The Good NET Guide

The good NET guide, is here to the sole perpose of helping everyday uses get the most out of the internet. We all know there are billons of pages, and more infomation on tap then ever before. But its not always as easy to find as it should be. The aim of thegoodNETguide is to make it simpler,  from useful links to helpful tutorials.

The news, the jargon, the trends and all things internet

When 10 hubs is just too few, and 24 is a few too many, and 80 is way too many… have I got the USB hub for you! They just added these things to stock at ThinkGeek, and unlike the other hubs we’ve seen recently, this one actually looks pretty nice. It’s got kind of an Apple vibe, but obviously still ran run with the PC big boys on sheer geekiness

See original here:
16-port USB hub is a little more tasteful than those other ones

The SXSW festival in Austin, Texas is currently ground zero for a war, the location war. While over a dozen services have launched new products or features around location, two still seem to stand above all others in terms of use here: Foursquare and Gowalla. Earlier today, Business Insider ran a report suggesting that Foursquare was dominating the battle — unfortunately, that’s simply not true.

In fact, Foursquare and Gowalla are basically in a statistical dead heat, at least in Austin. Multiple sources confirmed this information, and one actually showed me proof (which I was asked not to share). In other words, the war is still raging.

So why did Business Insider draw the conclusion that Foursquare was “mopping the floor” with Gowalla? Because they looked at their “The Hive” feature which scans Twitter for links being shared by influencers, and noticed that many more are sharing Foursquare links. Of course, the main problem with this information is that it uses a small sample set of data. The other problem, as Business Insider notes in an update, is that Foursquare tends to have more “spam check-ins” — that is, fake check-ins.

It’s important to remember that while Gowalla uses GPS data to verify a person is actually at the venue they say they are, Foursquare does not. That’s how this guy can check-in all over the world and steal mayorships for places he’s never been. The downside to Gowalla’s system is that sometimes it prevents you from being able to check-in at all, if they can’t verify you’re at a place. Or sometimes places are created in the wrong spot, so you can’t check-in some places even if you’re really there.

To use my own small sample set of data, it seems that the people on my social graph is Austin are in fact using both Foursquare and Gowalla to check-in everywhere they go. I’ve also noticed that more seem to be sending check-in data to Twitter from Foursquare. But again, that doesn’t mean they’re not using both, just that they’ve decided to use only one to send out data to Twitter (which makes sense), and for whatever reason, most are choosing Foursquare for that.

[image: DreamWorks Pictures]

Many people (including myself) have come to the conclusion that Gmail, with its threaded messages, spam filtering, and vast storage space, is one of the web’s best webmail providers. In fact, we like it so much that we use it for both our personal accounts and work accounts using Google Apps. But that also poses a problem: many of us wind up having to maintain two separate Google accounts, which means we have to swap logins whenever our Gmail, Reader, or other data is stored under the other account. Fortunately, there may be an end in sight for this juggling act.

As today’s SXSW panel on Gmail came to a close, the panelists revealed one last juicy tidbit: they’re working to resolve the problems with multiple namespaces that users have to deal with. The team didn’t get specific — they simply repeated that they have to deal with the same problems, as they have “@google.com” accounts for work and standard Gmail accounts for personal use. And they know it’s a pain.

There’s no time frame, and we have no idea what form the feature will take. But at least we know Google is working on it.

Image by Helico

During the Behind the Scenes of Gmail panel today at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, team member Jonathan Perlow made a revelation that will be a huge relief to power Gmail users: things will soon get a lot faster.

When addressing the question, “why is Gmail slow?,” Perlow asked the audience to raise their hands if they thought Gmail was too slow. A solid number of people raised their hands. Perlow said that the reason everyone didn’t is because slowness is really only an issue for power users of the service — those with hundreds of thousands or even millions of messages. As someone approaching 100% usage of my Gmail inbox, I know this problem well.

The good news is that not only is Google well aware of the problem, they are have a solution. While he didn’t elaborate on the backend changes that will be the solution, Perlow was confident enough to say, “we are fixing it.”

Gmail currently has hundreds of millions of users (Google wouldn’t give the exact number), and it ranks as the number three email service in the world (behind Yahoo Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, both of which have been around longer than Gmail).

This afternoon at SXSW, a panel of Gmail and Google Buzz team members took part in a panel where they discussed what goes on behind the scenes at Gmail. The panel covered a smattering of topics, covering everything from Gmail stickers to site speed, but eventually the discussion turned to the elephant in the room: Google Buzz’s privacy shortcomings when it launched last month.

Google Product Manager Todd Jackson said that Google had learned a lot from the incident, acknowledging that Google was in error when it made the assumption that users wanted to move their email and chat contacts over to their Buzz social graph, and auto-followed them.  To make sure that kind of blunder doesn’t happen again, he revealed that Google may start pre-releasing new Buzz features to small subsets of users.

So why exactly did Google Buzz launch with some key social features missing? Jackson said that while Google employees were testing out the product internally, they never had much desire to mute any of their coworkers, and that their email contact list closely matched the people they wanted to follow on Buzz. Obviously, that wasn’t true for most people once the product was released outside of the Googleplex. Which is why Google is considering pre-releasing new Buzz features to a few thousand opt-in users long before they’re rolled out to the public.

That would stand in contrast to what Google does for many of its major product launches, as Jackson says that the company doesn’t like to preannounce things (it frustrates users when they can’t try the new release out for themselves). But in the case of Buzz, where changes can have a major impact with respect to user privacy, it sounds like Google may be making an exception. Jackson also noted that he had actually asked SXSW speaker danah boyd to give her keynote talk on privacy and publicity at Google headquarters.

Today at the Gmail Behind The Scenes panel at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, key team members of the Gmail team revealed the true secret of the service: Shit umbrellas.

Product manager Todd Jackson made the humorous revelation when explaining how the Gmail team works as a group of about 100 people, the vast majority of which are engineers. “You can either be a shit funnel or a shit umbrella,” Jackson says.

What he means by that is that as a product with hundreds of millions of users (and a company with thousands of employees) there’s a lot of stuff constantly being hurled at the team — as a shit umbrella, the product managers protect the engineers from getting distracted. It’s not enough to be a “shit funnel” where they would pass some of the junk down to engineers, they need to fully protect the engineers.

This sentiment was echoed by Edward Ho, who is known as “Mr. Buzz,” as he’s the one who built up the Google Buzz team (a sub-unit of the Gmail team). Ho noted his hatred for unnecessary meetings, and has made sure that when the Buzz team needs to have them, they are based around demos, not talking about things. “It’s all about what you’ve done,” Ho says.

Some other interesting notes about Gmail:

• The original invites system wasn’t a marketing ploy, it was simply an engineering decision to make sure they could scale
• There’s a 30-1 engineers to products managers ratio in the Gmail team — it’s certainly one of the biggest ratios at Google
• The Gmail team is spread over a few offices around the world (including Zurich), it used to be more, but they consolidated to help the product.
• There are “hundreds of million of users” — the third-largest email provider
• In India, Gmail is the number one email provider
• Gmail is growing fasters internationally than in the U.S.
• Gmail is available in 53 languages
• Internally, the Google Buzz team was known as “Team Taco Town” after an SNL skit
• Google uses Gmail internally (obviously), switched over from Microsoft Outlook at launch (about 6 years ago)
• Gmail is slow for some users mainly because they have a ton of emails saved. A fix for that is coming soon
• Most of gmail is written in Java, JavaScript, C++
• There are several hundred thousands lines of javascript in Gmail – one of the biggest in the world
• No new feature can launch for Gmail that adds latency to the product

[photo: flickr/atomicjeep]

After trying to find a way to remotely control their DSLRs, the clever hackers at HDRLabs couldn’t really find anything that would do what they wanted. So what did they do? Built a control of their own, using a Nintendo DS

Continued here: 
Control your Canon DSLR with a Nintendo DS

Facebook’s f8 conference is shaping up to have quite a few improvements in store for developers, and we think we’ve come across another one: a change to Facebook’s data retention policy. Yesterday, Facebook employee Monica Keller (who left MySpace to join the company last month), took part in a conversation on Twitter that seemed to indicate that developers may no longer have to delete user data. The possible change came to light after Gnip CEO Eric Marcoullier gently chided Keller about developers being unable to store any user data, to which she responded, “come to f8!”.

Since that tweet, we’ve heard further whispers about a change to Facebook’s 24 hour policy retention, and that Facebook is already briefing developers on the upcoming changes.

So why does this matter? Facebook has historically been quite restrictive with regard to what developers are allowed to do with user data; in particular, it only allows developers using Facebook Connect to store user data for 24 hours before they have to delete it, or ping Facebook’s servers for a refresh. There are some exceptions to that rule (you can get a sense for them here), but the majority of the ‘meaty’ content can’t be stored by developers. As a result, applications have to constantly connect with Facebook’s servers, which multiple developers we’ve spoken with say is very  inefficient.

If Facebook does extend that 24 hour window, developers would be able to do things that generally require locally stored data, like batch processing (this isn’t feasible now because the application would have to make an API call for each user). Likewise, if these applications had the data stored locally they would be able to boost load speeds because they wouldn’t have to  wait for a call to Facebook’s servers after their applications loaded.

Of course, such a change would also have privacy implications (we’ll wait until we have all the details before we analyze those).  That said, we’ve also heard that many developers simply ignore some of Facebook’s data retention policies, in part because Facebook has a very hard time enforcing them. So it’s unclear just how big an impact this would have on the applications being developed.

Whether the bloggers like it or not , it’s looking like the iPad is a hit . Initial estimates show that over 120,000 iPads were pre-ordered on friday, according to Investor Village. Some estimates showed roughly 50,000 devices ordered in the first two hours

Here is the original: 
iPad sales estimated to top 120,000 on first day

I mentioned in my last post that mobile is bridging the digital—not to mention analog— divide in India, with almost half as many new mobile accounts being opened just last January as there are Internet users in the entire country.  And there are a host of interesting companies seeking to leverage that network as some kind of rudimentary, literally “dial-up,” Internet that extends far beyond the country’s 50 million or so Web users.

One of the most ambitious companies I met with during my last trip to India in November was Eko, a mobile banking company. There are a few SMS-based bank applications in India, but Eko differs because the phone isn’t just another channel for the account—it is the account. You make payments and transfer money simply by dialing numbers. It’s so simple, you don’t even need to understand SMS to use it.

It’s an ingenious offering that doesn’t try to be everything to everyone. It aims squarely at the unbanked—some 60% of India’s huge population. For now, Eko is focusing on the 1,000 kilometer corridor between Delhi and Bihar.

It’s a textbook case of the how hard it is to build something incredibly simple within a sandbox of tight constraints—yet that simplicity is the same thing many would argue caused Twitter’s 140-character missives to become so universal. There are no extra bells and whistles with Eko’s service because there’s no room for them, and at the end of the day, probably little need for them.

The accounts are actually held by the State Bank of India, which insures up to 100,000 rupees per account, but Eko’s customers don’t ever go into banks. The “tellers” are the tiny corner groceries that dot every neighborhood and street corner in India’s crammed urban areas and expansive rural areas. They are the center of commerce for those living on intermittent jobs, tips and handouts. These stores sell medications by the pill, shampoo in tiny sachets, cell phone minutes by the Paisa, and frequently extend credit when needed. Eko just seeks to give this already trusted, daily-visited vendor one more thing to sell.

The interface is simple enough for anyone to use, regardless of language or literacy. Just like filling out a check requires you to enter the payee, how much you are paying and sign it and Eko transaction has the same three elements. Eko customers type the bank’s short code, then an asterisk, then the mobile number of the person you are paying, then an asterisk, then the amount, then another asterisk. Then comes the signature. That’s the tricky part, but also the most important, because the account is solely on phones, which can be stolen.

Eko’s founder Abhishek Sinha (pictured above amid his signage) wanted to come up with a cost-affective equivalent of an RSA token, so he created a paper version of it. Account holders get little booklets with pages of 11-digit codes. Seven digits of it are random numbers, with four randomly placed black marks, where the person enters his or her PIN. So even if the booklet is stolen, no one knows the PIN number and they still can’t access the account. There’s a VeriSign logo on the back of each booklet. Sinha reached out to VeriSign to see if they could come up with a better solution– instead they endorsed his.

Freedom from always having to carry cash has obvious safety and empowerment implications. But this is a hard company to build out broadly in a country like India. The very strength of the model to truly reach the unbanked—turning those trusted, neighborhood grocers into tellers—inherently makes it costly and time-consuming to build because there are so many of them serving relatively small neighborhoods and villages. Eko has 30,000 account-holders right now. “I thought it’d be a million by now,” Sinha says. “We’ve had a lot of false starts.”

There’s a cost-time trade off. Since the service launched in late 2007, Eko was outsourcing the management of the grocers to a third party who sells multiple things through the channel already. But evangelizing the product takes more hand-holding, so the number of accounts wasn’t growing. Since November, Eko has taken over the management of these grocer accounts assigning employees to each neighborhood and investing in street promotions, blaring its Bollywood-eque jingle extolling the virtues of banking and bedecking stores with in-store signage. Now new accounts are soaring. Eko had just 6,000 accounts before the switch in strategy. It added 10,000 in January and is now adding 10,000 every 15 days.

But costs are going up too. Sinha, who made some money founding a previous company Six DEE Telecom Solutions, has self-funded the venture until now, and in Eko got a $1.78 million grant from the World Bank and The Gates Foundation. But that money will run out this year. He’s working on raising a venture round now—and hoping to get a whopping $10 million. In his previous startup he says he was turned down by literally hundreds of VCs and says that this time it’s going a lot better. Indeed, he jokes, it’d be hard for it to go worse. For one thing, he’s learned a 60 page PowerPoint is overkill.

Like VNL, the solar-powered, mobile equipment company that was 100% bootstrapped by the founder, this is one of those companies that is tricky to build in India. There’s a huge social need and business opportunity if it hits scale, but there’s also a lack of capital to support deals like this. A venture firm is more comfortable in the $3 million-to-$5 million range and a private equity firm would demand a lot more maturity of the business before it would invest. Had Sinha not invested his savings in the project, it likely wouldn’t have gotten this far.

I asked several times if Sinha was worried. What if he couldn’t raise the money? He laughed every time I asked with a look in his eyes of “Do you know how hard it actually is to be an Indian tech entrepreneur?” He says he’s been through enough to know there’s always a way. (Regular readers know there’s a word for that.)