Mark Fletcher spoke about his experience starting ONElist and Bloglines at this month's SDForum Startup SIG in Palo Alto. Mark has given a similar presentation at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference and at Startup School, but if you are not in California you might have missed his advice for starting your own company while moonlighting and being super-cheap. Mark's last corporate job was with set-top box maker Diba which was eventually acquired by Sun Microsystems in July 1997. He started working on a new company, ONElist, on the side, funded by a $5,000 bonus check for its first six…
Nokia announced an upgrade to the 770 Internet tablet operating system and bundled hardware this morning at the VON Europe Conference in Stockholm, Sweden. The new operating system, now named Internet Tablet OS 2006, features Google search and IM functionality built-in, including prominent display on the homepage and task bar. Nokia 770 owners can now chat with friends using text and voice from their Internet tablets. Nokia developed the IM and VoIP based on XMPP and Google's libjingle extensions. The voice and text screens are branded with the Google Talk logo, including the beta designation. The Gizmo Project will…
Flickr's gone gamma with a new site design and functionality. The new site packs more links into less space using JavaScript menus. It looks like Organizr has been completely rewritten in JavaScript with no Flash required. The site also features a new search results page sorted by relevancy, recency, and interestingness. The search index contains photo titles, tags, and descriptions but not notes. You can search for groups of interest and people with a much cleaner result page. Tags: flickr…
Tony Fadell helped develop handheld devices for General Magic and Philips. Tony had a vision of a portable MP3 player complemented by an online music store. His startup, Fuse, couldn't get VC financing to build the product. He shopped the idea around to big companies such as Real Networks and only one company decided to experiment with his idea, hiring Tony as a contractor to build a prototype in two months. The first review on Slashdot in October 2001 called the product "lame" and "not very exciting" for lacking wireless and a bigger hard drive. The product idea became the…
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…
The Department of Justice cleared the search box feature in Internet Explorer 7, calling it respectful to "users' and OEM's default choices and is easily changed." Windows Live Search is the current default search engine in Internet Explorer 7. Google was not happy with the browser defaults and complained to the antitrust division. (via Search Engine Watch) The article also mentions a resolved issue with the "first-boot" experience in Windows Vista. I just installed Vista beta 2, and my first screen was a "Welcome Center" with a few control panels and tweaks. The first boot experience in Internet Explorer 7…
Google introduced three new products today during its press day in Mountain View. The new product launches are part of Google's refocus on its search and advertising business after an internal audit showed an overcommitment of resources to auxiliary products such as Blogger and Gmail. Google Co-op introduces social recommendations and tagging to the search process. You can "subscribe" to a friend or data provider's content to receive a special OneBox with information from these companies or individuals. It's similar to Google's Enterprise OneBox and its partner experience combined with personal subscriptions. Users can also can add tags to…
ExpoTV is best described as Epinions in video form. Users submit video reviews of products and share tips with others. Creating a review can be as simple as demonstrating a product's features in front of a webcam. I watched video reviews of an iPod shuffle, Proactiv acne solution, and Sharpie highlighters. The company was founded by executives from the cable TV industry. ExpoTV content is available on-demand from Comcast, Adelphia, Charter, and a few other big cable companies. ExpoTV makes money by connecting viewers with a product purchase. Videos in certain categories receive an Amazon gift card of $10-$25…
Video publishers using Brightcove will soon be able to reach over 400,000 broadband-enabled TiVo boxes as early as next month. Videobloggers using Brightcove can expose their content to TiVo users and collect some additional advertising revenue. Internet TV is easily mixed with content major networks. Users will watch content unaware if it took place from 2-2:30 p.m. or if it was an enclosure in a feed. Very cool. Tags: brightcovetivo…
The latest nightly builds of Firefox 2.0 (Bon Echo) include new XML parsers and feed tools for an improved sbuscription experience. The new feed processor provides a more user-friendly display of a a feed and passes the appropriate subscription data to other desktop applications, online aggregators, or Firefox's own Live Bookmarks feature. The new feed handling contains three specific parts, as outlined by product lead Ben Goodger last week in an e-mail to the Camino developers list. A feed sniffer to determine if the loaded content contains a feed, regardless of the MIME type returned by the publisher's servers….
Two years ago Dave Winer created feeds.scripting.com to help people share lists of feeds and discover other members of the community with similar interests. Winer just relaunched the site at a new URL, share.opml.org, to connect a new community and raise awareness of the OPML file format. The new site was based on Manila and the new site is built on top of WordPress. The Share Your OPML site collects lists of feed subscription URLs from its members and presents lists of most popular feeds, individual feed subscribers, and a peek into the lists of other members with similar reading…
Another weekend, another NewsGator news item of fun. This morning the NewsGator servers decided to replace the content of feed items with the item's link. It's more than a bit annoying and reminds us how updates from the cloud can go wrong and you are trusting your content will be delivered by the proxy in a timely and accurate manner. Did the proxy parse the feed correctly? Does the central database have the latest items available for its subscribers? Did it change the content in any way? Did the client software change its refresh rate to lower the burden…
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…
Appcasting is a way to add automatic updates to your applications using RSS 2.0 with enclosures. Mac apps TextMate, SubEthaEdit, and iStumbler already use appcasts for updates and frameworks such as Sparkle help you easily add updates for your own Cocoa app. Application developers can describe their application and the changes present in each update. You can add CSS and images to make the update screen pretty, and Sparkle lets you specify a web page to retrieve if you would like to keep the size of your RSS file small. Developers code the location of the appropriate RSS feed directly…
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…
Helio just launched, and every phone has a feed reader combined with unlimited data service. The reader is named "Helio on Top," displaying new messages on the bottom third of your screen as they come in. Selecting the message displays the full article and you can also browse through three items or channels at a time. Helio on Top is graphically very similar to Motorola's Screen3 reader. I like the small square images on the left of each alert. Given the tiny screen it's important for these images to add context but also create a more comporting feeling that…
I like the new Get a Mac ads Apple introduced tonight. The messages are simple and conversational with just one or two competitive points each. Less viruses, less restarting, better applications built-in for editing photos and websites, as easy as your iPod, simple connectivity, and a really good value are the themes communicated throughout. The Get a Mac campaign also promotes podcasting support as a good reason to switch….
Microsoft Research will be demonstrating some of their projects tomorrow afternoon in Mountain View. It's a total geek science fair, with futuristic ideas such as recording and indexing everything you see and hear throughout the day, auto-classifying blog content, or searching the web based on a cameraphone picture. The demo room is open from 2-4 p.m. for browsing. I'll be on the lookout for a tricorder or new textual analysis of blogs. Tags: msresearch…
Google is a bit upset to find it is not the default search engine in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 browser and is starting to talk antitrust. Safari, Firefox, Camino, and Opera all have Google built-in as default and sometimes the only search option. "The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose." Want to change your default search…
Nokia plans to release a podcast client for its latest smartphone lineup in early July. The application takes advantage of 3G cellular data networks and/or nearby WiFi hotspots to deliver new audio content to your phone right after it's published. Users can search for podcasts but it's not clear who is providing the directory and search content for Nokia. Tags: nokiaseries60…
One of my favorite scenes in Lawrence of Arabia is "Chaos in Damascus." The Arabs have just captured Damascus from the Turks and various civil tasks are divided between multiple tribes. Damascus in the hands of Turks was a pie-in-the-sky dream they never thought was possible, yet they are now all in the great hall trying to organize. There is infighting among the tribes, civil tasks break down, and tribal leaders point fingers blaming other tribes or things they do not understand. The telephones do not work because they have no electricity. There is no electricity because no one will…
Ben Goodger just blogged about feed discovery in Firefox 2.0. He was able to use the same feed sniffing techniques as Internet Explorer 7, making the feed world a bit simpler for both users and publishers. Tags: firefoxie7…
According to The Wall Street Journal eBay is talking to Microsoft and Yahoo! about partnerships that could help the auction giant better compete against Google and its expanding offerings. EBay is a large advertising spender but sees Google's moves into e-commerce as a threat to its main businesses in auctions, PayPal, and Skype. Should eBay and other companies be afraid of Google as the search company expands to new areas? Is it fair to eBay sellers to exclude a large referral source such as Google? I think eBay is just asserting itself in the marketplace and shopping around for some…
Popular social networking site Facebook is moving beyond schools and into the workplace. A new version of the site went live this morning allowing new registrations on corporate e-mail addresses. I was able to signup using my Microsoft address and completed my profile. Basic profile information still seems geared towards college students and dating. Members can self-select what they would like to find on the network including friendship, dating, a relationship, random play, or "whatever I can get." My Microsoft social network on the site is currently filled with recent graduates who most likely had a profile before entering the…
Sony updated its system software for the PlayStation Portable last night. System update 2.7 includes support for Flash content inside the browser, AAC audio playback, and channel-level RSS settings. AAC support means the PSP might soon support QuickTime chapters, allowing podcasters to add images and descriptive text to individual segments. Flash 6 limits the functionality of new multimedia features such as streaming audio and video but it should work fine within websites using Flash for navigation. Tags: pspsonypsp…
