Things I want in 2011

New year brings freshness, excitement, energy and also expectations. Here are a handful of things I hope 2011 brings for me. These are not predictions by any means, just some wishful thinking on my part enroute to India.

Broadband Anywhere We pay for broadband access many times over. Wired broadband at home, 3G/4G for smart phones. And increasingly on device specific plans, monthly (as in ipad) or part of the device (as in kindle). If you own multiple connected devices, chances are you also are paying multiple carriers for same internet access sliced and diced differently. I hope in 2011 carriers come out with unlimited internet access plans with no restrictions that work everywhere, or any device of my choosing.

Digital wallet Our smart phones are becoming smarter with each revision. I hope in 2011 they take over our wallet. I recently lost my physical wallet and had to go through the pain of individually calling the various card providers and then waiting for a physical replacement to arrive in mail. I hope smart phones become smart enough to replace a physical wallet. Upcoming technologies like NFC, or Pay-by-sms are promising steps in that direction. Phones should be able to allow me to complete a transactions via a payment method of my choice (via secure pin, phrase, finger print recognition etc) and let me remote wipe it, if I were to loose a phone (and thus the digital wallet). This Idea can be extended to other physical cards typically carried in a wallet i.e. membership cards, passes etc. I hope in 2011 smart phones get rid of my wallet

Video on demand 2010 was a year where a myriad of devices struggled to get video on demand to our TV sets. I believe a large number of people are waiting for a true video solution in order to get rid of their cable/satelite TV. Google TV, Roku, Boxee, Apple TV are just a few players. They all are struggling to sign up enough content from the various content producers to make video on demand an viable alternative. I think technology is there and it is waiting for a business model/plan to make it work. I hope in 2011, the players in this space get together to give us a true video on demand, where I can watch what I want, when I want for an decent price - iTunes for Video.

Death of CD We all thought CD was dead. Apple even told us so [TBD]. But wait, why did I buy handfull of them just in a last few weeks ? Game Consoles rely heavily on CDs for their games to prevent piracy. Most of my games are kid oriented. kids and cds dont go togather, I am always worried about cds getting scratched and unplayable. I hope with Kinect, Move & Wii focusing on more kid oriented games, an kid friendly alternative to CD is developed in 2011. That will save me some yelling.

Try-before-you-buy-apps Not sure if apple realizes, but in my opinion the biggest obstecle to an even more widespeard use of apps is lack of “try before you buy”. I hope in 201l, the appstores come out with an innovative way to let us try apps, before we acutually purchase them. They can just hold charging the card for a day or so. I know, I would definitely buy a lot for apps, both for me and my kids if I could experience the functionality before making a commitment. Like dating before you pop the question ;)

What does the techie inside you want in 2011. Post your thoughts in comments :)

10 significant tech tends of 2010

As this year comes I started to wonder about the tech trends that have affected me personally. There are quite a few and I decided to pen 10 of them down. here they are in no particular order.

Cloud Sun had been saying for years network is the computer. Google continues to convince us of moving to cloud by “assembling” google documents as a credible alternative to office. But its only now that cloud is showing signs of coming of age. The rise of smart phones and apps has led to radical shift in the way software is architected. Instead of thinking of applications as client/server or as a 3 tier systems, we have started thinking of them as set of cloud based services that can be accessed from anywhere: web, smart phones, tablets, PCs etc. They continue to work when offline and magically sync back once online. dropbox evernote two apps I love the most and use regularly on various devices are perfect examples of such apps.

iPad I don’t own ipad yet but lust after one. Its a game changer. It is single handedly killing the netbooks. Ipad’s sucess has beeline of vendors touting their android netbooks. Msft will attempt to re-peddle its tablets too. Like iphone reinvented the smart phones, Ipad reinvented the tablets. It has encouraged us techies to think about form along with the function. also, if they complete its ok to drop the function in order to keep the form. This usualu goes against our engineering acumen, but iPad proves it by doing less than otehr tablets, but doing is extremely well. I am looking forward to see how the tablets evolve in 2011

Developers,Developers,Developers 2010 was a great year to be a developer. Success of apple app store and its reimplementation by almost every other platform is very exciting to an individual developer. It is nice to feel wanted for a change :) The app phenomenon can and will turn the life around for many a developers. We just need a strong passion, lots a caffeine and a strong belief (and may be a understanding spouse ;), almost all tools needed to be an app developer are very affordable or available for free. Also, social media makes a good product take off virally.

Andorid is rising up fast. It is showing a lot of promise. Almost every single manufacturer has an android offering or will shortly. Andorid is being used in almost every major consumer electronic appliance: phones, tablet, tvs, stbs etc. Android will surely become the “windows” of the consumer device market and thus it will become increasingly hard to avoid it. Android definitely provides healthy alternative to iOS. It will be interesting to see how the eternal open vs close battle plays out. I think technically they both are about the same and there is a place for both of them.

Location based services will increasingly become popular. Rise of the “checkin” based services like 4square, gowalla, facebook places, and location tracking apps like latitude and loopt are constantlt evolving. Slowly these apps will become commercialized with vendors offering e-coupons or other forms of incentives. This combined with social element, local content providers and crowd sourced reviewes/recommendation will make location based apps increasingly popular. I think gps enabled mobile devices & location based apps form a very symbiotic relationship and if traditional gps providers don’t do something soon, everybody else will eat their lunch.

HTML5 is a crowned prince of the internet, its just waiting for flash to die before it can take its rightful place on the net. Flash is being kept alive by the community to differentiate themselves from the iOS (so they can have an extra checkbox). Its been proven again and again that there is some truth to Steve’s rant. Mobile devices are defining the landscape of tomm, they need battery life and reliability (no bosd). Any technology that can provide that will be the king, and others will die off. HTML5 is a step in that direction. Its still premature to write a flash eulogy. I just hope in 2011 html5 becomes the platform on which web development is based on.

Family Gaming is another welcome development of 2010. Microsoft & Sony one upped nintendo by releasing kinect & move. They both seem to be family oriented gaming platform with a large variety of “E” rated games. They are definitely fun to play with. I think they will make parties more interesting and may be will bring back the family game night :)

3D TVs tried to make a big splash this year, riding on the avatar wave. They still might have a ways to go. I personally don’t seem to be interested in watching regular TV fare in 3d. It might have some potential in games. 3D Kinect game does sound very appealing to me

Google TV made a big splash with some marquee manufactures behind it. The major networks were quick to pull the rug. Video still remains a tough nut to crack, thus there is still time where apple/google tvs, or services like roku/boxee become mainstream.

Sun being acquired by oracle might have a major implications on tech industry. Oracle is slowing either closing down or significantly altering the open source technology landscape that blossomed under Sun. There already have been lawsuits flying with oracle & google for use of Java as part of android platform. I just hope these technologies continue to thrive elsewhere and continue to fuel the tech startup industry

These are a few things that caught my attention in 2010, I am looking fwd to what 2011 will bring to us. Its really a exciting time to be part if the tech industry

Is Ad-Blocking unethical ?

I Hate Ads. Both on TV and online. There are 5 main reason I hate online ads.

1. Ads slow my browsing experience. Significant number online ads are use rich media (google text ads are notable exception) and thus take up a significant bandwidth on an page. Its unacceptable to me that ads slow my browsing experience, even more when I am browsing for text (like news sites or blogs), or researching something online. See Venturebeat study.

2. Ads are a battery drain Its been proven that flash drains battery a lot faster. Significant number of non text ads are in flash, and I don’t want them draining my precious battery. See Ars Technica study.

3. Ads are a bandwidth hog. We now live in era of tiered mobile data plan. We tether our computers to our smart phones, browsing via our mobile data plans. I want to maximize my browsing experience by seeing the content I am interested in, and do not want ads taking a bite out of our data plans.

4. Ads compromise my privacy. Quite a few ads plant tracking cookies. I hate being tracked online, as much as you would if you were tracked in real life. see this article

5. Ads profile me. Most ads I see are totally irrelevant, or profile me. They tend to be just white noise that I would rather not have. Look at this Wall Street Journal study.

All first tier web browsers have very effective ad blocking plugins (chome, firefox, safari ). These plugins are smart enough to prevent the browsers from downloading the section of the websites that looks like an “ad”, they use variety of heuristics to do this - they look at the size of the image, the source of the image, placement of the image etc to determine that. By blocking Ads they promise a faster, more secure online browsing experience, a longer battery life and saving on the data plan. All this for free. Also the ad blocking plugins preserve the site layout, and thus they do not compromise the content. I use ad blocks on all my browsers. It is the usually the first plugin I install. In fact, I don’t even upgrade to a newer version of the browser if the ad blockers are not available.

While the venture capital industry is crediting with fueling the tech startups, the Ad industry is truly responsible for keeping them alive. Most startups depend heavily on Ads as a revenue source. I do understand the online rule : If you do not pay for your product, you ARE the product. And I do not want to pay for stuff. So per the law I need to give up my privacy and let the site productize me, or I compromise my browsing experience by viewing ads. Hence my ethical dilemma. I don’t want to pay of stuff online. I don’t want to watch ads (which indirectly pay for my online stuff). This means I essentially want to consume my online services for free. Is this analogous to shop lifting ? Am I being unethical by blocking ads and disallowing the potential revenue the site could have made ?

I think the ad industry needs to innovate. They need to make sure that the ads are not a nuisance.

1. They are not heavy (the ads should not increase the bandwidth usage/download time by say 5 to 10% of the actual content).
2. They don't use technologies that are detrimental (flash).
3. They should not track me, if I don't want to.

I think Ad industry is taking a right step with Open data alliance. Hopefully they will figure out a way so I can live with ads, and do not feel like a shop lifter when I am browsing.

A non gamers perspective on the Gaming consoles

Recently I got xbox360 kinect bundle. It was the appeal of Kinect that drove me to buy xbox. I also own ps3 and wii even though I am not a gamer. I have only played family games. Recently quite a few of my non-gamer friends have asked me about how these consoles differ, hence this post.

Wii has established itself firmly as an non-gamer console of choice. It probably has the largest collection of the Family Friendly “E” rated games. Wii also has a extremely low learning curve. It allows grandparents to play side by side with their grandkids and have fun! It is a great way to have a fun filled family night. *Wii Fit * is a must have, It puts fun back in the exercise. It actually makes you want to do exercise.

Few things that I did not like about Wii are that it does not do HD. I have a big screen HD TV, and I hated seeing crappy graphics on it, so Wii has been relegated to the basement “play room”, where my kids can enjoy it with their buddies on an older CRT. We have two Wii controls which get shared during group play dates. It usually becomes hassle to keep reminding kind to use the wrist band. and we have had our fair share of wii remote becoming a projectile tossed around the room.

PS3 has been a premier gaming console. I have not bought the new move so my review is of console only. I essentially got PS3 because of things it could do outside of gaming. I was looking for a cheap bluray player last year and PS3 was the cheapest and best bluray player. It is wifi ready, connects to internet, and does does DLNA. It comes with sufficient storage. We use it to view movies over net, watch dvds (it upconverts), bluray and to share pics/home videos via DLNA. PS3 does great hi-def and is 3D ready. Being able to watch online movies on big screen via ps3 is huge as most Bollywood movies are available online and I don’t have to run around to try to rent it.

Unfortunately PS3 is not casual gamer friendly, maybe move will change that, but having a physical control to gesture with, is just projectile waiting to smash your TV.

Xbox w/ Kinect Xbox with Kinect is a game changer. Its the newest kid on the block, thus, there are are just a few games. Xbox/Kinect has all the signs of being the console that rules the causal gaming and your coffee table will be the collateral damage. Kinect makes you move your whole body, making you jump, kick, wave, dodge and gesture with your hands, giving you a full body exercise. You will ache in places you never knew existed. Its very intuitive to use and is fast and amazingly good. It also makes a great party gadget, guests can joining and leave seamlessly. No controller to exchange. It is also a lot of fun to just to watch people play. Old and young play it alike. Couch potatoes will also have an urge to stand up and join in.

Although, Xbox does Hidef, it can’t play bluray disks. Also, for some inexplicable reason, MSFT changes monthly fee for online access (via xbox live). For me it means I cannot use netflix, facebook and other online features. Xbox doesnt have a browser, so cannont watch stuff online (like you can with PS3). You are stuck whats supported by xbox live and have to pay for it. I have not tried DLNA, but it seems to be limited to MSFT Media center.

My dream console would have been PS3 with Kinect. Sigh. Kinect will definitely dethrone Wii. Nintendo stopped innovating after Wii, and they will have to pay dearly for it. Kinect has enough appeal and geekry for it to rule the roost in my household. PS3 will still be there for its bluray and online/DLNA capabilities.

These are a few things I am thankful for

Thanksgiving gives us an opportunity to think about the things around us that we usually take for granted. It gives us a moment to pause and acknowledge their impact on our daily lives. Here are a few techie things I am thankful for.

I am first an foremost thankful for innovators & entrepreneurs for continuing to fuel the immense growth in the tech industry. It feels great to be part of the tech revolution.

I am also thankful to the open source community. They continue to amaze me by continuing to evolve open source alternatives, and keeping them at par and in many cases ahead of the closed propriety system. hats off to them

I am also thankful to Social movement. Twitter helps me feel the pulse of stuff around me and facebook helps me find and keep in touch with friends and family. I could'nt image a day without either of these.

I am also thankful to Apple & “app” phenomenon fueled by the iOS devices. Rise of the “apps” has in a true sense democratized the market and eliminated the entry barrier. It puts a normal individual developers on the equal footing with a large corporation. Our apps are placed side by side and thus can now compete on features rather than the marketing/supply chain/big company infrastructure.

Finally I am thankful to apple to give us techies the wares to lust about. We had been given utilitarians pcs, phones that we used because we had to and not because we wanted to. By putting design at par with with tech has given rise to the a beautiful lust worthy gadgetry. The rest of the market is following quickly. and as they say mimicry is the best form of admiration!

You think you are a customer ? Think again

We all think of ourselves as customers of the various websites. We almost feel initialed to a free or a freemium model for sites we use. We all assume that ad-supported model works and it should be pay for usage of the sites.

As online usage continues to grow, so does the competition for online ad dollars. Thus the sites are increasingly trying to make ads more “effective” and “attractive” for the “Ad buyers”. The way this is being done is by making ads more relevant and appealing to the web surfers in hopes to get more clicks. The way these websites can make the ads more relevant to the users are by sharing the information about the users with the advertisers. this is done via cookies. WSJ recently had an interesting article about how some of well known sites use 100s of cookies each to track the browsing habits of its users.

Lets quickly review the definitions of a product and customer.

Product:  something that is marketed or sold as a commodity
customer:  one that purchases a commodity or service

This brings us to the topic of this blog post. From the website's perspective the customers are the companies that are buying ads on its sites. The product is the data that they are selling - our personal data, our profile.

In order to complete in the market place, they need to improve their product. They improve it by coming up with new and innovating ideas of collecting increasingly more and more personal data. Facebook makes an very interesting case study.

Just think about the things facebook has added over the years. We think we are the customers of facebook and these new features are added to serve us. Once we see the real customers, we see that these are pretty amazing and well thought attempts to improve the product. The very popular like button, the facebook connect, now defunct facebook beacon, share via facebook, and now facebook messages. using our personal profiles they already know where we live, went to school, work, what what we like, who we communicate with, and now what we communictae about. This will create an unparallel product for the real customer

Too much social is not a good thing

I do agree, the three things that are doing to define the coming years are : social, location and mobile commerce. Increasingly we will look to our social graph for recommendations on restaurants to eat at, movie to see, or next electronic gadget to buy. Vendors will try to lure us by customized coupons pushed to our mobile phones based on our profile, and we will buy stuff or pay our bills by our phones.

Having said that, I still think that we are not a throughbred social animal. Agreed society is a big part of life, but we are not ready for it to become our life. Me for one am not willing to give up my privacy. Also, I refuse to create multiple “avatars”/profiles of myself to please the different vendors in order to get a deal, or to present a favorable image to impress my professional colleagues.

I do believe in power of social and location powering the mobile commerce to herald the next generation of web. I hope it is done right by respecting our online privacy. The trend that I find most troubling is Give me your passwd and we will import your friends etc to our site

Increasingly I run into sites online, or apps on my mobile phone and try to lure me into giving them my userid/passwd of of my existing accounts. They claim to do that to import my friends and contact information to help jumpstart my experience on their site/application. I get the dilemma these sites are in. A normal user uses may be 4-5 sites at most on a regular basis. Most users do not have a time or a need for yet another site to be part of their daily online experience. Thus, its a huge uphill battle for the startups & importing data is a huge help. I get this.

What irks me the most is the blatant way in which they ask us for our passwords. To me its like Maitre d’ asking me to hand over all my credit card statements so he/she can suggest the best dish for me. Today most online portals that I use, contain a ton of information about me, the list of friends is a very small portion of it. I do not want to give them access to everything. Plus, unless I immediately change my password, there is nothing for them from snooping around in future. e.g I Use a ton of Google services, gmail,gtalk, google voice, google checkout, google documents, google adsense, blogspot, youtube, appengine. They all share the same password. If I give a new site my Google password, and hope they will import my Google friend list and without snooping around with everything else, now or till such time that I change my password, I am being very naive. Storage is cheap, data about users is gold mine. I am sure they want to get as much information as they can. Even if they are pure in their intensions, I cant trust the folks who actually coded or handle the data, almost everything is outsourced throughout the world, one on knows anymore where the data end up today or in future

I do believe in power of linking social networks from different sites. These startups do fill a niche. But I don’t want to give them “keys to the kingdom”. I wont trust them anymore than I would a guy on the street asking me for my Google passwd. I would give them access to data, on my terms . Things that will make me comfortable are:

1. I do not want to reveal my password to a site wishing to import data. Instead I should be able to tell google to give a onetime access to just the
   data I want to be made available to that site nothing more.
2. If I have given a access for a certain duration, I should be able to revoke that permission at any time.
3. Every time any external site does access my data based on these permission that should be logged and I should be notified, if I so choose.
4. I should be able to preview the access I have given the data that was shared any time in future.

Some of the above have been addressed by technologies such as SSO, OAuth etc. Google does support OAuth. But I find sites (including Google) to be seriously lacking at reporting. They don’t allow us to pick and choose what we want to share or notify us of what was accessed. I really don’t feel in much control when I share stuff using what is implemented.

I really hope as “social” takes the center stage and as new and upcoming sites encourage us to share more data, some of the technologies do come to our rescue and keep us in control.

Ideas for safe browsing in an unsafe world

Last few weeks there have been numerous reports of various hacks, tools, apps, malwares, privacy policy violation that etc that make it easy to steal our identity, gain access to our personal information, or to otherwise profile and compartmentalize us.

This relentless assault on safely and security of online browsing, let me to device an scheme that would help me feel somewhat secure in this insecure world. Here is the idea. I would love your feedback or to know more about how you make online experience more secure.

I divide my online browsing into 4 major categories:

1. Sites where I do financial transactions My Bank, Broker, Credit card provider etc.
2. General Browsing News Sites, Various Blogs, Online research, where I dont have enter a password.
3. Sites which know a lot about me These sites are usually protected by password Mail, social sites.
4. Hi Risk sites Shady sites which I know try hard to install malware.

My major concern was that one “bad” or a “poorly” implemented site should not compromise other sites or my computer. If a site is inherently unsafe, or easily hijackable or breachable, It should not give the keys to the kingdom to the hackers.

My plan essentially involves using a different browser for each of the above categories with some simple rules. All the major browsers are free and they are keeping up with each other. Specially since IE has caught up . I have 3 different browsers installed and I use all of them.

1. Financial sites : I use following rules. you should only ever have one financial sites open at a time. Use a clean browser to open the site. The browser used for financial purposes should not be used for anything else. Its ONLY used for conducting a financial transactions, that too only one site at a time. I never remember passwords, use “incognito/private browsing” for visiting these sites, so that I am not impacted by cookies etc. I use Safari for this.

2. General browsing : This is how I browse the web. I have a separate browser for general browsing. This browser needs to be fast, capable of syncing bookmarks and fun to use. This where I spend most of my time. I use chrome for this.

3. Social sites : I use firefox for this. These sites specially facebook and twitter try to “track” the browsing habit, I make it a point to do my main browsing on a different browser all togather. I don’t do single signon or connect my friends from one social network to another. eg. Dont give facebook the password for gmail, yahoo etc. and have them access my mails etc. No matter what their privacy policy says, they all have rotten apples.

4. Suspect/unsafe sites : These are the riskiest sites. I browse them on a “dedicated disposable computer”, or a virtual machine, never on the main computer ever. I use firefox and use its various plugins to asses the risk and minimize the impact.

The main idea for this process is to make sure that one shady site should not compromise my browser or my computer and thus hack into other sites that I do business with.

Strong Passwords

some of the common mistakes made by users when using passwords for web sites

1. using same password for all sites. even if this password is very strong. It exposes you to a very simple trick. Hackers create a simple website to give away something for free. recruit people to sign up. get their user ids/email at signup and then try the email/userid at other sites using the password provided to gain access. Very simple but effective.

2. Using weak password. every one knows this is open to dictionary attack. Also its easy for anyone standing over your shoulder to guess

3. Using “public” knowledge questions/answer for “Forget my password reminder”. we all live in world of facebook, where every minute detail of your life is public knowledge. If your password reminder questions are just a facebook search away, your strong password is of no use.

4. Using same easy to guess algo for sites. Anyone getting hold of one of your password gets the keys to kingdom for all your sites. Thus in your yahoo password os oohay, its easy to guess what your amazon & gmail passwords are

5. Happily typing in your passowrd to random apps/sites to pull your “contacts” in to app. We all live in world of apps. We have no idea who made these apps. They encourage you to type in your passwords for various sites yahoo, google, facebook to automaically pull in your data from these sites. They might be a password collection trick too.

How to create strong passwords

1. Use a auto generated passwords held under one password program like [lastpass], [1password]. These programs are available for all OSes, smartphone etc.

2. Use a password algo. Like one suggested by “mozilla” [mozilla]

3. use a commonworld phrase but exchange the letters with the letters physically next to the original one on the keyboard. example instead of myamazonpass becomes ,us,sxpm[sdd

Thoughts on “back to the mac”

Apple sent out the invitations for an media event on 20th. It invitations are notoriously brief but show a lion peaking through a slightly jar apple logo with the caption “Back to the Mac”

The blogosphere is alit with speculation that the new mac os version will 10.7 code named “Lion”. Most blogs also are saying (quoting the recent Apple patent applications) it will bring the convergence of ios with mac os and will mark the new touch capable hybrid macs capable of running ios & macos

I do agree that this will be next in the macos X series. The Lion is an strong indication that this is the continuation of the feline scheme. So I do think that it will be macos 10.7. I am just not buying the “Lion” name. its too non-appley. The lion is just too pedestrian a name. I think it might be called Leo.

Also merging of MacOs with iOS will be a huge step. I thnk i t deserves its own version jump rather than just an dot release bump. Apple has made very incremental upgrades fot its dot releases in the X series named after felines. Merging two different Oses into a single hybrid OS seems to call for an entire new version. As this is clearly an Feline Os and thus an incremental release.

I do agree that Apple has to eventually release a hybrid OS. Apple would save it for an much bigger event may be the next ADC. It will herald a new macos era. It just make sense. The OS being announced next week will be just another incremental update

Techstars : Presentations

Vacation Rental Partner

1. saves time and organize the rental, like booking a hotel.
2. same ad on multiple sites
3. various tools, mobile stuff

why : into travel, love start up
what : front end (jquery), social media(facebook, twitter)

Rezora
email marketing system. corporate sales team.
templates for advertisement
have a business model
work out of home, geo disperse
national brand name client

look for : Mobile Developer:
backend developer, front end developer, sales, Account manager
paul@rezora.com


statsmix

dashboards, data scattered everywhere. aggregates data and builds dashboard. REST api. works with tons of data form different apis. areound teh web
Visualize the data. in various graphs. and tehn generating reports, automated analyze the data

why work : define the product

looking for : designers, front and back end developers : Ruby & JQuery, MySql and nosql
(cassendara , mangodb)

looking for people who can do multiple things.
tom@statsmix.com

graphicly
looking to change comic industry
air/iphone/ipad/windows7 app

looking for dreamers. can you impage? can you believe ?

looking : Ruby developers, designers,

micah@graphicly.com
@micah

scriptpad
liam@scriptpad.net

mobile apps for doctors iphone/ipad
3rd app : for prescriptions coming soon

40% of handwritten prescriptions lead have errors

final stages of federal approval

looking for iphone developer & android developers
mono, monotouch
artist : ui uix developer
bizdev : sells to drs

use .net for writing crossplatform native apps


liam@scriptpad.net

orbotix

robotic balls controlled from your smartphone

new game platform.

looking for : firmware engineer, api designer, android & iphone developers

jobs@orbotix.com


snapabug

snap engage: live chat with website visitors as they visit the site.

work from home ok.
self funded and profitable

looking for sales partner.

sendgrid
email delevery

raised $6millon
12,000 clients, growing from 18 to 30 by year end

need : support engg, web engineer, marketing director, inside sale rep

omniar
"we make real world clickable"

visual search api for smartphone.
best at recognizing 3d objects.

software engg : build and scale apis, clould experience, visual recognition
founders@omniar.com, zach@omniar


blipsnips
social + video = blipsnips

web and mobile platforms.

engineer: ruby , hadoop
marketing


spotinfluence
reach + relevance + = influence

searching teh social media for finding people that influence on any topic
apis to lots of company to make money. search free

need: front end developers, PR, marketing/sales,

people@spotinfluence.com

onetruefan
84% traffic comes back one a month or less, only 6% weekly
that 6% does majority of page views
objective : to make websites more engaging by integrating social media
-> auyto checking in people

need : UX engineer.

nextbigsound
online music analytics. work with massive amount of data. quick iteration.
great angel investor. self starter.

passion of music and java

looking for front end developer.

jobs@nextbigsound.com












sendgrid.jobscore.com

Techstars: Demystifying working of start ups

1. Panel discussion : eric (founder and ceo onestart), Alex (founder and ceo next big sound), Paul (ceo or orbatics)

Paul : personality type: (no 9-5 job), ready for abuse, underpaid, overworked and should love it

Eric : "starting a startup is mental illness".

Alex: Should live with your coworkers. work life balance is zero


Q. Why is your product disruptive ?
Alex 1. speed , 2. quality :
Eric: core mental illness is optimistic. world issues dont matter. you have an idea that you keep working on it. no matter what happened.
Paul: Changed direction for raindance from voip to video conferencing to meet impossible revenue target

Q. what can new employee expect
Eric : over work, underpay, no benefits :
- every employee can redefine what the company does. employees learn the ropes so that they can fulfil their dream. you get to employee # 1-50, not employee #13232. you can make a difference. gauranteed to fail in big company
Paul : autonomy , drive and purpose is the main motivation

Q. what kind of jobs for the non technical
Paul :business developer, sales, product manager after technical
Alex: first 3 hire technical then sales ( tech first and then sales
Eric : core team : technical+product , but also need a UI skillset, it matters

Q. what type of mentoring activity does startup provides
Paul : no handholding, might go to conference, no training
- what you learn : how to prioritize, how to work togather,

Q. what should student, FTE expect, why should they join startup
Paul : startup should be attached to your life. startup shuld become your life and that way they would be happy. its a different lifestyle, its not 8 hr job. if you want to put in 8 hrs and then do something else. startup is not for you
Eric: if you are in abig company couple of levels above you have no idea of whats going on in your life. a=in startup you knhow everything. you know how much money is in bacnk, its all transparent
Alex: the earlier you join, the bigger your equity stake will be.

Geeks Guide to CWG 2010

1. Official web sites : www.cwgdelhi2010.org/
2. twitter hash tags : #delhi2010, #cwg
3. follow official twitter account : @commonwealthdel
4. Smart phone apps : Zoomi (iphone, android, black berry etc) :
5. Best place to watch it online : BBC iPlayer
6. Watch Live TV coverage on wwii
7. Check Justin.TV for possible live streaming
8. In US TV Asia will show one hr highlights every day

Do no evil

wow google has done an about turn on its do not evil mantra. does these mantra even make sense now. There are 2 main objections I have with the google-verizon deal (or a non-deal/pact/arrangement/MOU).

1. wireless is excluded : we all know that mobile internet is the way forward. It is explictly excluded by saying that it applies to "wireline" internet. Verizon is the biggest android carrier. Google is betting heavily on android. thus google sees a huge revenue potential by creating a fragmented internet experience on the mobile users. internet is internet on every device. no differentiation. Google you are in bed with the devil

2. The wording of "public internet" didnt raised as many eyebrows as i thought. Internet is internet. there isnt an "private" internet or an non-public internet. looks like they are trying to carve one out. They reference "differentiated" services now. Looks like they will offer some kind of "paid" internet model where stuff would run faster. they want to create different class of internet, free and paid. the internet does not look "neutral" anymore. google sold itself out!

Apple Mail issues - ATT00001.txt , missing incoming attachments

Apple mail has been a big pain in the ass for sometime for me. Occasionally it will drop incoming attachments. no rhyme or reason. It seems to prefer dropping the larger attachments, but it has dropping smaller ones too. The attachments show up ok in webmail. I am using snow leopard and use exchange imap.

this thread suggests trying to set the prefered format to html always to avail the issue. it kinda sorta worked on some cases for me. I am still loosing attachments but less frequently

Permanent solution:

Quit Mail
Open Terminal,
Enter "defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool FALSE"
Open Mail.

second issue i have is when sending attachments, my friends often see an extraneous blank attachment. The solution for it seems to me to check the following options

 Edit->Attachment-> Send windows Friendy Attchment
 Edit->Attachment-> Insert attachment at the end of the message

iphone does NOT charge via usb if connected to apple keyboard

I have been having this problem for last few months. I have the original iphone dock connected to my apple wired keyboard USB port. It used to charge without problem for the for two years and then it stopped charging midway. I thought the battery had gone bad.

I bought the new iphone 4 and it HAD the same problem.

I ran into a few articles online about this. one from apple : which specifically say that low-powered usb ports might have an issue. They also say that the battery will actually drain if the computer is turned off or sleep. I have definitely noticed that. I leave my iphone docked to my compyter every night and i have woken up to a totally drained iphone instead of finding a flly charged iphone.

wonder cant Itunes/iphone detect it and report it ?

comcast really cares about your account

here is the email one of my buddies got after he opened an account with comcast. look at the password

Thank you for taking the time to register with Comcast.

Below is your login information.

       User Name: ##########
       Password: uAxk+K~ZwjT=QEl2+c45M(Lzxp&4Tonb(#ezb7Hf

To update your profile, track applications or apply for further 
positions at  Comcast, you can access the login page at 
www.comcast.com/careers and click on the "Login or Register" 
button.

If logging in for the first time, you can cut and paste the user name
and password provided above into the login page; you will then 
be prompted to reset your  password. Once you have logged in, 
you can change your user name by clicking onthe "Change User Name" 
link.

Thank you for your interest in Comcast. We wish you the very best in
your career endeavors.

Gadget development on mac and windows

We have been developing a gadget for both mac and windows. Its been an interesting experience to say the least.
on the mac we developed on safari/firefox and it worked flowlessly as a mac widget. On windows it was a teeth pulling exercise.
of course the mac widget code did'nt work at all. we developed the code on ie 8, hoping it work as the gadget.
ofcourse it failed miserably. getting css to work on the windows gadget was painfully hard

we wanted to have the exact same codebase for both mac and windows. with same css that works accross both.
it was painful process.

wonder when the day would come when life will be easier for us developer.

personal security measures for everyone

I am at the security/hacking talk by Ken Sipe at the Uber Conf. It was an very interesting talk. Learned about some of the cool tools availble to hackers. He also some good guidelines that i think we all can/should use. Specially in light of how easy it is for hackers to do "bad" stuff.

• We should all use different browers for general browering/browsers for financial transactions. i.e use chrome exclusively for financial transactions, firefox for general browing


• When browsing to a site where you do financial tramsactions always have ONLY One tab open. to the site you are at.


• never do business with site ( as a policy)
  
  
  
  • that will return your passwd in email/over phone
  • will ask you passwd to another site


• do a simple xss check/sql injection check

interesting rules. I hope to use them

thoughts on Uber conf

I am attending  the uber conf  this week. Its been an interesting experience. I mainly attended sessions around a few themes  architecture and performace. I also attended a talk on scala.

Looks like everyone wanted to bash java and push their new fav language of the week. Scala does look good and I am looking fwd to using it, The functional language and concurrency seems very appealing.

The architecture talks were very intersting. Most of them focused on soft skills. architects also need to be hands on coder. cant get too far away from where rubber meets the rocks.

On the performance talks, there wasnt anything earth shattering, looks like the caching, reducing latency etc

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experiences with Design Firm

At my work we decided to hire a design firm to develop a free mobile app with approx a few thousand potential users. It was an interesting experience. They did have some great ideas. They thought of interesting ways of integrating our services with other services, like google apis on android.

What I found missing was understanding of our target userbase. They did go through the motions of trying to understand our userbase. But most of the ideas they came up with were targeted towards young techie gen. At Qwest our userbase is mostly older non techie population. who has landline these days ? Also I wonder if they even understood the role of telephone at home ? Its a shared device. Its ment for the family. Its the number that you call to check back with the babysitter, or reach your family when you are travelling. These designer are from mobile generation. they think of landline as their "own" personal phone just an extension of mobile phone.

Anyhow I am not sure if some of the services that they came up with that got our product team all excited are that cool : geo based call forwarding. Syncing contacts between mobile phones and land line are good thing. ( contact syncing : will ending up syncing contacts between multiple cell phones tied to accouct as a side affect, geo based call following will lead to "phone" hijacking)