- Great quote for the industry… – Welcome to Vendor Alley
Chandler Barton (president and CEO of CB when purchased by HFS) once said, “People have this business backwards. You need to cut expenses when the market is good because don’t need to spend the money, and you grow market share when the market is bad. So when the cycle turns, which it inevitably will, you’ve got a larger share”.Agreed.
- How “Why Startups Fail” Fails – Signal vs. Noise
David Feinleib at Mohr Davidow Ventures pens a piece called, “Why Startups Fail.” Here are his four reasons with my thoughts below.Agreed.
- DimP – A Direct Manipulation Video Player – TechCrunch
DimP, a direct manipulation video player, lets users drag items on the video screen to move forward and back instead of just via a scroll bar on the bottom of the video.Holy smokes people are smart. This is sooooooooo cool – how the heck did they figure that out.
Archive for the ‘links’ Category
items for 05.24.2008
May 23, 2008items for 05.20.2008
May 18, 2008- Drop.io: Simple Private Exchange
Drop.io enables you to create simple private exchange points called “drops.” The service has no email signup and no “accounts.” Each drop is private, and only as accessible as you choose to deliberately make it.
(tags: fileshare)
items for 05.11.2008
May 9, 2008- Future of MLS Features 2008 – Matt’s Real Estate Technology Blog
The purpose of this paper is to generate discussion on possible MLS system future features by providing a big picture view of the changing relationship of real estate professionals with each other and with consumers, the changing relationship of local and regional MLSs with each other, and to illustrate, at least at a high level, how these changes may be either enabled or reflected technically in the MLS system of the future.My thinking lately is matching several of Matt’s ideas.
- Mosso Launches CloudFS Storage Service – GigaOM
Mosso, an on demand hosting start-up is embracing Cloud Computing with open arms, and today launched the beta of CloudFS, a new web-based storage offering that will compete with Amazon’s S3. Mosso plans to charge $0.15 per gigabyte, and will remain in beta till end of third quarter.Competition is good for Amazon and it’s S3 customers.
items for 05.05.2008
April 25, 2008- Presdo, The Magical Online Scheduler – TechCrunch
I want you to stop what you are doing right now and go try Presdo. It is a deceptively simple online scheduling assistant that is a prime example of what a modern Web app should be. It only shows you what you need to see at the moment that you need to see it. And it understands what you want to do based on normal (and not-so-normal) English that you type in.Beautiful simplicity.
items for 04.21.2008
April 21, 2008- The killer real estate app time forgot – 1000Watt Blog
It was a killer app then; it is a killer app today. It was Web 2.0 before we even knew what that was.
items for 04.19.2008
April 17, 2008- May We Help You? – Amazon Web Services Blog
From the very beginning, we’ve always wanted to make sure that developers had all of the formal and informal support needed to build and to run their applications. - The Service Health Dashboard – Amazon Web Services Blog
We now have a Service Health Dashboard available at http://status.aws.amazon.com.
items for 04.14.2008
April 14, 2008- Urgency is poisonous – Signal vs. Noise
So far our four-day work week experiment is working. We haven’t found ourselves collectively wishing we had an extra work day a week. We haven’t found ourselves gasping for extra hours. Instead I feel like we’ve been more focused and working better together. - Draft Syndication Data Standard Approved – FBS Blog
Last week at the RETS trimester meeting, a draft of a syndication data format was approved by the general session. A brief history… - Storage Space, The Final Frontier – Amazon Web Services Blog
In the same way that your running EC2 instances, your Elastic IP addresses, your S3 buckets and your SQS queues can be thought of as items contained within the scope of your AWS account, our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.
items for 04.06.2008
April 7, 2008- How EC2 changes the game in batch grid computing – RightScale Blog
Enter Amazon EC2. If user A enqueues a job needing 500 nodes for 10 hours and user B a job needing 800 nodes for 5 hours what do you do? Very simple: you check the balance in their account and then start 500 instances for user A and 800 instances for user B. Done. No priorities, no scheduling, just pure compute fun!
One of us (Ed) observed: the resource that is “allocated” in the finite computer center is the use of hardware, but the resource that is “managed” in a Cloud is cost. It is a new mind set that 1 computer for 100 hours has the same cost as 100 computers for 1 hour. Of course there are details such as start up costs for large numbers of nodes and ensuring that each billed instance hour is fully used. But those details are a small leap when compared to the issue of understanding that 1=100. - Source: Google To Launch BigTable As Web Service – TechCrunch
Google may be releasing BigTable, its internal database system, as a web service to compete with Amazon SimpleDB, according to a source with knowledge of the launch. There are also rumors that press is being pre-briefed on the product, although we haven’t been contacted by Google.
BigTable is a highly scalable database system used internally by Google to support over 60 of its products and projects. A source says Google has plans to announce next week that it will make BigTable available to outside developers as a service. Amazon provides a similar service through SimpleDB, a cloud database solution announced in December.
items for 03.30.2008
March 28, 2008- New EC2 Features: Static IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and User Selectable Kernels – Amazon Web Services Blog
We just added three important new features to Amazon EC2: Elastic IP Addresses, Availability Zones, and User Selectable Kernels. - Department of Remarkably Good Ideas, nuclear weapons edition – blog.pmarca.com
This just in:Defense Secretary Robert Gates has formally ordered the Air Force, Navy and Defense Logistics Agency to conduct an inventory of all U.S. nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon-related materials to make sure all items are accounted for…
The order comes in the wake of the discovery last week that four nuclear warhead fuses were accidentally shipped to Taiwan in 2006…
The inventory review, which will involve thousands of items, is due to Gates in 60 days. Pentagon officials said the request was ordered, in part, because this latest incident comes after the August 2007 accidental flight of six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 bomber across the country.
The CNN headline is to the point and priceless:
Pentagon Ordered To Locate All U.S. Nukes
I’ve been trying to think of an idea that would be even better than this one.
And I have failed.
This is, officially, the best good idea of all time.
Sleep well!
items for 03.16.2008
March 16, 2008- Why we disagree with Don Norman – Signal vs. Noise
Don Norman, an author, professor, and partner at the Nielsen Norman Group, read the Wired article about us and wrote a piece asking, “Why is 37signals so arrogant?” - Gmail Art Ad (Video) – Google Blogoscoped
From the YouTube caption: “A video that Saatchi Moscow created and produced for Google to attract more Russian people on GMail.” Gmail designer Kevin Fox comments, “Oh my god I want to kiss this video.” Note the Google homepage has been turned into a giant painting before, too…
items for 03.03.2008
January 25, 2008- [On Writing] Biz dev emails and first impressions – Signal vs. Noise
Yesterday I got an email from a biz dev guy at a company that syncs data between different applications from different companies.This was the first line of the email:I work for an enterprise level integration company that is looking to attack the long tail of the market for point to point integration solutions.
Delete.
items for 01.04.2008
January 4, 2008- Dominion Enterprises up for sale? – Welcome to Vendor Alley
Landmark Communications is the parent company of Dominion Enterprises. Dominion Enterprises owns eNeighborhoods, Advanced Access, Homes.com and the Harmon Homes magazine. - slapdash – Bill de hOra
Reg Braithwaite: “What I admire about professions like Engineering and Medicine. In short, their Code of Ethics. Try this: Employ an Engineer. Ask her to slap together a bridge. The answer will be no. You cannot badger her with talk of how you hold the Gold, therefore you make The Rules. You cannot cajole her with talk of how the department needs to make its numbers, and that means getting construction done by the end of the quarter.” - For $5 Million You Can Buy Enough Storage to Compete with Google – High Scalability – Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites
Kevin Burton calculates that Blekko, one of the barbarian hoard storming Google’s search fortress, would need to spend $5 million just to buy enough weapons, er storage. Kevin estimates storing a deep crawl of the internet would take about 5 petabytes. At a projected $1 million per petabyte that’s a paltry $5 million. Less than expected. - Cold snap causes iguanas to fall out of trees
Awesome headline! It was cold here in SoFla this week.
(tags: post:tzetzefly)
items for 12.29.2007
December 29, 2007- Visualization of names and words used by Presidential candidates – O’Reilly Radar
The New York Times has a really interesting Circos/Clusterball style visualization of the names used by US presidential candidates to refer to opponents in the debates preceding the Iowa caucuses…If you’re a fan of visualization (ala Edward Tufte), check this out. Very well done.
- Thrudb – faster, cheaper than SimpleDB – igvita.com
Highly scalable document-oriented database ideal for deployment on virtual (Amazon EC2+S3) or dedicated infrastructure. Differs from SimpleDB in that it uses CLucene for full-text search and memcached for speed and scalability.
(tags: thrudb)
items for 12.22.2007
December 22, 2007- Preliminary NAR Gateway Report released – BloodhoundBlog
Finally – some details about this project. Good to see specific use of RETS here. Would love to see lot’s of comments on this, but the timing of this release will probably limit the discussion. - NAR’s Gateway Concept Out In The Open – FBS Blog
At long last, the NAR’s Gateway concept is out in the open for discussion. I’ve been asking about more details for some time and want to thank Jim Duncan for making it happen.Trust Michael to instigate much of the discussion.
items for 12.21.2007
December 21, 2007- O.C. Realtor membership may drop 15% in ‘08 – Lansner on Real Estate
Register reporter Jeff Collins tells us that three of the four major local Realtor groups are expecting some noteworthy slippage in membership in ‘08…We’ve been waiting – and wondering – when this downtrend would start.
- Drive – blog.pmarca.com
From Paul Zollo’s book Hollywood Remembered, an oral history of the movie industry: A 2001 interview with A. C. Lyles, a producer at Paramount who was born in 1918 in Jacksonville, Florida and worked at Paramount for over 60 years….Great story.
items for 12.16.2007
December 16, 2007- Amazon removes the database scaling wall – Scripting News
When Amazon introduced S3 in March 2006 I knew I would use it and I was sure a lot of other developers would. I saw it as a solution to a problem we all have — storage that scales up when needed, and scales down when not. Otherwise we all have to buy as much bandwidth as we need in peak periods. With S3, you pay for what you use. It makes storage for Internet services more rational. Later they did the same for processors and queuing. And a couple of days ago they announced a lightweight scalable database, using the same on-demand philosophy and simple architecture and API. It’s going to be a huge hit and forever change the way apps are developed for the Internet.I was explaining the significance of this to Scoble on the phone this morning. It’s worth repeating here…
items for 12.13.2007
December 13, 2007- Exodus at Zillow? – Future of Real Estate Marketing
News that Vast.com has launched a new real estate search engine (see Inman’s Search platform launches with 2.4 million homes) isn’t nearly as interesting as who’s launching it.
Ben Clark is leading the company’s real estate business unit and its foray into this industry. And if that name sounds familiar, it should. From Inman … - The blue ocean of real estate – 1000Watt Blog
A while back I addressed large group of agents, members of an elite force handling estates, plush portfolios and families with trust funds, crests and insignias. My discussion covered current innovations in marketing — blogging and social networking in particular….
items for 12.07.2007
December 3, 2007- Who Needs Non Compete Clauses – GigaOM
Not Bijan Sabet or his partners at Spark Capital. “…have decided to do away with the non-compete clause. Starting today. We will not require a non-compete clause with our portfolio companies and new investments.” Hey maybe other VCs should embrace this as well. (#)
items for 11.21.2007
November 21, 2007- We Knew This Was Going To Happen: iPhone Equipped Passenger Takes On Flight Crew Over Weather – PlaneBuzz
“Oh joy! I can’t wait for the next ground delay or long taxi due to weather somewhere to get a smart ass with a freakin I-phone shoving it in my face saying “It’s NOT raining there… SEE !” Too late … already happened to me.
Pretty funny story. - The Serverless Internet Company – Scobleizer
At one point Max seemed like he was joking around with me when he told me “we don’t own a single server.” I asked him FOUR more times to make sure I heard him right. I even got incredulous with him at one point saying something like “what the f*** do you mean you don’t own a server?” and “you mean not a single bit of your Web site comes from servers that aren’t owned by Amazon?”This is the future – the near future. Running a business is fun. Running a NOC is not fun – and that’s a huge understatement.
items for 10.26.2007
October 27, 2007- Evidence Based Scheduling – Joel on Software
Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce their boss to a fit of giggles, and in the ensuing joviality, the schedule will be forgotten… - You have to love this industry – blog.pmarca.com
I know I do! October 2: Steve Ballmer, the Microsoft chief executive, believes that the craze for individual social networks such as Facebook risks being exposed as a “fad”… “I think these things [social networks] are going to have some…
