Enclosures

46 posts filed under this category.

Syndication and Widgets Primer

Today’s publishers need to think beyond the fixed location of their website and fully integrate with the large hubs of user activity on the desktop, mobile phone, social networks, blogs, and web pages at large. Syndication and widgets power new opportunities to carry content beyond the walls of a single site and into some of the largest brands in the world yet some publishers still haven’t gotten the message. I recorded a 1-hour video presentation earlier this week to better explain the syndication and widget landscape to web publishers.

Podcast: Social media trends with Charlene Li

Social computing has changed the way we interact with the Web. Our information consumption and production benefits from the participation of the crowd in its various forms, creating niche audiences and new types of curators independent of space and time. We’re connected to local experts on hiking, cooking, parenting, programming, and much more. Yet social media extends beyond the realm of content creators, bolstered by the comments, ratings, rankings, sharing, and reading masses that help us find the content we seek. Forrester Research released a report last week, Social Technographics, detailing levels of social media participation among 10,000 adults and…

Podcast: Taking Ajax offline

Rich Internet applications are stepping out of the web browser and onto the desktop, helped along by a new set of toolkits. Web developers are able to code against desktop resources using familiar languages and toolkits such as JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, or HTTP interactions. Offline access for web applications is about much more than planes, trains, and automobiles — it can accelerate performance and integrate with established desktop interactions as well. Offline web applications are a hot topic, but often misunderstood. In this week’s podcast I step beyond the myths of offline web applications with special guest Brad Neuberg….

Six Apart widget podcast with Byrne Reese

Last Friday I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco to talk about widgets with Byrne Reese. Byrne is the former product manager of TypePad, currently a product manager of Movable Type, and a developer of plugins and widgets used in both products. Byrne and I talked about the current state of widgets in Six Apart’s four blogging products: TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Vox. Our 25-minute conversation about Six Apart widgets is available as a 11 MB audio download. I will summarize a few highlights from our conversation below. Listen to Niall Kennedy interview Byrne Reese of Six Apart…

Rasmus Lerdorf on scaling web apps with PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf led OSCON attendees through a series of optimizations for modern web applications using PHP at O’Reilly’s Open Source conference today. Most programmers use default installations and configurations for their web applications and never really dig deep within their stack or their own code to optimize page load and latency. The full slides from Rasmus’s talk are available online and I recorded audio of the entire session from the front row. Rich web applications make better use of browser user interfaces through the use of less visible round-trips to the server (through AJAX or other methods). These new…

The Widgetization of the Web

Widgets are taking over the web, small pieces at a time. Big web destinations are opening their templates to custom configurations by users and pre-configurations with special partners. Mix and match your favorite content from around the web on your personal start page from Microsoft, Google, or Netvibes. Share a few live and always updating bits of information in your blog sidebar using widgets on WordPress or TypePad. Small(er) businesses can leverage the huge distributions of users across most of the top web properties. Over half of the top Internet companies for home users currently open up their pages for…

PodSession: Instant Messaging

Seth Sternberg of Meebo joined me and Om on this week’s edition of Om and Niall PodSessions covering the latest trends and developments in instant messaging. Microsoft and Yahoo! launched new versions of their messaging software this week, including many features I will never use. What do end users want from their instant messaging software? Seth doesn’t think the big portals have added a new feature that users have been clammoring for in years. Chinese company Tencent has captured about two-thirds of the Chinese market with its QQ client. Estonian company Skype has enjoyed tremendous success with its P2P and…

PodSession: Startup Do’s and Don’ts with Matt Mullenweg of Automattic

Last night Om and I sat down with Matt Mullenweg, lead developer of open-source blogging software WordPress and a recent founder of Automattic to record our latest PodSession. Automattic is a software services company centered around the WordPress blogging platform. We chatted about how to successfully scale a new web application. WordPress.com currently hosts about 200,000 blogs with mirrored hosting in San Diego and Dallas. Matt and I agreed that it’s best not to over-optimize at the beginning but instead sit back and watch the actual usage of your web application to fine-tune. Check out Cal Henderson’s new book,…

PodSession: Broadband and console gaming

Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony are showing off their latest gaming consoles this week at E3 in Los Angeles. Xbox 360, Wii, and PlayStation 3 each feature an ethernet jack and online gaming experiences built-in. These new devices are increasing demand for HDTV, broadband, and networking gear in the home. Game developers are able to push out new content after the game has shipped, or introduce smaller, more niche games through a console maker’s online marketplace. The connected console is changing the way games are made and causing consumers to rethink their living rooms. Om and I cover these topics and…

PodLeaders podcast interview

I few weeks ago Tom Raftery interviewed me over Skype as part of his weekly PodLeaders podcast. We chatted about Technorati, Macs, Microsoft, podcasting, and many more topics I’ve been meaning to blog about. Tom is a fellow Irishman and some of my answers are aimed at a European audience. I’ve briefly answered the questions from the podcast below. You can listen to the entire interview for my full responses to questions from Tom and his listeners. I recorded the interview from my home at 8 a.m. after a brief cup of tea, so hopefully it all makes sense. Can…

PodSession: Startup School

Want to found a startup! First you should go to school and learn a few things. Last Saturday’s Startup School at Stanford brought together about 600 people from across the country and in some cases the world to learn what it takes to take a business from zero to profit without going broke. Om and I both attended and talked about the event and the current environment for new startups in this week’s PodSession. The event was organized by Y Combinator, a venture firm focused on seed funding for geeky projects. Students in the Y Combinator program can try startup…

PodSession: You’re being watched, and Macs now do Windows

Om and I received a variety of feedback last week as podcast listeners stood up against research reports about podcasts and their audiences. Some people thought a 20-minute discussion of hot tech news was just right and others wanted even shorter, more digestible chunks. This week Om and I recorded two 10-minute podcasts to try something new and introduce a little variety. It was also tough to pick just one topic this week since both Apple and Google had big announcements last Wednesday. You’re being watched Your cellular carrier knows where you are at all times. Pinpointing your location helps…

PodSession: wireless broadband

I want high speed Internet everywhere. Forget the WiFi hotspot locator attached to your keychain or the questionable reliability of a local cafe, I want a reliable and fast connection everywhere I go, even if it’s on a train or car moving 60 mph. Thankfully the cellular phone industry is up to the task and rolling out wireless data connections with up to 3 Mb/s in the San Francisco Bay area and other large metropolitan areas throughout the U.S. These new mobile technologies are known as EV-DO or HSDPA depending on the carrier and are delivering high enough speed…

PodSession: online storage

In this week’s PodSession Om and I talk about online storage and the increased need to backup your digital lifestyle. The launch of Amazon’s Simple Storage Service was just the beginning of online storage utilities. Companies such as Amazon help people feel their data is safe with a company that already manages large amounts of data and will be in business for a long while. We are starting to see some enterprise-level backup and storage technologies applied to the consumer space. Home computer users are consuming more and more storage space by ripping CD collections, downloading music and movies, and…

Are portals back in fashion?

In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I talk about Google Finance, the latest piece of the search company’s portal play. According to Hitwise, 10% of Google UK’s visitors clicked out to Business and Finance sites last week. Yahoo! Finance received .02% of those clicks. Is Google in denial about its move towards a portal service? I liked the new Google Finance, especially the chart overlays and integration with other Google products. Om found the new product lacking a few of his favorite features from Yahoo! Finance such as institutional holdings and insider trading. A search…

VOIP and mobile integration podcast

In this week’s PodSession Om and I discuss voice and mobile technologies currently available for platform integration. When does it make sense for a web application to add voice or mobile capabilities? What are the costs and benefits? Are so called “web 2.0” companies just shinier versions of existing applications? Is anyone actually pushing the envelope and inventing entirely new industries? IP-based voice applications have already changed the way we think about communicating online. Mobile phones are now common tools of daily communication with relatively fast data connections with always-on access to the Web and focused data. Why are we…

Web interactions podcast

In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we talk about newly popularized methods of interaction within web applications. JavaScript, Ajax, and Flash have all seen a huge surge in demand and mindshare over the past year. What is the current state of the technology and is there enough talent to step up and fill the demand? JavaScript developers need to account for a variety of different implementations and parsers across browser platforms. You need to apply special tricks and hacks to the interaction experience consistent and dependable. I’d prefer to develop for the latest version of Firefox only…

Online privacy podcast

In this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions we discussed the current state of online privacy and the options presented to users with their choice of product and features. Do users pay any attention to EULAs? Does anyone realize what data is being stored about them online and shared with advertisers and potentially governments? This week’s podsession, Online privacy: who’s watching you?, is 29 minutes long and a 13 MB download. Tags: privacyonlineprivacy…

VoIP, not just for cheap calls

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about VoIP and the new applications with seamless integration of new voice technologies. A recent study by In-Stat found 73% of all VoIP subscribers have migrated to VoIP without making a conscious decision to adopt the new technology. On Sunday my dad asked me about Vonage, and the various boxes he saw advertised with the services in the Sunday newspaper inserts. To him, Vonage was just another long distance provider and happened to have cheap rates to call Ireland. He had no clue…

Search news around the world

On this week’s episode of Om and Niall PodSessions Om and I discuss changes in the search industry over the past week and their implications for future business development around the world. This week’s session is titled search around the world as we cover the changing landscape in the United States, Europe, and Asia in about 20 minutes. The DOJ paid Google a visit this week after the company refused to hand over search logs and information for its hundreds of millions of users. The long list of requested data made online users realize just how much personal information is…

Entrepreneurial sellout podcast

The latest episode of OnPodSessions, When to sell out, is now available for download. This week Om and I talk about large companies acquiring startups, what they are looking for, and how various startups position themselves. The selling out podcast is 23 minutes long and a 10.6 MB download. Last week I read a blog post and PowerPoint presentation by Joel Toledano of Yahoo! Search’s business development team. The presentation and blog post was a follow-up to an entrepreneurial event organized by CalTech and MIT. I felt like the presentation suggested small companies need approach Yahoo! about being acquired and…

Gadgets in the living room

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available for your listening pleasure. This week Om and I talk about the latest consumer electronics announcements from CES over the last week and some of the emerging trends for new gadgets in the living room. I liked the Intel Core Duo announcement and its energy-efficient design. New laptops utilizing the technology have over 11 hours of battery life! I was also impressed by XM Radio’s new XM Passport hardware, a tiny 1.5″ square satellite radio tuner that can be inserted into multiple devices similar to a SIM card. Om…

Emerging video trends podcast

Om and I sat down this week to discuss the current and future state of video creation and distribution technologies. We both expect many video-related announcements from this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that will bring a wider variety of video consumption products into the living room. We also talked about new ways for amateurs to create and share videos online and using specialized portable hardware such as the iPod video. I don’t think any search company currently is doing a good job indexing video content. Even audio content has been a big challenge. Closed-captioning provides a bridge…

Paid placements over broadband pipes

The latest of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week Om and I talk about the emergence of paid placement or prioritization of services on networks run by broadband providers such as your cable or telephone company. Cable and phone operators currently prioritize the handling of data packets from their own services flowing across the network. A call placed using a carrier’s Internet telephony product will receive priority handling ahead of calls placed using competing services such as Skype or Vonage. The carriers are now in discussion with other businesses dependent on fast delivery of their content to…

Week of the APIs

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. This week’s theme is APIs and the new opportunities for service providers, developers, and end users. Kevin Burton of TailRank joined us to add an independent developer perspective to this week’s discussion. This week’s session is 26 minutes and 28 seconds in length and a 12.2 MB download. Topics Amazon introduced its Alexa web search platform on Monday. The new services give developers the ability to use content from Alexa’s crawler data and other web services in a hosted environment. Amazon is letting developers upload their own data, process…

Exclusive: TypePad outage update and details

Popular blog hosting provider TypePad.com was unavailable to its members for 18 hours today as a result of a failed storage upgrade during scheduled maintenance late last night. I visited Six Apart’s headquarters in San Francisco earlier this evening to talk with Six Apart employees about the events that transpired and the current state of TypePad’s blogging platform. I sat down for an interview with Anil Dash, Six Apart’s Vice President of Professional Products, about an hour after TypePad’s servers came back online. We discussed TypePad’s reliability issues over the past two months, what went wrong today, and how…

Podcast with 37signals

Earlier today I had the opportunity to interview Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals for my podcast with Om Malik. We talked about scalability’s role in business planning, built-to-flip startup companies, and programming using the Ruby on Rails framework. Our interview with Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson is 29 minutes and 50 seconds in length and a 13.7 MB download. Om posted earlier this week about companies that don’t take scale into account when building a web service. David Heinemeier Hansson responded to Om with his own experiences building Basecamp and other hosted applications. We took the…

Rich RSS beyond text

I just posted the latest episode of Om and Niall PodSesssions to our podcast site. This week Om and I talk about the possibilities of RSS beyond text and blogs as content such as photos, music, movies, and more are delivered using RSS and other syndication formats. I have been playing around with some of the new broadband RSS services on my TiVo and thinking about new methods of content delivery to the home. Broadband access has been sold as an instant-on service available anytime you wish to interact and retrieve information. I believe the next wave of services will…

PodSession on blogs, RSS, and advertising

The latest episode of Om and Niall PodSessions is now available. Om and I sat down at his apartment last week to talk about blogs, RSS, and advertising. Om asked most of the questions, focusing the discussion about how to make the right choices in blogging software and services to become a better blogger. Full show notes are available on the Om and Niall PodSessions site. This week’s podcast is 21 minutes in length and a 9.7 MB download. After the podcast I gave Om’s RSS a makeover including switching his feed to FeedBurner, adding more branding by utilizing more…

Om and Niall PodSessions #3

I sat down with Om Malik tonight to record the latest of our weekly podcasts. We sat across the table from each other in a quiet room instead of using Gizmo Project and you can tell the difference in the quality of the audio file. This week’s podcast is 8.9 MB in size and 19 minutes and 15 seconds in length. We spent most of the podcast talking about startup companies in the Bay Area. Last week Om and I became well aware of the new bubble forming in the valley. I shook my head as I saw two new…

Maps, Microsoft Live, and Xbox 360

I recorded a new podcast tonight with Om Malik covering the big news in the technology industry over the past week. We focused on mapping technologies, mobile phone use, and Microsoft’s new online strategy. Om and I hope to continue covering the latest technology news each week. You can subscribe to my enclosures feed to always receive the latest episode of a yet unnamed series. The audio file of our discussion lasts for 19 minutes and 39 seconds and is a 9.1 MB download. I hope you enjoy. Please leave comment or ask questions directly on this post or contact…

VoIP podcast with Om Malik

I use voice over IP applications such as Skype and Gizmo Project but I don’t follow industry developments in the same detail as Om Malik and his broadband blog. Om and I tried out the podcasting abilities of Gizmo Project tonight with a 19 minute discussion of the current state of voice over IP (VoIP). We talk about some of the industry basics, news of the week, and where the industry as a whole is headed. Click here to download the 8.7 MB MP3 file. Topics covered: Skype vs. Gizmo Project Dialing out to a phone grid Microsoft Windows Live…

Igor Jablokov interview on multimodal search

Last Monday night I sat down with Igor Jablokov, an IBM program director working on new methods of multimodal search using open standards, to do a podcast. Multimodal search adds voice commands to a visual display to allow easy access to a long list of commands and contextual information. The technology is currently used in web browsers, mobile phones, and automobile computing systems. I also recorded a presentation by Igor on mobile search at Mobile Monday in April. IBM is one of the contributors to the VoiceXML proposed standard. Opera and Motorola are also active contributors. IBM promotes a…

Interview with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons of NewsGator

I had the opportunity to sit down with Greg Reinacker and Brent Simmons to talk about the NewsGator and its recent acquisition of Ranchero Software. I spent about 30 minutes with Greg and Brent talking about how they decided to work together, how NetNewsWire contributes to NewsGator’s product strategy and revenue goals, and what changes we can expect from both sides in the near future. I asked a few questions Greg and Brent had never discussed and there are definitely a few details yet to be worked out. We also talked about Nick Bradbury and NewsGator’s acquisition of Bradbury…

Thad White of Yahoo! Mobile

The final presentation of the night was from Thad White of Yahoo!… content on their computer and send the content to their mobile phone using an SMS message with a URL.

Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol

The second Mobile Monday presentation was by Fabrizio Capobianco of Funambol. Funambol develops the open source SyncML server Sync4j.

Buzznet presentation at Mobile Monday

Jeff Clavier and Marc Brown of Buzznet were the third Mobile Monday presenters. Buzznet is a photo sharing service and platform based on a LAMP architecture.

David Sifry 106 Miles talk

I just finished editing the audio of David Sifry’s talk at the February meeting of 106 Miles, a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley.

Orb Networks presentation at Mobile Monday

Ted Shelton of Orb Networks was the final Mobile Monday presentation. Orb Networks offers media streaming from your broadband connection and Windows XP computer to any Internet-connected device with a web browser and RealPlayer or Windows Media Player. You can browse and listen to music, movies, and television from your home computer while you are away from your desktop PC. Orb Networks started in July 2004 and launched its first product at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show. They do not have to pay licensing fees since users have already licensed their own content. The top use of Orb is…

MobiTV presentation at Mobile Monday

Alan Moskowitz of MobiTV was the third presenter at this month’s Mobile Monday meeting. MobiTV delivers 24 channels of live television to your mobile phone for $10 a month on top of your carrier’s data plan. They are powered by Java and claim to be one of the first recurring revenue applications using Java. You can channel surf on your phone with little effort. Alan shared some interesting statistics on MobiTV. Mobile television use is 5.65 minutes per session with approximately 2.34 sessions per day. Live television is used more often than their clips product due to its more…

Garage Cinema Research presentation at Mobile Monday

On Monday I attended the Mobile Monday meeting at Microsoft’s campus in Mountain View. There was an impressive set of presenters all focused on mobile media. The first presenter was Marc Davis of UC Berkeley and the director of Garage Cinema Research. Garage Cinema Research is interested in adding metadata through context-aware applications. You can infer data about the general location of a cameraphone user from their cell tower triangulation, the time of day, and popular photography subjects in the area. If a user adds a category to their photograph, a server can return a best guess of the object…

How To Run Your Own Software Business presentation

Oliver Breidenbach, Steve Dekorte, Steve Gehrman, Will Shipley, Brent Simmons, and Dan Wood participated in a panel discussion about how to run your own software business. Below is my summary. I also have audio of the entire session (44.1 MB MP3, 1:36:48) except for mentions of Omnigroup lawsuits that were removed at the request of Will Shipley. Time to market varied for different software vendors. It took Dan 6 months to develop Watson. It took Brent 10 months to develop NetNewsWire including learning Cocoa. It took Oliver 3 weeks to develop his first product and receive his first payment. The…

Howard Dean Yahoo! Local advertisement

Yahoo! has a new advertisement for Yahoo! Local featuring Howard Dean (listen to the MP3). Howard Dean lists some of the states he visited on his book tour. (via Yahoo! Search blog)…

We the Media introduction

This Friday is the official launch of Dan Gillmor’s first book: We the Media. The text will be available under a Creative Commons license. Currently only the book’s introduction is online. I thought it would be cool to have an audio version of a portion of the book available by the Creative Commons party this Friday. Tonight I am happy to make available to the online community my reading of the introduction to We the Media by Dan Gillmor in both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis audio formats. My reading lasts 19 minutes and 6 seconds. If you are interested…

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