Leap Year Friday Links

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Happy Leap Day!

FireFox 3, Mac Speed Demon: A Firefox developer added two lines of XML to Firefox and sped it up a ton. Can you say undocumented WebKit features?

Netscape will no longer be supported, as of tomorrow, March 1.

I’m gaga over my iPhone. This article makes me leery of what Apple is going to let developers build on the iPhone platform.

Boingboing has lots of the TED videos up. Highly recommended watching, some of the brightest minds in the world were on the TED stage this week.

The OLPC is difficult for some people to open (video).

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Lights, Camera, Hair Gel

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Yesterday I was filmed for a documentary about 30-something women called Seeking Happily Ever After, which looks at why today’s 30-somethings give themselves permission to take more time to select a spouse. People seem to things I know about these things, I really don’t, I’m a 39 year-old single guy who sits in front of the computer too much.

The Producer’s Guild of America selected the film to be screened at The Sundance Festival 2008.The producer is looking for funding for the project. She can be reached at producer@seekinghappilyeverafter.com.

Later on today I am speaking at the Boston University Communications School on a panel, “The Now and Here of New Media Technologies– and their Impact on Communications Management.” Not quite as glamorous but I do enjoy the opportunity to stretch the minds of tomorrows PR and marketing leaders.

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Comcast paid for people to fill seats at FCC Net Neutrality hearing

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Uh oh, turns out Comcast paid people to sit in on the FCC Net Neutrality hearing at Harvard yesterday. I cannot tell you how much this disgusts me. Almost enough to switch to DirectTV, but their Internet service leaves a lot to be desired. Whoever was responsible should be fired, but not before being forced to listen to Hanna Montana for 67 hours straight, or maybe this playlist would be more appropriate.

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Boston FCC Hearing on the Future of the Internet

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160x300.jpg If you’re reading this blog I thought you might want to know about this. I got this from the community leader from my old South End block, where I don’t live anymore. How did this slip under my radar? Agenda seems balanced between policy and technology and I’m going to try to make the policy part. I’ve participated in a few open wifi community proposals from the consultant end, and know from experience these events either blow smoke and avoid the issues (talking point PDF notwithstanding), or they rip into the cable and telcos, people get angry and things get done. This one could go either way, being Boston (just look at our wifi initiatives). I hope the FON guys are represented.

WHAT: A Public Hearing on the Future of the Internet
WHEN: Monday, Feb 25, 2008

TIME: 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

WHERE: Harvard Law School, Ames Courtroom, Austin Hall

1515 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138

Directions: http://www.law.harvard.edu/about/contact/directions.php/

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Venture Hacks T-shirts

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Behold the brilliant t-shirts from Venture Capital Wear, via Venture Hacks.

My favorites:
Don’t pitch me, bro!
Your Mom is not a valid test market.
I wouldn’t use that term sheet as toilet paper.

Ha!

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Guitar Hero and rock Band, the new itunes?

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Bob Lefsetz’s music industry blog has a great set of comments about how Guitar Hero and rock Band are turning people, especially kids, onto a lot of classic rock and other songs they might not normally be exposed to. The comments about 3 year olds knowing the words to “Smoke on the water” are hilarious.

A while back I mentioned that I think iTunes will become a software management system in addition to music and movies. Add to that my thought that rock Band and Guitar Hero could turn into the next iTunes. Why give a percentage of the sale to Apple when it’s easy enough to do a deal with the labels?

As one of the commenter’s says:

Youd be crazy to not license your song to guitar hero. Do it and expose your music to a ton of people who have never, or would have never heard of your stuff!

The long tail of yacht rock, coming to you via your gaming system.

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Predicting Startup Success

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Interesting article in the Times today about YouNoodle, which claims it can predict the success of startups. Telling point, they haven’t run themselves through their own system. I think the primary value of the site will be connecting people, the predictor sounds like a gimmick. I wonder what they are basing their analysis on, historical data?

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MySpace to Launch Incubator

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MySpace plans to announce that it has formed a business incubator called SlingShot Labs to spawn Internet start-ups for News Corporation’s growing empire of Web properties, which now includes The Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com as well as the video game site IGN, according to BusinessWeek. The new venture is seeded with $15 million to hire roughly 40 employees, mostly software developers, say people with knowledge of the plans.

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Get Satisfaction

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I’ve run across Get Satisfaction a number of times in recent months. Today I was setting up PBWiki and saw the support link went to Get Satisfaction’s PBWiki category. I love the idea of aggregating support into a single site. I would hope that in the future they enable the ability to search for multiple products at once.

An example I need badly is WordPress and Ecto, my blogging tools. Sometimes Ecto isn’t playing nicely with WordPress, other times WordPress is to blame for some obscure bug that I always seem to be the first one to come across. Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to search for a problem and the results would include all the related programs and services that interrelate?

I also like the concept of “I have this question too”, which I would think alleviates the myriad questions that are often similar and should be in a “master FAQ” which is what I think we’ll see coming from Get Satisfaction.

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