The Progress Bar

Why Social Media Overload Means New Opportunities for Startups

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 17:34:42 +0000

Nova Spivack has several ventures in production that focus on the real-time stream, including Bottlenose (for filtering the stream), StreamGlider. His recent article Sharepocalypse Now: Why Social Media Overload Means New Opportunities for Startups looks at new startup opportunities in surrounding social media filtering/curating.

Do More Faster

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:09:33 +0000

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Razorfish Offers Gesture Sharing for Smartphones and Tablets

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:08:02 +0000

Amnesia Connect from Amnesia Razorfish on Vimeo. As seen on Adverblog.

Getting to Love Mailchimp

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 18:18:06 +0000

We’re finally getting around to setting up a few newsletters here at Digicraft. This week we made the move from the creaky aWeber to Mailchimp and have had a great time reading their blog.

Check this out:

In late 2008, MailChimp Labs began Project Omnivore. Our goal was to build a massively scalable tool for our abuse team that could predict bad behavior.

The experiment started with an nVidia Tesla supercomputer, then grew to a cluster of Amazon EC2 servers running a genetic optimization program for 2 weeks nonstop, running over 61 trillion email data comparisons.

This article shares some of the results of our experiment, and where the technology is taking us…Project Omnivore: Declassified

How Facebook Ships Code

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:44:42 +0000

A thorough look at how Facebook ships code. From internal engineering processes to the lack of project manager influence/control, how and when code gets shipped and lots of Facebook internal trivia. Fascinating! Its kind of scary how much power Facebook engineers have.

Corona SDK game by 14-year-old developer reaches #1, Dethrones Angry Birds

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 22:30:00 +0000

In Eighth grader knocks Angry Birds out of the top free spot on the App Store, we learn there is a new game in town, and it just dethroned Angry Birds as the number one game in the iPhone app store. Built with Corona,

From the Corona Blog:

Corona-built game named Bubble Ball (which was our most recent App of the Week) just passed the free version of Angry Birds: Seasonson the App Store’s free apps chart. According to the developer — who is just 14 years old — the physics puzzle game has over a million downloads to date, and the download numbers haven’t even topped off yet.

Its amazing how anyone can truly make a living building iPhone apps now that the skills required to make games and apps has be reduced to point and click. Obviously really deep and complicated games require significant coding skills, but the barrier to entry is now quite low.

Springwise- Your Daily Fix Of Entrepreneurial Ideas

Wed, 12 Jan 2011 15:47:47 +0000

Springwise has a great weekly newsletter featuring entrepreneurial ideas, highly recommended.

Bump Raises $16 Million Round Led By Andreessen Horowitz

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 14:53:08 +0000

If you’ve got a smartphone you’ve probably heard of Bump. The company, which makes it easy to share contact information by “bumping” phones together, has raised a $16 Million round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Bump is one of those companies building a great and useful product that Apple is probably going to build directly into the phone with NFC, Near Field Communication, which is coming right around the corner.

Mobile Payments With Verified Photo

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 18:14:42 +0000

FaceCash is a mobile payment system that allows consumers to use their cell phones to make purchases at the point of sale. via Springwise.

Amazon Launches Route 53, The Last DNS Provider You’ll Even Need

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 19:15:41 +0000

Amazon Route 53 is a new service from Amazon that manages DNS names and answers DNS queries.

The two things I feel are most valuable are:

Very fast update propagation times: One of the difficulties with many of the existing DNS services are the very long update propagation times, sometimes it may even take up to 24 hours before updates are received at all replicas. Modern systems require much faster update propagation to for example deal with outages. We have designed Route 53 to propagate updates very quickly and give the customer the tools to find out when all changes have been propagated.

Low-latency query resolution The query resolution functionality of Route 53 is based on anycast, which will route the request automatically to the DNS server that is the closest. This achieves very low-latency for queries which is crucial for the overall performance of internet applications. Anycast is also very robust in the presence of network or server failures as requests are automatically routed to the next closest server.

Fun Fact: “Route 53″ is a play on the fact that DNS servers respond to queries on port 53. If you want to learn more about Route 53 visit http://aws.amazon.com/route53 and read the blog post at the AWS Developer weblog.

Thanks to All Things Distributed for the pointer.