allows for the movement of a partition from one POWER6-based server to another POWER6-based server in the data center with no application downtime, resulting in better system utilization, improved application availability, and energy savings.

…Are you ready for Crowd computing? Your enterprise will be

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Social Data Revolution

2009-11-01T07:18:00.003-08:00

Social Data Revolution, Part 1 — Time and Money: What Instantaneous and Free Communication is Doing For Consumers

Way back in time, communication seemed simple: people were home in the evening, and you could just swing by for a chat. But then the printing press was invented, greatly increasing the scope and reducing the cost of communication. Print, often complemented by services such as mail delivery, enabled firms to reach a huge number of people inexpensively.

Sears, for example, sent its catalog to millions of US households twice a year from 1896 until 1993. It was a slow world—products and prices remained valid until the next issue came out. Relevant dates, such as the delivery date, were hard to predict and rarely communicated to customers. But the customers did not expect much transparency from the firms, either—they were happy as long as the toaster they ordered eventually arrived.

Shifting the focus from transaction to relationship

In this era of limited communication, the firm only knew about the final orders, not the process of decision making. The focus was on transactions, not on relationships.

And now? The Internet allows us to reach anyone, anywhere, instantaneously. The reach of communication has increased from the people in the sender’s town to the entire world. People are social—they want to listen, comment, and be heard. But now that everyone can have a voice, who actually gets heard?

In the old world, senders bore the main cost of communication. Buying stamps and mailing out physical letters limited the number of messages generated. But in electronic communication, the marginal cost of another message is essentially zero. The bottleneck has moved from the sender to the receivers: they are becoming inundated with more requests for attention than they can deal with. The problem is that we are hard-wired to attend to new stimuli. We need to make these new technologies work for people and not against them.

The new currency: May I have your attention, please?

With all these demands on our time, how should we allocate our attention? Randomly? Perhaps—a former colleague’s strategy was to sporadically delete the messages in his inbox as his way of coping with information overload. Needless to say, though, his typical excuse (“I guess your email must have been in the batch I deleted”) was not particularly popular.

Right now, for most of us, that long-awaited love letter arrives the same way as yet another credit card solicitation. Can we do better than allocating our attention randomly? The answer comes in two parts: data, and more data.

Meta-data matter

Meta-data, data about the message, can help guide our decisions: how important it is for senders that their message gets read, and what is the message’s expected value for the reader?

Well, the simplest way to get this data is just to ask! Mr. Sender, tell us on a scale from 0 to 10: how important is it to you that the reader actually reads your message? And how much do you think the reader will get out of it? These two numbers can help us prioritize our attention.

But taking these values by themselves won’t do the trick. Just as in the physical world, slimy marketers will try to game the system by creating the impression that their message is of utmost importance to us. They’ll try to whet our appetites and get us to open that spam.

To solve this problem, we’ll need to introduce a direct feedback mechanism by getting some data from the message’s recipient. Obviously, this wouldn’t work for physical mail—our junk mail just finds its way to the shredder. This non-response is a very weak learning signal since the sender has no way of gauging the recipient’s response to the message. It could be that the recipient was an early adopter of the sender’s product and is very happy with it. Or, he could be getting very annoyed with all these messages, to the degree that he is actually starting to hate the company!

In the world of cheap, bi-directional communication, we can do better. The receiver can directly indicate the actual value the message has for him—if he actually does enjoy receiving lots of updates, for example, he can express positive feedback. By indicating the actual relevance for him, the receiver can increase or decrease the relevance of future messages from the same sender. That is, he directly benefits from his actions in the immediate future.

Senders, on the other hand, can benefit as well. There is a new term in the cost function of mass communication—the cost of sending unwanted messages, as expressed by the rising voice of the consumer. Being aware of their recipients’ feedback helps them maintain their pristine reputation—senders will not benefit by becoming attention offenders.

Cheap communication allows us to calibrate senders’ predictions with the actual value perceived by the recipient. As we build up a history of direct feedback, our relevance functions will improve and allow us to prioritize our attention effectively. With free bi-directional communication, the era of the con-artist is coming to an end—only companies that respect their customers will be able to get through to them. Since everybody has an incentive to make as accurate relevance predictions as possible, we can use the power of the community to build a good system.

To sum up, two data sources allow us to harness the power of the community: relevance predictions from the senders, and relevance assessments of the recipients.

The communication revolution is a meta-data revolution

With communication being free and instantaneous, attention is increasingly scarce. Economics is the science of scarcity. So, that’s why we need to develop an economic model of communication. Before, scarcity was on the side of the senders (time, money). It was impossible for firms to communicate effectively with large numbers of people at once, and communication/coordination between customers was even more difficult. There was no way for an individual to effectively reach a broad audience beyond a very limited radius. But the communication revolution has brought about many changes. At first glance, this seemed to be great for companies—it’s now almost free to bury customers in ad campaigns! However, now that the scarcity has shifted to the recipients (time, attention), communication needs to go beyond transactions and move to relationships. In fact, the value of relationships is greater than the value of transactions. Truly customer-centric companies like Zappos understand the value of long-term relationships and bidirectional communication. Unfortunately, though, these companies are the exception. There are many more companies that are moving in the wrong direction by cutting costs in customer service. In general, communication between individuals and firms has not become any easier even though it’s now easier than ever for individuals to communicate with each other. When will the communication revolution allow us to easily reach all companies we want to talk to?

Social Data Revolution, Part 2 — Why We Need a Sound Data Strategy

A previous post discussed how free communication has changed the world, including the expectations and work of individuals, business, and society. This post discusses how two data revolutions (the first about passively collected clicks on Amazon.com, the second about actively contributed data), and the ensuing change in consumer expectation make an astute, coherent data strategy critical.

The first data revolution came from the dream of collecting data from consumer decision-making. With the advent of the web, firms pondered whether it might worth saving the vast amounts of data that customers were generating through their clicks and searches. For consumers, there was no hiding-after all, there is no online equivalent of discreetly checking out a magazine while a bookstore employee is looking the other way. Amazon.com has pretty much saved all user data from its beginning.

Back then, customers had no choice but to share their intentions with firms. If a technology enthusiast wanted to find out if a website sold a particular surveillance device, there was no shortcut but to type some keywords into a search box and therefore give the company a valuable intention stream. Companies, therefore, had all the power. Many tried often too hard to push products and advertisements. The consumer had no voice.

During the first data revolution, successful companies gained power by collecting, aggregating, and analyzing the customer data they collected. However, most companies did not know what to do and ended up burying their data in tombs.

The second data revolution brought about a new dimension to data creation: users started to actively contribute explicit data such as information about themselves, their friends, or about the items they purchased. These data went far beyond the clicks and search data that characterized the first decade of the web.

An early example of user-generated content was Amazon.com’s reviews system. The firm realized that users often trusted recommendations by other users more than promotional material found elsewhere on the web. By enabling users to actively contribute such explicit data, Amazon.com succeeded to leverage knowledge dormant in its large customer base to help customers with their purchasing decisions.

Later, Wikipedia increased transparency even more by allowing online collaboration. By allowing users to interact and build on top of each other, the site relinquished control over their space. The benefit of allowing such user interaction today is obvious-why spend time on hold with a customer service representative if we can just Google the cryptic error codes to see if someone else has already solved the same problem? People learned that by sheer large numbers, an online user community was likely to be more helpful than a representative employed by the company.

Today, the online world has shifted to a model of collaboration and explicit data creation. Successful firms develop systematic ways to encourage and reward users who contribute honest data. A good system does not try to trick customers into revealing demographics or contact information that is useful for the company. Rather, it rewards users with information that is useful to them.

Netflix, for example, allows users to contribute ratings for movies that they have seen. Users have an incentive to contribute accurate data because this will give them better recommendations for new movies. The 1999 “Web 2.0 company” MoodLogic (acquired by All Media Guide, in turn acquired by Macrovision) enabled users to create metadata about their favorite music. Why on earth would they do that? Because they got back playlists, which made it easier for them to discover new music they enjoyed. Such successful companies realized the key feature of a good incentive system: people need to see that they profit from the outcome in some way if they are willing to put in the effort to contribute truthfully.

In the last few years, users have gone a lot further than contributing metadata to movies and music: in fact, they have taken center stage. The center of the universe has shifted from e-business to me-business. Customers are also starting to discover each other, and to interact with each other. Knowing that they are not alone has shifted the balance of power from companies back to consumers. And they have begun to demand transparency. Customers are beginning to have a voice. They are realizing that the data they voluntarily contribute can help them and others with making decisions, providing true value. In turn, they want to be treated fairly as individuals by the companies they pay attention and money to.

What are the consequences of this change towards the expectations of consumers?

Successful interactions have become genuine communication with near-instantaneous feedback. For example, PayScale allows users to retrieve real-time salary reports based on their job title, location, education, and experience-but only after they have contributed their own data. As the expectations of users change, firms must spend more time developing incentive systems that will entice users to participate.

Indeed, the online world is beginning to be ruled by the expectations of the users. No longer is it sufficient for a search engine to cough up some hotels across the world when a weary traveler is looking for a good deal in Bangkok! As these consumer expectations shift, companies that want to stay relevant have no choice but to accept the ideas of the consumer revolution as swiftly as possible. For users, switching costs are cheap-firms can no longer think of “customer relationship management” as providing stickiness for thecustomer (just like fly paper provides stickiness to the fly). Industries such as real estate and automobiles whose business models are built on information asymmetries will quickly lose their revenues to those who increase transparency using data contributed by consumers.

This leaves us several deep questions to ponder, including what the implications are on customer expectations, and what companies can do to address these expectations. This is the social data revolution (SDR).

Social Data Revolution, Part 3 — Digital Exhibitionism: The Future of Relationships?

Yesterday alone, Facebook users issued 21 million friend requests. 17 million requests were accepted. So many new connections, and yet they’re all treated the same—what an oversimplification!

All Facebook links are created equal. But links can differ in strength—for example, a close friend versus a casual acquaintance. Links can be in different categories, like your boss versus a random hookup. And links can be asymmetric—Amy may think that Bob is a good friend, yet Bob may not trust Amy at all! The world is not a binary place.

Discovering Discovery: Don’t ask, Do tell

How can we use data to investigate these different properties of links? Today’s social networks do a lousy job of leveraging our existing data. Why do you need to manually confirm my friend request if we’re already calling, IM-ing, and emailing each other all the time? These data sources should be able to make a good guess about the strength and type of our relationship. Why not use existing data sources to propose better default responses?

If we give our networks a richer structure for our links and relationships, we will also be able to discover interesting facts about ourselves. Why is this important? By investigating implicit relations, we can gain insight into our relationships and how they work. For example, I might be surprised to find out that whenever I email my friend John, he always writes me back promptly whereas I always take 10 times longer to respond to him! Armed with this knowledge, I would ask my system to tell me to get my act together and crank out that response if I’m getting too delinquent.

Facebook 1.0 has helped us create an intimate network of our 17,000 friends. Will Facebook 2.0 help us manage them?

Mind the Explicit, Mine the Implicit

What else can data tell us about the quality of our relationships? One way to use data is to figure out differential interest in budding relationships. It’s easy to do this by looking at communications patterns in email, for example—does one person spend hours crafting that perfect email, only to get a reply that took only a few minutes to write? Or has he suddenly acquired a brand new set of favorite books, movies, and music that just happens to match his new love interest? People leave rich traces on the web—we can discover much more about them than the data they explicitly give.

This is only possible if we can look at the user’s history. After all, we can only make inferences about our behavior if we have a past to compare it against. But this introduces new questions: how much would you pay to know how long Monty spent writing you that email? How much would you pay to keep your data private?

Trust Networks

Social networks are also great for learning about trust. Let’s say that I’m thinking of entering in a business deal with you, but I don’t know you too well. Should I trust you?

There’s an easy way to use the power of networks to answer this question. Let’s just look at all of your other connections: do they trust you? We can give people reputation scores by allowing users to rate their interactions with friends. To make the system even more powerful, we could allow users to link their reputations. To illustrate: let’s say I trust my friend Mike so much that I am willing to attach a trust coefficient of 0.9. This implies that if Mike’s rating goes up by 1, I should get a rating boost of 0.9. Conversely, if someone has a bad experience with Mike and downgrades his rating by 1, my rating will also go down by 0.9. Through the power of the community, reputation ratings would spread quickly. (What trust coefficient would you attach to the author of this post?)

Reward Content Generation

One of the best ways to engage users is to get them to understand how every bit of data they contribute will end up benefiting them. In the example of trust networks, people can improve their own reputations by linking themselves with others. In my previous post on communication, I talked about a system where providing feedback on an email’s relevance would directly benefit you in the future. Online social networks need to reward people to provide explicit data, too.

The Facebook Feed was a brilliant idea for surfacing relevant content created by friends. Ideally, the Feed would create a positive feedback loop: good content provided by friends would get high ratings, which would motivate them to post even more good content. However, an early system of allowing users to rate the submissions of their friends was poorly designed—only 21% of users used the feature. On a rainy day, April 15, 2008, Facebook turned off the feedback system. What a step backward! I wish Facebook instead had created a better machine learning system to reward its users to generate and surface good content.

Social networks based on mutually confirmed binary relations was Day One in evolution of social networks. Introducing, richer semantics, more expressive structures including trust coefficients are the beginning of Day Two. What will the second week bring?

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Social Data Revolution

2009-11-01T07:18:00.001-08:00

Social Data Revolution, Part 1 — Time and Money: What Instantaneous and Free Communication is Doing For Consumers

Shifting the focus from transaction to relationship

In this era of limited communication, the firm only knew about the final orders, not the process of decision making. The focus was on transactions, not on relationships.

The new currency: May I have your attention, please?

Meta-data matter

Meta-data, data about the message, can help guide our decisions: how important it is for senders that their message gets read, and what is the message’s expected value for the reader?

To sum up, two data sources allow us to harness the power of the community: relevance predictions from the senders, and relevance assessments of the recipients.

The communication revolution is a meta-data revolution

Social Data Revolution, Part 2 — Why We Need a Sound Data Strategy

What are the consequences of this change towards the expectations of consumers?

Social Data Revolution, Part 3 — Digital Exhibitionism: The Future of Relationships?

Yesterday alone, Facebook users issued 21 million friend requests. 17 million requests were accepted. So many new connections, and yet they’re all treated the same—what an oversimplification!

Discovering Discovery: Don’t ask, Do tell

Facebook 1.0 has helped us create an intimate network of our 17,000 friends. Will Facebook 2.0 help us manage them?

Mind the Explicit, Mine the Implicit

Trust Networks

Social networks are also great for learning about trust. Let’s say that I’m thinking of entering in a business deal with you, but I don’t know you too well. Should I trust you?

Reward Content Generation

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TED Talks James Surowiecki: When social media became news

2009-10-31T08:40:00.001-07:00

comments which received in the talk, best talk from James, and best comment which pulled mw to write this in my blog

Wanja Svasek (-2)

Nov 4 2008: In my view this talk is short sighted
Somewhere i agree. but with the big picture i for sure do not.
Everything is a network.. not just the internet..the universe itself is a network of networks.
We are already slaves to this in the first place.
And next to that people getting locked into a network is something that happens when you remove choice.
Ants don't seen to have choice or never use it..
We humans loose choice by getting told that there is such a thing as wrong and right.. making us doubt.. and then logically go for what everyone else thinks is right.
I think a 'human' communication network like the internet that works purely on information and is seen as a place where every bit of info is just a possibility and wrong or right is as relative as everything else, has no reason why such a thing should flail.
In short it is doubt that creates science and space for adventure.
It is static ideas of good and bad that create a locked down system.
This has always been my soul reason to be against any kind of religion.
To believe is a lie.. it is trust and love you should give..
well.. enough rambling:)

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Copenhagen's Inconvenient Truth

2009-10-31T08:26:00.001-07:00

How to Salvage the Climate Conference

Summary --

The Copenhagen conference won't solve the problem of climate change once and for all. Rather than aiming for a broad international treaty, negotiators should strengthen existing national policies and seek targeted emissions cuts in both rich nations and the developing world.

MICHAEL A. LEVI is David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment at the Council on Foreign Relations.

This December, diplomats from nearly 200 countries will gather in Copenhagen to negotiate a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which for the first time bound wealthy countries to specific cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Most of these emissions come from burning fossil fuels -- coal, oil, and natural gas -- for energy, from deforestation, and from the agricultural sector. They must be cut deeply in the coming decades if the world is to control the risks of dangerous climate change.

Most of those devoted to slashing the world's greenhouse gas emissions have placed enormous weight on the Copenhagen conference. Speaking earlier this year about the conference, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was emphatic: "We must harness the necessary political will to seal the deal on an ambitious new climate agreement in December here in Copenhagen. . . . If we get it wrong we face catastrophic damage to people, to the planet."

Hopes are higher than ever for a breakthrough climate deal. For the past eight years, many argued that developing nations reluctant to commit to a new global climate-change deal -- particularly China and India -- were simply hiding behind the United States, whose enthusiastic engagement was all that was needed for a breakthrough. Now the long-awaited shift in U.S. policy has arrived. The Obama administration is taking ambitious steps to limit carbon dioxide emissions at home, and Congress is considering important cap-and-trade and clean-energy legislation. The road to a global treaty that contains the climate problem now appears to be clear.

But it is not so simple. The odds of signing a comprehensive treaty in December are vanishingly small. And even reaching such a deal the following year would be an extraordinary challenge, given the domestic political constraints in Washington and in other capitals that make such an agreement difficult to negotiate and ratify. The many government officials and activists seeking to solve the climate problem therefore need to fundamentally rethink their strategy and expectations for the Copenhagen conference.

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When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

2009-10-31T08:10:00.001-07:00

Title When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order

Author Martin Jacques

Publisher Penguin Press

Year 2009

Pages 576 pp.

ISBN 9781594201851

Price $29.95

With the prospect of China's economy surpassing the United States' in less than 20 years, the great debate today is over whether China will integrate into the existing world order or seek to transform it. Invoking the grand logic of the rise and fall of great powers, Jacques, a journalist, makes the case that China will dominate and reshape the global system. He argues that although China's first steps toward global preeminence are economic, eventually its political and cultural influence will be even greater -- and that, overall, "China's impact on the world will be at least as great as that of the United States over the last century, probably far greater." Jacques also claims that Beijing appears to offer the world an alternative route to modernity -- and therefore a different vision of world order. Having adopted the trappings of Western capitalism while embracing a more illiberal conception of social order, China is modernizing, not westernizing. Therefore, Jacques argues, its coming hegemony will reorient politics and society. But the book is better at describing differences between the East and the West -- their cities, customs, values -- than alternative logics of global order. It does not explore in any depth what it will mean for China to become a global hegemon. Hegemony involves building a system of institutions that other states seek to join, overseeing an extensive system of alliances, and providing public goods. The United States' liberal orientation has facilitated its leadership. It remains to be seen whether China can build a Pax Sinica without an open, rule-based world order.

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Better and Better: The Myth of Inevitable Progress | Foreign Affairs

2009-10-31T08:01:00.001-07:00

Indur Goklany's The Improving State of the World offers a healthy corrective to the pervasive view that everything is getting worse. But its facile suggestion that further advances are all but inevitable misreads the true causes of progress.

James Surowiecki is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Wisdom of Crowds.

via foreignaffairs.com

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Crowd computing

2009-10-31T07:58:00.001-07:00

Crowd computing is an overarching term which defines the plethora of human interaction tools that enable idea sharing, non-hierarchical decision making and the full utilization of the world’s mind space. Examples of these tools (many falling under the Web2.0 umbrella) include collaboration packages, information sharing software, such as Microsoft’s SharePoint, wikis, blogs, alerting systems, social networks, SMS, MMS, Twitter, Flicker, and even mashups. Business and society in general increasingly rely on the combined intelligence, knowledge, and life experiences of the “crowd” to improve processes, make decisions, identify solutions to complex problems and monitor changes in consumer taste. An early example of crowd computing was the discovery of a gold deposit location at the Moribund Red Lake Mine in Northern Ontario. Using all available data, the company, Goldcorp, Inc. had been unable to identify the location of new deposits on their land. In desperation, the CEO put all relevant geological data on the web and created a contest, open to anyone in the world. An obscure firm in Australia used their software and algorithms to crack the puzzle. As a result, the company found an additional 8 million ounces of gold at the mine. The only cost was the nominal prize money awarded.

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8 Steps to running your business on (mostly) free apps

2009-10-29T09:29:00.001-07:00

"I should thank me frd @dhaneshkk for this article."

If you spend, or plan to spend, substantial dollars on Web services or software support for your startup, you’ll want to read this post. I’m going to show you how, with my 8 Steps to Running Your Business Off Low-Cost Web-Apps, it is possible to run a substantial company on software services and infrastructure that are either entirely free, or available for a low monthly fee, on the Internet.

As an entrepreneur and bestselling author, I’ve lectured and written previously about how intense competition on the Web has lead to a proliferation of companies that offer mission-critical services for free or at very low-cost. I am not the only one who has recognized this phenomenon.

In late September, I took another step to try and amplify the benefits of this trend for entrepreneurs: I launched Search Free Apps , a search engine that includes over 700 hand-picked enterprise-quality applications that are free on the Web. This week I will also launch the Your Web Applications Audit by Search Free Apps, which you can use to save more money on the Web services you’re currently using, or to locate new services to support your startup’s low-cost expansion.

The benefits of this approach extend beyond lowering your operating costs. Avoiding a cost-prohibitive investment in custom technology will also afford your young company greater flexibility to adopt new, better Web technologies as superior technologies or services evolve. This will be even more important as your company grows. All of which adds-up to a more competitive firm.

At the end of this post, I share the list of free or low-cost apps that deliver mission critical infrastructure to my startup, Search Free Apps. I hope you try my service to find additional apps that suit your particular business. Even if you don’t, read my 8 Steps to Running Your Business Off Low-Cost Web-Apps, below. Follow them to gain even more value from my low-cost strategy.

1) Establish a bias towards software-as-a service.
Find free online applications (such as Weebly or ImageShack) that you rent on a monthly basis. Software should only be adopted in extreme situations. By adopting capabilities that reside on the Web, you eliminate the headaches associated with software maintenance. You also get the benefit of ongoing upgrades.

2) Identify the services you need; assume free or low-cost versions are available.
(See sample list below). Low-cost services should form the baseline for your ultimate choices. Then, any higher-cost service you identify needs to demonstrate the value of a premium price through some combination of factors including: better features, greater reliability, superior support, or greater ease of use. (In my experience, many premium-priced products do not).

3) Never commission custom software.
Custom code limits your flexibility by locking you into the offerings of a specific vendor for a lengthy period of time. You’ll pay for upgrades, and also lose the opportunity to try new low-cost Web services that come to market.

One way of thinking about this issue is to look at the costs of sophisticated services over time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that if a particular feature costs $50,000 to $250,000 today, a year from now it may well be available as a Web-based service that can be rented for less than $40 per month, and two years from now it may be one feature in a service package that rents for less than $25.00 per month.

4) Live by my 60% rule.
If a particular service meets 60% of your needs today it is what you should use. It’s good enough. As Web-based services are constantly enhancing their offerings, within a few months it will likely meet 80% of your needs, or even include valuable features that you had not imagined.

You must also accept that in a 60% world some potential customers will get away. But the appropriate question to ask is: How much revenue can I add to our business by filling in the gaps in a 60% solution? The answer is likely to be very small. Moreover, it’s my experience that businesses that invest in finding infrastructure services that are perfect, as opposed to good enough, rarely achieve profitability. They spend too much time looking for “perfect capabilities” outside their core offering, tend to over-spend on these capabilities, and thus, lack the flexibility of their competitors.

5) Focus on how a service works, not the brand-name provider who sells it.
In a large number of cases, sophisticated service platforms may be designed for one purpose, but can be implemented to provide a variety of purposes that are valuable to the needs of your enterprise. Think creatively about how a service may be extended and integrated into your infrastructure, and you will find many valuable uses for it.

6) Automate as much as possible.
There may be aspects of your business, particularly in your core offering, that require human intervention. However, you want to build a low-cost infrastructure that automates everything else. Once you need to put people power against any part of your infrastructure, you have lost the ability to easily scale the business.

7) Always have a backup ready.
The long-term reliability of any Web service should always be on your mind. I counsel companies to have a replacement for all services identified at the time they decide what services to use. Also include an estimate of the time it would take to replace a specific service, and an ongoing means of ensuring any valuable data or records accumulated by any of your services are transferred to you..

8) Learn html.
You or someone you trust must be educated in simple html. Sure, many Web businesses have in-house capabilities that eliminate this issue. However, I have seen too many start-ups founders from outside the Internet industry become totally at the mercy of outside vendors. For the lack of some easily obtained knowledge, they lose the ability to make the majority of the responsible judgments and tradeoffs advocated above.

The low-cost or free Web app can be a very powerful tool in the arsenal of any company. In today’s intensely competitive environment every startup founder should carefully investigate whether his or her company is fully integrating these cost-saving and flexibility-enhancing services.

Sites where I get free or low-cost services for Search Free Apps:

Mozy: continuous online backup of PC’s. It’s free for the first 2 Gb.

Weebly: free site hosting and easy Web site creation service.

Wufoo: sophisticated forms; free for the first three forms.

Weber: auto-response service, with unlimited follow-ups and mailings for $19.95/month.

Feedburner: free RSS management.

Typepad Pro: unlimited blogs for 14.95/month. (Other are free, like WordPress.org.)

Web-Stat: Web tracking free, or $5.00/month.

Image Shack: free web-based management of images.

Bruce Judson is a Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management, the author of Go It Alone!: The Secret to Building a Successful Business on Your Own (one of the first books to be published on the Web, Bruce’s book is yet another free resource for you to tap!), and the founder of Search Free Apps.
Copyright 2007 Bruce Judson. All rights reserved.

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Add files to your Dropbox!‏

2009-10-29T06:07:00.001-07:00

Hi Swathi Dharshana,

We noticed that you signed up and installed Dropbox recently, but haven't really used it yet.

If you put files into your Dropbox folder, they'll instantly be available on any computer that you install Dropbox on. Once files are in your Dropbox, they are automatically backed up and accessible online.

Try putting files in your Dropbox today!

- The Dropbox Team

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Crowd Science

2009-10-29T05:45:00.001-07:00

Changing how you think about market research sample

We believe in the long-term sustainable approach to data collection. Crowd Science offers a sampling and data collection methodology that not only achieves the reach of river sampling, but also the targeting capabilities of traditional panel research. Continuous website audience profiling allows Crowd Science technology to efficiently and accurately target the right sample in the right contexts. This gives researchers access to targeted respondents who would never join an online panel but are happy to participate in surveys on their terms. This provides ‘passive’ survey takers the best chance for a positive experience. The end result is a sustainable long-term option for the market research industry.

Who are we?

Crowd Science is a research technology and services company that offers a fresh approach to online research. It was founded by a group of software engineers and researchers who came out of comScore, Apple, Netscape, IBM, and Cisco. Crowd Science is a Granite Ventures portfolio company, with locations in Silicon Valley and Toronto.

Your Crowd Science Demographics Package

https://app.crowdscience.com/account/b2ef2e5d67/sites/add/

Before you can begin, please choose your ideal package plan

Pricing Plan (more information)

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Easy setup

Set up is simple. All you need to do is create an account, add your site, tag your pages (just like existing analytics/ad/widget services available), and you are done. No worries, we are compatible with existing ad systems, so you can sit back and enjoy.

Polite, customizable invitations

No flashing, no punching monkeys, no free iPods, and a zero-pixel footprint. We know you care about your visitors, and so do we. Our main focus is to be as polite and non-intrusive as possible to your audience. You can choose from four types of invitations, customize colors, and include your own branding and invitation text. It's your call.

Audience profiling with short inline surveys

Visitors stay on your site while taking the survey. Each question has been carefully selected to be useful for publishers and advertisers alike. Our surveys are short and to the point. Crowd Science Demographics' technology makes sure that only a small portion of visitors are invited to provide information. Being temporary and occasional is the key to keeping your audience focused and happy.

Comprehensive reporting

Real-time reporting. As a publisher, you’ll have full and controlled access to your data via the Crowd Science account interface, where you can choose who else gets to see your data, as well as how they will see it (in pie and bar charts).

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We also feature day-in-week and hour-in-day displays. You’ll be able to identify the “shape” of your audience.

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You can export your data in Excel/CSV format, and use it with other tools or data. There is no format lock-in and you are free to do what you please with your data.

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Google Wave Use Cases: Education

2009-10-29T05:07:00.001-07:00

Written by Richard MacManus

Google Wave is a much hyped new Internet-based communications and collaboration platform. It was announced at the end of May, released as a 'Preview' product shortly after and 100,000 more invites were made available at the end of September.

Early users reported mixed feelings. But one month after Google Wave was opened to tens of thousands of people, how are people using it now? What use cases are being discovered? Let's start with the education sector. We'll explore other use cases in upcoming posts.

What is Google Wave Again?

A quick reminder of what Google Wave is. In a nutshell, Google Wave is a new form of real-time communications. Google describes it as "equal parts conversation and document." In our first 'hands-on' post at the beginning of June, we described it as "real-time email with a big dose of IM built-in" - although we noted that "this only describes a small part of what Wave can do."

In a recent CNN profile, Wave creators Lars and Jens Rasmussen described it as making email "collaborative and instant."

Wave in Class

After searching some public 'waves,' we came across an educational wave. Entitled 'Wave in Class,' this wave was started by Loren Baum (a self-described "collaborative learning enthusiast" and graduate student at Ben Gurion University) and Sam Boland (a Politics student and "Tech Enthusiast" at Occidental College, Los Angeles).

The wave was started to explore concepts like "Collaborative Note Taking" and "Wave as a Debate Host." Nearly 100 people are included in the wave, ranging from teachers to PhD students to IT professionals to high school students.

This particular wave was framed at the start as being "a set of collaborative documents, supported by a chat."

As a note-taking tool, Samuel Boland wrote that "there appears to be a concensus that this [Google Wave] will work as a note-taking tool, the only disagreement is over how to implement it." Options for note-taking include voluntary extra-curricular groups, rotating in-class groups and small in-class groups.

A few users enthused later in the wave that "Google Wave combines a lot of the best features from different applications" - but with a real-time twist. It was noted that while Google Docs can be used to share notes and collaborate on assignments, with Google Wave students can collaborate in real-time. This could be important in education for things like notetaking, asking questions (a.k.a. a backchannel) and collaborative projects.

Another feature of Wave that would be useful for education purposes, according to this 100-person wave, is the play-back ability - "so instructors can see exactly who did what, and see the progression of ideas."

Will Wave Make Students Lazy?

One concern that seemed to pop up several times in the wave was that Google Wave could make it too easy for lazy students to get by. As Justin Neitzey succinctly put it: "I don't think kids should be allowed piggy back of the work of others."

This is a similar concern that some in the education system had with Wolfram Alpha, another innovative Web tool that is set to change the way education is delivered.

Manny Guendulay responded that "reading those notes and participating in the collaboration of those notes hold totally different of levels of thinking." He argued that "the person simply reading the notes (passively learning) has no chance to perform at the same level as someone who helped collaborate (active learning) on those notes, or even watched and read along while they were being created."

In other words, engaging with Google Wave - and the Web in general in fact - will lead to smarter, better performing students. That sounds reasonable to us, but time will tell for both Google Wave and Wolfram Alpha on that score.

Conclusion

Overall, it is clear that Google Wave has potential to be very useful in the education system, particularly as a real-time collaborative note-taking tool. Three students experimented with just that in a lecture; the resulting notes were said to be "more complete" than if Wave hadn't been used.

If you're interested in exploring other education waves, check these out:

Higher Ed Directory (meta)
Software Roles in Education - a structured, goal driven exploration
Wave for Notes - about note taking
Student-side Class Management: a Wave template

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

The Future Is Big Data in the Cloud

2009-10-27T08:12:00.001-07:00

While when it comes to cloud computing, no one has entirely sorted out what’s hype and what isn’t, nor exactly how it will be used by the enterprise, what is becoming increasingly clear is that Big Data is the future of IT. To that end, tackling Big Data will determine the winners and losers in the next wave of cloud computing innovation.

Data is everywhere (be it from users, applications or machines) and as we get propelled into the “Exabyte Era” (PDF), is growing exponentially; no vertical or industry is being spared. The result is that IT organizations everywhere are being forced to grapple with storing, managing and extracting value from every piece of it -– as cheaply as possible. And so the race to cloud computing has begun.

This isn’t the first time IT architectures have been reinvented in order to remain competitive. The shift from mainframe to client-server was fueled by disruptive innovation in computing horsepower that enabled distributed microprocessing environments. The subsequent shift to web applications/web services during the last decade was enabled by the open networking of applications and services through the Internet buildout. While cloud computing will leverage these prior waves of technology –- computing and networking –- it will also embrace deep innovations in storage/data management to tackle Big Data.

A Big Data stack
But as with prior data center platform shifts, a new “stack” (like mainframe and OSI) will also need to emerge before cloud computing will be broadly embraced by the enterprise. Basic platform capabilities, such as security, access control, application management, virtualization, systems management, provisioning, availability, etc. will have to be standard before IT organizations are able to adopt the cloud completely. In particular, this new cloud framework needs the ability to process data in increasingly real-time and greater orders of magnitude -– and do it at a fraction of what it would typically cost -– by leveraging commodity servers for storage and computing. Maybe cloud computing is all about creating a new “Big Data stack.”

In many ways, this cloud stack has already been implemented, albeit in primitive form, at large-scale Internet data centers, which quickly encountered the scaling limitations of traditional SQL databases as the volume of data exploded. Instead, high-performance, scalable/distributed, object-orientated data stores are being developed internally and implemented at scale. At first, many solved this problem by sharding vast MySQL instances, in essence using them more as data stores than true relational databases (no complex table joins, etc.). As Internet data centers scaled, however, sharding MySQL obviously didn’t.

The rise of DNRDBMS
In response to this, large web properties have been building their own so-called “NoSQL” databases, also known as distributed, non-relational database systems (DNRDBMS). But while it can seem like a different version sprouts up every day, they can largely be categorized into two flavors: One, distributed key value stores, such as Dynamo (Amazon) and Voldemort (LinkedIn); and two, distributed column stores such as Big Table (Google), Cassandra (Facebook), HBase (Yahoo/Hadoop) and Hypertable (Zvents).

These projects are in various stages of deployment and adoption (it is early days, to be sure), but promise to deliver a “cloud-scale” data layer on which applications can be built quickly and elastically, all while having aspects of the reliability/availability of traditional databases. One facet that is common across these myriad of NoSQL databases is a data caching layer, essentially a high-performance, distributed memory caching system that can accelerate web applications by avoiding continual database hits. Memcached’s (disclosure: Accel is an investor in Northscale, parent company of Memcached) broad distribution (which is behind pretty much every Web 2.0 application) has become this de facto layer and is now accepted as a “standard” tier in data centers.

Managing non-transactional data has become even more daunting. From log files to clickstream data to web indexing, Internet data centers are collecting massive volumes of data that need to be processed cheaply in order to drive monetization value. One solution that was been deployed by some of the largest web properties (Yahoo, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.) for massive parallel computation and distributed file systems in a cloud environment is Hadoop (disclosure: Accel is an investor in Cloudera, the company behind Hadoop). In many cases, Hadoop essentially provides an intelligent primary storage and compute layer for the NoSQL databases. Although the framework has roots in Internet data centers, Hadoop is quickly penetrating broader enterprise use cases, as the diverse set of participants at the recent Hadoop World NYC event made clear.

As this cloud stack hardens, new applications and services –- previously unthinkable -– will come to light, in all shapes and sizes. But the one thing they will all have in common is Big Data.

Ping Li is a partner with Accel.

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

Most influential open-source gurus

2009-10-27T08:05:00.001-07:00

Influence in open-source development communities is earned through years of writing and sharing great code. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, influence in the business side of open source is also gained through sharing expertise, and not necessarily from making mountains of cash.

At least, that's the lesson I take away from MindTouch's inaugural survey of 50 open-source business executives. MindTouch, an open-source collaboration company, has spent the last few months surveying executives within the commercial open-source community, asking them to name the most influential people within the commercial open-source ecosystem.

The result is effectively an all-star list of open-source business executives. The top five are as follows:

Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM
Matt Asay, vice president of business development, Alfresco (and fellow CNET blogger)
Mårten Mickos, entrepreneur-in-residence, Benchmark Capital, and former CEO, MySQL
Jim Whitehurst, CEO, Red Hat
Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO, Acquia

As part of MindTouch’s 2009 open source best practices research, we asked C and VP level Open Source Executives who they thought are the most influential people in the industry today. Over 50 votes from Executives in Europe and North America were cast to determine the 2009 edition (note: they could not vote for anyone in their own company). What makes this list remarkable is that industry insiders were the judges.

There were a few surprises from outside of the open source industry. For instance, Steve Ballmer was voted in because of his negative remarks on the open source industry and its subsequent positive impact. Vivek Kundra was voted in because of his contributions to the industry inside the US Federal Government (in fact the Whitehouse.gov site was revamped with open source software). Notably absent however are any influential women.

This list of the top influential Executives of the 2009 is ranked by the effect these individuals have had on the open source industry. Not all are recognizable, but these leaders are the movers, shakers and thought leaders of the open source industry. Want to know the future direction of open source? Just ask a few of the people on this list.

Rank

Executive

Biography

Larry Augustin

Larry Augustin is CEO of SugarCRM. One of the group who coined the term “Open Source”, he has written and spoken extensively on Open Source worldwide. In 1993 he founded VA Linux (now SourceForge, NASDAQ:LNUX), where he served as CEO until August 2002. While CEO he launched SourceForge.net and led the company through an IPO in 1999.

Matt Asay

Matt Asay has been involved with open source since 1998, and is one of the industry’s leading open source business strategists. Asay currently manages sales and business development activities in the Americas for Alfresco. Asay also writes a very influential open source blog on CNET.

Martin Mickos

Mårten Gustaf Mickos was chief executive officer (CEO) of MySQL AB. He served as chief executive officer from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun bought MySQL AB. He served as senior vice president of the database group at Sun Microsystems until February 2009.In February 2008 he was announced as member of the board of Mozilla Messaging, in May 2009, he also joined the board of directors at RightScale.In September 2009 venture capital firm Benchmark Capital hired Mickos as their Entrepreneur In Residence.

^{Jim Whitehurst}

Jim Whitehurst was named President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat in December 2007. Whitehurst joined Delta Air Lines in 2002, serving in various roles, most recently as Chief Operating Officer, responsible for Operations, Sales and Customer Service, Network and Revenue Management, Marketing and Corporate Strategy. Prior to joining Delta, Whitehurst served as Vice President and Director of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and held various leadership roles in their Chicago, Hong Kong, Shanghai and Atlanta offices.

Dries Buytaert

Dries Buytaert created Drupal in 2001 and has led the software project ever since. He has guided it through rapid growth and to widespread acclaim. Dries is able to motivate the burgeoning community of users and developers by communicating ‘the big picture’ while paying careful and measured attention to the technical details essential to good software development. These two factors have been crucial to Drupal’s popularity and success to date.

Honorable Mentions

Individual	Their Company	Individual	Their Company
Mark Radcliffe	DLA Piper	Mark Shuttleworth	Ubuntu Project
Andrew Aitken	Olliance Group	Rod Johnson	SpringSource
Marc Fleury	Retired (JBoss)	Scott Mcnealy	Sun Microsystems

The full list is available here.

The common theme running through these top-five vote getters is how open they've been with their peers. Larry Augustin sits on several boards of open-source companies, but he also frequently speaks at industry events and has been involved in open source from its inception.

Matt Asay, my friend and fellow CNET blogger, sits on more than 10 open-source advisory boards, chairs the Open Source Business Conference, hosts an informal get-together every year (called Open Source Goat Rodeo--don't ask why), blogs at an unhealthy rate for CNET on open source, and has actively helped a range of aspiring open-source entrepreneurs understand the mechanics of running an open-source business.

Mårten Mickos made the world safe for the $1 billion open-source acquisition, but he has also traveled the globe speaking at open-source events and is very generous with his time, sharing know-how and best practices with other open-source executives.

Jim Whitehurst, breaking the typical Red Hat mold, has been active in industry events, has hosted a range of dinners and other small-scale, intimate events with open-source executives. He is amazingly accessible, given that he has a fast-growing open-source company to run. It's unfortunate that Whitehurst is the only Red Hat executive to make the list; Red Hat should follow his lead and be more permeable to its peers. Its influence would grow accordingly, just as Whitehurst's has.

Finally, there's Dries Buytaert, who blogs frequently on his project, Drupal, but also regularly attends and speaks at industry events. He has also been active behind the scenes, working with other open-source companies to share information on how to optimize community development.

Open-source code becomes valuable when you give it away. The same holds true for open-source business expertise. There are individuals who have made more money than these with open-source software, but in terms of influence, the more you share, the more influential you become.

What do you think? Who else should be on the list? Who influences you?

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

We hate HomeWork

2009-10-27T06:25:00.001-07:00

The Best Way to CHEAT in EXAMS

# The long-sleeved shirt method

This approach is best used in the winter. Before an exam you should write a whole bunch of information you think is important on you forearms. Then put on a long-sleeved shirt to cover your arms. Make sure to get a seat in the middle of the room, so a teacher may not get a good look at you rolling up your sleeve for a minute. The rest is obvious.

# The hat trick

A very easy way to cheat on exams is to wear a hat (preferably a baseball one) forward. With your eyes concealed from a surveying teacher's view, you can glance over to the exam of the person next to you. The good old "wandering eyes method," but without the worries of the instructor saying "Keep your eyes on your own paper" because he cannot see your eyes. But beware of those teachers who walk around, make sure to sneak a peek at where they are to minimize your chances of getting caught. Jeff (*****@*****.edu) adds that, "At my school, the most popular way for guys to cheat was similar to your 'hat trick.' They would make a crib sheet, and then tape it on the underside of the bill. The way guys wear their hats so low on their heads, most of the teachers still haven't figured it out. Just be careful you don't tilt your head too far back or your notes will be revealed." And especially don't wear your hat backwards, then you can't read your notes.

# Desk notes

Very simple and to the point. There is one sure fire way to cheat on an exam, and that is to write on the desk. This is best used for math/science exams or some multiple choice. When the instructor is still not ready to start the exam, and you are still allowed to have books out, write a few quick notes on the desk. If the instructor comes by during the exam just push your papers over it, and when its all over just rub it off with your hand to destroy the evidence.

# Kleenex Method

Sometimes instructors have tissues on their desk. This mainly works sometime after a few people have turned in their exams. So during an exam make like you are sick: cough, gag, blow your nose, basically do anything to give you an excuse to get up and take a tissue from the teacher's desk. No teacher would ever say no to a student coming up and asking for a tissue. But while you're up there sneak a peek of the tests people already handed in. Remember what you saw and write what someone else already wrote, but be sure to footnote! Alexander (*****@*****) net says that, "another good way to cheat is to get some 'Puffs Extra Thick' tissues," and in them write information you don't feel like studying to remember, and use up a box or two of tissues on the test.

# The all-knowing TI-82

This method only works for classes in which a calculator is needed to do some of the math. Make sure to borrow a friends TI-82, or some other nice expensive graphing calculator if you don't own one. With this little gadget you can type in formulas, notes, even examples with step-by-step instructions. If you think you'll get caught, don't worry you won't. This method is fool-proof. Your teacher may know about possible cheating like this, but refuse to let him reset your calculator. This would erase all the contents of the calculator, instead argue that you have your life's work stored in it, and that it contains the launch codes for the US nuclear arsenal (Just make up something good). Some fella who goes by "MRF" (*****@*****.edu) sent this, "2 variations on the TI-85. I have a friend who is in the habit of taking his cellular phone out of his back pocket whenever he sits down so he doesnt crush it. You write notes in the alphanumeric memory location. Or: Timex Data Link Watch note mode. Nuff said." I guess so mrf!

# The buddy system

This is an old method that still is undetectable. Sit next to a friend who knows what is going on in class, or pay some stranger off, and take the test next to this person. When they finish, which will be way before you because you haven't got a clue as to what is going on, have them sit back and hold their exam up so you have full view of their answers. Copy away!

# Grab-bag method

Make sure to bring all of your notes to the exam. Get there early at least in time to have a lot of seats to choose from to sit in. Get your notes out and place your backpack on the floor by your feet. When the instructor calls for everyone to put their notes in their bags, be sure to place yours so that you can see your notes from taking the test. Pull the sides of your bag up so that it makes a protective wall around your notes so no one can see your notes but you. It's like taking an open book test, but not.

# Stress Relief

This method is similiar to the hat trick method, and was submitted by Ron (*****@gnn.com). During the exam sigh deeply as if you are so totally stressed out. Then procede to lean your head into the hand that doesn't have a pen. From the front this looks as if you are so stressed and frustrated that you are about to bust. Remember, teachers like to see students stress out on exams so this will can only help you. Meanwhile, your head is tilted directly at the person's paper next to you or across the aisle. You have to have good eyesight because you are looking out of the corner of your eye, but it is shielded from the instructor by your hand. If you wear contacts remember to clean them with the proper enzymes to make sure they are crystal clear. Or there is the occasional stretch. and yawn. really stretch back, arms in the air, yawn and close your eyes, turn your head to the side, and open the eye furthest away from the instructor. They will see one eye closed and assume the other is as well (they can't see it) you have about five seconds here to either check your answer off someone elses, or just get six or seven multiple choice answers! Using this with several more adventurous cheating methods will increase the success rate.

# Doublemint!

Here's a modification to the crib note method suggested by some fellow who did not give a normal name so I didn't know whether to include his alias (*****@netctrl.com). Everyone likes to chew gum, well except those weird people on the cinnaburst commercials, and depending on the teacher most will let you chew it in class. So before the test write all the information you think you will need, and even some you don't need, on the inside of your gums wrappers. When you get stuck reach for a piece of gum, chew and cheat away. No one will ever think that Wrigley's gum was an accomplice to your cheating, if they did than your teacher is very clever. Always keep one with no notes in case your teacher questions you, and you should offer him a piece of gum as a gesture of good faith. Tell him, "Ok I'll give you a piece, but how would some guy at the candy factory know what I needed to know for your test! Unless you know the guys at the factory and tried to set me up!" This also works well on cough drops with paper wrappers especially since a teacher usually has no problem with cough drops.

# Erase the Evidence

This was suggested by Chris (*****@*****.no) and complements many of the aforementioned standard cheating techniques. If you don't know a THING of the subject of your exam, it would be wise to have a friend (that knows the subject pretty well, or is easily bought) write down the nessesary 1,2,3's or years on a eraser or paper inside a pen, and have you borrow it. In fact, Chris claims to have tested this method under very strict control lab experiments, and it has been proven to work repeatedly. A rular or back of a calculator or dictionary works well too, but the eraser can leave no trace, just start erasing, and "poof" any evdence has vanished. Sam (*****@*****.com) writes that his "method is fairly simple, but it works. If your school has desks with a polished surface, "write" necessary data on desk using eraser or (my preferred method) the sweat of your hand. You can only "read" data if you look at desk from certain angle (reflection of light). I have yet to meet a teacher who had any clue of what I was doing.

# The crib sheet

There is always the age old method of using a crib sheet. To do this you need to take an tiny piece of paper, say smaller than a 3x5 index card and jam every piece of information that you think will come in handy on it. Bring it to the exam, and keep it hidden either with the exam papers or in the palm of your hand. The Phantom (*****@*****.uk) adds that a very effective way to conceal a crib sheet is to wrap your wrist with some gauze or bandage. You can write on the bandage or slip a crib note in their. He goes on to say that another good way to cheat is to hide crib notes inside the casings of a pen that unscrews. Nihilist (*****@*****.net) writes us about how he and the *entire* rest of my class got through 3 years of Japanese with straight A's and not knowing ONE DAMN THING with many of the cheating methods we proudly feature here at the Cheaters Paradise (Now I just want to get one thing straight, this site has only been up since mid-May, and only started to gain some recognition since school began). But this site is missing one that's served this guy well, so we decided to let this fella let everyone in on this cheat. "You need to buy a clear bottle of your favorite beverage (Mountain Dew, Coke, Dr. Pepper, etc.) and carefully peel off the label wrapped around it. Then tape a big crib sheet (or whatever) around the outside and then glue the label back. As you drink your beverage down you get your answers and the instructor will never be the wiser." I must say, that I like it, otherwise it wouldn't have been added. And just so you don't think I'm tooting my own horn, here's this guy's homepage. And "The Swamp Thing," and because that was so original I'm gonna tell everyone your name is Darwyn (*****@*****.ca), decided to make me aware that there is also the old hide-your-crib-notes-under-a-patch-trick (Well just to clear the air, I have never heard of this method, but after reading it I can honestly say I wish I had). For this method you simply attach patches to your jeans on 3 sides to make a secret pocket, and the crib sheet hides inside! He also wanted to make the following Public Service Announcement, "Remember, you are only cheating yourself!" Well Al Bundy says, "It's only cheating if you get caught," and he scored FOUR touchdowns in a single game, so there!

# The Watergate Tape

This was submitted by Ed (*****@*****.com) and it is a variation of the long sleeve method. Write your answers on masking tape and put it in the inside of the cuffs of your jacket/shirt. Leave the cuffs unbuttoned (You don't have to scrub this off after the test like the arm method, all you do is peel the tape and throw it away). You can also put tape inside your lapels, on your socks (Cross your legs and pull your pants legs up until you see the notes. This works very well. If the teacher thinks that you are writing on your arm, all you do to prove her wrong is to push up your sleeves. Just make sure you don't have hairy arms otherwise this may hurt a bit. Robin Williams, if you're reading this, don't try this at home!

# Pre-emptive strike

Also submitted by Ed, this one requires a room decorated with alot of posters, art, projects and such. Remember there is no "I" in "team". Gosh, all those Sesame Street episodes about "cooperation" really paid off! Since this is a real account, this is exactly what Ed said: "We had several people in on this one (Mid term exams). One person made a poster of latin verbs that we were going to have to have on our test (It was announced ahead of time) and placed it in a strategic area in the classroom just prior to the 1st Period bell. When we came in at 6th period (the last of the day), our proud poster was still in place. About half of the class copied from the poster and blew the curve. After class, the teacher discovered the poster, but could not retest about 100 students because we had already left for Christmas break. Man was she smoked." How sweet it is! Looks like Christmas, or Hannukah, or Kwanza (I'm not sure if these are spelled correctly) came early for this bunch of students.

# Like the back of my hand!

"I couldn't believe u forgot the age-old method of writing whatever information you think you'ld need on your hand!" screams Debbie (*****@*****.com.sg). Well she was talking about the simplest cheat of all, writing on the palm that of your hand. A am sorry I forgot it, but it ain't easy making sure all these cheats get posted. Though this one may be risky, because it's so damn obvious, it is still an old stand-by.

# Whisper Those Sweet Nothings

Mark (*****@*****.com) reminds us about the easiest method of all, to just talk to your classmates outside of the exam. "If there are two classes for the same course, ask the people in the other class what is on the test. This has worked very well in high school, but I'm not sure if it would be any good in university." Well it does work, mostly in entry level courses, but hey, that makes Freshman year even more fun.

Posted via web from sdn's posterous

Web 3.0

2009-10-16T20:35:00.001-07:00

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)

I have written a few pieces already addressing the disjointed nature of the web, whereby, you go one place for content, another for community, and a third for commerce, the most notable of these is the popular, 4C: Yahoo’s Turnaround Formula.

Let’s quickly recap the terminology:

3C = Content, Commerce, Community |
4th C = Context |
P = Personalization |
VS = Vertical Search

This, I submit, is the formula for the future: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Web 2.0 has been a nichy phenomenon with hundred and thousands of microcap efforts addressing one of the Cs, lately, Community being the most popular force, producing companies like MySpace, Facebook, Piczo, Xanga, and Flixster.

In Web 1.0, Commerce had been the driving force, that produced companies like Netflix, BlueNile, Amazon, and eBAY. It had also resulted in the Dotcom meltdown.

The same period that is seeing the surge of Web 2.0, has also seen a great deal of investment in Vertical Search, like Sidestep for Travel.

Personalization has remained limited to some unsatisfactory efforts by the MyYahoo team, their primary disadvantage being the lack of a starting Context. More recently, Netvibes
has raised a lot of buzz, but also lacks the same organizing principle: Context.

In Web 3.0, I predict, we are going to start seeing roll-ups. We will see a trunk that emerges from the Context, be it film (Netflix), music (iTunes), cooking / food, working women, single parents, … and assembles the Web 3.0 formula that addresses the whole set of needs of a consumer in that Context.

Imagine.

-I am a petite woman, dark skinned, dark haired, brown eyed. I have a distinct personal style, and only certain designers resonate with it (Context).

-I want my personal SAKS Fifth Avenue which carries clothes by those designers, in my size (Commerce).

-I want my personal Vogue, which covers articles about that Style, those Designers, and other emerging ones like them (Content).

-I want to exchange notes with others of my size-shape-style-psychographic and discover what else looks good. I also want the recommendation system tell me what they’re buying (Community).

-There’s also some basic principles of what looks good based on skin tone, body shape, hair color, eye color … I want the search engine to be able to filter and match based on an algorithm that builds in this knowledge base (Personalization, Vertical Search).

Now, imagine the same for a short, fat man, who doesn’t really have a sense of what to wear. And he doesn’t have a wife or a girl-friend. Before Web 3.0, he could go to the personal shopper at Nordstrom.

With Web 3.0, the internet will be his Personal Shopper.

Web 3.0 & the Semantic Web

My definition of Web 3.0 is one of the most popular entry points into this blog. In it, I proposed the vision of a web which becomes increasingly verticalized by “Context”, and the relevant Content, Community and Commerce elements are successfully mashed up “in Context”. I also proposed 2 other elements: Vertical / Contextual Search, and Personalization. Thus, I concluded, Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

I got both extremes of reactions to this formula. But I also got some good questions and observations, which, after several months of discussions, warrant a follow-on synthesis post.

One question is about Tim Berner’s Lee’s Semantic Web definition and how it correlates with my vision. Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.” [Wikipedia]

Well, yes, my vision is similar. Except, while Tim is an academic, and thinks in terms of new technology, I am an entrepreneur, and I think in terms of execution and viable, sustainable business models, not just technology.

So, let me now provide the bridge between Tim’s thoughts and mine.

You see, I grew up in India, with a household full of servants. However politically incorrect it may be to say so, I thoroughly enjoyed the lifestyle of being able to delegate tedious tasks to these servants. Thus, in the future that I envision, I would very much like to see Intelligent Agent “Servants” taking care of lots of my repetitive tasks.

Now, I happen to have worked on AI algorithms a fair bit, over the years, and can assure you, that for Agent technology to work, you would need to constrain the domain of its activity. Intelligent Agents would never be successful in providing value if let loose in an unconstrained environment. Thus, it needs “Context”.

A “Travel Agent” is not the same as a “Personal Shopper Agent” or a “Personal Financial Advisor Agent” or a “Real Estate Agent”. All those agents are entirely possible, if you design them in the context of the vocabulary (Semantics) of the vertical domain. Unconstrained, and without context, they fail. Thus, the Semantic Web can only be implemented in a Contextual Domain.

And within each Contextual Domain, you would find a sustainable business model that includes Advertising and eCommerce revenues, indicating that the future of the Web, Web 3.0 as we are trying to call it, is a Verticalized, Contextualized, Personalized Web.

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) + Place

Yes, we need to add a new variable to the definition of Web 3.0, and that variable is Place.

Imagine.

You are on a business trip in New York, and you need to buy a gift for your 13 year old son. You need a Size 8 Nike Air Zoom, and you have exactly 30 minutes before you need to zoom out of Manhattan towards JFK, to catch the flight back home.

Today, you have no way of knowing which store closest to you would have in their inventory a Size 8 Nike Air Zoom.

But in the web’s perhaps not too distant future, you can presumably look it up online.

Indeed, as Cal McElroy has put it, It’s About Place.

Place, here, encompasses location. Where ‘you’ are, via GPS technology. Where ‘things’ and ‘places’ are ‘near’ you. Via GIS technology.

You may be at a beach resort in Santorini, and want to know what’s the best spot to catch a beautiful sunset. You may be in Rome looking for a great family run Trattoria near Piazza Parlamento, where politicians, you’ve heard, often gather for meals. Or, you may be looking for a new home or a new job, and need to map out the amenities (Grocery Store, Dry Cleaning, Gym, Restaurants, Nail Salon, Hair-dresser, …) in the neighborhood.

In other words, if you take each Context we have discussed, and explore its “Place” dimension, you will find a set of open problems emerging. The solutions to these problems need to become a part of the new web, so I propose to include it in my Web 3.0 definition, which therefore, becomes:

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) + Place

Related companies: Navteq, TomTom, TeleAtlas, Garmin. You may also want to look up a company called Local.com. Local is also a big part of IAC’s strategy.

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Steve Job’s Commencement Address

2009-10-16T07:53:00.001-07:00

This is one of my favorite speeches of all times and was given by Steve Jobs at Stanford’s 2005 graduation ceremony. His philosophy of life and business is very similar to what I also believe in. That’s why, he’s truly a rock star and huge mentor to our industry. Hopefully, one day I also have the chance to share a similar message in a similar ceremony. Enjoy!

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

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Announcing support for PHP and other languages on Windows Azure

2009-10-16T02:55:00.001-07:00

The Azure Services Platform team is delivering on its commitment to providing an interoperable, comprehensive and flexible cloud platform.

Windows Azure

At MIX09, the Windows Azure team is updating its CTP to include feature updates which will allow developers to take advantage of:

FastCGI: allows developers to deploy and run web applications written with 3rd party programming languages such as PHP. This provides developers using non-Microsoft languages the ability to take advantage of scalability on Windows Azure. (Read more here: Using 3rd Party Programming Languages via FastCGI)
.NET Full Trust: provides developers with a level of flexibility in Windows Azure that removes limitations on .NET Libraries which require full trust (including .NET Services) .NET Full Trust, via spawning process and p/invoke, also allows developers to utilize existing investments in native code or legacy components that they will now be able to invoke on Windows Azure. (Read more here: .NET Full Trust)
Geolocation: provides developers with the ability to specify a location for their applications and data to build responsive services with lower network latency as well as the capability to meet location-based regulatory and legal requirements. This feature will be available a few weeks after MIX 2009. (Read more here: Geo Location Enables Developers To Choose Data Centers and Group Applications & Storage)

A new version of the developer SDK and Tools for Visual Studio will be available for download to enable developers to take advantage of the new features. The SDK update will include:

Managed Full Trust support (including Native Code support via P/Invoke and spawning native code processes)
Support for FastCGI applications.
Support for rewrite rules via the URL Rewrite Module. Creates URLs so developers can lead users to shorter, search engine friendly, and easier to remember URLs.
Support for SQL Server as the data store for Development Storage – move from SQL Express to full SQL Server for backend developer store.

In addition to supporting the latest Windows Azure SDK, the Tools for Visual Studio will offer:

Native debugging of roles called via PInvoke running on the Development Fabric
FastCGI starter template
Chained install of both the Tools and SDK (one install)
Update notification for newer releases

To summarize, this is what Windows Azure entails as of today:

Computation Services

Ability to run Microsoft ASP.NET Web applications or .NET code in the cloud

Service hosting environment that includes Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1

Security supported by flexible Code Access Security policies

Small runtime API that supports logging and local scratch storage

Web portal that helps you deploy, scale, and upgrade your services quickly and easily

FastCGI, a protocol for interfacing applications to web servers, which will allow customers to deploy and run web applications written with non-Microsoft programming languages such as PHP (Developers will be responsible for including the relevant runtime libraries for these languages when deploying applications.)

.NET Full Trust to allow usage of additional .NET features such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

From Full Trust .NET, developers can call into unmanaged DLLs

Simple data storage services

Blobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation

Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe

Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center

Development Tools

Complete offline development environment, including computation and storage services

Complete command-line SDK tools and samples

Visual Studio add-in that enables local debugging

New SDK Download: a new version of the Windows Azure SDK will be available for download at a time to coincide with the MIX09 conference, which will enable developers to take advantage of the new features offered by Windows Azure, as well as an update to the Visual Studio add-ins.

The SDK and the Tools for VS addin is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/sdk.mspx.

SQL Data Services

You may recall seeing this when Azure was first announced:

The SQL Data Services (SDS) team (the 3rd block above Windows Azure in the image above) publicly shared the evolving capabilities in SDS to provide customers with the ability to utilize a RDBMS data model in a cloud-based environment supporting Transact-SQL (T-SQL) over TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol (read more here: What’s Next for SQL Data Services…) SQL Data Services is on track to deliver a public CTP mid-calendar year 2009 and be commercially available in the second half of calendar year 2009. At MIX, the SDS team has announced the evolution of SDS capabilities to provide traditional relational database service with T-SQL compatibility over protocols that support data access APIs such as ADO.NET, ODBC and OLE DB.

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Your Guide to the Crowdsourced Workforce

2009-10-15T21:03:00.001-07:00

Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We've written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we'll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.

The official definition of crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, is "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call." Last year we laid out a set of rules for successful crowdsourcing, which might be helpful to keep in mind when employing the services of any of the companies listed below.

Graphic Design

One of the most well-developed areas of crowdsourcing services on the Internet is graphic design. Generally, these sites exist in the form of graphic design contest web sites where clients put up a call for submissions for a piece of graphic design work, and designers compete for a cash prize by submitting designs.

crowdSPRING is the latest entry into the increasingly crowded crowdsourced graphic design service market. The service officially launches today, after a $5000 design competition it held over the winter to design the crowdSPRING site itself -- a wise move because it shows that the founders are willing to "eat their own dogfood" and also attracted an initial set of designers to the site.

crowdSPRING is well set up, offering legal protections for both buyers and sellers and a guarantee that all projects posted on the site will get at least 25 entries. crowdSPRING charges a 15% commission on all posted projects.

99designs is very likely the largest graphic design contest site on the web. From its humble beginnings as an area on the web development discussion forums at SitePoint, to being spun off from the SitePoint Marketplace a few months ago, 99designs has experienced astonishing growth to become a leader in its market. The site now has 18,000 registered users -- 11,000 are designers -- with 150 being added each day. $10,000 worth of prize money is put up for grabs on the site daily and it serves 5 million page views per month.

SitePoint co-founder Mark Harbottle tells me that many designers use the site for lead generation, and that often, winning designers find that contest holders will turn into long term clients who forgo the crowdsourcing option on future projects to work directly with a designer whose work they know they like.

GFXContests is a forum-based design contest site founded two years ago that seems to attract mostly logo design jobs. Full disclosure: I was one of the co-founders of GFXContests, and sold the site earlier this year. I am no longer involved with it. An interesting note: the site's logo was designed via a design contest held on the SitePoint Contests service (now 99designs).

DesignOutpost is one of the oldest design contest services, sometimes credited with originating the idea -- though that's up for debate. The site is forum-based and relies on a "design team" (pre-approved designers) to fill out its crowd.

Designcontest.net is another large, forum-based design contest site that also relies on the pre-approved "design team" concept.

Pixish (our coverage) is a design and photography contest marketplace launched in February by well-known designer Derek Powazek. Unlike many of the design contest services in this round up, prizes on Pixish aren't always cash.

Others

A number of large web development discussion communities host contest areas, including NamePros, v7 Network, and Webmaster Talk. Meanwhile, Grapic Competitions is a directory of individual graphic design competitions (not affiliated with the above sites), many that offer cash prizes.

Programming

Top Coder uses a competition approach to leverage is distributed network of over 50,000 developers to create software for its enterprise clients.

The software development community -- especially the open source community -- has long used "bounties" to help lure developers to certain tasks. microPledge (our coverage) is an escrow service that allows people to do three things: set up, contribute to and pay out software bounties, accept donations for projects, or set up a fund/bounty for an in house project (as a developer). In essence, that means people can give the crowd an incentive to work on a software development project.

Like microPledge, Cofundos.org (our coverage) is a web service for offering and managing software bounties. Cofundos.org is focused specifically on open source software, but the team behind it has indicated that they plan to adapt the concept to other areas, including beyond software development. Expanding beyond software development (to say, event funding) is something that microPledge has also hinted at pursuing.

Customer Support

Fixya is a question and answer community, in which people ask and answer technical support queries. Think of it as Yahoo! Answers for tech support. Uniquely, though, Fixya has partnered with some companies to provide an official channel for crowdsourced tech support. Most recently, the site launched a co-branded version of their service for Best Buy.

The goal of Get Satisfaction (recent coverage) isn't really to crowdsource customer service, so much as to make it easier for people to get access to companies they have an issue with. However, people do provide one another with help on the site -- similar to at Fixya -- and companies can use it to monitor customer support issues to more quickly tell if an issue isn't just an isolated incident.

Research & Development

IdeaScale (our coverage) does for research and development what Get Satisfaction does for customer service by providing Digg-style feature request boards. Companies are able to tap the "wisdom of the crowds" to learn what their customers want from their product or service.

featurelist.org is very similar to IdeaScale, but more public, not branded, and focused on software.

FeVote is another suggestion board web application that lets companies crowdsource their research and development. Like Get Satisfaction, FeVote aims to put the control in the hands of the users by encouraging them to make suggestion boards for their favorite companies.

CollabAndRate is "organic collaboration" software that enables companies to poll their customers, employees, or partners for new ideas. Essentially, this is the same idea as the three sites mentioned above, but with a slightly different pitch.

Whatever You Can Imagine

Amazon's Mecahnical Turk service (recent coverage) is what the company refers to as an "on-demand workforce." In reality, Mechanical Turk is a 100,000 strong member crowd that people can call on to complete a wide variety of tasks. See the 10,000 Cents art project as example of how one can leverage Amazon's crowdsourcing service.

Kluster (our coverage) is a recently launched crowdsourcing site that utilizes a crowd workforce to create any sort of project. The idea behind Kluster is that a group of passionate people working together can come up with better solutions for any decision-making problem than a single person. Whether that is planning an event, designing a new logo, or creating a new product, Kluster believes their system can work, though it seems likely to be used mostly for intangibles (graphic design, copy writing, programming, etc.).

Think of BigCarrot (our coverage) as microPledge or Cofundos.org for just about anything. BigCarrot specializes in "inducement prizes," which are basically cash bounties for achieving a specific goal. In fact, inducement prize contests and software bounties operate on essentially the same premise -- dangle a carrot and let talented people fight for it. Large-scale inducement prizes aren't easy to organize, though, so BigCarrot hopes to make it easier by crowdsourcing the prize creation process and letting anyone create or contribute to a prize

via:: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/crowdsourced_workforce_guide.php

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Michael Phelps's Photos - Speedo's 2010 Collection

2009-10-14T10:20:00.001-07:00

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