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Posts Tagged ‘friend’

FriendFeed is down right now. It has been down for the past 30 minutes or so. Sadly, that’s not news anymore. Not because, like Twitter of old, it’s down all the time, but rather, because it seems like no one really uses it anymore. Case in point, it’s been down for over 30 minutes and there are maybe 50 total tweets about it (and several are from the same users).

That means that of all the tens of millions of people around the world on Twitter, a full 50 of them care enough to tweet when FriendFeed is down. It’s hard to imagine any other service that got to the size FriendFeed did (which, granted, wasn’t huge), only getting 50 tweets if it goes down.

It’s sad, really. FriendFeed was easily one of my favorite services (so much so that I’m still waiting for another service to replace it). But since the acquisition by Facebook, it has been a ghost town. And now, with its 500 Internal Server Error, it’s really a ghost town. The impressive team behind FriendFeed (most are still with Facebook now) have indicated they wouldn’t let the service wither, but that seems to be exactly what is happening.

If it comes back up, I wonder how many of these remaining few dozen passionate FriendFeed users that are tweeting will even notice. Maybe they’ll just give up too.

How many roads must a man walk down Before you call him a man? And how many seas must a white dove sail Before she sleeps in the sand

Originally posted here: 
Lenovo brings new touch-enabled all-in-one to market

So your friend is an Apple head. He’s got the Mac Pro, the MacBook, the Air, the iPhone; he’s got Apple sheets, an Apple tattoo, he eats an apple every day — right, he’s got it all. …or does he?

See the original post:
For the true Apple lover: the iMac G4 lamp

As soon as Google Buzz was released earlier today, all the early adopters piled in to give it a spin. Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmal and a founder of FreindFeed, was among them and his initial reaction was: “This seems vaguely familiar . . .” Or, as he put it elsewhere, “There’s a FriendFeed in my Gmail. Sweet! “

It is vaguely familiar to him on various levels. Like FriendFeed before it (which was acquired by Facebook), Buzz acts as a way to bring together different social streams together—Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, Google Reader shared items, status updates, shared links and videos. It presents them all in a single stream from everyone you follow from you Gmail contacts. Each item can be commented on, “liked,” or taken into a private email or chat conversation. You end up getting comment strings around a single shared link, photo, or video, just like on FriendFeed, except FriendFeed can import items from many more social websites. (Although FriendFeed is not enabled as a connected site for most users, strangely enough it is enabled for Buchheit’s account.).

But the other reason Buzz is vaguely familiar to Buchheit is because it lives right inside Gmail, which he launched when he was a Google engineer. It appears right under your “Inbox” link, and takes over the entire window where your 10,000 unread emails usually stare you in the face. It replaces it with a living, breathing, never-ending social commentary. My first reaction when I saw Buzz was to wonder what happened to all my mail. I didn’t miss it.

Unlike Google Wave, which lives in its own silo, the fact that Buzz is a feature of Gmail makes me want to use it, despite it’s deficiencies. Right now, Buzz only consumes communications from outside Google in a one-way fashion. You can see other people’s Tweets, for instance, but you can’t Tweet back to them. And those Tweets definitely don’t come in realtime either. There is a noticeable lag.

Buchheit agrees. When I asked him via email how he feels about Google channeling him, he responded: “It seems nice. Integrating into Gmail is the right way to go. It’ll be interesting to see how much activity it gets.” The fact that I was sable to gather his thoughts from Buzz, FriendFeed, Twitter, and Gmail speaks to the disjointed nature of our communications. Back in November, I had the opportunity to interview Buchheit on stage on whether he thought that email is dead. He defended email and admitted he had not yet tried Google Wave. But he’s already jumped into Buzz.

The question is not really where email is dead, but whether it will continue to be the primary form of electronic communication, or merely recede to the background as convenient dumping ground for archiving our realtime conversations. Whether Buzz puts more people at ease with using a realtime communication mode as their primary communication mode remains to be proven. But it points towards the inevitable direction that all Web communications are taking: more realtime, intermingled, disjointed, and multimedia.

There you go, right on the living room wall. A big, fat Death Star.

Read more from the original source: 
Star Wars Death Star Fathead coming in February for $100

You know that Christmas is next week , right? That means you only have eight days left to finish your shopping

See the original post: 
Christmas shopping at Amazon? Better finish up today

The honeymoon period with my Droid has worn off, and I still love it. But it’s far from perfect. One of the biggest gripes I’ve had has been with app support. In particular, the native Facebook app — by far one of my most commonly used apps and one that actually came preinstalled on the phone — has sort of sucked until now. Yes, you could read your News Feed, but many of the app’s functions actually kicked you into a separate browser window and weren’t done in the native app. Today, that changes.

A new version of Facebook for Android is now live on Android Market, and it’s a big improvement. I’m still playing around with it to find the various changes, but the app’s description points out two big ones: you can browse your friend’s profiles and photo albums natively. Given how core both of those features are to the Facebook experience, it’s surprising that they weren’t there to begin with. Suffice to say, this is a big leap forward for the app, and users are already expressing their delight on Twitter and the Market’s integrated reviews.

Making these features native has a number of benefits. It’s now easier to share photos, and you can zoom and leave comments on them. And because you’re no longer browsing your friend’s profiles from the browser, everything is much faster.

That said, there are still a number of key features missing. For one, you can’t access your Inbox to send or receive messages. And there isn’t support for Events, either (that one took over year until it was finally included in the latest Facebook for iPhone update).

Thanks to Florian Seroussi for the heads up.

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When a man in the UK was asked to be the best man at his friend’s wedding, he was touched. So touched, that he promised not to pull any pranks before or during the wedding. After the wedding though, that’s another story.

This man, who is choosing to stay anonymous, has set up this Twitter account for the sole purpose of automatically tweeting when the newlyweds are having sex. I’m not kidding. Read the entire tweet stream from the bottom up if you want the full story. But basically, this guy was watching his friend’s house while they went on their honeymoon and he placed a device under their mattress. This device, which is similar to the one found here, is a pressure-sensitive pad that tweets out when sexual activity starts, when it ends, the force of the “action,” and a “frenzy” rating.

December 9 saw the first such action. This is the first report:

They’re on the job! #1 – Action commenced at 12.21GMT. Weight: 84KG.

And then it was over — 3 minutes later:

They’re off the job! #1 – Action concluded at 12.24GMT. Duration: 3 m.15 s. Frenzy Index: 8 (scary). Judge’s Comment: “Is that it?”

But alas, that was just a test of the guy jumping on the bed to make sure it would work. It did. So the real first action is as follows:

They’re on the job! #2 – Action commenced at 15.50GMT. Weight: 151KG.

22 minutes later:

They’re off the job! #2 – Action concluded at 16.12GMT. Duration: 22 m.05 s. Frenzy Index: 4 (easy listening). Judge’s Comment: “Good work!”

Before everyone goes crazy over this, remember that all of this is being done anonymously. Neither the friend nor the couple are known. In fact, who knows if this is even real, and who cares, it’s hilarious. Still, the man claims he will let his friend in on the fun soon. “What you will NEVER know is who they are. Or who I am.I figure I’ll tell my mate in due course that he’s had an audience.So spread the word!,” writes the anonymous man. Consider it spread.

So why’s he doing this? “BTW – he stitched me up something rotten when he was my best man so I reckon this is reasonable payback ,” he tweets.

Oh Twitter, the joys never end. What will they think of next?

[photo: twitter/pnoeric]

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I’m tired. Very tired. It’s a little after 4am San Francisco time – noon GMT – and I’m sitting in the arrivals lounge Heathrow airport, thanking the lord for Boingo hotspots and trying to commit these few hundred words to cyberspace before the daylight finally penetrates my brain and my whole body goes into jet-lag meltdown.

And to think I was so organised 24 hours ago. My column was written – 1000 words on a big subject of the week; a big subject that I now can’t talk about, for reasons I also can’t talk about. Don’t ask.

Still, I’m a professional and there’s no use crying over spilt milk – I’ve spent five pounds on a coffee, opened a fresh Google Document and am all set to write am alternative column on  how happy I am to be back in London, and how excited I am for the opportunity to catch up with all the amazing and inspiring start-ups my erstwhile home has to offer.

But therein lies the problem. While I’m certainly happy to be here – it’s my 30th birthday tomorrow, and there is a party planned – the truth is, I’m just not all that excited about London’s current crop of dot com hopefuls.

When I moved to San Francisco at the start of the year, I promised myself I’d head back to the old country twice a year – mainly to keep my cynicism topped up and to make sure I didn’t lose the accent that your American women find so endearing. But also for a third, more serious reason: I don’t want to forget my roots. The London technology scene is where I cut my columnising teeth, and it’s Brit entrepreneurs that first inspired me to try – and fail – my hand at building a start-up. Whereas Valley entrepreneurs point to Facebook and Google as their inspirations, mine came in the form of Moo, Last.fm and Bebo. Smaller fish perhaps, but each with a uniquely British vibe that somehow made them more fun; more human. Also – say what you like about San Francisco as a technology hub, but the London scene’s parties shit all over the rest of the world.

But recently something has changed. I noticed it when I last visited back in June and, in what turned out to be my penultimate column for the Guardian, I  called time of death on London’s start-up scene. Everyone was running out of money, I said, people were getting laid off in their droves, and all the real action is – as ever – in San Francisco. Two days later, Guardian Tech’s freelance budget ran out of money, my column was laid off and I was hired by TechCrunch in San Francisco. QED.

And since then London has only become less relevant as a home for dynamic exciting start-ups. Take ‘Silicon Roundabout’. Last year, Dopplr co-founder Matt Biddulph noticed that a number of high profile start-ups – including Moo, Last.fm, and of course Dopplr – were all based within walking distance of the old street roundabout in East London. He jokingly suggested that the region be renamed ‘Silicon Roundabout’. Today the Old Street roundabout remains but Dopplr – and Biddulph – have left for Berlin, Last.fm is owned by CBS in New York and Moo has just opened a US base of operations in Providence, Rhode Island. A similar story is true right across the Capital, with Bebo laying off almost all of its local staff and countless other London 2.0 poster children looking to the US for money or a new base of operations. The idea that a company can thrive – or even survive – in London alone seems entirely implausible; ridiculous even.  Off the top of my head I can’t think of a single exciting web business that has come out of the UK in the past six months. Spotify is the nearest candidate and that was created by Swedes.

Moreover, in the few short months since my last trip back home I’ve gone utterly native in my attitude towards my homeland. I see plenty of my Brit friends when they visit San Francisco, but rather than asking for news from the old country, I’m more likely to ask them when they’re going to come to their senses and move to the Valley. I still visit TechCrunch Europe several times a week – Mike Butcher always does a solid job at covering what’s going on over here – but even there I’ve noticed a curious change in my attitude to what I read. Where once I read TCEU through the eyes of a local – noting new companies and inwardly congratulating the latest Belgian company to secure funding – I now look at European technology news in the way American news channels cover foreign stories about escaped bears. Not to learn anything useful, but rather to amuse myself on how parochial foreigners can be. Oh, bless, the French have launched their own rival to Facebook. Ho ho ho.

Things have got so bad that I’ve even started to mentally turn on my friends who are still toiling away near Old Street. A couple of days ago, one such friend – who I won’t name, sufficed to say he’s CEO of a hot London start-up – emailed me an amazing screed in response to a post by one of my TC colleagues hyping a Valley-based rival. The thrust of my friend’s complaint was that his company has been virtually ignored by TechCrunch.com even though TechCrunch Europe had hailed it as one of the continent’s rising stars. This disparity he blamed on the fact that TechCrunch (US) is only interested in local companies, created by people who happen to be friends of our writers. Six months ago, I’d have agreed with him – I mean, there really no need for ten thousand Pandora stories for every Last.fm post, or four hundred Foursquare plugs for every mention of Rummble. But on reading my friend’s email this week, my first response wasn’t sympathy, but apathy. Mate – I thought – that’s just the way it is. TechCrunch is based in San Francisco and so are most of the companies TechCrunch covers. Those are the rules of the game. If you don’t like it, stop whining and get on a fucking plane.

But the fact is, my friend is right; and I’m wrong. There are hundreds of amazing technology companies outside of the Valley, many of which haven’t taken a penny of American money and are making money hand over fist without a single San Francisco-based user. Just read a couple of Lacy’s recent dispatches from India of China; or week’s worth of TechCrunch Europe posts and you’ll see that’s true. The problem – my problem – is that living in the Valley has it easy to forget, or care, about them. The skin of the bubble is just too thick and the voices from Europe (and beyond) just too faint and distant.

And so I’ve taken my own advice and got on a fucking plane. In the three weeks I’m in town, I’m planning to meet as many UK-based start-ups as possible, to keep half an eye on what comes out of LeWeb next week, to catch up with friends who are still doing cool things near Silicon Roundabout, to re-avail myself of the kick-ass social scene here – and above all to remind myself that the old country is still home to plenty of new thinking. And then at the end of the month, I’ll return to the bubble – re-energised with cynicism and hopefully slightly less convinced that Foursquare represents the most important thing in the future of the world. I mean, everyone here knows that’s Spotify.

But all that will have to wait until next week. I’ve got a birthday to have first – and right now I just need to get some sleep.

Hello London. And goodnight.

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Video Professor is trying to raise $10 million in convertible debt, according to an investor pitch document that was forwarded to us. The company “incurred substantial losses which depleted its cash reserves” in 2008, says the document, and is looking to use the new money to “retire its line of credit, purchase media, build strategic alliances, finalize the technical development and launch of the e-commerce platform and accelerate growth.”

The company’s product offering was one of the scams we called on in our ScamVille posts. The company lures in potential customers by offering free learning CDs. But they are then billed up to $290 for products they never intended to buy. We outlined how the scam works here, and also point to a number of other sites with thousands of consumer complaints.

According to a revenue chart, revenues for the company peaked in 2006 at around $135 million, but dropped to under $80 million in 2007 and were just $40 million in 2008. Projected 2009 revenues are nearly $100 million.

“VPI’s competitive advantage is the superior quality of its learning programs, its use of subject matter experts, and the trusted relationship that the brand has earned with consumers,” says the document. It fails to point out the hugely negative reviews and complaints in this article as well as Amazon and epinions.

The document also boasts:

STRONG BRAND EQUITY

Having maintained the longest running direct response marketing campaign in the history of television, the VIDEO PROFESSOR™ brand is highly recognized in both consumer and commercial markets with millions of satisfied customers. VPI has supplied computer learning to over 20 million unique customers, many of whom have
purchased multiple learning titles.

And to all those 20 million “customers” who’ve already been scammed one time by Video Professor: look out, they’re coming back for another dip at the well:

VALUABLE CONSUMER DATA

VPI has contact information for tens of millions of consumers who have responded to VPI’s offer to, as the commercials say, “Try My Product.” VPI has judiciously protected consumer information and has not allowed other marketers access to this valuable database. This consumer data, combined with the data mining technologies embedded in the new VideoProfessor.com, provide a valuable source of new revenue.

The complete document is below:

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