Austin entrepreneur making decisions to maintain optimal experience.
It’s not about anything. It’s creativity. It’s design. Beauty. Positivity. And, it’s associated with Microsoft’s Zune. Therefore Zune must also be those things. ? I’m not sure, but that seems to be the idea — and I love it:
I prob. still won’t buy one, but I do love ‘em OR do I love agency:collective and the fact that they “get it.”
I actually wrote this up back in February ‘06 and never posted it, but after reading Stuart and then Léon’s recent blogs, I fugured at add my own on the topic.
10 February 2006–
Today, while I was studying for a marketing test, I became distracted by an idea I had a while back for a “virtual lanlord” service. So I got up, because a good biz idea is a great reason to stop studying, and did some Google’n. Long story short, I didn’t find what I was looking for - maybe a good thing for my virtual landlord company - but I did find two services that I think are awesome: Prosper, in the US, and Zopa, in Great Britain, are the only two online marketplaces facilitating person-to-person lending (PLEASE correct me if I am wrong). They remove the bank from the lending/borrowing sequence and take advantage of their countries’ Automated Clearinghouse (ACH) to electronically transfer money for free. On the lender’s side, I think of it as a “virtual landlord” for leased moneys. It compiles a repayment schedule, tells/reminds borrowers (renters) when to pay, allows them to pay online, and enforces the law (forecloses) when they don’t pay; therefore taking the stress off the shoulders of the lender. The above still sounds kinda confusing, check out this Via Prosper’s “how it works” page:
“People who need money request it, and other people bid for the privilege of lending it to them. Prosper makes sure everything is safe, fair and easy. Here’s how it works:
(click image to enlarge)
…and via zopa:
“The markets work just like, well, markets. Lenders put their wares on display; in this case, money they are prepared to lend to other people for a certain length of time. And, just like any market, different vendors may have different prices (otherwise known as interest rates). Some may pick lower rates but only want to lend to borrowers who have a very high likelihood of paying it all back. Others may pick higher rates but be prepared to be more flexible, thereby taking a punt on borrowers who might be slightly more likely to default. Borrowers can then come and have a sniff about, see what the rates are and if they’re good value agree to borrow. Because Zopa cuts out the middleman, everyone gets a great deal. … All lenders and borrowers enter into a legally binding contract with their respective borrowers and lenders. Zopa manages the collection of monthly repayments and if any of that money is not paid on time, uses exactly the same sort of recovery processes that the high street banks use. Zopa earns money by normally charging borrowers an exchange fee of 1% and if borrowers take out repayment protection insurance on their loan, receives commission from its insurance provider. Zopa doesn’t charge lenders a bean.”
Continue reading ‘Prosper, Zopa, P2P Lending - Heard of it?’
There are and have been many predictions on the path Wi-Fi will take and the role it will assume. The concluding chapter of Going Wi-Fi, published in 2003, gives 20 predictions – 10 of which I believe have come true. Some predictions are far fetched. A faculty member at the University of Texas at Dallas predicted that by 2007 mobile communications devices will “be voice-controlled and use heads-up holographic display[s].” Unfortunately for many, it doesn’t look like 2007 will embrace this kind of future.
Nevertheless, these predictions were very insightful, covering the topics of business (maybe a wireless PBX), medical care (24hour vital monitoring and reporting), etcetera, but something was missing. And that was any allusion to the growth of social networks, virtual identities, or the like. Social networking, used in a broad sense, is big now, but the spread of wireless, I believe, will transform the revolution; connecting people, groups, and intelligence in ways never before possible.
We, the participants in the MySpace generation, the blogging generation, and others are connected to an identity, and/or identities, in cyberspace. The strengthening of that bond is parallel to the spread of Wi-Fi (most importantly, free Wi-Fi) and the doggedness of cellular; simply, more convenient, efficient, and economical access to the World Wide Web.
The blogosphere and projects such as WeFeelFine.org have been invaluable to sequentially interpreting the status of society as a whole. However, the nature of blogging is not conducive to real-time feedback. Wi-Fi, the great Last Mile, offers this.
Moblogging, radar.net, mobile video sharing, elements of Web 2.0, to name a few are the current tools moving a nearly synchronous Info Strada. What does the future hold? I believe the exponential growth of social networks and their assimilation of mobile communication devices is foreshadowing a trend towards increased Interconnectedness.
As it becomes easier to mirror ourselves and our lives virtually, it becomes more significant to mirror the state of cyberspace as a whole, and relay it back to its elements. Components seeing themselves as an integral part of a whole, then acting and reacting based on the state of the collective, the world – this is the model for self-consciousness; and a step for progress.
From Tom, the founder of MySpace, via the MySpace Bulletin Board:
Jun 23, 2006 3:10 PM
i want to hire some more .net developers to work on myspace. do you have experience? here’s what i need:
Required Skills/Experience:
- 3+ years of solid C Sharp experience
- 3+ years of ASP.NET (and the .NET 1.1 Framework) experience
- 4+ years of experience developing with SQL Server 2000 (including stored procedures)
- Strong knowledge of several protocols (including HTTP, TCP/IP, and UDP)
- a solid foundation in n-tier, Business Objects, Design Patterns, and general OOP
- Strong knowledge (and wisdom) of IIS6 and its internals
- Experience on sites under heavy loads that require meticulous attention to coding practices as they relate to performance and scalabilitygo here to upload a resume: myspace developers
please dont upload anything about any other job at myspace. i’m only posting this to find .NET developers!
oh yah, you’ve got to live in, or move to LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA! yeehaw!
Original Bulletin (mySpace account require)
Does this mean the largest and, in my opinion, worst social network is finally going to get better? I sure hope so. I’m getting like 5 spam friend requests per day.
This is the type of work that makes this computer/information-lover inspired:
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on. [...]
- Jonathan Harris & Sepandar Kamvar
May 2006
Blogged with Flock
Foreshadowing how we will access information in the future, Openomy:
What is Openomy? Openomy is an online file system. You can store files on Openomy and access them from any computer. Openomy organizes files and users via tags (as opposed to folders). You can choose to keep your files guarded by Openomy, or allow certain outside applications (of your choice) to do new and interesting things with your data.
Blogged with Flock
Obviously, I like the number 27. Turns out other people do too. Like Erinna and Jennifer of The Chronicles of 27:
[...] My friends and I discovered the magic of 27 in college, realizing that people would frequently cite the number 27 in conversation when needing a random number.
For example:”Oh my God, I love this movie. I’ve seen it like 27 times.”We then began seeing it creep into other things…movies, songs, TV shows. We discovered a website called The 27 Conspiracy, which was a great source of sightings for a while…but Brandon, the keeper of that site, got too busy to keep up with it.
Weird Al Yankovic references the number 27 in a lot of his songs and videos. Some alert listener has chronicled all the Al-related 27s here. [...]
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Edit (July 12, 2006): I have learned something, thanks to this article posted by Christof, and a talk with Adam Malinowski.
The way I now understand it, GHz is just the frequency chips run at and, contrary to what Intel has led us/me to believe, is not necessarily a rating of speed. Using MHz and now GHz as a rating was, as I understand it, done by Intel for marketing reasons. In fact, AMD processors that run at a lower GHz rating are often faster. To compete with Intel, AMD began assigning “Power Ratings” to their chips. For accurate speed ratings, we should look instead at benchmarks.
Incredible:
A prototype that is more than 100 times faster than regular desktop PC chips has taken the world record for the world’s fastest silicon-based microchip, clocking speeds of up to an astounding 500GHz. Needless to say, the chip was kept cool with liquid helium. Further advancement in this field could eventually lead to faster wireless networks and more affordable cellphones to get the entire world connected as new applications crop up and the costs for existing products plummet. By comparison, the fastest Pentium processor available from Intel today runs at speeds of up to 3.8GHz.
This is similar to what Tom Serres and I are going for at UT:
By Stefanie Shaffer, University of Maryland
[...] The Hinman Campus Entrepreneurship Opportunities Program is a three-year-old living-learning venture at Maryland’s College Park campus, jointly sponsored by the engineering and business schools. Students live and work side by side in a state-of-the-art dorm inside what can best be described as a business incubator.
The program’s home feels more like the office of a Fortune 500 corporation than a traditional residence hall; there are no tile floors, concrete block walls or raucous students in sight. Instead, the lobby greets visitors with a conference room, a professional office and a computer lab, with a seminar room just down the hall and wireless Internet connectivity throughout the building.
“Because it’s a business environment, it should have a corporate look,” Thornton said.
And a corporate look it has.
The conference room - marked by the rich scent of fine leather - features a glass-topped cherry-wood conference table, high-back leather chairs, a whiteboard and telecommunications capabilities. The room is available to every student in the program via a sign-up list for meetings and presentations.
Much of the technology availed to Hinman CEOs has been donated by Avaya Inc., including cell phone technology that links students’ cell phones and dorm phones so they never miss a call.
Executive Assistant Cindy Gilbert mans the program office and provides any services a business receptionist would, Thornton said.
“Our building is really a dorm for dreamers,” said finance major and Hinman CEO Kamana Sharma. “Every apartment has an open-door policy because we all foster the spirit of entrepreneurship and that unites us all.
“If you have a business idea, you can go down the hall and find a computer science major to write up a program, go next door to find a marketing major and then run upstairs for an engineer to develop your prototype - all within a day,” Sharma said. “An idea is just an idea sparked in one individual but is ignited and actualized as a group.”
Roommates and Business Partners
Students experience the program in a broad spectrum of ways. While some students are already running their own successful businesses and have been for years, others - especially computer science and engineering majors -use the program as a business learning tool while honing their technical skills in the classroom.[...] Current students’ majors vary and include business, engineering, psychology, computer science, math, architecture and English. There are many double majors and one triple major. Character, integrity and drive are key traits Hinman CEOs possess, Thornton said.
“Students join because they know they want to do something different and want to grow themselves and their businesses,” she said. “They don’t know the word ‘no.’ When they see a challenge, they just see a new opportunity.”
Liesel Pollvogt of Tabblo, on Mashable.com:
Tabblo is a site you use if you want to tell a story or do something meaningful around a group of photos. The idea is to give people a really easy way to combine text and pictures in an attractive layout, and then give you various options for sharing that content with specific people only or the world at large.
I love the idea of using photos to tell a story. Especially when I’m on vacation, I wish my digital camera would allow me to attach a voice-note or message to one or a set of pictures. When I got home, I would spend less time trying to remember: what did the tour guide say about this building, what’s the name of this beach.
If I had that ability, the next step would be integration with something like Tabblo: Dock my Tabblo-enabled camera >> it brings up all the photos, and the notes >> I add some more notes >> pick a template of sorts >> set privacy >> send them up to the site >> all my subscribers receive a ping that I have new photos. Someone please do this, just let me know about it.
… radar might have the jump. They don’t need to reinvent the digital camera, voice-notes and text are already capabilities of most cameraphones.
Does someone know a good word for: a story created with photos?
radar.net, on one of my favorite blogs:
Radar is a new mobile photo sharing application - but unlike its rivals, it’s designed for sharing among a select group of friends. When you sign up, you get a unique Radar.net email address to send your images to - you can then invite friends to view your pictures and comment on them. You can use Radar on the web, or view the mobile version on your cellphone.
At a time when everyone else is building wide open, publicly viewable photo sharing applications (eg Where.com), Radar’s strategy is an interesting one. While there’s definitely a demand for less public sharing, these services will surely experience slower growth: if your users aren’t posting images from your service, creating blog widgets and offering free promotion on MySpace, it’s more difficult to build your userbase. Yes, new users will be referred by their friends, but that seems much less efficient than web-based viral marketing ala Flickr and YouTube.
Image quality and network speeds will only get better. If radar continues to grow and innovate their potential is huge.
The Nobel Peace Prize I’m curiosity if past recipients ever had the prize as their goal. Likely. The winners of this prize genuinely inspire me. I aspire to be among the ranks of these individuals.
“Today, Thom Yorke released a site for his next album, The Eraser.” Awesome. Thanks Trey.
One thousand numbers = one thousand paintings. I always love these kind of ideas, mostly because I’m green-eyed.
Google Notebook this week by ZDNet’s Garett Rogers — As was announced at the annual Press Day, Google Notebook is set to make it’s debut this week. As others have spotted in the Google Blogoscoped Forums, www.google.com/gn now redirects to /notebook rather than /notebook redirecting to /gn — an attempt to make the URL a bit more user friendly I […]
I really like google.
