Box.net had humble beginnings as a Berkeley class project to revamp an industry in need of change. Aaron Levie (pictured above) and his cofounders thought online storage, backup, and sharing could use a makeover and they built a prototype and business reasoning for the class. Fellow students bought-in and encouraged the team to further develop the service in exchange for a few dollars a month. Box.net currently offers 1 gigabyte of free storage, with upgrades available starting at $5 for 5 GB. They don’t offer the most free space or the cheapest but see their strength as integration with…
Category Archives: Web development
Amazon Simple Storage Service
Amazon shook up the world of onlien storage with the introduction of Simple Storage Service (S3) in mid-March. The web service is aimed at developers, providing REST and SOAP access to file storage and retrieval for 15 cents a month for a gigabyte of storage and 20 cents for each gigabyte transferred. The service has BitTorrent support built-in, and developers have extended developed many libraries and services in the three months since its launch. I was lucky enough to have Jeff Barr of Amazon present on S3 at this month’s SF Tech Sessions. Amazon needs to store its own…
Tetris using Yahoo! UI utilities
Yahoo! released the latest version of its UI utilities this week, including the components used in the new Yahoo! homepage design. You can use the various utilities to build your own website, but Dustin Diaz decided to build a version of Tetris. The game combines Yahoo’s Event Utility and DOM Collection utility to create some cross-browser brick busting action. One of the good things about releasing your code to the world is you never know just how people will use it. I doubt anyone at Yahoo! thought about gaming when they released the UI widgets but developers are resourceful!…
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…
AIM opens to developers
AOL Instant Messenger is now officially available to external developers for custom presence, add-ons, and full integration of AIM into existing applications. I signed up for a developer key and I’ve implemented my AIM presence to my contact page as a first step. The new AIM developer features open up new methods of integration for everyone from the independent publisher all the way up to big corporations. AIM Presence You can now integrate your AIM status into web pages and other applications to let people know when you are online. You can also communicate your idle status, away message,…
Automatic favorites import using browser history
TailRank launched a bunch of new features today focused on improving the meme tracker’s ability to recommend new sources and hot posts. Users can now have their favorite weblogs automatically recognized without the need for relatively confusing terms such as OPML, RSS, or blogrolls. Favorite sites are imported using a user’s browser history. I think this technology will be common across many sites in the next 6 months, and here’s how you do it. The user clicks on an “Auto Configure” button that initiates the magic. Clicking the button loads a list of links that are potentially sites visited by…
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…
WhuffieTracker
Yesterday afternoon I collaborated with Caterina Fake, Chris Ratcliff, and Josh Kinberg to create WhuffieTracker. WhuffieTracker is an Web application that tracks your ego and citations from a variety of online sources. Our team’s idea was to combine all of the ways someone might be talking about you online, regardless of the discovery or publishing source, into one package you install on your own server to track your whuffie over time. The collaboration was part of a hackfest called Mash Pit. WhuffieTracker prefers to consume information using RSS feeds corresponding to activity around a certain URL or, in a…
Python event on the 25th in Santa Clara
SD Forum is hosting a half-day session all about Python on Wednesday, January 25 from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. in Santa Clara. For just $25 you can spend your morning learning about Python from Guido van Rossum, Greg Stein, Bram Cohen, Alex Martelli, and active startups using Python. $25 for all that and $10 less if you are already a SD Forum member. Tags: sdforum, python…
iMac developer transition kits
If you are a Mac developer and received a developer transition kit from Apple you can now exchange the old system for a new Intel-based iMac. Apple will send out the 17″ iMac first, allowing you to transition all your work off the old box, and Apple will even pick up all shipping costs. Sweet deal. The developer transition kit gives you a $1300 iMac for about $1000. Tags: imac…