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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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)…
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…
