The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘summer’

Ash Patel, a senior Yahoo exec and one of the company’s longest serving employees, will shortly be stepping down. His last day will be next Monday.

Patel was one of Yahoo’s first sixty employees, and joined shortly before the company went public in April 1996. There are just six current Yahoo employees who joined before Patel, the company says.

His first job at Yahoo was “technical Yahoo,” a title given to all engineers. He created the My Yahoo product and also built Yahoo’s first instant messenger client. He stopped coding for a living in 2002 and has since been in a series of product and engineering executive positions.

His current role is EVP Product Architecture & Strategy. He has also served as Chief Product Officer and has run the engineering group at Yahoo.

I met with Patel this morning for a little over an hour to talk about his time at the company the early days at Yahoo.

One of his favorite moments was summer 1996, he says, when cofounder David Filo would stay up all night watching the news and manually updating results from the Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Most updates to Yahoo’s website were manual in those days, he says, although there were a few partners sending in content in a variety of formats.

Patel also talked about how annoyed he would get trying to test Yahoo’s instant messenger client during the wee hours of the night when no one else was awake. He couldn’t test new features on his sleeping friends, so he added a feature where a user could add themselves as a friend. That feature is still part of Yahoo Messenger.

Says Filo, “Did you know that you can add yourself as a contact in Yahoo! Messenger? Well, you can. Why? Because Ash needed a way to test the code to see if it was actually working the way we wanted it to while Messenger was first in development. He couldn’t wait. He wanted that feedback immediately and he wanted that chance to get things right on the fly. That’s the kind of ingenuity Ash brought to Yahoo!. He helped us to move faster than we thought we could and to find new ways to look at our work from the user’s point of view.”

Patel says Yahoo is in a transition period but is building the infrastructure it needs to compete in the future. Everyone is focused on social right now, he says, and so is Yahoo. But they have product plans for “what’s next after that” as well.

I asked Patel about Yahoo’s current troubles, saying that Yahoo sort of feels like England in 1940, surrounded by the Nazis (I’m not sure who the nazis are in my analogy, but we met very early this morning and it was the best I could come up with). His response – “Well, look who won the Battle of Britain…Things turned out ok.”

We also had a side discussion about whether Carol Bartz could play the part of Winston Churchill. But like I said, it was early.

What’s next for Patel? He says he’s going to take a few months off with his family and start to think about the future this summer. He advises a few startups, he says, although he doesn’t seem to be suggesting, yet at least, that a startup is in his future.

One thing is clear – Patel will be missed. He is a genuinely likable and intelligent guy who’s seen a lot over the last 14 years. It’s a loss for Yahoo that he’s leaving, but this guy clearly will continue to bleed purple.

There was an interesting debate on today’s Ron and Fez that speaks to a subject we’ve been whinging about for some time now: digital delivery of content, specifically of music. Pink Floyd has won a court ruling that will put an end to places like iTunes selling its songs individually.

Go here to read the rest:
Pink Floyd only wants you to download their entire albums, not individual songs

Hello John Biggs - I would like to be the CrunchGear intern. At 28 years of age I’d probably be the oldest, creepiest intern that CrunchGear has ever hired

Continued here:
Goodbye, CrunchGear.

Over the last six months, doubleTwist, the iTunes alternative that lets you manage your music, videos, and photos, has really been stepping up its game. In October the company integrated an Amazon-powered MP3 store, allowing users to download and sync their music directly with any of hundreds of compatible devices, much as they would with the iTunes/iPod combo. And today it’s adding a new feature that makes it an even more viable iTunes competitor: support for podcasts.

Co-founder Monique Farantzos says that doubleTwist has built and integrated a podcast search engine with 20 times as many podcasts as iTunes offers. Rankings are based on popularity (as opposed to a simple listing that would grow unmanageable with that much content). The new feature is launching on Windows now, with Mac support for podcasts coming next month.  Later this year, doubleTwist will offer an API allowing other applications to tap into the podcast search engine.  The company is also planning to launch a client for Android (which would presumably allow users to stream content) over the summer.

Farantzos says that doubleTwist is also going to start offering more cloud-based services. In May, users will be able to store the podcasts they’re subscribed to server-side, so they’ll be able to use the same subscriptions on their desktop and mobile clients without having to dock them together.

While it supports many devices, doubleTwist is becoming increasingly popular as an ‘iTunes for Android’. In January, it forged a partnership with T-Mobile, which promotes doubleTwist and has pre-installed it on some devices. Now, 53% of doubleTwist users are using it to sync with Android phones. The application also supports syncing with many other devices, including WebOS, BlackBerry, Sony PSP, and digital cameras.

doubleTwist is still missing some of the functionality that iTunes has, like the ability to download TV shows and movies. But the podcast functionality will add some video content, and 1 in 5 users are using it to manage video content they already have.  And some people may even appreciate the added simplicity if they’re just interested in music. In any case, it probably isn’t worth holding your breath for doubleTwist to add movies and TV downloads any time soon — content owners are still set on wrapping that content in DRM.

Also see Songbird, another iTunes alternative (you can see our past coverage here).

Online vacation rental giant HomeAway this morning announced that it is expanding its global footprint and moving into South America with the acquisition of the publisher of AlugueTemporada.com.br, Brazil’s leading vacation rental site. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed.

With its acquisition of what HomeAway claims is the largest vacation rental website in South America with over 12,000 property listings, the company is for the first time extending its virtual borders beyond North America and Europe and increasing its total vacation rental listings to a respectable 475,000 properties.

AlugueTemporada.com.br will continue to operate as an independent brand from its office in Rio de Janeiro, the city that will – conveniently – be hosting both the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics.

Seems like HomeAway is on a bit of a buying spree more than two years after it raised a whopping $250 million in a single financing round – just last week it announced that it had purchased BedAndBreakfast.com for an equally undisclosed sum.

HomeAway also operates HomeAway.com, VRBO.com, BedAndBreakfast.com and VacationRentals.com in the US and multiple vacation rental sites in France, the UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

Expect more small acquisitions from HomeAway in the months to come.

In November last year, we’ve shown you not one but two trailers for the Prince of Persia movie , and both turned out to be quite decent. And this third full-length trailer (courtesy of IGN) for one of this summer’s blockbusters doesn’t look too shabby either. The movie’s full title is “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” and it’s scheduled for release (by Disney) in the USA on May 28.

See the rest here: 
New Prince of Persia trailer looks awesome

Archos is gunning for the more budget-sensitive crowd with the 7-inch “Archos 7 Home Tablet” running Android atop a 600MHz ARM9 CPU due in April for around $179. The lower-powered CPU ought to be good for some nice, long battery life and the tablet is capable of basic web browsing and 720p video playback across a wide variety of codecs. You can check out 8:35 of pure ebullience from one of Archos’ biggest fans, Charbax : The tablet will be available in capacities of 2GB and 8GB, priced at 149 Euro and 179 Euro, respectively.

Read the rest here: 
Budget 7- and 8-inch Android tablets coming from Archos

In the summer of 2009 MySpace hired Katie Germinder, Facebook’s Director of User Experience and Design, as an SVP. Her primary job was to assemble a “swat team” of leading outside designers and user interface experts and re-imagine MySpace from the ground up. That team was made up of four people – including two former Apple designers and one ex-Facebooker – and worked out of a conference room in MySpace’s San Francisco offices for six months. They were creating a new site, located at remakingmyspace.com, and it was going to launch sometime right about now.

RemakingMySpace was going to be a new version of MySpace with every piece of legacy stuff thrown out the door. Users and employees would be solicited for input – to get new ideas and vote on already submitted ones – to rebuild the service brick by brick. Most of the work over the last six months was spent reimagining the design in various ways that would be shown to users, and building tools for the submission and consideration of new ideas. And “users” was broadly defined to include input from artists and bands, advertisers, etc.

It was bold, controversial and progressive. And now it’s also very, very dead. Germinder left MySpace last week. And the guy who hired her, former CEO Owen Van Natta, was terminated the week before.

So what happened? The project was trouble from the start. Germinder was strongly pushing the project, obviously, and had the support of Van Natta. But she was working outside of Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn’s organization. Hirschhorn hated the idea from the start, say multiple sources, and constantly worked to undermine it. He favored a much more straightforward redesign effort. And, sources say, VP Product Mike Macadaan was also an outsider to the project, and strongly disapproved say of the whole process.

None of that mattered as long as Van Natta was CEO and was able to push the project along. But once he was gone and Mike Jones and Hirschhorn took over as co-presidents, remakingmyspace was history. Within a day the team was dissolved and moved back into the product organization. The Apple designers, there as consultants, will likely be leaving shortly as their contracts expire.

We’ve spoken with sources on both sides of this. Some say that the the consultants were way too expensive and Hirschhorn and Jones thought the pace of the project was too slow. One source said that almost no work was done at all, and that the team was often absent from the office. But others who knew about the project (the site was live for some MySpace employees) thought it was brilliant, and noted that six months wasn’t all that long for a project of this scope. There was genuine excitement within MySpace over remakingmyspace.com, and some are disgusted that it was all thrown away.

One thing that strikes us as odd is the fact that the chief complaints – expense and time – were no longer relevant. The project was effectively done and the expense of it was behind them. “This was killed out of pure vindictiveness,” says one source. Another said that Hirschhorn never even bothered to really understand it, he just wanted it killed.

So what comes next? A straightforward redesign that won’t rock the boat, says one source. Another says that many of the ideas from remakingmyspace will eventually make their way into whatever MySpace launches. Officially, all MySpace will say is “The reimagination of MySpace’s user interface is a top priority. Under Jason Hirschhorn, VP of Product Mike Macadaan and his team are leading the charge to redesign the site and create a beautiful new and exciting environment for our users.”

We’re now trying to track down and verify screen shots and the new logo for remakingmyspace.com. Stay tuned for updates.

Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.

At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. Now, to be clear, these are only searches for the .com names, for example, “facebook.com” and “youtube.com” and not just the terms “facebook” and “youtube” themselves. Still, across the board, traffic had been rising for these .com domains and then at the same time all dropped off a cliff.

One might think this has to do with the China situation (Google warned it might have to pull out of China after saying it would remove previous restraints on searches). But drilling down into the data shows that while the searches from China did take a big fall, they did as well from other countries around the world too.

Other sites saw drops as well, but by far these large social sites saw the most pronounced drops that all seem to be aligned. Weirdly, google.com did not see any drop (though I’m not sure who uses Google to google google.com).

We’ve reached out to Google for some clarification or insight into this and will update when we hear back. The logical answer would seem to be that they switched something in mid-January that led to these huge drops in social site searches on Google, but who knows. Maybe we have a wild honey bee extinction situation going on here within Google.

Update: Google’s own Orkut.com also seeing a drop. As are several popular European social sites like Tuenti.com.

[via Mrinal]

What we have here is a machine that automatically turns office paper into toilet paper. It’s called White Goat (seriously) and is made by a Japanese company called Oriental [JP].

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Videos: Machine turns office paper into toilet paper