Welcome EVDB
March 30, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Products & Opportunites
Brian Dear, a former regular on The Well has launched EVDB, the events and venues database.
EVDB, Inc. helps people find relevant events and share their discoveries with others. We're building a worldwide repository of event and venue data that the whole world can use. Our goal is to help people discover all kinds of events they might have otherwise missed, and to profitably be the best at what we do.
It was intro'd at PC Forum on March 21, a chic private affair. Shortly thereafter, they closed funding.
Note to entrepreneurs: See how they closed the $2.1m Series A VC round, at the same time that they completed their "seed funding" with well-known insiders? What this means is that EVDB gets to pick the brains and meet the friends of these high-network people because they're invested, literally, in EVDB's success. For their "effort," they get in at the "pre-money" valuation, meaning that if EVDB is successful, their (customary) $50,000 investment will be worth millions. I know of someone who put $50,000 into Ask Jeeves (because a friend said, Hey you should do this) and it turned into $7 million. Why do the Series A VC's put up with this? Hey, everyone is friends here – it's not about the money, we want to get the right experience on the team. Etc.
So, how did they get the "pre-seed" funding which actually built the product? I think Brian financed it, in the usual guerilla manner. Great job, and I'm excited to see it bear fruit. It happens to be a domain I'm interested in, but I also enjoy observing how products come to life inside the gritty capitalist machinery.
Also note their approach to "release early and often" explained in the first blog first. Hey, check that out: They have a product blog linked right from the main menu, right there with the FAQ and the Privacy Policy. Are blogs ready for prime time? Well, no – this is a tiny three-person startup, not GM. Oh wait, GM has a blog. Anyway, what the geeks are doing now, you'll be doing soon. And what the geeks are doing is releasing products that are not "done" to get actual customer feedback, and telling you openly about the problems and current status, without the usual pablum from the corporate communications office.
Sloppy work
March 30, 2005 | Products & Opportunites
This is why people distrust Quark XPress on Mac OSX (via Macintouch):
[Kalani Patterson] Our tech dept has verified the following: Installing Quark 6.1 on a 10.3.x system (I can't speak for other versions) results in thousands of changed permissions. We captured a logfile from such a repair, which weighed in as a whopping 9.9MB plain text file... opening the file in Word resulted in over 4,000 pages of corrections!
It seems the idiotic Quark installer manages to reset every single program on the drive to world read-write-executable (chmod 777). Ditto after installing the 6.5 updater. Lesson learned: With Quark, repair your permissions before and after each installation and update!
The Supremes: MGM vs. Grokster
March 29, 2005 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
In the next 24 hours, there will be a lot of press coverage about today's argument at the US Supreme Court in the MGM vs. Grokster case. Let's just see if any corporate or commercial or mainstream media coverage is as good as this blog entry. For some reason, I doubt that "objective" journalism will be nearly as comprehensive, or interesting.
Google code base
March 29, 2005 | Science
The idea that Google has just one code base for everything they do is mind-boggling.
Laptop illusions
March 24, 2005 | Life
Good idea. Set your background image to a photo of what's behind it. Result: An apparently transparent desktop.
Best lego kit ever
March 24, 2005 | Science
You must see these videos: M-TRAN II auto-reconfigurable robot
'Each block can rotate 180 degrees around the link that connects it to its mate, and each module contains a magnet that can be switched on and off, enabling it to connect to other modules in the system. Genetic algorithms allow the robot to discover new ways of moving on its own.'
Also, The OmniTread:'The OmniTread is divided into five box-shaped segments connected through the middle by a long drive shaft spine that drives the tracks of all segments. Bellow s in the joints connecting the sections inflate or deflate to make the robot turn or lift the segments. The bellows provide enough torque for the OmniTread to lift the two front or rear segments to climb objects.'(38MB WMV)"
(Via jwz.)
Seasonality
March 21, 2005 | Nature & Environment | Products & Opportunites | Science
Here is yet another fantastic software application from a small (one-person) firm. Seasonality from Gaucho Software is a $25 desktop weather application.
Who cares, you say. After all, weather.com does that for free. But weather.com is slow, and filled with annoying chartjunk and ads. You have to load lots of pages (read, advertisements) to get the info you want.
Seasonality is a small, tight, targeted application designed for users – not for advertisers. It has a four-day forecast, sunrise and sunset, and radar maps. Best of all it has temperature and windspeed graphs looking back from one day to one year. You can set multiple locations and see them at a glance. The UI is clean and obvious. It's a really nice 1.0 release. I'll play with the 30-day free trial for a couple of days, but on first glance I'm almost certain to buy it. Congratulations to Gaucho!
How do zip codes work?
March 21, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
I'm back from vacation. There's prolly some stuff to write about from the last week. In the meantime, if you ever wondered how the US zip code system works (or like cool data-driven Flash apps) check out Zipdecode. Oh, and turn on the zoom function.
Free Month of Netflix
March 10, 2005 | Business & Commerce | Life
If you've been thinking about trying Netflix, here's a free month offer for new customers:
- - - - - - - -
1 Month FREE DVD RENTALS
FROM: Michael J.
EXPIRES: 3/23/2005
(Quantities are limited.)
Michael thought you might enjoy the Netflix DVD Rental Service and
has sent you an invitation to try Netflix free for one month.
To redeem this special offer, just use the link below.
http://www.netflix.com/Default?mqso=80000124
- - - - - - - -
And after you sign up, visit Hacking Netflix for info and tips.
Walter Murch
March 10, 2005 | Arts & Culture
Walter Murch at Transom.org. From Jay Allison's introduction:
"If you work in sound or film, you will come to know the name Walter Murch by your colleagues' tone when they say it. This is the man responsible for movies you remember for the dance between sound and picture--he shaped them both--The Conversation, The English Patient, Apocalypse Now, Cold Mountain--and those are just a few of his picture editing and sound mixing credits. He has won multiple Oscars in both categories and is, well, generally regarded with some awe.
Walter has created for Transom a new essay called Womb Tone as a companion to his lecture, Dense Clarity - Clear Density, now illustrated here with sound and film clips, detailing Walter's process. It's amazing. Take a chair in the classroom, and sit quietly."
Walter's Book, In the Blink of An Eye, at Amazon.
Scent of A Robot
March 9, 2005 | Arts & Culture
Really choice live action/animated rap video by Pete Miser. Language and visuals are work-safe, but the concept probably isn't.
A Product for Everyone
March 9, 2005 | Business & Commerce
I don't even know what to say.
Why Feel Righteous About All The Bad In The World?
March 8, 2005 | People & Society | Products & Opportunites
I heard someone was annoyed that tsunami relief collection boxes were being taken down too soon. And I thought of a product opportunity!
We should make a big electronic wall-sized display of the Top 100 "current disasters." It can be ranked by number dead, with arrows up and down for increasing or decreasing trends (like the Billboard chart). Then, people can swipe their ATM cards and punch a button (like a vending machine) to donate to that relief effort. We could have a couple of video screens, one with looping multi-camera views of the disaster itself, another with endless talking heads about just how bad it really is, and a third with exposes on on how fraud and corruption are taking away from each effort. Then, we could have web links for browsing and comparing THIS disaster to other ones that might be similar by location, number affected, type (hurricane, avian flu, earthquake, etc), relief effort ($), etc.
Oh wait, I just described the Internet and cable TV!!
Seriously, there is so much to worry about in the world. Could we focus on our local situation, with the poverty, heroin, homelessness, and crime that locals seem to deny? Why are all the bad things so far away? The problem with instant relief efforts is that it keeps people reactive. Sigh.
Taste of New England
March 8, 2005 | Life
Sitting at home Saturday night, watching "Ray" with some friends. [Insert erudite comment about the awesome fantastic movie.] Into the table lamp next to me flew a cluster fly. Everyone could hear the boink! hitting the lampshade.
Me: "First cluster fly of the season!"
Lynne: "Good, means it's warming up."
Me: "Mud season will be here soon."
And indeed, it's been above freezing for 36 hours, it's pouring rain outside, and the dirt road is turning to deep ruts. Time to go to Florida!
Perhaps you had to be there. It was a true New England moment.
Phish has even started off a song immortalizing the cluster fly.
Welcome, this is a farmhouse. We have cluster flies, alas. And this time of year is bad.
We are so very sorry There is little we can do, But swat them
If it's in a song you know it's real.
Catallaxis
March 1, 2005 | Business & Commerce | People & Society
Daniel O'Connor recently launched "Catallaxis - The Integral Economics Weblog." Today's post, A Crisis of Vision, is a draft introduction to his forthcoming book. It's a very good summary of the current economic dialectic, and seems quite reasonable and balanced. Long, but worth the read.
Four Days on Rails
March 1, 2005 | Science
Since we've been pimping Rails, why not point to this helpful toolbox.
"There have been many extravagant claims made about Rails. For example, Curt Hibbs' Rolling with Ruby on Rails claimed that you could develop a web application at least ten times faster with Rails than you could with a typical Java framework... The article then goes on to show how to install Rails and Ruby on a PC and build a working "scaffold" application with virtually no coding.
While this is impressive, "real" web developers know that this is smoke and mirrors. "Real" applications aren"t as simple as that. What"s actually going on beneath the surface? How hard is it to go on and build "real" applications?"
