You may have missed this due to the iPhone hype yesterday. If you have ever been interested in learning how to program, you should check out Brandon Watts interview on the ScobleShow. He is the developer of the Leopard Programming Language. He is also one of the Tech Evangelists that I work with at Criteo.
Sphere: Related Content Many of you already knew this, but I have been in San Francisco since Tuesday. I came here for a meeting with Criteo on Wednesday, but have stayed over to meet other people as well as just to do the tourist thing. That is why I haven’t updated the blog as well as I usually do. I have enjoyed my stay here, and seriously considering relocating here; well if someone would hire and pay me a California salary! 
Should I be in line down at the Apple store around the corner? No. I don’t like standing in lines. One of my biggest pet peeve’s is to “stand in a line” for anything. One of the things that sort of really irritate a person who has spent anytime in the military.
One of the goals I had when I left the service many moons ago, was to never stand in a line unless absolutely necessary. The iPhone will be there tomorrow, and the next day, and probably for many days to come. If I want to buy one, I’m in no hurry. Additionally, since I am a social media person, if I did get one today, I’d have to blog about it!!
I read two good articles this morning. Sad, right? TWO! One almost shocked me. It was on CenterNetworks of course, and I thought for a moment, “Well, well… Allen fell for the iPhone push today.. ” — Glad to see he was talking about a funding round for iContact. Worried me for a second.
The other item was that Om Malik is going to Israel for a blogger conference. Enjoy Israel, I have been there many moons ago; loved the country – very very beautiful place. Not only that (for the linguist impaired such as myself) – they speak English!
Technically Speaking, I’m going to be here in town, San Francisco, through the weekend. Back to the STL and regular updates next week. Oh, btw, that is so far – two good articles – still going through my feeds, updating the Link Blog.
Sphere: Related Content FreshBooks, has now added time tracking and online billing capabilities. Other companies such as SlimTimer provide the time tracking, but online billing is a great addition for FreshBooks. In doing so, the company is building a 21st Century invoicing platform for the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industry, making the Web a more effective and friendly place for business transactions for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and their customers.
FreshBooks API allows application designers, businesses, services companies, and users to integrate FreshBooks’ industry-leading billing platform into an entirely new category of products, features, and solutions for enhancing and streamlining productivity, workflow, sales, CRM, project management, and invoicing.
Application/service integrators can incorporate FreshBooks APIs into existing and new products to extend functionality, including timers, project planners, and desktop widgets. Services providers, such as ISPs, Web apps, wine, book or other product of the month clubs, with an existing sales infrastructure can use the API to add a professional-quality billing component. Tech savvy customers can also integrate FreshBooks functionality into their current workflow. All share the common goal of improving customer services and expediting the payment process.
FreshBooks is a painless online invoicing and time-tracking service designed to make its users look as professional as ‘Fortune 500′ companies. It changes the way businesses manage their books, saving them time, improving their cash flow, enhancing client communications, and streamlining their business processes.
Based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, FreshBooks, formerly 2ndSite, was introduced on May 1st 2004 and has released 18 new versions since then. Aside from providing painless online time tracking and billing services, FreshBooks also helps small businesses by driving community-based initiatives such as weekly tele-seminars, daily web log stories with helpful information, and an active, user-driven forum. ellipticals
Sphere: Related Content Planypus, the Chicago, IL based event planning company is launching a new look today. The team has aggressively responded to their users needs and suggestions. In my mind this makes Planypus the leader in the event planning sphere.
While other event planning sites seem to gain all the press as well as the VC funding, Planypus moves forward and addresses the issues that their users find. This company has been a favorite of this blog as well as a sponsor (disclaimer) but from the first time I viewed them, I saw a winning product.
They don’t remain stale, old, and uninviting. In fact the new look along with new ideas has bolted this company into first place over other event planning sites. You can have all the VC funding in the world, but if your product is not up to par, it will fail. Money isn’t a key to building a winning product.
The team at Planypus responded to suggestions from its users, both new and converts from its competitors, and added the ability to:
• See old plans
• Vote not only on dates and times, but also on miscellaneous ideas
• Tag friends in bulk
• The ability to send friends private messages
• Merge multiple emails into one account
• Chose new, fun icons
• A complete restyle of user profiles
In the current online event planning industry, other companies are still stuck in the announcement state of mind. They help their users announce their plans but stop short of allowing the group of friends to collaborate and discuss details. According to one observer, “Planypus is on the cutting edge of event planning.”
The team at Planypus listened to its users, and over the last month added a large variety of new features, visual uplifts, and performance enhancements. Yan Pritzker, CEO and founder stated that the, “passionate users have been the single most important factor of our success. They give us ideas, yell at us when we have done something wrong, and shape Planypus into what it is today.”
Planypus is the product of Fifteen Reasons LLC, a startup based in Chicago and Washington D.C. The company was started in 2006 by five seasoned software engineers and entrepreneurs, with backgrounds including IBM, KPMG, and Orbitz, who share a vision to drastically simplify the way people make plans together.
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* In the right hand corner after you hit start – you will see “1/13″ – click the right arrow to get to Episode 13!
Episode 13 notes:
AOL new blog news look
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Time Warner Inc. plans to launch a test of its overhauled news portal on Tuesday, drawing influences from the uncluttered design of popular Internet blogs.
The online division of the world’s largest media company said it aimed to keep readers returning and to introduce a new generation of media consumers to the site by offering more interactive features such as polls and voting features and user-created news on one page.
Slide, the San Francisco company that lets you create photo slideshows that you can embed in blogs and other sites, has acquired a specialty company called Favorite Peeps. While the purported purchase price was piddling, it suggests a land grab may be under way by companies developing applications for Facebook.
Perhaps not as crazy as it might sound: the reported price is only $60,000. But nonetheless, the fact that the Favorite Peeps widget just got acquired by Slide – a company keen to dominate the Facebook apps market as it faces the uncertainty of MySpace’s widget policy – shows that the frenzied activity around the Facebook platform is paying off for some developers.
CircleUp, a service that lets you send questions by email to groups as large as hundreds or thousands of people, and then collect and organize answers on a single page, has raised $3 million in a first round of financing.
CircleUp, the polls creator, has released an embeddable MyQuestions widget to accompany its existing service, combining the functions of an instant messenger with a Q&A forums.
Activate your iPhone with iTunes
CUPERTINO, California and ATLANTA—June 26, 2007—Apple® and AT&T Inc. today announced that iPhone™ users will be able to activate their new iPhones using Apple’s popular iTunes® software running on a PC or Mac® computer in the comfort and privacy of their own home or office, without having to wait in a store while their phone is activated. Activating iPhone takes only minutes as iTunes guides the user through simple steps to choose their service plan, authorize their credit and activate their iPhone. Once iPhone is activated, users can then easily sync all of their phone numbers and other contact information, calendars, email accounts, web browser bookmarks, music, photos, podcasts, TV shows and movies just like they do when they sync their iPods with iTunes.
“Usually it can be done in less than 20 minutes, but it can take several hours depending on your carrier,” Apple said.
To make the switch, customers will need to enter into the latest version of iTunes their existing mobile phone number, their existing mobile account number, billing zip code, and password (if applicable).
ATLANTA and CUPERTINO, California—June 26, 2007—AT&T Inc. and Apple® today announced three simple, affordable service plans for iPhone™ which start at just $59.99 per month. All three plans include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling. With everything else already included, iPhone customers can easily choose the plan that’s right for them based on the amount of voice minutes they plan to use each month. In addition, iPhone customers can choose from any of AT&T’s standard service plans.
All three plans include unlimited data, Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll-over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile calling. With everything else already included, iPhone customers can easily choose the plan that’s right for them based on the amount of voice minutes they plan to use each month. In addition, iPhone customers can choose from any of AT&T’s standard service plans.
tennis ball will open your car door
Lock your keys in the car? Apparently you can retrieve them with a tennis ball. The trick involves drilling or burning a hole in the tennis ball and then using muscle to force enough air pressure into the door to pop the lock.
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Sphere: Related Content I am guessing you haven’t heard enough about the iPhone this week. I’m also being sarcastic.
Here are a few funny items I saw:
At 5:00 a.m. on Monday, the two iPhone enthusiasts stationed themselves outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue flagship shop in New York City’s Manhattan borough, assuring their first and second places in line. Yes — they plan to remain there till Friday evening and are seeking food and MetroCards as donations.
Sphere: Related ContentAt the other end of the spectrum lies the doofus in the skull t-shirt above. A friend of mine caught him at a party. Check his texts about it:
I’m at this party with a bunch of [company name deleted] people, and this dude from apple is conspicuously busting out his iphone.
* In the right hand corner after you hit start – you will see “1/12″ – click the right arrow to get to Episode 12!
Episode 12 notes:
IRVINE, CA–(Marketwire – June 25, 2007) – Local.com Corporation (NASDAQ: LOCM), a leading local search engine, today announced that the company has been awarded patent number 7,231,405 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for the process of indexing and retrieving web-related information by geographical location.
The patent covers local search technology related to identifying location information from web documents, indexing that information and making it searchable geographically. In Local.com’s commercial implementation of the technology, the search results are ranked by search term, LocalRank score, location prominence, among other factors. The system then extracts, matches and indexes web pages from the Internet and generates web references where applicable on more than 16 million local businesses listed nationwide on Local.com.
The first retail-bound volume shipments of Apple Inc.’s hotly anticipated iPhone device arrived successfully in the United States this past weekend, touching down quietly at a handful of drop locations just six days before the device is due to go on sale at nearly 2000 Apple and AT&T retail locations.
Click here to find out more!
People familiar with the matter say the intrinsically valuable freight was carried inbound by a certain Hong Kong-based air courier, which services Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco. The early arrival is to assure the cargo can clear customs with enough time to handle unexpected delays, those people said.
Awaiting the freight at each location on Sunday were armed personnel, who were reportedly hired by Apple through its courier’s ground handling agent and then cleared by the Transportation Security Administration. Armed guards are extremely unusual for freight coming out of the Asian sector, those familiar with the matter explained, and are typically reserved for shipments containing riches such as gold and diamonds.
iPhone and Sprint – and more games!
Also preparing for Friday’s “iDay” is Sprint, which last week issued a series of guides designed to help retail employees counteract customers who are looking to cancel their service contracts in favor of rival AT&T and iPhone.
The document, title “iPhone Talking Points Guide for Sales and Customer Care,” comes by way of MDN, which notes that Sprint staffers “are being told to expect an initial drop of up to 6 percent of their current ’smart phone’ customers” beginning with Friday’s iPhone launch.
Today a story out of the U.K. shows Bebo being used in part to coordinate a fight at a school in the town of Tiverton. Over 80 students it appears were involved.
“Police said the arrangements appear to have been made on the social networking website Bebo and by emails, mobile phones and text messages. Bebo said it had not been contacted by the police about the matter.
Nimbit-OMT – What record company?
With OMT, you can sell not only your songs, but your merchandise as well (t-shirts, hats, posters, etc.). There’s a concert tour calendar with the ability to purchase tickets through the OMT widget, a bio page for fans to find out more about you, a connect feature allowing fans to sign up for your newsletters, and a “cart” function so users can see what they’ve added, how much it costs, and purchase their items.
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* In the right hand corner after you hit start – you will see “1/11″ – click the right arrow to get to Episode 11!
Episode 11 notes:
Emerson Spartz, the 20-year-old creator of the popular Harry Potter fan site Mugglenet (mugglenet.com), experienced a similar run-of-the-mill adolescence. “I wasn’t an entrepreneur when I started,” says Spartz, who now tallies more than 1 million hits per day at Mugglenet. “I became one after I realized the Web site’s potential.”
Although worried that his image as a businessman could tarnish his Potterhead status, Spartz tells BusinessWeek he pulls in “a six-figure income.” To angry fans who accuse him of financially exploiting their Potter passions, he simply cites server costs: Once a minor fiscal drain, they now run $125,000 annually. “If I can meet Harry Potter fans’ needs and make money at the same time, why shouldn’t I?” he asks.
We’re now at the busy crossroads where globalization meets Web 2.0. This presents both a challenge to the old ways of doing business and an opportunity to gain tremendous leverage via the right goods and services. To thrive in this era, companies will have to figure out how to engage young people from all over the world when they conceive of products and services. Businesses need their help in turning concepts into finished products and, especially, in marketing them. Another angle: Companies can follow the trail of blogs and social networking sites to find and recruit young employees all over the world.
Better get used to it. Flying blind is the unavoidable consequence of coming to terms with today’s most important demographic group: the tens of millions of digital elite who are in the vanguard of a fast-emerging global youth culture. Because of smartphones, blogs, instant messaging, Flickr, MySpace, Skype, YouTube, digg, and de.lic.ious, young people scattered all over are instantly aware of what’s happening to others like them everywhere else. This highly influential group, many of whom are also well-heeled, is sharing ideas and information across borders and driving demand for consumer electronics, entertainment, autos, food, and fashion. Think of it as a virtual melting pot. As the population of the young and Web-savvy grows into the hundreds of millions, the pot is going to boil.
Plaxo, the contacts updating service, was popular briefly a few years ago but then started irritating people — it would constantly ping you with update requests from friends and solicitations to join Plaxo.
In short, it got a reputation of being “evil,” and then turned quiet, and we wondered if we’d ever hear from it again.
But tomorrow, the company launches with a promising new release. It’s a complete overhaul, and extremely ambitious. In some ways, it looks like it wants to target Facebook.
Now you can sync your Google Calendar and Address Book with your corporate calendar and address book Exchange/Outlook, Apple Apps, LinkedIn, and any other web service or software you prefer to use. (I say almost because there are still some platforms that are not supported, and the beta release isn’t quite bug free.) The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up has just executed a reboot as a web-based service, and is now focusing on syncing. The company is also making all the information available via its mobile page: m.plaxo.com.
Big rumor of the day: Google is buying GrandCentral. We checked with GrandCentral and they declined to comment. If it indeed does happen, it would be delicious irony: Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet were with DialPad, which got sold to Yahoo. So this would even the score. GrandCentral has raised about $4 million from Minor Ventures and has been looking to raise more cash. Google dollars might be an easier option.
Via – TechCrunch post – Google-GrandCentral
The web offers more than a few sites with variations on the Digg theme, but Spotplex, which has designed a potentially more democratic ranking system, is different.
Instead of the submit-and-vote system used by Digg and its clones, Spotplex ranks articles based on the number of impressions they get. Bloggers insert a line of code into their blogs, and Spotplex works in the background, tallying each time someone lands on an article’s page.
The good thing about this service is that it’s rather hands off for bloggers; no need to go back to the site to re-distribute content or bookmark it. Of course the downfall of this model is that only items submitted by bloggers can be searched. In order for it to become an ideally useful tool for both bloggers and readers alike,
Over the last six months, i’ve noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That’s only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it’s not a shift so much as a fragmentation. Until recently, American teenagers were flocking to MySpace. The picture is now being blurred. Some teens are flocking to MySpace. And some teens are flocking to Facebook. Which go where gets kinda sticky, because it seems to primarily have to do with socio-economic class.
More on Yahoo management shuffle
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo Inc. said Sunday that its chief domestic sales officer had resigned and that the company would merge its search and display advertising departments in the U.S. as the Internet powerhouse fights to catch up with online search leader Google Inc.
Yahoo said it hoped the latest shake-up would streamline the way it sold advertising to customers who increasingly want to buy ads across a variety of formats, including being linked to search terms, popping up as a graphical display and being shown as video.
The reshuffling comes after a major executive overhaul announced last week, with co-founder Jerry Yang replacing Terry Semel as chief executive. In the latest organizational change, Yahoo said Wenda Millard, chief sales officer in the U.S., was leaving the company effective immediately.
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Sphere: Related Content I alluded it to it in the last post, but you are going to be sick of the iPhone by Wednesday. Friday is the big release, and Hollywood wants to leverage their way onto the device. I think that is a smart move as the Video iPod is a great way to deliver media.
And in Hollywood, where Mr. Jobs’s convention-defying tactics are all too familiar, media executives are eagerly preparing for a new era as they hope to position more content where consumers want it: in their hands.
Technically Speaking, these last three posts would have been Episode 11, but I figured just as my readers like to read or can’t watch a video all the time, I’m not able to record a quick one at this moment.
Sphere: Related Content Looks like Rupert Murdoch is not going to give up. It appears according to the latest from the WSJ that News Corp and Dow Jones are in negotiations once again.
Representatives of Dow Jones & Co. and News Corp. were in intense negotiations yesterday following a near breakdown in discussions over a proposal to safeguard the editorial independence of The Wall Street Journal, according to people familiar with the matter.
After a couple of weeks of relative inactivity, takeover talks heated up over the weekend and were moving quickly. The talks were characterized as constructive, but not before generating high emotions and brinksmanship on both sides. News Corp. threatened to back out of the negotiations and told Dow Jones at one point it was about to send a letter pulling out.
Technically Speaking, will the deal be done before the 4th of July? I wonder if someone is paying for expensive cruises? Doubtful, as we all know what this week is all about. iPhone.
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