The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘will-eventually’

It took almost a year, but Xobni finally released its email app for the Blackberry. It works as a standalone app integrated with the email on your Blackberry, but similar to Xobni’s Outlook plugin, it ranks your contacts by importance and pulls in social data from Facebook, LinkedIn and other places.

Along with the Blackberry app, Xobni is introducing another product which may turn out to be more important in the long run. It is called Xobni One, and it syncs your Xobni contacts in Outlook with your contacts on your Blackberry, all in the cloud. As Xobni rolls out more apps in the future, Xobni One should be able to sync contacts across those as well (very Mesh-like).

Xobni One is a way to sync your desktop and mobile contacts. If you use Outlook on your desktop at work, but Gmail on your Blackberry, Xobni One reconciles the two. And when you leave your job, your contacts stay with you. Xobni One isn’t free. It costs $4 a month or $40 a year, bundled with the Blackberry app. Keeping your contacts in sync is expensive. Doesn’t it seem that Google or Microsoft will eventually just do this for free?

The last time I ever dealt with a compost pile was back in elementary school science class  with an over-zealously earth-minded teacher. While I could never find that much enjoyment from decaying matter, Japanese design firm Bakoko has created an interesting greenhouse heated by various compost chambers in the walls.

Read the original:
Compost-powered heating

Make found these wonderful floating space robots designed to fly in formation in zero gravity. How do they do it

More here: 
Dance, floating space robot, dance!

“The amount of fun you’re having at a party is inversely proportional to the number of times you’ve tweeted about it.”

Last week, I tweeted these deeply profound words to my 4,844 followers. The vast majority took the proper course of action and ignored them. But there were a few exceptions. SGN CEO Shervin Pishevar responded that this should henceforth be known as Kincaid’s Law. Never one to shy away from getting my own eponymous law, I agreed. Then something truly unexpected happened: I received the unsolicited endorsement of none other than Bob Metcalfe, the man behind Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe also founded 3Com, co-invented Ethernet, and has been inducted into just about every tech Hall of Fame out there.

Yes, I know he was joking. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to print that tweet out and frame it. And who knows, maybe real-life interaction will eventually prove to be more important than social media when it comes to human happiness.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, Metcalfe’s Law states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system”. It’s up there with Moore’s Law in terms of well known tech “laws”. I’m in very good company.

Now excuse me while I go stand in front of a mirror and tell myself how awesome I am.

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The Screw Key is simple enough: a key with a Philips or straight bit on the end.

Excerpt from: 
The Screw Key is a key that screws

Google is taking a step towards taking all the messy, unstructured information on the Web and putting it into neat little, labeled boxes. Literally, that is what Google Squared does. First announced at last month’s Searchology event, Google Squared is now live. You can try it out.

Google Squared is an experimental search engine that is in its own “labs.” It gives you topical search results broken down by categories, something that Bing does in a different way with guided results in the left explore pane. Google Squared is more comparable to Wolfram Alpha in that it is A) really early stage, and B) goes and finds out every facet of a subject based on a single keyword search. But unlike Wolfram Alpha, it does not “compute” answers based on data that it has ingested into its own databases. Its database is the Web.

Does Google Squared crush Wolfram Alpha today? No. But as I originally suggested when it was announced, adding structure to the Web will eventually win out over a self-contained database. Even if it seems primitive today, its approach scales better than Wolfram’s.

Type in something like “planets” and the results come up as grid with the planet names, images, a short description, the equatorial surface, and the mean density. It only manages to identify seven planets, and those include Pluto and Ceres. (Where’s Uranus?) This is still very experimental. But you can add more rows and columns. When you click on the the “add” box under the planet names, for instance,, it will suggest the missing ones. Or you can add yor own category, and then it will fill in the other boxes in that row. You can also add a column. It suggests categories such as “Date of Discovery” and “Escape velocity” (which is important to know if you are planning to visit and want to ever return).

But how would you get to one of these planets? Well, you would need a spaceship, of course

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The CandyFab 6000 is an updated version of the larger 4000 model and can make 3D objects out of sugar.

Continued here: 
3D candy fabricator promises a sweet time

This, without the keyboard Harry G. Frankfurt wrote a great essay on the concept of “bullshit,” explaining that it is the locus of truth and and falsehood, the “deliberate making of false claims about what is true.” “In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all,” he writes. Well, the boys at BBG just picked up on a little pet peeve of mine: analysts and their various prognostications.

See the rest here: 
Analysts and their bullshit

LookStat, an analytics platform for photographers that sell their work online in micro-stock marketplaces, has closed a $500,000 Series A funding round led by Founders Co-op.

Lookstat is a tool for photographers that allows them to track their earnings across online stock photography sites like iStockphoto, Shutterstock, and Dreamstime, with support for Fotolia, 123rf, and Stockxpert coming in the near future. The site can automatically identify when the same image is being sold at multiple sites, and can aggregate all sales for that image into one place. Lookstat is also currently tested a workflow platform designed to help photographs distribute their content.

While the site is currently free, it will eventually begin to charge a subscription free, though it will likely remain free for any photographers who earn less than $100/month.

While LookStat may be addressing a niche market, it’s one that is growing steadily. In February we saw Fotolia reach one million registered members, with 1.5 million paid downloads a month (Comscore currently reports that they have over 2.8 million unique visitors). Competitor iStockphoto, which was purchased by Getty Images in 2006, gets over 4.8 million monthly visitors.

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Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute, a seed stage incubator and mentoring program that we first covered last month, is set to release a set of legal documents this afternoon that promise to protect startup founders from, as he eloquently puts it, the “atrocities of investors.”

The new documents, created by Wilson Sonsini attorney Yoichiro Taku, are posted publicly on the website. They have a variety of novel rights and privileges:

• Creation of a Class F Founders stock that has 2:1 board votes per founder and 10:1 voting power over normal common stock. These shares vest monthly without a cliff and have single trigger acceleration. Class F holders get acceleration on change in control and approval rights on new investments, liquidity events, Board size, and dividends.
• A clause that requires the payment of $100,000 to the Founders Institute in the event a founder leaves the board of directors to give a disincentive to firing founders down the road.
• Grant of a warrant to the Founders Institute to buy 3.5% of the fully diluted stock of the company in the form of the equity sold in the first round of financing, which is pooled for participating founders and mentors.

The stock grants and any penalty fees paid are put into an exchange fund that all participating founders have ownership in. Therefore, all companies participating in each class have some stock in all the other companies - a great way to reduce overall risk. One big winner in each class means everyone gets a little bit rich. 60% of the warrant stock goes to the founders, the institute keeps the other 40%.

There’s a risk that these extremely favorable founder terms could create problems when the companies try to raise outside funding. Ressi says they won’t let a financing die from these terms and will likely waive rights if forced to. His reputation will require that - if these agreements protect founders he’ll be a hero, but if they kill financing deals the program will collapse.

Applications for the first startup class are open until May 10.

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