The Progress Bar

Ziphone. Installer app, BSD subsystem, SSH. Bricked iPhone. Terror. Long walk. Hard reset. Twitter Rant. Backlash. RTFM. Passwd borked. Blush.

Installer or Cydia. Fink-like fence-sitting. RTFM for 135 minutes. Cydia. Installing. Moving sensitive data across partitions. Do NOT reinstall BSD Subsystems, _Fake_BSD instead. SSH to iphone works. iPhoneNotes too. Time to dive into Cydia and see what’s out there.

Today I find out about the theiphoneproject.

iPhone custom firmware http://theiphoneproject.org/b/macosx/iphonepwned/ but I just learned about Cydia yesterday! BootNeuter is what I need when I take my car into the shop and have to swap out the computer (custom turbo booooost controller.)

theiphoneproject: Can you give us an overview of the process?

The Devs: In all honesty, it’s quite simple. This is the first release of Pwnage, and the process of building an IPSW is thus far only supported on Mac OS X. The first thing to do is make sure you have the Official IPSW of the firmware you are running (eg. If you are running 1.1.4, download 1.1.4). Now open the Pwnage tool, and click “Browse .ipsw” and browse to the firmware file that you just downloaded. Next you click the “iPwner” button, and watch as PWNAGE patches the iPhone bootlader, making it possible to circumvent any code signing checks. After this, your iPhone will reboot. As the iPhone reboots, exit the Pwnage app, and reopen it.

Here is where the magic happens, once the phone has rebooted, click on “IPSW Builder,” and you are presented with a list of the building options (jailbreak, unlock, etc..) including the all new “BootNeuter,” the ultimate iPhone unlocking solution. Once you have customized your IPSW, hit OK and let Pwnage build the restore file. Next we head to iTunes, option+click on the restore button, and navigate to the custom ipsw that you just created,. Hit OK and we’re done! iTunes will restore the iPhone to the state of your choosing (Be it jailbroken, unlocked etc…).

iPwner has released PWNAGE into the wild. Anyone try it yet?

WIRED mag on VCs Adjust to Facing More Competitors for Fewer Companies. Appropriate given tonight is the bi-monthly Webinnovators group meeting here in Boston. David Beisel at Venrock founded Webinno, he’s done a great job bringing startups in front of an audience that now is pushing 400 people per event. Hey, this blog is the #2 link on Google for “webinnovators.”

I’ve been to a few events lately billing themselves as “like webinno, but smaller, more focused, easier to meet people.” Webinno is hit or miss in terms of connecting with useful people, as are most large-scale networking events. Unless you are a pro networker, you’re wandering around the room and practicing your quick exit strategy, as in “nice to meet you gotta go.”

Boing Boing’s Corey Doctorow says most Internet startups don’t need VC, or if they do, it’s for small seed rounds. I say it depends on the market sector. Nobody builds a new piece of hardware like a router on their credit card.

Paul Kedrosky, a partner with Ventures West:

Right now, honestly? This time sucks for us, it’s a bad time.

Most internet startups these days are simple to the point of being more of a web service, requiring less startup capital, fewer employees and a totally flat org hierarchy. Six months from cocktail napkin business plan to finished closed beta service is almost the norm these days. Anything more and you’re legacy building, which is a waste of time for the most part in most entrepreneurs minds, unless you’re building a router.

I was surprised to see that the WIRED article says nothing about the other values VC bring to the table, like experience, connection, mentors and other back-room value that’s lost to most entrepreneurs in the beginning.

See you tonight, Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge.

Auren Hoffman writes about the gender gap in social media.

At Rapleaf we conducted a study of 13.2 million people and how they are using social media. While the trends among the sexes indicate they are both massively using social media, women are far outpacing men.

If you are creating a new Web 2.0 site and you want to go viral, you target women. Young women drive virality and so all the new innovation is targeted towards them. That means that the gender gap on social networks (and increasingly in all of social media) is only going to widen. More and more innovation will be targeted towards women and they will continue to get more engaged. And while we expect men’s adoption to social media to continue to increase, it will likely be slower than the rate of adoption by women.

Interesting insights. It’s exciting to be able to see the usage patters on social networks so transparently. A friend recently has access to a few hours of social network traffic and was appalled at the baseness of what people do, really lowest-common-denominator stuff.