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interesting idea on overcoming food shortage by using a series of high-rises in urban areas where fruit, vegetables and livestock can be raised by utilizing greenhouse methods and recycled resources year-round, allowing cities to become self-sufficient.
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Photographer Jim Brandenburg’s challenge: Make a portrait of the north woods in upper Minnesota over the ninety days between the autumn equinox and winter solstice, with one, and only one, exposure per day. Amazing photos!
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Google has just released a set of components called Libjingle that allow third party applications to interact with Google Talk. The components, which include some source code, are being released under a liberal license allowing for free incorporation.
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VC Fred Wilson says its high time the consumer electronics industry joins PCs and the internet in becoming flexible vis-a-vis consumers and entrepreneurs: its nearly impossible to take control of one’s experience and impossible to innovate in this sector.
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talks about the “corporate” persona often assumed by startups and how it prevents relationship-building. “I slowly realized the importance of relationship building, especially with customers and how powerful it can be as a competitive advantage.”
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makes the point that the value of a social network is also determined by the strength of the connections between the people in it. gives examples that on Amazon individual reviewers don’t matter but on Skype, individual people you talk to do matter.
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In the long run, the value of a social network is not only determined by the number of people in it, but in the ability for the network to monetize them. It is much easier to do that if you are vertically focussed rather than horizontally focussed.
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presents four ways in which del.icio.us-like services can generate revenue: 1) Contextual Ads in a Social Search Engine 2) Selling “Tag-Stream Data” 3) Advertorial Tags 4) Other Contextual Advertising based on User Value
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Practical entrepreneurs don’t follow a big vision but look for a low-risk market where one’s skills can be applied. The 4 rules: 1) choose a fragmented market 2) sell to business not consumers 3) clear and simple revenue model 4) eat your own dog food
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discusses the “Edit & Continue” feature in Visual Studio in the context of whether such tool advances are making programmers more sloppy. Also, hypothesizes that additional checks are no guarantee and may paradoxically increase the probability of errors.
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“In product management, the things you choose not to do are at least as important as the things you choose to do. Though it might seem like adding features is always a good thing, there are actually tradeoffs being made with each feature added.”
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an interesting post on what game developers should ask for in retail contracts.
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how filters/aggregators like Squidoo help micro-ISVs get attention and showcase their expertise and translate it into revenue.
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A list of all projects at IBM Research. Most of them have papers and documentation, and looking at them might spark off an idea..
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a great presentation on how Microsoft has changed the UI in Office 12 to make it more usable, essentially an exercise in managing complexity.
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a very fascinating story about how changes and trends in specific vertical industries can happen, giving the example of the centuries-old ice industry which is being forced to change in a disruptive way due to innovation.
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Ten tips for businesses analyzing the impact of a decision to use an open-source project. Quote: “Don’t be an Open Source ostrich. Open Source software is not likely to go away nor are you likely to avoid it. As always, “be prepared” is the best motto.
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a list of Google search operators, which actually pretty handy for repetitive searches that you make into shortcuts.
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“The Deep Web is the gigantic source of information stored deep down in databases - rendered through DHTML and not accessible to standard crawlers. In many cases, they actually do not even exist until a user asks a question by filling up fields in a form”
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In the light of Alexa (an Amazon-owned search company) opening up access to its index via an API at cheap rates to anyone who wants it, the index of a search engine is fast turning into a commodity.
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Discusses how simply reducing the complexity or number of steps marginally can lead to market dominance (eg. Google, Skype). Also discusses how reducing the barriers to entry make your products much more attractive.
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very interesting article which talks about competition in the software components market, and how it impacts the choices you make in development — essentially leading to analysis paralysis. also discusses the problems inherent in internal code reuse.
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good tips on overcoming fear and achieving success. “While fear embedded in the unconscious mind can sabotage our success, the reverse is also true. You can use your unconscious mind to influence your thinking in order to achieve your goals.”
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a very good summary of the conversation about how to make money from the Long Tail. a must read!
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Can humor skills be developed? Yes, absolutely. Steve Pavalina gives some extremely good tips on how to develop them.
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how normal people act when committed people set out to do extraordinary things, taking examples from the author’s life. Very inspiring, makes you feel that you missed a lot by not acting when it was needed.
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With bottlenecks removed and the costs of production dropping, IT Consulting looks like the Long Tail of services. The future of services is in making lots of small engagements pay, rather than shooting only for the big ones.
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discusses the fundamental tension of the internet: between convergence/anti-convergence, bundling/unbundling & centralization/decentralization and suggests that if all content is “unbundled”, the cultural products subsidized by commercial junk may go away
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quotes Bill Gates: “Google’s business model is based on advertisements from which they make a lot of money, which it keeps with itself” and makes the point that there’s too much profit right now in online advertising for Google, which isn’t going to last.
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explains in numbers how picking Rails over Java affects the bids he puts in for consulting jobs (considering only the actual programming part of the bid). The approach that Stuart takes in differentiating between the two is quite interesting.
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Microsoft’s Robert Scoble was concerned about the exodus of developers that are leaving .NET for Ruby on Rails, and asked for feedback on the reasons. Follow the comments/trackbacks for a very interesting discussion.
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TinyMCE is a open-source web based Javascript HTML WYSIWYG editor control. It has the ability to convert HTML TEXTAREA fields or other HTML elements to editor instances and is very easy to integrate into other CMS systems.
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Nice CSS technique for replacing multiple-select boxes with a scrollable series of checkboxes.
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an explanation of what all 99s in uptime measurement really mean in terms of hours. also recommends two rules for on-demand service providers: 1) Take steps to keep users informed 2) Be upfront about service levels
