Tech Session: Online Storage

This month’s SF Tech Sessions event is all about online storage and the new services changing the way we think about our data. Jeff Barr of Amazon will introduce us to S3, a relatively cheap storage backend for developers and their applications. Aaron Levie from Box.net will demonstrate popular consumer applications for online storage including a free gigabyte easily managed on Box. Fabrik will talk about online backup built-in to hard drives in our machines and connecting to the Internet to share files and insure none of your precious data will be lost.

Tech Sessions is this Thursday, June 15, at Microsoft’s San Francisco office at 1 Market Street from 7-9 p.m. Please RSVP in the comments of the event announcement or on Upcoming if you plan to attend.

The event is free as always but if you like pizza and drinks please donate.

Windows Live Product Reader

MSReadr v1

Many people like to keep up with new product announcements and launches across Microsoft but wish they had an aggregated way to keep track of it all. Meet MSReadr!

MSReadr is an information aggregator for all of the product team blogs across Microsoft’s Windows Live division. Search, Messenger, Mail, they’re all in there. You can view the latest news right in your browser, subscribe to one feed for updates from all of the blogs, or add the site’s OPML file as a reading list.

The site is powered by Python and Sam Ruby’s branch of Planet Planet. The domain name is missing an “e” because that’s the Web 2.0 thing to do.

Also available at RoboScoble.com.

This project was created on a Sunday evening without the approval or blessing of Microsoft. It’s a work in progress.

Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup

Reports are coming in from the Vloggercon conference about Robert Scoble‘s latest career move. According to Beet.TV and a few other verbal sources who were at the conference Scoble will publicly announce he is leaving Microsoft within the next few days and joining Silicon Valley startup PodTech.net as a videoblogger. Scoble has been at Microsoft for about three years and plans to move back to the Bay Area.

Robert Scoble was employed as a videoblogger at Microsoft’s Channel 9 developer center, interviewing teams across Microsoft on their latest releases and features. Later in his Microsoft career Scoble’s popular blog became a part of his job as well, connecting his readers to Microsoft teams, announcements, and people and company using Microsoft products. He was originally hired as a developer evangelist for what was then Longhorn, now known as Windows Vista.

The news does not surprise me, as Scoble’s tour of corporate campuses and PR firms over the past year undoubtedly yielded some lucrative job offers. Working at PodTech allows Scoble to continue chatting about technology every day with executive clients of the corporate communication network. Scoble’s readership in the blogosphere will be a selling point for new clients, allowing them to have an amplified message in this new communication medium. PodTech is early stage and I’m sure Scoble has a good sized equity participation.

What does the news mean for Microsoft? More people in large companies now realize the value of an information aggregator for internal and external communication. In a 60,000 person company you need some internal connectors to help keep teams and projects working together and benefitting from the work and knowledge of others. If Microsoft does not already have a team or teams dedicated to internal corporate development, hopefully they’ll realize the value and create such a team.

Microsoft’s TechEd conference kicks off this week, and executives will talk about new developer programs and outreach efforts. Windows Live Messenger is rumored as the first Windows Live product to leave beta, and it’s also the first big application I know of to have a link to the team blog as a menu item. Expect more applications to connect directly with their user active base through the application. The Windows Live Dev also just launched to help connect more people with information about products and to collect feedback.

Many companies have bloggers among their ranks who want to be the next Scoble. I’m sure a few people within Microsoft envision themselves in the position of a PR blogger. The world of corporate communications is changing, and the good news is that you are now able to get closer to the teams developing the products and features you use every day. Yesterday Nick Bradbury of FeedDemon was able to get an annoying bug fixed within the Windows networking stack just by blogging about it. A few people responsible for the file causing him some grief were able to jump into the comments, get the information they needed, and hopefully patch the issue before the next release.

Best of luck to Robert Scoble on his new venture.

Disclaimer: I work for Microsoft but the words and thoughts above are my own.

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Google GBuy payments system on June 28?

Google is releasing a payments and certification service named GBuy on June 28 according to a report on Forbes.com. Merchants enrolled in the program would receive free payment processing during the beta period and, according to RBC analyst Jordan Rohan, 1.5% to 2% after the beta period expires.

GBuy will reportedly process orders on Google’s domain, similar to PayPal processing, and hand the user back over to the requesting site once the transaction has completed. The new service would give Google a more complete view of commerce search conversions, ultimately allowing the company to charge higher or lower rates to advertisers based on observed purchase conversions.

The new service is also reported to have a merchant certification program, allowing select merchants using the GBuy service designation as a “trusted GBuy merchant.” The special seal of approval would be displayed in Google’s search results and could possibly be used as a new ranking variable for advertising placement.

Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard

I’ll be looking at World Cup schedules every day for the next month, but a few people at Microsoft put together a small application named Soccer Scoreboard to track your favorite team, group, and results from your Windows desktop. It even has a RSS aggregator built-in so you can follow along with the latest news about Rooney’s foot or whatever you’re into. Game times are displayed in your local time and the application is localized to close to 20 languages.

Microsoft Soccer Scoreboard

Here’s a short list of soccer feeds from around the world if you’d like to add them to Soccer Scoreboard or a more general-purpose aggregator.

FIFA World Cup kickoff

Jens Lehmann

Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. home team Germany will take the field against Costa Rica to kick off The World Cup, the biggest sporting event in the world. I am a total soccer nut and I’ll be distracted for the next month as I watch from afar as the U.S. lives up to its #5 ranking and Ronaldinho weaves through the defense with his golden boot and a smile. The world’s attention will be on Germany for the next month watching blades of grass fly and a thermal-bonded ball hit the back of a specially woven net.

This is my first World Cup watching from the technology industry instead of from the world of soccer. In 1994 I was at Santa Clara University watching Brazil train. In 1998 I was working for the San Jose Clash and the coaching staff got together to watch the big games on satellite TV. In 2002 I ran an online sporting goods business scrambling to get high end Adidas soccer balls out of Pakistan while the country tested its latest missiles and the longshoreman’s union was on strike here in the U.S.

I’ve added the major games to my work calendar with various levels of importance. Netherlands versus Argentina? Definitely watching that one live. United States vs. Czech Republic? I’ll be on the edge of my seat. I’ve warned my coworkers to not be alarmed by the screams of joy and agony coming from my office over the next month.

Let the games begin! Ole!

URL shortcuts for feed syndication specs

Want an easy way to jump to the specifications of your favorite web feed technologies? Me too! I created a few URL shortcuts to eliminate the need for bookmarks and provide a new and memorable way to introduce people to specs and standards. Add a subdomain before FeedSpecs.com and you just might find what you’re looking for.

A simple setup that makes it easier to share feed information.

I’d ideally like to create a centralized learning site supported and in partnership with other companies in the space to help introduce more people people to feed syndication technologies. If I had more time I’d make each spec better styled, create a feed generator in JavaScript, and provide a full database of aggregators and their parsing behavior.

I’ll stick to the simple stuff for now and keep adding domain shortcodes as new namespaces gain popularity.

comScore breakdown of Technorati traffic

Technorati comScore graph

comScore Media Metrix has published a breakdown of Technorati’s visitors as well as inbound and outbound link traffic. comScore now tracks over 4.5 million monthly unique visitors to Technorati as of April 2006.

Of those people visiting Technorati.com in April, 29.6 percent arrived at the site via MySpace.com. Similarly, 26.6 percent of those leaving the site immediately went to MySpace.com. The high level of cross-visitation suggests a symbiotic relationship between the two sites.

Yahoo!, Wikipedia, eBay, and MSN are also high sources of traffic according to comScore. No mention of Google, or Technorati’s media partners in the comScore analysis. Technorati’s largest age demographic is 35-54 year olds (36%).

I’ve seen many instances of the “MySpace effect” on the growth of online startups. YouTube, Userplane, and Slide are just a few companies benefiting from easy integration with MySpace and its millions of users.

Online spreadsheets in the real world.

Google Spreadsheets main view

Google officially launched its Spreadsheet product in its alpha labs, allowing a small user base to poke around and experience the new ideas and integration. I can see the immediate benefit from online spreadsheets integrated with a portal experience such as Google. I’ll give you two concrete usage examples: my soccer team and my mom.

First, realize that although Microsoft’s Office suite is probably the best selling piece of packaged software in the market, it’s not a staple of every household. Microsoft created a special basic version of Office 2007 to increase sales from home users. My mom doesn’t use Office and I don’t have full adoption across a team of 20+ players.

The announcement from Google has been way too overhyped as the latest strike in the blow-by-blow epic battle between Google and Microsoft. Office Live will have online spreadsheets too, and you can signup for an account there today and play around a bit with that experience if you’d like. Neither product is an Excel-killer and that’s not what these new announcements are about. Online mail applications and other portals into personal information exchanges need to increase the number of file attachments they can render and possibly produce if they want to provide a good user experience. Gmail users could now have a new option of rendering a spreadsheet from their mail message, make a quick edit, and on to the next task. Hopefully all big online mail services are looking at how they can better manage our daily personal information flow and help users view the most popular attachment types on each system.

My soccer team

I produce team schedules and contact lists to share among about 20 people. Things change frequently throughout the season. A game is rained out, a player moves or gets a new phone number, or the game location may change. I would create an HTML table, upload it to my private hosting account with a custom domain for our team, and anyone with a web browser can view our latest information. I am the only one who can edit and upload, and in the case of a team contact list, I’ll put it behind a username and password prompt to keep things private.

Google Spreadsheets save view

Not exactly a good solution for the average user. With online spreadsheets and user-level rights management anyone can edit, auto save, and view the latest data in a variety of formats. Most people already have an account with a major portal, and if they do not it’s not too much of a hassle for them to sign up and use the account for multiple services.

My mom

Getting my mom to download a free Excel viewer is tough enough. She interacts with most new files as they arrive inside her Yahoo! Mail account (fairly typical I believe). She can now take action directly within the mail message, make a few changes, and have the confidence she did everything right.

A major portal might also integrate new change alerts for spreadsheets and other collaborative data sources into a personalized home page so my mom can keep track of what’s going on without needing an e-mail message regarding updates.