For those of you who don’t know, for the last 6-7 months I’ve been working on a Facebook application called Honesty Box. Honesty Box lets users on Facebook send each other anonymous messages and replies knowing that there’s a level of protection built in that reduces the likely-hood of spam because of the close nature of the social network. Dan Peguine, a co-founder, hired me to assist him and his partner in June with the explosive growth of the application and I’ve been working on it ever since. Adonomics is currently the benchmark by which applications can guestimate their worth in the marketplace. Of course this estimate and finding a buyer are two different things, but it’s an important gauge of the applications value. We have been tracking our “worth” through Adonomics for a while and have seen some interesting phenomena. Today when I checked our valuation, we were at $6.2 Million! (more…)
Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category
SimpleDB - Outsourced Database Software
Friday, December 14th, 2007
TechCrunch broke this to me this evening. I am very excited about a pay per drink service for relational databases. Amazon has released a product called SimpleDB and it’s going to shake the small to mid-level web hosting realm to it’s roots. During my time at NWF, we were payed a huge licensing cost for Microsoft SQL Server and now in my freelance world, I’m constantly at odds with keeping MySQL running efficiently and learning the nuances of query tuning. The reason this is earth shattering is because you can “fire your DBA”, because that’s just not true, you’ll still require someone who understands data modeling, database normalization and all of that stuff and how to make sense of it as it comes back out of your RDBMS. However, this does remove a huge barrier to entry for small companies in capital expenses. Now for just a few dollars per month a company can create a database, put it online, populate it and run a business off of that data without worrying about scaleability. Considering Amazon now lets you virtualize your entire IT infrastructure utilizing storage and compute clouds, small businesses — with the assistance of a good consultant — can literally grow infrastructure on demand. I for one am looking forward to seeing how performance actually plays out on this and how the $0.14 per machine hour gets billed. The Compute Cloud charges per instance hour, so even an idle machine costs about $75/month. If it follows a similar billing model, it’s $100/month, which doesn’t help cottage industries but is still viable for startups and other small businesses who are already running dedicated server equipment.
New Apple Ad
Thursday, December 13th, 2007
Common Craft - Explanations In Plain English
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007I’ve been noticing more and more of the Paper Prototyping style videos making it big for explanations. Paper Prototyping is an excellent way to show technology without spending lots of time building a usable prototype. Designers and developers often use them to do user analysis before building out a full sit e that is harder to change. Google’s been doing it as have others. I found this place (the folks who are helping Google) and really like their style. The above video talks about why blogs (like alynfamily.com) are such a big deal. They’ve done some other good videos too about compact fluorescent bulbs, RSS and zombies. If you have time to kill, check them out Common Craft.
Laptop Hard Drive Failure :(
Wednesday, December 5th, 2007
When it rains it pours. It seems I’ve been having a bout of technological bad luck this year. Generally I count myself fortunate that technology seems to work for my 98% of the time. However, this last Monday, my luck changed. For the second time this year I lost a hard drive in one of my machines. In May it was the G4 desktop’s data disk (it was configured with a data volume and a system volume). Fortunately I keep pretty regular backups and so all that was lost was some free iTunes videos and my music library which I was able to recover off of my iPod. This time the drive was sort of usable, which was good because I didn’t have a recent backup. I was able to mount it with Firewire target disk mode to the desktop and save most of the important files. As luck would have it, the iTunes library was gone as well as a few random photos taken with PhotoBooth. Generally, I consider my losses minor - besides, Oskar’s iPod had most of that music. I also took this as an opportunity to save myself the hassle of calling Apple Support for hours on end and upgrading the capacity and the spindle speed as well. Based on findings of similar upgrades others have done (before a complete failure) they experienced disk performance increases of at least 30%. I also upped the capacity to 200Gb which should give me some extra room for all of my missing iTunes music! 
I purchased the drive from ifixit.com, which I’ve used in the past. They offer great guides for assisting with the process and have pretty much any part you could want for your Apple laptop or iPod.
Ultra High-End Audio - Another cool toy
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
With the Christmas holiday quickly approaching, the absurd continues on. I mentioned the Willies Jeep a couple of posts back and saw this one on Crave just the other day. Kharma brings us an audio system 99.999% of people can’t afford. Perhaps I am wrong, are people really making this much money that they can blow so much on absurd things? The speaker set you see left (photo courtesy of HigherFi.com) retails for about a cool million - who need’s 100 thousand dollar cars when you can get speakers? Oh, don’t forget that you’ll need to buy a preamp, amp and at least a tuner expect to drop ten thousand on that, but what’s a few grand after the million anyway? I guess I’ll just have to live with my sad sub $1,000 Boston Acoustic speakers and theater system until I win PowerBall.
iWant: iPod Touch >= 32Gb
Wednesday, November 28th, 2007 
Yes, I realize this hasn’t been released (or even announced for that matter) but I still want one. I suspect they’re going to be pricey when they are finally released but please, oh please Apple, release a high capacity version, I’ve been waiting for 2 years to upgrade!
Free teleconference provider
Tuesday, November 27th, 2007
Yesterday I had the need to host a conference call. Being a one person shop, it’s cost prohibitive for me to pay money to have an on demand conference bridge (especially when most of my clients have their own.) Back to my problem, I needed to speak with another small company yesterday and there were four of us that needed to be on the call. I can bridge two calls together with my Vonage service, or even just using my cellphone, but four - that’s one too many. So I tried FreeConference.com and was very pleased with the results. The base offering is free (you’ll pay toll charges to the dial-in line, MN for me - go figure) and they have a $0.10/minute plan for toll free numbers and will even record the call. After the call ended, I received a report of who was on the call and for how long, even what numbers they called in from.
Stirling Engines, way cool desk toy + more!
Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
I was reading Slashdot this afternoon and I stumbled across this gem. Of course, being a gear head, I was curious how an engine might run without fuel. The principle is the known as the Stirling Engine, an external combustion engine that uses any constant external heat source to power it. Imagine the environmental impact of basically free rotational energy! On the companies website, they have a model that runs on the heat from your hand (the MM7) including a video of it (and other models) in action. How cool is that! You too can get your hands on one for about $380 from the American Stirling Company.
Why OpenSocial doesn’t matter - yet.
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
OpenSocial, is a new open standard for applications to integrate with some of the largest social networks in the world. On the surface, OpenSocial is a great move forward for application developers. The learning curve for FBML and FQL at Facebook is trivial at best, but just as learning many similar languages at once, having one simple API to reference is ultimately much easier. The portability of write once, run anywhere brings back to mind the panacea called Java. However, in reality, OpenSocial promotes frivolous time wasting applications that lack any real utility. This may change (and I sincerely hope it does) in future iterations, but for now, Facebook has the social networking platform to beat.
