Google's monthly secrecy

Only 400 of the leeter than thou will be in attendance. It's by invite only and they're going to announce something that will change everything!

So is anyone else terribly excited for google's announcement?

I figured it would be best if I left speculation till a later date. I have been contacting some of my sources relentlessly in an effort to know a little more. Well, thus far I have come up with very little information.

I will stay on top of this for all you loyal readers out there... I have been searching the web for different clues; and I already emailed a friend I know who works at google. A peon, but a peon that is closer than I am to the google empire.

Read - Webpronews | digg (What's this?)

Microsoft Windows Officially Broken

Windows is broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Read - Microsoft Windows Officially Broken (Smart Office News)

What is a podcast?

Recently, a friend asked me what is a podcast and how can he begin using and listening to them. Here is how Wikipedia defines it: "Podcasting is a method of publishing audio programs via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed of new files (usually MP3s)"

Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds, and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together, or each feed separately.

Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device.

Think of your iPod as having a set of subscriptions that are checked regularly for updates. Today there are a limited number of programs available this way. The format used is RSS 2.0 with enclosures.

To start selecting podcasts of your interest, you can check any of the following links.

Audio.Weblogs

Podcast Alley

iTunes Podcasting

Of course, you can listen to podcasts using any PC based or portable MP3 player. Me, I prefer iTunes to do so on my laptop and my iPod to do it on the run. You can also try the player created by the one that started it all. iPodder by Adam Curry

Here they go again

WIPO's latest destructive regulation: The Broadcasting and Webcasting Treaty. Jamie Boyle nails it.

Any Open Source Company Can Get Funded

The NY Times continue the drumbeat that Sandhill Road is in a feeding frenzy to quickly fund new startups. The article profiles XenSource - a chip startup that would allow the running of multiple operting systems on a single chip. It also relays the conventional wisdom that any open-source software company can get funded.

Read - Fighting to Get in on the Next Little Thing (NY Times)

Blook

Tom Evslin has launched his newest project – hackoff.com. It’s a blook (an online book distributed as a blog). I’ve been watching this evolve. In addition to being awesome content (this is the book that every entrepreneur from 1997 – 2001 wanted to write), Tom is using (as well as inventing) lots of blog / Web 2.0 publishing technology into the experience.

24, Lost – you’ve now got competition for my brain.

A great idea...

Found this today - an announcement by IBM that they have started a program to encourage their employees to become math and science teachers. they will assist with a transition plan, some tuition money, mentoring etc.

I think this is one of the most valuable things IBM could have possibly done, and I really applaud their initiative. Now, I just hope that IBM in Mexico will do the same or similar.

Nanotech: What average Joe wants

A few days ago, the Woodrow Wilson Center's Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies released a study of U.S. public perceptions on nanotechnology. Their definition of nanotech is the broad small-interesting-stuff definition, not molecular manufacturing. But since both types of nanotech have the same label, public perception will surely be shared to some extent.

People look forward to medical advances and improved products. But even so, they want to see more careful testing of products before they are released. Only 11% think that voluntary industry standards will be sufficient. That's a pretty low level of confidence!

Dr. Jane Macoubrie, the study's author, was quoted: "Thorough pre-market product safety testing was a key way people wanted government and industry to act to improve trust. Numerous named examples ranging from Vioxx to dioxin have created a widespread perception that industry pushes new products to market without adequate safety testing, and people feel industry too often has put its own interests ahead of consumer safety." People don't want a ban, but they do want governmental oversight.

People were also concerned about lack of consumer awareness of nanotechnology, and possible unintended uses.

When molecular manufacturing is developed, these issues will be even more urgent. Programmable nanofactories will pose little or no direct threat to consumers. But their products will be as varied as software, and some may be as under-tested and buggy as software. There will be a strong financial incentive to rush new products and technologies to market. And in the case of health care, there will be a strong humanitarian pressure for some new lifesaving treatments--as there is today.

Perhaps the biggest problem with molecular manufacturing will be "unintended uses." This could include a wide range of problems--from arms races that get out of hand, to products that are desirable to individuals but destructive to society.

If this study has an effect, it should encourage nano-related businesses to go out of their way to educate the public about their technologies. CRN and Foresight will have a lot of work to do, educating people about the differences between nanoscale technologies and molecular manufacturing, and the diverse reasons why both are important.

Startup Globalization

Some very big transactions recently served as reminders that tech startups are now a global game. First, there was the sale of privately held, New York-based Linkshare to Tokyo-based Rakuten for $425 million. Then came the confirmation, on September 12, that San Jose-based eBay would buy Luxembourg-based Skype for up to $2.6 billion (with an additional $1.5 billion potentially to follow, depending on Skype’s performance over the next year).

Not that long ago, mergers and acquisitions among tech startups were predominantly a local affair, for instance, with one company CEO driving Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco to meet with another company's CEO to close a deal. Now deal-makers are assessing acquisition candidates as much for their global coverage as their revenues and technology strengths.

Continue Reading on Technology Review

Tadalist

My process for blogging is fairly simple. I have two sources to come up with blog entries. One is a running idea log that I keep using tadalist. The other, and more frequent source is just the spur of the moment idea that I want to blog about.

Occasionally I will also write a stub of a post and then revisit it later, or I will write a complete post and then be dissatisfied with it and never hit publish.

My blog ideas list on tadalist is getting pretty long so I'll list some of the ones that I put on there a while ago:

Ideas:

• NewsItem relevancy, rank by date or popularity or what? - Google just came out with blogsearch, so this is still pretty current. They search by relevant by default but also allow by date. For blog search I have to think that date is what really matters, or a micro-relevancy within a small time period.
• The phone companies are dead. - Next one is pretty current too, what with Skype being bought by Ebay recently. Seriously, data transfer is getting cheaper all the time, and what is a telephone call but sending and receiving data? Phone companies represent an outmoded monopoly that we will be better off without. VOiP + wireless is coming to cell phones, and that's going to change everything, especially with wireless coming everywhere too.
• Personalization rant - I just dont' like personalization. It's freaky, I dont' feel like i'm in control of it, it doesnt' work right, I don't know. Maybe someone will get it right for me one of these days, but right now I don't have much use for it.
• Implement a bittorrent tracker in ruby - I thought this might be a fun project to learn ruby better.
• Implement a MUD in ajax. - I keep thinking I want to see a casual web based mmorpg that uses ajax to create a dynamic game that I can play with other people.
• Why isn't video blogging bigger? - I don't know, I'm coming to love podcasting, maybe it will follow the same historical pattern: Print->Radio->TV, blogs->podcasts->videoblogs
• Using todoLists applications to manage information. - I use tadalist all the time, this list itself comes from tadalist. It's kind of like an internet scratchpad. Managing simple personal or small group information seems to be one of the next big things in internet applications, with 37signals currently leading the way.
• The new way of searching - Why I'm using delicious and other tagging services to find things on the internet over google more and more, and how to do it.
• Del.icio.us demo idea: you can see who is posting from where on delicious based on their timezone and language, it would be interesting to do something that tied bookmarking activity to world locations.
• Delicious for groups - del.icio.us isn't polished or mainstream enough for this yet, but I wish that groups of people I knew used del.icio.us for link sharing, because it's really efficient and cool. And I don't like Yahoo MyWeb 2.0.
• Why flash got it wrong and Ajax gets it right - I think ajax isn't the new flash, because ajax isn't trying to reinvent what the web really gets right: presenting documents of information to users. Flash applications also learn nothing from one of the most underappreciated benefits of the internet: a common user interface.

Product decisions

In Time’s article on the iPod Nano, Apple reaffirms their mission to guide instead of follow their customers:

It was a gutsy play, and it came from the gut: unlike almost any other high-tech company, Apple refuses to run its decisions by focus groups.

You can and of course should listen to your customers. But to be able to innovate on their behalf, you need to place an even higher premium on your own vision.

Startups more valuable

Valuations for startups are on average 16% higher today than they were a year ago, that according to VentureOne. A 16% rise might not impress many who have seen their home valuations rise a lot more than that in the past year, but still its good progress. Other findings include:
- It takes longer for VCs to get to liquidity thanks to fewer IPOs and fewer M&A activity.
- M&A may seem to have picked up but that is because there are some larger M&A deals; there are just fewer of them.

Read - Value of VC Backed Firms Hits an All-time High (BizJournals)

Some thoughts on Use Cases

I was recently questioned about the pre and post conditions of use cases and decided to share a few thoughts here.

A pre-condition of the whole use case is presumed to be true. You do not test the pre-condition inside the use case, nor do you have an exception case for the pre-condition being false.

A post-condition of the whole use case is guaranteed to be true. Inside the use case, you must include statements so that the post-condition is always true no matter what alternative or exception is executed.

You will often find that the post-conditions of one use case are the pre-conditions of another use case, especially when working with lower-level (more detailed) use cases.

When writing pre and post conditions of a use case, think of the use case as a black-box atomic unit with well-defined inputs and outputs. Imagine that you are testing the use case in such a way that you cannot see its internal behavior - all you have access to are the pre and post conditions.

If you insist that you have different pre-conditions and post-conditions for different paths through the use case, then you do not have different paths through one use case. Instead, you have different use cases.

If you look at the use case in a white box manner, you may wish to define internal pre and post conditions of parts of the use case. These would represent internal state changes of the use case.

I see many people handling pre and post conditions of the use case in a very casual manner. I don't have a problem with that as long as it is clear that the writing is intended to be casual rather than rigorously correct.

A rigorous use of pre and post conditions is of great benefit to the testing team. It may be that the testing team will rewrite the pre and post conditions to be technically correct in order to assist in the testing process.

Office 12

Microsoft puts their new UI on Office 12 (you can also watch it in action courtesy of the Scobleizer and Channel 9). It’s a pretty big departure from the current and previous versions of Office. They’ve also introduced more logical visual groupings in their toolbar, and seem to be favoring large and small icons in the same toolbar. Have a look and share your thoughts. And yes, it looks VERY MacOSX-ish

Google again

Maybe I should consider a change in my blog's name to something like google tracker, or google learner, I have commented far too much on them in my lasts posts.
Anyway, when just my last post was about technorati demise, and the coming of new blog search engines, here is google with his proposal.
Sorry you old blog-searching guys, this is the day you have been all having nightmares about.

http://blogsearch.google.com/

Adios Technorati, Hola PubSub, Ice Rocket

A number of well-trafficked Web commentators have already danced on Technorati's grave, with numerous comments on these sites by readers joining in. Most focus on how slow Technorati usually is. More often than not search results have become laughable thanks to spam blogs. Technorati's new tag project which lists the most popular blogs in categories is ludicrous. It lists numerous blogs on top 10 lists that have piss-poor Alexa rankings.
The lesson to be learned from Technorati should be that searching the live Web is extremely difficult. Yahoo, MSN and Google would be there if they had credible products. Moreover, as the live Web gets more and more important, this may well be the next defining moment for search leadership. It will be interesting to see if the A list search players buy or build.

Read - So long, Technorati (Kottke)
Read - Technorati Worthless (The Jason Calanis Weblog)
Visit - PubSub, Ice Rocket

Google here and there

So there’s been a lot of Google in the news this past weeks, including this story in the NY Times where a bunch of Silicon Valley veterans hint that Google might be the new “evil empire”.

Towards the end of the article, though, there’s this paragraph:

For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft’s operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem.

I strongly disagree with that. I agree that the central tenet of Microsoft’s success is that they have developed platforms, not just products — but where is Google creating a platform for third-party developers?

There are people writing hacks to hook Google Maps up to other software. And there are a ton of third-party search tools that simply redirect you to Google for web search (e.g. the toolbar search fields in Safari and Firefox). But that’s not a platform. What makes something a platform is that you can’t take it away without the stuff that’s built on it falling down. A Windows application doesn’t work without Windows. A developer can take the time to port a Windows app to other platforms, but you can’t just move a Windows app from Windows to any other platform.

Likewise from the users’ perspective. Big organizations can’t “just switch” from Windows, because they need their Windows software. Platforms are solid, because they are entrenched.

Just because lots of developers are integrating Google search into their applications doesn’t make Google search a platform; it’s just as easy to hook up to Yahoo for search. In my opinion, Yahoo even offers a better API for search than does Google, and their search results are pretty close in quality.

For all the speculation that Google’s goal is a “web OS” that supplants Windows as the lowest-common denominator platform for getting on the Internet, and for all the talk that Microsoft (and, in particular, Bill Gates) sees Google as a serious threat to their monopoly-powered golden-egg-laying geese, I just don’t see how Google is building a platform for developers that even vaguely competes with Windows.

“Follow the money” is as good a way as any to define a company: the point of business is to profit. This is why Apple is not, and has never been, a software company: their profits come from hardware sales — computers, and, now, iPods. Microsoft is a software company: their profits — billions of dollars every quarter — come almost solely from software.

Judged by their profits, Google is an advertising company. They don’t profit from search, they don’t profit from software. They profit by selling ads. This isn’t to belittle them — I think Google is a terrific company, and they are profiting handsomely from ad revenue ($369 million last quarter). They’re market leaders because their ads are better for everyone — they’re far less obnoxious than traditional web advertising (so they’re better for users), and yet they’re also more effective and cheaper (so they’re better for advertisers). And their software is, in many ways, ingenious.

If Google has a platform, it’s an advertising platform, not a developer platform. I’m not even saying Google should have a developer platform — I’m just saying they don’t. Any software that uses Google as a back-end for web search could be modified to use Yahoo or MSN by changing a few lines of code. Google Desktop might be popular, but it’s nowhere near as cool as Yahoo Widgets (a.k.a. Konfabulator) in terms of acting as a developer platform.

Plus, if Google is such a threat to Microsoft, why is it that all of their non-web software only runs on Windows? (“Google’s Windows-Only World”.)

Business-wise, Google’s software is just an excuse to show ads. Google’s search results and apps like Gmail serve the same purpose as the editorial content in magazines and newspaper. Google may or may not become a direct threat to Microsoft in the future, but in the here and now, the entrenched monopolies that ought to feel threatened by Google are newspapers. Newspapers, especially local small- and medium-market newspapers live off the revenue from classified ads. But because most towns have only one major newspaper, classified ad prices are artificially high. Google is primed to burst into this market, with targeted local ads that are cheaper for advertisers and easier for users to find what they’re looking for or interested in.

This all goes for Yahoo, too — their profits come from advertising, and they’ve been breaking into local markets long dominated by newspapers, such as movie theater show times and job listings.

Google-vs.-Microsoft may well be the battle everyone wants to see; but the battle that’s actually going on, for real, today, is the obvious one: Google-vs.-Yahoo. And what’s weird about this is that the Yahoo-Google rivalry is a good one — ignoring it to focus on a purely-hypothetical-at-this-point Google-Microsoft rivalry is like ignoring astronomy to gab about flying saucers.
See Also

* Robert X. Cringely: “Has Google Peaked?”:

But what if everyone is mainly wrong? What if search and PageRank and AdSense are Google’s corporate apex. Most companies would be content with that, but Google isn’t supposed to be like most companies. But what if they are? I hear a lot of talk about Google doing deals for video and music distribution, but where are those deals? So far it is all just talk.

I hope Google does pull off a couple more spectacular product feats, but I won’t be all that surprised if they don’t. It will take the company another five years just to mature the businesses they already have.

* Danah Boyd: “Why Microsoft-Only Development Is Foolish Business Logic”:

Companies keep competing on a product-by-product basis, forgetting that they need to be competing on a paradigm level. And forgetting that they need to be competing collectively, not individually. By creating a product that only works on Microsoft, you solidify Microsoft more than you compete with them. You may be competing on a product level, but in the long run, you’ve done Microsoft more good than harm and you’ve just made your competition more difficult. You’ve given people another reason to stay on Microsoft. Why? How can this possibly be good business logic?

* David Pogue: “Google Gets Better. What’s Up With That?”:

Ever heard the old joke about the two psychiatrists who pass in a hallway? One says, “Hello there.” The other thinks, “I wonder what he meant by that?”

In high-tech circles, that’s pretty much what people are saying about Google these days. If you hadn’t noticed, Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it’s now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs - and then gives them away. In today’s culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it’s all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to?

My Apple stock soared today!

Just in case you have not checked it out just yet (I seriously don't think that anyone who I know reads this blog has not) go feast your eyes and senses with iTunes 5, iPodNano and ROCKR.

iTunes EQ Plugin

Everyone knows that the best way to ensure that one is getting the very best quality audio is to invest in good hardware, and only listen to full CD quality (or better) music. However, not everyone can afford a professional audiophile setup. Macosxhints.com has what one man is calling the universal “perfect” settings for the iTunes equalizer. That is to say, that he claims that these settings will make improve the sound of widest range of music types. Of course, when ever someone makes a claim like this, there will be some who refute the assertion. Delving into the comments on the post reveals a comment by a very experienced audio engineer, who presents quite a negative attitude. The engineer claims that the “perfect” preset is the opposite of what should be done, and presents a preset that reverses the “perfect” preset.
Now, I make no claim to be an expert in audio, and my Dell and Altec Lansing speakers are far from ideal, but, to my ears at least, the “Perfect Negative” preset does improve the sound of my shoddily encoded MP3s.
Check the post out for yourself, and see if it doesn’t make your music sound better.

Del.icio.us

I’ve used del.icio.us some over the past few months as I’ve played around with user tagging. However, I’ve been struggling with tagging – I use Firefox and am an “in context” browser (e.g. I don’t want to end up on another web page when I do an action like “tag” something.) So – my use of del.icio.us was a lot lighter than I thought it would be since it “broke” the way I browse.

The VeryDelicious Firefox plug in solved this for me when I stumbled upon it today. It’s perfect – I now have a toolbar in Firefox that lets me add up to three tags for a web page without leaving the page, knows my existing tag list (so I can choose from them), and let’s me go directly to my del.icio.us page for a specific tag. Worth checking out if you are a del.icio.us and Firefox user.

Mowing the lawn (and being paid for it)

Almost two months since my last post. Thank you to all of you who sent me notes asking me to continue writing. I will maximize my efforts to do so. Specially now that big plans are coming to town and I will need to prioritize what should I do with my time.

Thinking about priorities, I recall that every Sunday when I was growing up, my dad would give me a list of the chores I had to do that week. Some, like taking out the garbage, were daily tasks. Others, such as my regular assignment of mow the lawn, could be completed anytime—as long as they were done by noon on Saturday. I knew I could do it on Monday, Wednesday or even Saturday morning. But I quickly figured out that the sooner I got it done, the more I could enjoy the rest of the week.

Without even realizing it, I was learning an important life lesson: pay now, play later. I could have waited until the last minute to do my chores. But if I had, I would have risked missing out on some fun activity my dad had planned for Saturday afternoon—an activity I knew I'd have to skip if I didn't get my work done. So I chose to make the effort on the front end.

Whether you're doing household chores or building a company, practicing the "pay now, play later" principle requires one key element: discipline. What exactly is discipline? It's the means to getting what you really want even when you don't want to do the thing necessary to get it.

The ability to make right decisions is critical to success in life.

That's true, but good decisions have no value without discipline. Decision-making takes care of goal-setting, but only discipline results in goal-getting. "Everyone wants to be thin, but nobody wants to diet. Everybody wants to live long, but not many want to exercise. Everybody wants money, yet few want to work hard. Successful people conquer their feelings and form the habit of doing things that unsuccessful people do not like to do. The bookends of success are starting and finishing. Decisions help us start; discipline helps us finish."

In other words, when it comes to success, good decisions and discipline go hand in hand. Good decisions minus discipline equals a plan without a payoff. And discipline minus good decisions equals regimentation without reward. Only when we have good decisions plus discipline do we have a masterpiece of potential.

Now, it's not easy to practice discipline. In fact, it can be downright painful at times. We all know what it's like to do something that we don't want to do but know we should do. That's the pain of discipline. But if you don't engage in that kind of pain, you open yourself up to the pain of regret, which is far more excruciating.

This leads me to an obvious question: How do you develop discipline? Although it is not an easy question to answer nor I am a discipline Yogi, here is what works for me:

1. Set deadlines and priorities. Don't make a list of everything you have to do and start working from the top. Prioritize your to-do list. Determine which projects you need to accomplish first and how much time you need to get them done. Then give yourself a deadline and get busy.

2. Challenge your excuses. I get so tired (angerly tired) of whiny people telling me why they couldn't, shouldn't, didn't and wouldn't. Put the violin away and start taking a hard look at the so-called reasons you cite for not being able to get things done. As I like to say, it's easier to go from failure to success than from excuses to success. As long as you're making excuses, you're
never going to make it.

3. Remove rewards until the job's done. Marathon runners don't stop for a break after each mile, and neither should you. I'm not saying you shouldn't divide your work into manageable chunks or celebrate the achievement of intermediate goals. Just don't have that Krispy Kreme doughnut too quickly.

4. Stay focused on results. Jackson Browne once said, "Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways." Staying focused on achieving results—with the priority items on your to-do list, I might add— will keep you from acting like an octopus on roller skates.

If you want to be successful—as a leader, as a parent, as a member of society—you have to pay the price. You can be disciplined and pay on the front end, or you can take the seemingly easier path and pay on the back end. Unfortunately, if you play now and pay later, the payment's much heavier. As I often say, hard work is the accumulation of the easy things you didn't do when you should have.

So, learn from my boyhood mowing-cleaning strategy. Pay now, and play later. Because if you pay now, you'll get to play a lot longer.