The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘process’

If you’re a photographer and use a Mac, chances are you’re using Lightroom or Aperture. Probably Lightroom, since Aperture is less popular among pros — and the latest version seems to be an acknowledgment of that. The features added in version 3 are clearly intended to draw casual shooters using iPhoto to the paid image editing honey pot.

Since so many of these amazing new features are direct side-loads from iPhoto, it smooths the process and makes the program as a whole more approachable, though whether existing Aperture users will find them helpful is questionable. Brushes, on the other hand, are a welcome addition to any photographer’s toolset, and depending on how dedicated you are, may be worth the price of admission.

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Last month we wrote about Crocodoc, a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues. Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.

Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace. The service will also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents.

CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400 Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word ‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing it online.

Back in January, Google announced that it would follow Mozilla’s lead and start offering cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (the open-source browser behind Chrome), or Chrome by the community. Google both matches Mozilla’s $500 and ups the bounty all the way up to $1,337 (yes, 1337) for “particularly severe or particularly clever” bugs. This week, they rewarded the first of those.

As noted on the Chrome Release blog, Google made four cash payments on Wednesday. There were two $500 prizes (both for memory errors), one $1,000 prize (for a cross-orgin bypass), and the first-ever $1,337 prize. The lucky receipient of that was a man named Sergey Glazunov, who located a bug that Google is calling, “High Integer overflows in WebKit JavaScript objects.”

This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already they’re testing version 5.0. Stable builds of both the Mac and Linux version of the browser are likely to launch at some point over the next few months.

A research team from Japan-based Mitsui Mining & Smelting and Tohoku University says it managed to develop a spreadable electrode that may lead to lower prices for LCD panels in the future. The key element of the technology are indium tin oxide particles of 5-10 nanometers in diameter (pictured) the team has created.

Excerpt from:
Breakthrough? New spreadable electrode may pave way for cheaper LCDs

Anyone who has lived in New York, knows the hassle and stress of finding an apartment that fits within their budgets and has enough space to live in. New startup Naked Apartments attempts to ease the process by being a sort of Match.com for renters and landlords and apartment brokers. The site matches qualified renters with brokers and landlords, automating the process of finding an apartments that meet renters’ search criteria.

Here’s how it works. Renters sign up, creating anonymous profiles that feature key statistics such as annual income, desired monthly rent, their desired apartment size, location and move-in date. Naked Apartments will also supplement that information with a free credit check, which means that the completed profile includes a renter’s credit score range. Brokers and landlords can get access to the anonymous profiles and choose to contact the renters that meet their financial requirements and have matching interests in their rental properties.

The catch is that brokers and landlords have to buy credits in order to contact each renter. Landlords pay $2 to contact a renter. Once a brokers contact renters with their rental properties, renters can choose whom to exchange contact information with and which apartments to see. The idea is that after renters work with a broker or landlord, they write reviews of their experience, helping other renters know which brokers and landlords to trust and how to navigate the waters

Naked Apartments also allows renters to take a more active approach and browse its listings database. Similar to Craigslist, the site allows renters to contact brokers and landlords to find out more about the property. Since the site’s launch, 2000 renters have found apartments through the system, through 100 brokers and landlords. Currently, Naked Apartments lists 13,000 apartments for rent.

The idea of Naked Apartments is compelling but like many rental listings sites out there, it will face strong competition from Craigslist. And Zillow, which catered to home sales previously, is now offering rental listings.

Couple of things to talk about, Honda just announced that they are going to showing off an electric concept vehicle, and a Hungarian company is making a concept car that’s capable of splitting in to two separate vehicles. Of the two, I think the Honda is more likely to become a reality. The Honda 3R-C is a single person transport, but pulls design cues from a trike instead of a motorcycle.

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Electrical vehicle concepts running rampant

For startups, the idea of creating a sales proposal is often a nightmare. While they’re vital to a business, they’re not exactly the easiest things in the world to create and manage. A new service launching today, Proposable, aims to simplify the process, and bring it to the web with some nice features.

Proposable is a web-based app that allows you to create, deliver, and get insight into your sales proposals in minutes (if they’re short enough). It does this with its proposal-building tools and templates that offer a combination of customization and standardization. Perhaps more importantly though, they offer a set of tools to get feedback on the proposals, and look at information about what’s working at what’s not.

For example, one of Proposable’s features allows for recipients to add comments to the side of any proposal. And because this is all online, if a client gives you some feedback on something they’ve liked changed, you can do so on the web and have it updated in realtime. That combined with the service’s notifications (via email or SMS), really does make the process a realtime one.

So what does Proposable cost? There are three options. For $19.99 a month, you get the ability to deliver up to 15 proposals and 1 GB on online storage. For $29.99 a month you get an unlimited number of proposals and 4 GB of storage. Or, if you want to use this with a larger team, the biggest plan is $79.99 a month, and you get 10 GB of storage and the ability to add 3 users (with additional ones being $15 a month extra). Each plan also comes with a free 30 day trial.

There are no shortage of sales proposals sites out there, such as the aptly named Salesproposals.com, but Proposable’s overall look and feel is far superior. The startup is the latest to launch out of Sproutbox, the Indiana-based incubator.

Professional social network LinkedIn has just added its 60 millionth member, according to a Tweet issued by the company this afternoon. Over the past year, network has seen a significant amount of growth, especially internationally. As of last December, the network had 55 million members, so its grown by 5 million in less than two months. In October, LinkedIn’s network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international.

To manage this growth, LinkedIn has also been expanding its operations in international markets, opening offices in The Netherlands, and India, two areas where LinkedIn is growing rapidly. Coincidentally, the 60 millionth member hailed from The Netherlands.

LinkedIn had a big 2009. Founder Reid Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Jeff Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman told us at TechCrunch50 that he’s not in any rush to go public. Later, Hoffman told Reuters that the company plans to pursue an IPO at some point, but not any time soon.The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years. LinkedIn launched two-way integration with Twitter as well as opened up its API to developers. The company also released a new version of its iPhone app in December.

Most people don’t realize this, but Northern California actually has two giant technology centers: Silicon Valley and Sacramento. Silicon Valley is the world’s entrepreneurship capital, and Sacramento is California’s State capital. They are less than 100 miles away from each other.  But technologically, they’re light-years apart. While Silicon Valley’s workers conceive the next revolution in technology, Sacramento’s workers toil away at maintaining computer systems that were built in the tech equivalent of the Mesozoic era. Both depend on each other: Sacramento workers maintain the State’s infrastructure and public services, and the Valley’s workers generate the revenue to pay Sacramento salaries. The irony is that while the valley entrepreneurs desperately look for problems to solve, Sacramento has problems aplenty and no saviors in sight.

Witness the problems that the state experienced last November when it couldn’t issue checks to unemployed workers whose benefits had run out before Congress authorized a payment extension. Workers had to wait for up to two months to receive their checks, because the Employment Development Department couldn’t make timely changes to its computer systems. Like most of the State’s systems, these were built in the ’70s and ’80s in now antiquated computer languages like COBOL, Adabas Natural, Assembler, and PL/1. They run under operating systems like CICS and IMS.

This is the tip of the iceberg. California has roughly 130 agencies and departments. Each has its own IT staff and its own systems. Each collects its own information and maintains its own databases. These systems are not usually integrated with each other. When they do share data, it is usually through file transfer in batch mode. This is a nightmare for citizens and businesses. Take the simple task of changing a business address. The business owner has to inform multiple agencies, such as Employment Development Department, Board of Equalization, Franchise Tax Board, Secretary of State, and various licensing and certification departments. Believe it or not, the State has more than 40 separate computer applications to collect the same personal and demographic information about citizens. Even for mundane things like email, the State maintains more than 100 separate systems.

California isn’t alone in having such legacy systems and challenges. Its systems are probably better than those of any other State, and it is making the investments in reducing costs and improving infrastructure.  Most large corporations run their operations on systems that were built decades ago.  This is a ticking time-bomb for industry as well as for government.

There was a time when there was a big difference between these enterprise systems and the PC and Web applications that Silicon Valley entrepreneurs build. Enterprise systems require large-scale transaction-processing capabilities, have stringent security requirements, and need to have high availability. But that is not different from what Twitter, Facebook, and Zynga require.

Even fledgling startups in the Valley are building systems that make some enterprise systems seem like child’s play. For example, Real Time Matrix has built a facility to create Twitter groups. This requires sophisticated real-time analytics and integration with multiple sources such as Twitter, blogs, and live feeds in order to process information “as it happens”.  The Web systems that Real Time Matrix has built process tens of thousands of transactions per second and rebroadcast the results to numerous and varied clients accurately and in real time.

At a talk I gave at California’s Executive Institute on Jan 21, I discussed these issues with the 200 IT managers in attendance; with State CIO, Teri Takai; and with CTO, P.K. Agarwal. Most were in agreement that new thinking was needed. IT managers seemed eager to be using the same technologies as their Silicon Valley brethren. Takai and Agarwal described how feverishly they are working to consolidate and integrate departments and move their systems into a more modern era. They are also working on streamlining the procurement processes for funding IT projects. Not long ago, it used to take an average of three years to obtain approval for a project. Today, they can do this in a year (that’s a lifetime in Silicon Valley, but considered fast in the government world). They claim they saved the State $400 million through all these efforts. Despite this, Takai and Agarwal have big challenges: they need to figure out how to make a dinosaur fly. Perhaps what is needed is to let the dinosaurs become extinct and be replaced by swift birds and mammals.

What I suggest that the State do as a top priority is to engage Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to rebuild its systems infrastructure. These entrepreneurs can create new systems for a fraction of the cost of patching up old systems. Take the system that processes unemployment checks. The State has budgeted $50 million to upgrade it. At the end of the day, it will simply have a more maintainable COBOL system if it does business the old way. Instead of the big state contractors who typically bid on and win such contracts, the State should reach out to the Valley’s entrepreneurs to rebuild this. Give them the detailed specifications and let them compete for this business (this requires streamlining the bidding process even further – even VC’s don’t take a year to make decisions). I’ll bet that the Valley’s entrepreneurs could build this system from scratch in less than a year for less than $5 million. That’s right: for less than a tenth of the cost. You can build sophisticated systems in the Web world for a tiny fraction of the cost and in a fraction of the time required for maintaining those old monsters. The new systems will be far easier to use, and cost relatively nothing to maintain. And we’d be boosting the local economy rather than the coffers of big state contractors with strong political connections.

I know that some systems are really complex and intertwined with others and can’t be fixed or replaced easily. The vast majority, however, aren’t like this. Most systems simply perform reporting and analysis – and these can be rebuilt in months, not years. I know because I started my career writing COBOL/CICS transaction-processing systems. Later I developed software to automate the process of developing large enterprise systems and co-founded a company to market it. My second startup built technology to automate the process of modernizing legacy systems. I’ve seen the technology world evolve and develop and know that what I am suggesting isn’t rocket science.

What is needed is to turn the Valley’s entrepreneurs loose on these problems and let them do their magic. The net benefit to California could be enormous. The modern world now runs on Web-based technology. So can California — and it can reduce its costs in the process. Sacramento has the advantage of having the world’s top-gun techies just a short drive away. They’re itching to help (and they can use the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

As a transplanted Brit in America, I’m having something of a hard time getting my head around this whole Late Night debacle.

Unlike most American television, late night talk shows – the Conans, the Lettermans, the Carsons (he’s the one who’s dead, right?) – never really made it out to the rest of the world.

The first, and biggest, reason for this is that the shows tend to be vehicles for movie stars to promote their latest project: movies that probably have different release dates outside the US. Watching Ben Stiller talk about a movie that we won’t be able to see for six months isn’t so much entertaining as annoying.

The second reason is that, to my eye and ear at least, most of the shows are astonishingly unfunny. I mean, really. The men are paid millions – tens of millions – of dollars and given armies of writers to be hilarious and yet they still have to hire a sidekick to laugh at their punchlines. Hell, one of them – is it Leno? – even has a drum rimshot to telegraph when we’re supposed to laugh. It’s about as pathetic as me hiring some guy to add a ‘LOL’ comment to all of my posts on TechCrunch. Which come to think of it isn’t a bad idea.

I’m sure I’m missing the joke somewhere, but I suspect the real reason these shows are so popular to you Americans is that they’re institutions. And what was it Groucho Marx asked? “Who wants to live in an institution?”

Amiright folks? Badoom-tish!

But still, I live in America now, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the most important cultural rift in the country’s history since the great Cheersquake of ‘83. In particular I’d be doing the world a disservice if I didn’t respond to the growing number of apparently sane commentators who are urging Conan O’Brien to take his act online.

Nick Summers at Newsweek began the Siren call:

“The new comedy prestige─to be the material that dominates Twitter’s trending topics list, to create the clips embedded on a million blogs─has nothing to do with airing on a certain network at a certain time.” 

Nick Bilton at the New York Times joined in:

“Mr. O’Brien’s youthful supporters won’t crowd around the television at a specific time, instead they go to YouTube and Gawker to watch their late-night television, and share their own commentary around each clip. So here’s my advice to Mr. O’Brien: After he leaves NBC and spends a few months healing his wounds and pulling the troops back together, he should come back and make the Internet his time slot.”

But it wasn’t just people called Nick. Jim Louderback from Revision3 went as far making Conan a formal – if attention-seeking – offer: “I’m willing to give him a substantial ownership stake in Revision3, if he makes the jump here.”

In his open letter, Louderback adds that “the [online] space has seen a 35% average increase in advertising spending in 2009.  (Just think how many cigars that would buy for Triumph The Comic Insult Dog).” Bilton meanwhile accepts that “the expenses associated with producing a high-quality show needed to attract celebrity guests quickly add up show” but points to Seth McFarlane as a star who has managed to convince advertisers to move their dollars online.

The size of the potential online audience excites Louderback too: “Conan’s voice – and own special brand of entertainment – deserve to be viewed not just by the 300 million people in the US, but by the 6 billion people around the world,” he says, confident that the Chinese and the Iranians are just crying out to be entertained by an American and his masturbating bear. As Bilson says: “It’s clear we are approaching a fork in the road, and the road sign for the next generation clearly points to the Web. For Mr. O’Brien’s core audience, the time slot is being replaced by a URL.”

These are arguments we’ve heard many times before. Television is a sinking ship! The Internet is the future, and smart talent will jump aboard and reap the spoils. We’ve heard it for newspapers – journalists should create blogs and become their own bosses; print is dead! – we’ve heard it for books – the Kindle means anyone can distribute their own writing;  publishing is dead! and we’ve heard it for music – bands should release their tracks online for free and make money from live gigs; record labels are dead! And always the same arguments: audiences and advertising money will follow talent, without need for intermediaries. It’s just a matter of time before stars like Conan realise this and then the rest will follow!

It’s a great message; it’s just a shame that it’s also – and obviously – total horseshit.

Let’s start by putting to rest the myth that audience follows talent. Howard Stern’s move from nationally syndicated radio to Sirius satellite might have made him a fortune, but it also lost him a huge chunk of his audience and almost all of his pop cultural influence. Likewise, the vast majority of high-profile bloggers who were given book deals have failed to earn back their advances through sales, despite publishers being certain that their millions of online readers would translate into book buyers. Those journalists who quit newspapers to go solo have struggled to pull in readers. And the idea that Conan’s audience will follow him online is equally ridiculous.

The truth is, audiences aren’t loyal to a particular star: they’re loyal to a medium, and often within that medium they’re even loyal to a slot. Conan knows this which is why when he was offered a later slot for his show – 12:05am, with Leno being moved later to replace him – he refused. “Some people will make the argument that with DVRs and the Internet a time slot doesn’t matter,” he said. “But with the Tonight Show, I believe nothing could matter more.”

The other reason he refused is that he understands that in the media the most important thing someone can have is not money or viewers or readers or listeners… but prestige: that X factor that makes people know you’re a star.

Getting prestige isn’t easy – and that’s the point. We live in a world that’s full of people who want our attention and we can’t possibly filter all of them ourselves, so we accept that we need certain media gatekeepers to do the filtering for us. NBC is one of those gatekeepers: the Tonight Show spot is the very expensive jewel in their crown – a crown that can only be worn by one person. By choosing Conan to be that person, NBC immediately signals that he’s worthy of our attention. He’s a rising star. He has prestige. As a result, he gets paid a fortune and attracts a large fan base, not just on television but on the Internet and on any other medium he appears.

It’s the same signal that’s sent out whenever a blogger gets a book deal, or an unsigned singer becomes signed to a major label or a local journalist is hired to write for the New York Times. We know that publishers don’t give book deals to everyone, the Times (really) can’t afford to recruit bad writers and record labels don’t hire people who can’t sing. So by being accepted by one of those gatekeepers, an author, or singer or journalist is granted prestige. They are a star.

But the tricky thing about prestige is that it only works in one direction. Moving from obscurity to a prestigious job, or moving from a prestigious job to an even more prestigious job tells everyone that your star is in the ascendancy, that they should keep watching. But the moment you move even one step in the other direction – say by going back a less coveted time slot, or by switching to a less prestigious medium – it’s all over. All of your hard-earned prestige can vanish in months or even weeks.

And that’s why Conan would be insane to leave behind television and move exclusively online. The Internet might have huge audiences and growing ad spending but it has zero prestige. Its greatest selling point is that it isn’t a gatekeeper; everyone is welcome. Anyone with a webcam, some cats and a Roomba can get a million viewers and anyone willing to spend a ton of money can produce a show that looks as good as the Tonight Show. And yet no matter how much money they throw at their video, or how many YouTube views it gets – no matter how Internet famous they become – they’re never going to be a star; not like Conan is a star.

Likewise, by turning his back on the prestige that he has from television, and moving online, Conan’s star – and his associated ability to command large audiences and even larger paychecks – would fade in a matter of months. We might all claim now to be ‘With Coco‘ but before long our attention would drift away to whoever the gatekeepers decide is worthy of it next.

And when that happens, Conan becomes just another ginger cat on a Roomba.