Comment on Appistry Opens the Cloud to (Almost) All Apps by Why Cloud Computing Sells and NoSQL Is Fading: Cloud «

[...] which experimented with terms like “hive computing” and “application fabric” before settling into its cloud groove, or Cloud.com, which wasn’t getting nearly the attention it deserves under its previous VMOps [...]

Comment on Appistry Opens the Cloud to (Almost) All Apps by Why Cloud Computing Sells and NoSQL Is Fading: Cloud «

Backlink: http://gigaom.com/2009/03/09/appistry-opens-the-cloud-to-almost-all-apps/#comment-523929

Location Based Networks need to "show us the money" as soon as possible (All About Symbian)

... there is an answer, and some companies are pushing towards it. Don’t get me wrong. Foursquare and Gowalla have done really well building ecosystems that attract early adopters. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates that they only attract early adopters. If they want to reach the majority who don’t care about making it to Mayor, they need to abandon their pretence of fun, stop...

Source : All About Symbian

Explore : Nokia, Phone, Social Network, TechCrunch

Post originale: http://wik.io/info/US/228788213

Comment on All Hail The Cord Cutters by Cutting the Cord With Sprint TV [on Video]: Mobile «

[...] our new Cord Cutters feature makes clear, many folks are trying to ditch expensive paid TV in favor of alternatives that give [...]

Post originale: http://gigaom.com/2010/11/08/cord-cutters/#comment-507055

Building A Successful Tech Startup Is All About Timing

I never had the opportunity to invest in YouTube but I have to admit that if I did, I probably would have passed (which of course would have been a huge mistake).

I’d been around the Web long enough to remember the dozens of companies before YouTube that tried to create crowdsourced video sites and failed. Based on “pattern recognition” (a dangerous thing to rely on), I was deeply skeptical of the space.

What I failed to appreciate was that the prior crowdsourced video sites were ahead of their time. YouTube built a great product, but, more importantly, got the market timing just right. By 2005, all the pieces were in place to enable crowdsourced video – the proliferation of home broadband, digital camcorders, a version of Flash where videos “just worked,” copyrighted Web content that could be exported to YouTube, and blogs that wanted to embed videos.

Almost anything you build on the Web has already been tried in one form or another. This should not deter you. Antecedents existed for Google, Facebook, Groupon, and almost every other tech startup that has succeeded since the dot-com bubble.

Entrepreneurs should always ask themselves “why will I succeed where others failed?” If the answer is simply “I’m doing it right” or “I’m smarter,” you are probably underestimating your antecedents, which were probably run by competent or even great entrepreneurs who did everything possible to succeed. Instead, your answer should include an explanation about why the timing is right – about some fundamental changes in the world that enable the idea you are pursuing to finally succeed. If the necessary conditions were in place, say, a year ago, that might still be OK – YouTube happened to nail their product out of the gate, but if they hadn’t, a company started later might have succeeded in their place.

Often the necessary conditions are only beginning to emerge and knowing when they will do so sufficiently is very hard to predict. We all know the Internet will become fully social, personalized, mobile, location-based, interactive, etc. and lots of new, successful startups will be built as a result. What is very hard to know is when these things will happen at scale.

One way to mitigate timing risk is to manage your cash accordingly. If you are trying to ride existing trends you should ramp up aggressively. If you are betting on emerging trends it is better to keep your burn low and runway long. This takes discipline and patience but is also the way you hit it really big.

This post originally appeared at cdixon.org and is republished here with permission.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Stealth Mode Is Back!
• The Small Pool Of Smart VCs In New York Has Expanded
• Trying To Lasso An Angel Investor? Start By Subscribing To Their Blog

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/XOM7i9fROd0/successfull-tech-startups-are-all-about-timing-2010-11

The Hobbit To Be Filmed In New Zealand After All

An anonymous reader writes "John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand, has confirmed this afternoon that The Hobbit will be filmed in NZ, after weeks of uncertainty. From the article: 'The future of the $670m production hung in the balance after an actors union issued a no-work order on the films last month. Talks were held overnight with studio executives from Warner Brothers to resolve concerns about industrial laws in New Zealand.'"

Firesheep: HTTP Session Hijacking For All (Digital Media Minute)

So here’s today’s holy-sh^t moment: the new Firesheep extension for Firefox that enables even your 4-year-old nephew to augment his income by blackmailing you after HTTP session hijacking via an open wireless network into your Facebook or Twitter accounts. The extension also identifies cookies from Amazon.com, Basecamp, Foursquare, Gowalla, bit.ly, Cisco, CNET, Dropbox, Enom, Evernote, [...

Source : Digital Media Minute

Explore : Technology, Webmaster News, Wireless

Post originale: http://wik.io/info/US/223995141

New York Jumps to Fifth Among All States in Tech Savvy Survey

New York State leapt to fifth place among all 50 states in The 2010 Digital States Survey. The Survey, conducted biannually is in its 11th year of a comprehensive study that examines best practices, policies and progress made by state governments in their use of digital technologies to better serve their citizens and streamline operations.


Two years ago the state was muddled in the pack at number 18, but has since added services such as:

OneNetNYS, which provides faster, more secure and robust connectivity to state data center resources and other state agency applications.

511NY delivers automated traffic and travel feeds via e-alerts and social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr. The information is real time, available in one location and provides volumes of information to the public.

New York's Straight Talk From the Taxpayer is an interactive website where citizens can submit, vote and comment on ideas for state spending. The site has more than 4,000 users, who have submitted 1,100 ideas and 3,700 comments.

Empire 2.0, a New York state government social media networking initiative designed to promote government participation, increase collaboration and expand the state¿s ability to share information with social media users. 

Anecdotally, we can report that in recent months, New York has welcomed Yahoo as a partner in Western New York, provided seed money to clean up an historic General Electric building for advanced Nano technology research, and is emerging as a home for start-ups.



The states survey is conducted approximately April - June (2010, 2012, etc.). The awards are presented during the National Association of State CIOs (NASCIO) annual conference each September.

--Dino Londis 

Post originale: http://career-resources.dice.com:80/articles/content/entry/new_york_jumps_to_fifth

MobileAppEx 2011 – The Only Mobile App and Business Solutions Event addressing companies of all sizes

Post originale: http://www.slideshare.net/darrinstern/mobileappex-2011-the-only-mobile-app-and-business-solutions-event-addressing-companies-of-all-sizes-5477723

Unsocial: Foursquare Plus LinkedIn Minus All Your Friends

Foursquare, LinkedIn, Facebook and the vast majority of social networks logically gravitate around the user's personal connections, the people you know. Unsocial, however, is a social network that doesn't care about your friends, it's focused on all the people you don't know but probably should. Launching this Monday morning at Venturebeat's DiscoveryBeat, the Seattle-based startup (founded by Kiran Modak, Justin Richardson and Santosh Khare) is officially coming out of stealth and unveiling its iPhone and Android apps.

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/31YzHkFZ7jw/

How Facebook Decides What To Put In Your News Feed – These 10 Secrets Reveal All

How does the social media giant decide who and what to put in your feed? Tom Weber conducts a one-month experiment to break the algorithm, discovering 10 of Facebook's biggest secrets.

The more digital our daily lives become, the more perplexing the questions seem. Will the growth of social media destroy our notions of privacy? Is democracy helped or harmed by the cacophony of opinions online? And perhaps most confounding: Why does that guy I barely know from the 10th grade keep showing up in my Facebook feed?

If you've ever spent time on Facebook, you've probably pondered that last one. The social-networking giant promises to keep us connected with our friends in exchange for pumping a steady diet of advertising at us—but the algorithms Facebook uses to decide what news to pass along can seem capricious or altogether impenetrable.

Facebook, much like Google with its search algorithms, consistently refuses to go into details about how it picks and pans content (save a few glancing details this year about the enigmatic engine that powers it, EdgeRank. So, with the mystery of that 10th-grade friend in mind, The Daily Beast set out to crack the code of Facebook's personalized news feed. Why do some friends seem to pop up constantly, while others are seldom seen? How much do the clicks of other friends in your network affect what you're shown? Does Facebook reward some activities with undue exposure? And can you "stalk" your way into a friend's news feed by obsessively viewing their page and photos?

To get the answers, we devised an experiment, creating our own virtual test lab within the confines of Facebook and tracking thousands of news-feed items over a period of several weeks. The focal point of our experiment: Phil Simonetti, a 60-year-old Facebook newcomer who allowed us to dictate and monitor his every move.

Like a half-billion people before him, Simonetti joined Facebook and began typing in his status updates. But in this case, Simonetti's only friends were a hand-picked roster of more than two dozen volunteers who agreed to sift through their news feeds for the duration of our experiment, dutifully recording any Phil sightings.

As our volunteers checked in with their reports, some remarkable findings began to emerge:

1. Facebook's Bias Against Newcomers. If there's one thing our experiment made all too clear, it's that following 500 million people into a party means that a lot of the beer and pretzels are already long gone. Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made "friends" never noticed a peep on their news feeds. His invisibility was especially acute among those with lengthy, well-established lists of friends. Phil's perpetual conversation with the ether only stopped when we instructed our volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…

2. Facebook's Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways (more on that below). But you aren't likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don't have exposure in the first place. (Memo to Facebook newcomers: Try to get a few friends to click like crazy on your items).

3. The Velvet Rope: "Top News": The real fun began when we eventually instructed different subgroups of our volunteer-friend force to interact with Phil in a controlled manner.

Suddenly, Phil began popping up on feeds. But which ones? The current newsfeed system offers users two options: "Top News," a highly selective feed of updates from friends, and "Most Recent," a "fire hose" that shows updates in reverse chronological order.

A bunch of interactions, however, still do not guarantee that you'll get on anyone's Top News, which is how a vast majority of Facebook users get their information. Some of our volunteers reported frequent sightings of Phil's updates in their Top News feeds, while others saw him rarely—and in some cases, never. Top News will show you hours-old updates from some friends while ignoring newer postings from others.

Facebook has a reason to do this: If users saw all of the posts for all of their friends, they might be overwhelmed (or bored) and tune out—a disaster for Facebook, which needs eyeballs to earn revenue. But in doing so, Facebook's ranking system makes judgments about items it thinks you'll be interested in.

What became clear after two weeks was that it's not the amount of activity you have, but the type (more on that below).

4. "Most Recent" News Is Censored, Too. As veteran Facebook users know, it's a simple matter to switch from the filtered-and-prioritized Top News feed to the "fire hose" of Most Recent. In Most Recent, items are displayed in reverse chronological order. So many users naturally assume that Most Recent contains every update from all of their friends.

Not so, as our experiment showed.

Even with test-subject Simonetti posting updates, links, photos, and videos several times a day, a few of our volunteers found that the items didn't appear in their Most Recent feeds. (At least, not until we took additional steps to up Phil's visibility.) If you've never tinkered with the "Edit Options" button on your Most Recent feed, this underscores why you should check it out—there's a little-used setting that caps the number of friends shown in the feed.

5. "Stalking" Your Friends Won't Get You Noticed. Maybe you've fretted about it while poring over photos of an old flame or estranged friend on Facebook—or maybe you've diligently worked to get on someone's radar by clicking all over their page. Do Facebook's mysterious algorithms factor your stealthy interest in another person into that person's news feed?

To find out, our test subject spent several days obsessively checking out the posts and photos of some volunteers who had yet to spy him in their feeds. The result was clear: The stalking accomplished precisely nothing.

6. Having Friends Who Stalk You WILL Help Your Popularity. Stalking does work in the other direction, we found. After Phil spent days posting updates in vain, with most of our volunteers seeing none of them, we tasked a handful of friends to start showing more interest in Phil. Even though he wasn't showing up in their feeds, they sought out his Facebook page repeatedly, clicking on links he had posted and viewing his photos. This was the point at which Phil finally began to break through. It took a few days of constant clicking, but not only did the friends doing the stalking begin to see Phil in their Top News feeds—others who weren't stalking began noticing him as well.

7. Links Trump Status Updates. We're sure you consider all of your musings fascinating—but Facebook doesn't. At various points in our test, Phil switched between writing plain status updates and posting links to content elsewhere on the Web. Even before some of our friends began stalking Phil, for those who were seeing updates from him, links appeared more frequently than status updates—presumably because links are more effective at driving "user engagement," which translates into people spending more time on Facebook.

8. Photos and Videos Trump Links. Just as links proved more potent than status updates in making it past Facebook's filter, so did photos and videos Phil posted. Here, too, it is likely a matter of engagement. Think about times you've spotted a thumbnail-size photo from a friend in your feed and clicked to see it full-size. Facebook likes clicks, and photos deliver them.

9. The Power of Comments. If items you post attract comments from a few friends, it clearly raises your visibility overall. When our selected volunteers began stalking Phil, he finally appeared to many users for whom he had been a no-show. But when we stopped the stalking and moved on to the next phase of our trial, directing a different group of users to not only look in on Phil but also repeatedly add comments to his items, he surfaced on the feeds of still more friends.

10. Why Facebook Really is Like High School: After weeks of testing and trying everything from having Phil post videos to getting some of his friends to flood him with comments, by the end of our experiment, a few of our volunteers had still literally never seen Phil appear in their feeds, either Top News or Most Recent. These were the "popular kids"—users of Facebook with 600 or more friends. (Conversely, those with only 100 to 200 friends were among the first to spot Phil.) So the key, as you build your coterie of friends, is making sure to include some without huge networks. They'll see more of your feeds, interact in Facebook-approved ways, and up your visibility with all.

Facebook didn't respond to our requests for comment about our findings. To be sure, this experiment wasn't foolproof. Facebook can—and probably does—draw on variables beyond those in our test. And our volunteer force of friends was only human, and may have missed some of Phil's posts.

Still, we were able to observe firsthand how Facebook can elevate or bury the news you want to share with your friends. For average users, cracking the Facebook code is something of a fun puzzle. But for marketers trying to tap Facebook—or individuals who see the service as a way to promote themselves—understanding how content propagates through the system is anything but a game.

But it also means that many users may not be aware of how much power they've put in the hands of this electronic mediator. (The very concept of the news feed was controversial as soon as it was unveiled, as chronicled in David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect.)

You might think you've shared those adorable new baby photos or the news of your big promotion with all of your friends. Yet not only does Facebook decide who will and won't see the news, it also keeps the details of its interventions relatively discreet.

All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine "what's important to you" as "what's important to other people." In that framework, the serendipitous belongs to those who connect directly with their friends in the real world—or at least take the time to skip their news feed and go visit their friends' pages directly once in a while.

Thomas E. Weber covers technology for The Daily Beast. He is a former bureau chief and columnist at The Wall Street Journal and was editor of the award-winning SmartMoney.com. Follow him on Twitter. This article originally appeared at The Daily Beast and is republished here with permission.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• BuzzFeed Founder Jonah Peretti Explains Why A Picture Of Lindsay Lohan's Side Boob Won't Turn Viral
• Facebook Owns The Patent For What Foursquare's Founder Invented – What?!
• Sorry Facebook, Google Already Had A Patent On Location-Based Social Networks

Post originale: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/tTBDh-dTzjA/how-facebook-decides-what-to-put-in-your-news-feed--these-10-secrets-reveal-all-2010-10

Voltaic Talks All Things Solar Bags [INTERVIEW]

by Nino Marchetti

One of the most common things seen today in calling a gadget green is to slap solar panels on it. All manner of cheap designs have some sort of panel installed to harness solar power, not always efficiently, as a means to power some attached device like a cell phone through cleaner energy. There are a handful of companies out there, however, doing it right, and we believe solar bags maker Voltaic Systems happens to be one of them. Voltaic designs and sells bags with solar panels installed in them, such as the Converter Solar Backpack we reviewed a few months ago. These bags harvest the sun's energy through the panels and channel it into a power storage unit you later can connect to a compatible device in need of electricity. Voltaic is one of the pioneers in the space of this type of solar bag technology. To learn more about them, we interviewed its head tech expert Jeff Crystal to see exactly how good solar gadget technology works. EarthTechling (ET): How did Voltaic come into existence? Jeff Crystal: Our founder and lead designer, Shayne McQuade, was traveling in Spain with a small standalone solar charger and was frustrated on two levels. First, it had so few solar cells (about 1 Watt) that it barely worked and second, he found that he often would forget to take it out of his bag and set it up to catch available sun. The first solar backpack was the opposite of that solar charger. There was lots of area for solar panels (4 Watts) and you didn't have to worry about setting it up, because it was set up. A few blogs including Treehugger picked up the bag and the company took off from there. ET: Why do you think solar bags such as yours have become so popular? Crystal: There are both functional and emotional reasons. On the functional side, we have all become so dependent on electronics, most notably our smartphones which have fairly big batteries and short battery life. Our bags and chargers keep these devices running. The included battery storage is crucial for this function. On the emotional side, I think our bags combine the fun of gadgetry with an environmental component. If you wear one of our bags, you will get stopped on the subway, in the airport, at a concert and asked "what does it do?" or "how well does it work?" The solar panels are this great conversation starter for discussions on solar and alternative energy in general. For most of our customers, this is really fun. ET: How does the solar panel technology in Voltaic bags compare to that found in smaller devices like solar mobile phone chargers? Crystal: The technology in the panels and the battery are pretty similar. Most of the compact chargers are using monocristalline cells like us. The main difference is charge times. Charge time is almost directly proportional to the amount of solar cells (visualized by surface area) you have in your charger. If you have a Solio or a High Tech solar charger which have 1 Watt or less of cells, you'll probably spend 16 hours trying to charge an iPhone to full, assuming the phone and the internal battery are empty. With 4 watts, we're charging an iPhone in 4.5 hours. A few other things that are interesting (at least to solar geeks like us): - We recently upgraded the battery cells to high-temperature Li-Polymer versions. These cost a bit more, but it means that the battery will maintain charge capacity longer than before. - In addition, we use a really high quality coating on the panels that lasts a long time and is super tough. We try and destroy them in this video and it doesn't work. ET: What is the craziest thing you've ever heard someone try to charge a Voltaic bag with? How did that go? Crystal: A fellow in Alberta is using the packs to power a gas detection unit to detect leaks. It seems to work very well. The solar powered DJs the Sycons in Los Angeles also use our gear to run their MacBooks at gigs. I think the crazier thing is where people take the bags. We love to get pictures and stories back from successful trips to the Arctic Circle, the top of Kilimanjaro and multi-year Peace Corp missions. ET: What future product plans does Voltaic have that you can share? Crystal: We have half a dozen products in development that we'll be launching in the next six months or so. Our goal on the solar charging front is to span from high-quality, inexpensive chargers for phones on one end to bags and standalone chargers for the new wave of tablets and portable laptops. The next year will be a lot of fun. Reprinted with permission from EarthTechling

Post originale: http://featured.matternetwork.com/2010/10/voltaic-talks-all-things-solar_2107.cfm