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Archive for the 'Link Roundup' Category

Link Roundup: YouTube Remixer, Mobile Network, Ebay vs Google, id Game Engine, Levi’s Mobile Phone

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007
YouTube Remixer
YouTube has officially launched YouTube Remixer, a new service that allows users to edit their videos from within YouTube itself.
Mobile Network
Researchers are turning cars into nodes that ‘talk’ to each other, forming a new type of wireless network. As cars enter the mobile network, drivers can download multimedia - including movies, images and songs - or get real-time information about traffic.
EBay vs Google
When Google invited eBay sellers attending the eBay Live! party in Boston this week to the Google Checkout Freedom Party — which was designed to poke fun at eBay’s restrictive policies — eBay got a little upset.
id Software’s new game engine
John Carmack showing a demo video of id’s Engine Tech 5. Anyone remember Quake back in the day? This video makes me miss my polygons!
Levi’s Steel Phone
In tune with its young consumers, the Levi’s(R) brand is adding a fashionable, steel mobile phone to its range of lifestyle accessories.

And finally my inapropriate but funny links of the week…you have been warned!

The Swear Jar
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Link Roundup: CB2 Child Robot, Interactive Paper, Bump Top, Photosynth Prototype, Building Facebook Applications

Monday, June 11th, 2007
CB2 Child Robot
The 33 kilogram CB2 is literally beyond words in its freakines. Apparently it emulates “the physical ability of a 1- or 2-year-old toddler, can turn over and stand up with assistance”.
Interactive Paper
Paper Four, a research project in Sweden, is developing an interactive paper. “Boring billboards can be turned into interactive displays by using conductive inks to print touch sensors and speakers onto paper, say Swedish researchers.” - NewScientistTech
Bump Top
a fresh user interface that takes the usual desktop metaphor to a glorious, 3D extreme. This technology has been in development for over a year now. Hopefully someone will finally integrate this into an Operating System.
Photosynth Prototype
The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.
“10 Things That Would Have Been Nice to Know When Starting My Facebook Application”
If you’re building a Facebook Application, you may want to pay attention to some of these tips. Might save you some time and headaches!

And finally my inapropriate but funny links of the week…you have been warned!

Car Alarm that will actually catch your attention
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Link Roundup: Indie Music Store, Microsoft Surface, Street View, Thinnest Notebook

Friday, June 1st, 2007
World’s largest Indie MP3 store launches
PayPlay has just launched “the world’s largest MP3 download store” — a store selling more than 1.3 million indie music tracks, with a search engine that allows you to search for your fave artists and get similar indie artists in the catalog.
Microsoft Surface - Video of Bill Gates Showing off his Expensive Table
So Microsoft Surface looks neat, but the hardware alone costs around $10,000. So not sure if you’re going to see many of these for a long time. Neat hardware concept though.
Google Maps - Street View (Vegas)
Google Maps now includes a “street view” in 5 US cities. Hopefully, more will come. The link above is of Vegas. Here are also the best things found so far with the Street View
Intel Unveils World’s Thinnest Notebook
Codenamed the Intel Mobile Metro Notebook. Being a tiny 0.7-inch thickness, it is crowned the thinnest laptop ever. Weighing in at just 2.25 pounds and sporting Intel speediest processor, it is not just a thin, its also fast!

And finally my inapropriate but funny links of the week…you have been warned!

Someecards.com - When you care enough to hit send
YouSwear.Com - When foreign people swear!
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Link Roundup: Largest 2.0 Websites, Floating Ship, DRM Free Music, iPhone

Monday, May 28th, 2007
Traffic Stats for Web 2.0’s 25 Hottest Sites May 2007
No big surprises here, but a fantastic look at what the most popular Web 2.0 sites are getting as far as traffic. The only site that makes me scratch my head is Photobucket beating Facebook. WTH!
Ship Floating On “Nothing”?
Take a look at this video, it’s kinda freaky to see a tinfoil ship floating on ‘nothing’. Well it’s actually a gas that is denser than air! My science fair projects would have been awesome had I known this in school.
Amazon reveals DRM-free music store
Apple and Amazon are both coming out with a DRM Free music service sometime very soon. According to Amazon 12,000 independant labels have signed up to this unnamed store. I think it’s about time this happened. Kudos to Amazon and Apple.
Apple iPhone being released June 20th
According to CNBC, the iPhone will be “in stores” on that date. Apple’s iPhone had been officially targeted for “late June”. Unfortunately for Canada the release date is still set for late Q4.

And finally my inapropriate but funny links of the week…you have been warned!

The 22 Worst Place Names in the World
Best Glitch in gaming history
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Link Roundup: $100 Laptops, Flickrvision, Dell Monitor, Popfly

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007
Students playing with $100 laptops around the world
A number of videos of kids in Thailand playing with the $100 laptops. These laptops, made by Quanta, have all of the specs a kid needs to get started with computers. The best thing about these laptops is they’re using Linux as the Operating system!
Flickrvision
By far the coolest tool I’ve seen come out of late. This is a wicked mashup of Flickr and Google. Every couple of seconds new photos are posted to flickr but who knows where they are coming from? This tool places those new photos on Google Maps as they are posted. Very addictive!
Dell launches ultra thin monitor
Super slick, sexy, and super thin. Dell’s created one of the most unique monitors as of late. What can I say…I’m a gadget nut!
Microsoft - Popfly Alpha
From Microsoft: Popfly is the fun, easy way to build and share mashups, gadgets, Web pages, and applications. Popfly consists of two parts. 1) Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups. 2) Popfly Space is an online community of creators where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users.

And finally my favorite video of the week, and yes…it’s totally inappropriate.

Masturbation gesture gone VERY wrong in the office
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Link Roundup: eBay and Google fight over StumbleUpon turf, Second Life opens up even more, your blog as your resume

Friday, April 20th, 2007
The blog is the new resume
Remember when bloggers were warned that their weblog may negatively impact their current or future employment? Well the medium is now so mainstream that the trend has flipped 180°, now it could be detrimental not to have a blog, especially in the face of competitors who do.
eBay buys StumbleUpon
eBay has purchased StumbleUpon, a popular web discovery tool that was originally developed in Calgary. The same day the announcement was made Google also announced that they are launching a very similar tool.
GigaOm launches a new blog focused on startups
Combining startup news, useful tips, questions & answers and more, Found|Read targets the startup and entrepreneurial market with the expertise of the Giga Om network.
VisiblePath challenges LinkedIn with superior network analysis
Connections can’t be made simply by emailing and requesting to be added to a person’s network. Instead, connections are established by ongoing communication, meetings, etc, and the site automatically adjusts the strength of the connection based on recent activity. No more collecting contacts just to have more contacts, instead you can focus on those you truly interact with.
Second Life goes even more open-source
Linden Labs has opened up the back end of Second Life, allowing for the expansion of the virtual world by third parties. This leads to some interesting questions about how Linden Labs can best generate income from their increasingly open world.
YouTube offers 50/50 revenue split with users
Talk of revenue sharing has been circulating for a while, but it is now rumoured to be happening as early as next week.
Why your online community needs moderators
Whether to moderate our community or to allow them to self-police has been (and still is) an ongoing discussion at Cambrian House. While this article doesn’t reflect our stance, it does contain some interesting commentary on the role of a community moderator.
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Link roundup: The ultimate landing page and the decline of blogging

Thursday, April 12th, 2007
Twitter feels the TWiT effect
Popular TV, radio and podcast host, Leo Laporte, was one of the first and most vocal supporters of the microblogging success Twitter.com. However, after expressing concern over branding issues and confusion of Twitter with his podcast This Week in Tech (TWiT), Leo has jumped ship and taken his microblogging to rival service, Jaiku. Will he bring his thousands of Twitter followers with him? Will people ultimately prefer the stark simplicity of Twitter or the more powerful, and complicated, Jaiku?
Shift happens
A very interesting short video presentation on the nature of demographic and technological shifts around the world. It raises a lot of issues and questions that anybody founding a business should ponder long and hard. The world we live in is very different than it was 10 years ago, and in another 10 years it will be even more changed.
Google launches free 411
First free Wifi for the San Francisco area, now free 411 service (accessed via a toll-free number). Google has been described as the ultimate money making engine, and that is at least in part due to their reliance on ad revenue rather than subscription or customer usage fees.
Should bloggers observe a code of conduct?
After the recent death threats made against popular blogger Kathy Sierra the blogosphere has been abuzz with discussion over bullying, freedom of speech, and what to do when the mean kids take it too far. Tim O’Reilly responded by suggesting a Blogger Code of Conduct, and sparked a second round of vigorous debate. Be sure to check out the responses listed in the trackbacks at the bottom of the page.
Postful.com converts email to snail mail
Google ran an April Fool’s joke suggesting they were adding an option to have your email sent as a physical letter, now a few short days later, it seems you can do just that using Postful.com.
10 tips for writing the ultimate landing page
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Link Roundup: Be an Internet TV star, run a mobile social network, Twitter with photos

Friday, April 6th, 2007
You can be the next Justin.tv
Online for only a few weeks, Justin.tv has already become the darling of the tech media. Justin streams his life to the web 24/7, and has already garnered massive media attention. Now, anybody with a helmet cam and a healthy sense of exhibitionism can use Ustream.tv to replicate Justin’s bold endeavor. Or, if you’d rather not think about who is watching you in the bathroom, you can use the technology to stream portions of your day, company events or other moments that you’d like to share immediately with your community.
How to get the attention of a venture capitalist
Who better to tell you how to capture the attention and imagination of a venture capitalist than a famous venture capitalist? The always insightful Guy Kawasaki shares some concrete and very helpful advice to get your company VC dollars.
Hot or Not moves from subscription to advertising for revenue
The popular rating and dating website, Hot or Not recently announced that they were moving away from their original revenue model of user subscriptions and instead shifting towards ad-based revenue. Although the website did quite well with community subscriptions, it will be interesting to see if this new model results in community growth.
The joy/cash curve
Need to set a price for your product or service? Well then, make sure you check out Seth Godin’s Joy/Cash Curve so that you can tailor your customer experience to maximize the joy that the transaction can provide.
Radar.net is a little like Twitter, but with photos
Just about everybody is in love with Twitter these days. It’s smart, simple, fun, woefully addictive - very nearly the “perfect” web service. But I still find myself lamenting that I can’t add photos when updating from my phone. Enter Radar.net, billing itself as a host for “photo conversations.” Currently in beta it requires you to give people a code before they can see your photos, hopefully they will add an option to make your stream public as Twitter does. Tech conferences recently have been Twittered pretty thoroughly, I look forward to actually seeing events on Radar soon.
Start your own mobile network
Sure you can start your own social network with Ning, but as you can see from Twitter (and now Radar), mobile interactivity is sweeping into dominance. Now you can use Sonopia to offer interaction on the go to your community.
Put more power in your PowerPoint
Cambrian House’s original investment pitch was based entirely on a single PowerPoint presentation, so we know the power of the medium. But new research demonstrates that text-heavy slides may actually make it more difficult fo ryour audience to understand and retain your information. Check out this article for tips on how to make your presentation work for you rather than against you.
Page views are a dead metric
AJAX and other Web 2.0 technologies are making old metrics like the venerated page view a thing of the past. But what do we measure instead? Compete.com, a statistics tracker similar to Alexa.com, recently introduced their Attention Statistics as a new way to track how many people are really paying attention to your website and other online destinations.
Crowdsourced photo sorting
iStockPhoto introduced crowdsourcing to the stock photography world. Now LikeBetter.com is using crowdsourcing to sort and rank photos. So far it seems to simply feed 2 images at a time in a head-to-head selection, but the technology and concept has some interesting potential applications.
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Link Roundup: Why you should NOT form a startup and Twitter unleashes their API

Friday, March 30th, 2007
Why not to start a startup

Paul Graham examines the reasons why you may be better off waiting to start your business. Anyone considering a startup should read this and make an honest assessment of their skills, weaknesses, plan and drive.

The problem with media star CEOs

UCLA analyzes the downside of having a media sensation as a CEO. While the exec will win fame for the company, s/he is often lured into more external activities, sapping the time and effort they can continue to put into the company that made them famous.

Why seed investing is less risky than later stage investing

Whether you’re looking to get into angel or venture investing, or trying to convince investors to buy into your brilliant startup idea, this article explains why buying in early is a wise move. (Want to see how startup financing works in action? Take a look at the Tequila Shots Ringside Startup Launch.)

Don’t give your software away free

If you’re planning to sell your software at some point, this article explains why it is better to charge immediately than give it away initially. Seven practical tips help you put theory into practice, and start your software empire.

Make Google Calendar rock

If you’re anything like MJ, our CEO, you need Google Calendar to stay organized. With GCal Sync you can keep your calendar synchronized with your Blackberry. Check out this article for 18 other great tips on how to optimize your Google Calendar experience.

Serph launches new real-time buzz tracker

In this age of information overload, most of us couldn’t survive without various aggregators and media trackers. Serph.com has thrown their hat into the ring, pulling buzz together from Feedster, Bloglines, Topix, Technorati, Sphere, YouTube, Digg, Podzinger, Google Blog Search and many more.

Yahoo quietly leads with API offerings

The web has become less about keeping people on your site and more about allowing people to pull elements of your site or data into their own online space and applications. As such, APIs are de rigeur, and Yahoo is now offering over 20 powerful and varied APIs. There’s something there for virtually everyone, including the sensational Yahoo Pipes for non-programmers.

Speaking of APIs… how to make money with Twitter

The blogosphere has been abuzz for weeks over Twitter. With the recent offering of an API a whole new world of mashups and monetization has opened up to the enterprising programmer. This sort of thinking can be applied to any popular or powerful web service wth an open API. Oh, did I mention that Cambrian House is offering APIs for our platform?

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Link Roundup: Read/WriteWeb on Crowdsourcing and an Interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Thursday, March 22nd, 2007
2007 Digital Outlook Report
From Avenue A Razorfish, via Guy Kawasaki’s blog, comes the 2007 Digital Outlook Report. The report covers several aspects of how producers, consumers, media and advertisers are using digital media to converse and communicate.
The realistic entrepreneur’s guide to venture capital
You’ve got the plan, the prototype, the drive. Your project is developing nicely, and you’re ready to push it to the next level with venture capital. VCs aren’t like banks, borrowing money from them is a bit more like borrowing from your in-laws. They are going to want input and a degree of control over how it is used. So check out this guide and make sure you know what a VC will expect of you.
5 most common mistakes made by startups
Maybe you’re not quite ready to court a VC. Avoiding these mistakes will help get you there.
Interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google
The CEO of Internet behemouth Google talks about innovation and maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit in a massive company. As Schmidt says, “You don’t learn very much when you yourself are talking,” so put on some headphones and enjoy his hard-earned wisdom.
Innovation +1, Earth’s gravitational field 0
Remember when space travel was just a dream? Okay, neither do I, but it wasn’t that long ago. Nothing can hold back human innovation and curiosity, and yet another private organization has successfully launched a rocket into space. Congrats, guys, and thanks for reminding us that the “impossible” only seems that way because it hasn’t been tried yet.
Cambrian House makes Read/WriteWeb
We were proud to see Cambrian House at the top of an aticle in Read/WriteWeb examining the phenomenal growth and continued potential of crowdsourcing.
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