A Book about Facebook

Karel Baloun, one of the first ten or so Facebook employees has written an ebook about his experiences there. I just finished reading it and don’t want to summarize it, but it’s definitely worth a read. You can find it “here”:http://www.fbbook.com/promo/techcrunch/read.php for right now, courtesy of “TechCrunch”:http://www.techcrunch.com. Topics range from the implications of social networks on how people project their identity to different groups (which ties in to a project I’m working on for a class), how Facebook started, and some helpful tips from a thirty-something to us college folks.

Considering most of you are probably reading this from Facebook, it should be an interesting read.

Microsoft Unveils Zune, Nintendo Announces Wii

Yes, there have been even more product announcements this week. In response to all the hype over the “remastered” iPods, Microsoft has “unveiled the Zune”:https://www.comingzune.com/. Among its features will be 30GB of storage, built in WiFi and ad-hoc networking (so you can connect to other Zunes in the area), radio, internet radio, and music and movie downloads. To compete with iTunes, Microsoft will “release Zune Marketplace”:http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/27/bloomberg/bxzune.php where customers can download music, movies, games, and tv shows. Despite the cool new features, I doubt if this will ever garner much of a market share. This is just too little too late to compete with the iPod which is filling so many people’s music needs so well right now.

For you gamers out there, Nintendo “has announced availability of the Wii on Nov. 19″:http://kotaku.com/gaming/top/nyt-wii-dated-and-priced-for-north-america-200514.php. Looks like they made it just in time for the Christmas buying season. It will sell for about $250 (much less than the Xbox 360 or PS3), games will be about $50, and vintage games will be avilable from previous Nintendo consoles, but “will NOT support DVD playback”:http://www.joystiq.com/2006/09/14/wii-wont-be-playing-dvds/.

This reads like a late night infomercial, but wait there’s more! Apple will be making “another special announcement on September 24th”:http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/15/043244. Rumors speculate that a new version of Aperture will be released and possibly an announcement of a MacBook Pro update.

New iPods and AMD Dells

Lots of consumer electronics news today. “Apple Unveiled the new line of iPods”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/hands-on-with-the-5-5g-ipod/ which increase capacity to 30GB and 80GB. It’s really not much of a change, just a much needed update to the tired old models on the shelf. They extended hard drive capacity, brightened the screen, and increased battery life. I think I might finally jump on the iPod bandwagon this time; I have been waiting a year or so for a new model to come out so I wouldn’t end up buying something to become instantly obsolete. The addition of TV shows and Movies to iTunes also makes it really attractive given my addiction to Lost, 24, etc. I can finally put that line-in jack on my stereo to good use.

Likewise, the “iPod Nano has been updated with an 8GB offering”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/hands-on-with-the-2g-ipod-nano-rainbow/ and the “Shuffle has been miniaturized”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/hands-on-with-the-2g-ipod-shuffle/ to the point that if you’re not careful it could blow away in a gust of wind.

In other news, “Dell has released their new desktops sporting AMD Athlon X2 processors”:http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/12/the-wait-is-over-dell-launches-amd-desktops/. Unfortunately, they completely messed up the timing releasing them right after Intel released their Core 2 Duo chips which “blow the Athlon X2s out of the water”:http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/14/core2_duo_knocks_out_athlon_64/. Another missed opportunity by Dell… Looks like they are also “facing an SEC probe”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aAcnXY7GB1tw&refer=news and might have to deal with a “delisting from the NASDAQ”:http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192701724. Tough times in Round Rock these days…

SXSW Interactive Day 4

So today was the last day of SXSWi. I’m sad to see it go, I had a great time, met some cool people, and look forward to coming back next year.

10:00am – “Building a Start-Up Technology Company” – This panel basically outlined the individual steps required to start a business. Incorporation, legal documents, hiring, etc. It was rather boring, but for someone without any business sense, it would be a good presentation. The slides are here

11:30am – “How to Be a Virtual World Entrepreneur” – This panel was about some of the interesting things going on in SecondLife, a computer game. We are supposed to give a presentation on the game in one of my classes, so I thought it would be good to get a little insight from the creator and some people following it. Apparently a lot of people are making money on the game by creating content and selling it. One notable person is Anshe Chung who buys land from Linden Labs (the creators of the game), develops it, and sells it to players in the game. She is estimated to make around $200,000 a year from it. SecondLife is unique in that money earned in the game can be exchanged to US dollars.

I worked the rest of the day…it was nice getting home at a decent hour with the sun still shining. I’m really going to hate going back to school.

SXSW Interactive Day 3

Today I had to take Honor to the San Antonio airport so he could make it back to San Jose and go back to work. The flight was supposed to leave at 6:30, so I recommended we leave at 4am. We didn’t get out of the door until 4:50 though and finally arived at the airport at about 6:00. Unfortunately the security line was long, so he didn’t make the flight and got bumped to the 12:00 flight.

So I made it back to Austin around 8:00 and took a little nap until 10:30 and made it to the 11:30 panels.

The first panel was “Building Buzz for Your Web Project” which was mildly valuable. One panelist suggested that taking your clothes off on your website helps and ‘doing anything it takes’ to get interviews with popular bands helps a great deal. I don’t think those approaches would work for me… Some of the more helpful suggestions were incentive or points systems to encourage the first users to promote your business.

Next, at 2:00 was the keynote of Craig Newmark of Craigslist. He mostly talked about citizen journalism but some of the questions brought out how he was dealing with being employed by eBay now and what the revenue model is. They charge for a few categories like New York real estate. He also emphasized something that seems to have come up a lot: that overall people are good. They are surprised how little fraud goes on with their services, though of course any at all is unacceptable. Looks like they have the video up of the interview online.

Next was the “How to Attract Money for Your Digital Convergent Business” paneled by several VCs who basically made it seems like it isn’t all that difficult to get VC money. In the initial seed state, all they require is a nice powerpoint presentation of your service and business model. They mostly make sure you have the expertise on your team to make the business successful. They favor people they know or who are in their network. The value of networking has seemed to be a major thing I have learned over the past few days.

At 5:00 was “The New Startup Cultures” panel. Ben Brown, a fellow Austinite, was one of the panelists. He started Consumating.com and recently sold it to CNet. Most of the discussion revolved around dealing with business partners, initial financing, bootstrapping, etc. Some of the audience members were a little weird, asking the panelists to come up with a dollar figure for how much he and his parter should split up the company.

SXSWi Web Awards

After the panels we headed over to the Web Awards party at the Hilton. They were running a little behind on setting things up so they wouldn’t let anyone in until 7 (we were there at 6) so we just went outside to sit on the balcony. There we ran into Seth from meebo and Geoffrey Grosenbach who does podcasts for the Ruby on Rails crew. We talked to them both for about 30 minutes, asked Seth how me met his two other parters, suggested a business model that he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about, and talked about Austin a little. It was a cool conversation and definetly just plain happenstance to converse with them out there.

Finally they started letting people in, I got my Coke (we were given 1 free drink ticket, most drinks were alcoholic and I don’t drink so my selection was limited) and proceeded to talk with Honor and see if we could find anyone else to converse with. Justin Abbott saw us from talked to him the day before and we talked a little more, nothing overly substantial, and then they finally opened the doors to the ballroom. Our table was very quiet; I had a lawyer from Washington, DC next to me and Honor had a journalist next to him. The web awards were pretty boring, though the comedian was OK, Laura Swisher I think. Meebo won in its category, so that was good, otherwise it wasn’t very well produced and was pretty boring.

We were pretty hungry, so I called Nathan and we were going to meet at the County Line, but they were closed already (since it was Sunday). I opened up my laptop and found the number for the Boatyard Grill, next to Hula Hut, found they were open till 10, so we ate there. It was fine, but doesn’t compare to Hula Hut at all. Then we had to get home and go to bed early so we could leave at 4am for San Antonio so Honor could make his flight.

SXSW Interactive Day 2

Today was probably the coolest of any of the days.

First we had to get up early, like at 8:30 so we could make the panels starting at 10:00.

The first panel we attended was “What’s Hot in Web Applications” which was basically a demo of the panelists’ sites.
YackPack – A cool ‘audio email’ kind of system. Check it out.
Meebo – Web based instant messaging that I’ve been using for around 8 months so far.
Zimbra – Web based Outlook type application that allows for an insane amount of plugins

Next we sampled “Smaller, Faster, Lighter” and “How to make the most of maps” but both were pretty uninteresting. We ran into Justin Abbott of BlogAds coming out of another panel and chatted with him for a while. We decided to just go to lunch early. Unfortunately it was Sunday so Stubb’s was having a brunch thing, then Ironworks was closed, so we ate at the restaurant in the Hilton which was pretty decent.

The next event was a keynote by Jason Kottke and Heather Armstrong. They discussed the various revenue models for blogs, how the micropatron system worked for kottke.org, and various blog/life balance topics. They seemed to have pretty good chemistry and the banter made the keynote entertaining.

After that, we attended the “Running Your New Media Business” panel, which was fine. All the panelists seemed to have an inside joke or something…they were all pretty much from the same street in San Francisco. The basic jist was to get everything on paper before you start something. They all basically told about how they got started and their philosophy on taking or not taking money. One of the panelists was one of the founders of Blogger who sold to Google and is now working on Odeo. Most of the others were web designers or developers.

The last panel was “Standardzella vs Tabellela” which first described some concepts of accessibility and usability and then reviewed several sites for both. It did help to understand what details and standards should be used in design and how to make a web site more usable.

SXSW Interactive Day 1

So we arrived a little late and just caught the last bit of the “AJAX: What do I need to know” panel. All they really talked about near the end was what libraries are out there and topics were brought up about security and stuff, but not really addressed. Some of the libraries mentioned were yahoo’s library, script.aculo.us, and dojotoolkit.org

Lunch took a while (we ate at some cajun place on 6th street and I think Heather Armstrong from dooce.com was sitting at the table next to us) so we were late once again (is this a recurring theme?) to the Jim Coudal and Jason Fried (of 37signals aka basecamp, etc fame) keynote. Jim didn’t get many words in and Jason seemed to take the theme of simplify, simplify, simplify a little too far. He discussed their software development process and basically said to do fewer and fewer features. They apparently don’t believe in functional specifications and went so far as to say they were useless. One interesting thing they do is separate a project into timeframes instead of projects. They use these time increments to delineate milestones and to prevent scope creep; a client has to increase their money to add anything that increases the time to deliver. He definetly advocated a sort of ad-hoc agile development system and said all the planning documents most software development projects start with are useless because they change so much and no one has any real idea of the accuracy of them at the beginning. I tend to agree with him.

After that, we went to the “Wisdom of Crowds” presentation by James Surowiecki which was probably one of the best panels the entire week. If you aren’t familiar with it, basically the concept is that the aggregate knowledge of large groups surpasses that of its smartest member. For example, some experiments involved predicting the number of jellybeans in a jar. It turns out that the mean of all the predictions was nearly perfectly correct and was in fact more accurate than any single prediction.

The next panels were largely uninteresting. We first went to the “Designing for Local and Global Social Play” which wasn’t really about anything. Just several academic researchers telling about themselves and what they were researching. We left in the middle of it. We then went to the “Creating Building Blocks for Independents” which was basically telling how BarCamp arose from FooCamp and is now in several cities around the world.

We were pretty tired after this, so we went home and napped for a little while. We went back downtown and my brother and I went to what I thought was going to be “Youth Group” in concert at the Parish room, but we got there after they had already performed and saw Matt Pond PA who was great. I definetly recommend his music. Honor went to the AMODA party but said it was pretty lame. The room was all dark and techno music was blaring. We left downtown around midnight and went to eat at Kerbey Lane then went home.

SXSW today

So…I convinced a friend that just moved to California to come to SXSW interactive with me. We bought the plane ticket at around noon yesterday and I picked him up from the airport at around midnight last night and then we went to eat at Magnolia Cafe. No one can accuse us of not being spontaneous.

Today begins to SXSW panels, so we’re getting up and getting ready to head down there right now. Hopefully we can meet some interesting people, potentially create some buzz for MyCool.com and learn a few things.

We haven’t quite decided which panels to attend, but I’ll write a little excerpt about each one.

Back to blogging…

As a requirement of one of my classes, I will be writing in my blog for the next two weeks at least. I haven’t updated in a while, but I plan on recapping some of the more interesting events that have happened since I last updated and how things are going now. Additionally, I’ll be attending the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference this weekend into the beginning of next week and then several of the free concerts that will be in town for the music conference.

Here’s a preliminary listing of the events I’ll be attending over the next few days:
Friday:
7pm – BarCampAustin meet and greet – Thistle Cafe

Saturday:
11:30am – 5pm SXSW Panels – Comment if you will be attending the conference and would like to have lunch.
6-8pm – SXSWi University Social & Austin on Rails Happy Hour – Buffalo Billiards
Rest of the night – BarCampAustin

Sunday:
10am-5pm SXSW Panels – same as before, comment if you’d like to lunch
5pm-7pm – Flickr, Upcoming.org, and Dec.icio.us party (hopefully) – Iron Cactus
7:30pm – Web Awards Ceremony

Monday:
10am-5pm More SXSW Panels
9pm – Adaptive Path + Consumating + Odeo Party – The Velvet Spade

Tuesday:
10am-12pm – SXSW Panels
8pm-11pm – Media Temple Closing Party