13March2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Locationaware; Mobile; Technology.
Since I have started at Skyhook I haven’t had much time to do any personal blogging. It’s not a knock on my job at all — in fact its a great thing that I have been staying really busy with work that I love and being surrounded by good people. But I felt the current topic was good enough to finally carve some time out and make a point to start writing about it.
The topic is the standardization of geolocation on the web. One of the main reasons I wanted to join Skyhook and have believed in the technology from the outset is the value of location in applications, and that really starts with web applications and eventually will carry into mobiles and the desktop.
Read the rest of this entry »
8February2007
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Personal.
I was lucky enough to get to meet Thomas Howe when I attended MashupCamp3. We collaborated on a session and he recently asked me to be a guest on a Podcast which we recorded today and he has already posted. Be sure to check it out — it’s available on his site and on iTunes.
It also serendipitously was on the same day that a big announcement about a partnership between Skyhook Wireless and SiRF leaked out on GigaOm.
1November2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Personal.
It has been a while since I have had the time to tend to my blog, mostly due to some changes on a personal level and probably due to some level of internet fatigue. I felt I finally needed to carve some time out and post an update. So, as some of you already know, I am really excited to announce that I have recently joined Skyhook Wireless where I will be leading all of the Product Management efforts. It was a big decision to take the job with them and essentially shelf what I have been doing with BlueTrim, but it was one that I made with a lot of forethought and a lot of sleepless nights.
Read the rest of this entry »
21September2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Personal.
UPDATE: The Boston Red Bull event was sadly cancelled.
Its been a while since I posted as I have been extremely busy with getting BlueTrim ready and I have been doing some Product Development consulting with a local company as well. I also recently participated in the Targa Newfoundland with my dad over the past two weeks. It is one of the two remaining targas left in the world (the other being in Tazmania) and it was an amazing experience. I will be sure to post the pictures once I get them all together.
In other personal news, I recently tried out for the Red Bull Crashed Ice event that is going to be held at the Boston City Hall Plaza on November 11th. If you don’t know what Crashed Ice is, check out the description from their site:
“Red Bull Crashed Ice returns November 11, 2006, featuring 100 adrenaline junkies- both men and women, young and old racing down an intricate downhill ice course featuring whoops, stairs, bermed turns and narrow chutes”
Be sure to check out the website and hopefully you can make it down on the November 11th and cheer me on during the event.
Read the rest of this entry »
13April2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: BarCampBoston; Business; Culture; Entrepreneurship; Technology.
I have been working since the Palo Alto BarCamp to organize an instance of BarCamp in Boston, but to little fan fare until recently. As of a few weeks ago the mailing list and BarCampBoston wiki page have suddenly gotten a lot of traction. The toughest part of getting an event like this off the ground is getting the major logistics out of the way and it sounds like we are on our way to tackling that. As of last week, we were lucky enough to have Monster Worldwide step up and not only offer their awesome facilities (photos) at the Old Mill in Maynard, MA but they were gracious enough to also step up as a major sponsor.
We have been lucky to have a few other local people (Lee, Shimon, Ron 
help coordinate and it’s been great to meet some other local people who are interested in helping bring Boston back to its previous throne in tech innovation. I am starting to see more and more movement at the grassroots level for meetups and events here, and it is a welcome site. Not long ago I joined the Boston Startup Meetup group for local startup founders, and it seems to be a great group, so I look forward to catching up with those guys.
A few of the local guys also just launched a local weblog, called Boston Web Technology Forum (BostonWTF), focused on tracking the current resurgence in the local web community — so be sure to check it out.
13March2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Entrepreneurship; Technology.
So there have been a few changes in the past month that I have been very tight-lipped about. I have been working on a new business, coined BlueTrim, which has consumed my full and utter attention. So let me fill everyone in and give you a little teaser.
We are thrilled to announce that we will be giving a “sneak peak” at the next WebInnovators meetup, hosted by David Beisel of Masthead Venture Partners. Attendees will not only get to see the first public demo of the platform, but we will be counting on them to help us shape the features as we move forward.
BlueTrim is going to be an online real estate listing database offering listings for properties for sale and for rent. BlueTrim is aiming to change the way people research, search for and find their dream living space. We are leveraging new technologies with a rich database of local information to aid users in their search. BlueTrim will be an open system, allowing brokers, principal owners and landlords to post their property to the system. While Craigslist does a fantastic job of allowing all types of people to post to their site, they fall short in helping a buyer find what they need and don’t offer real estate-centric tools that most buyers have come to expect.
We are working on aggregating the vast amounts of latent information available in public records and dispersed in the corners of the internet to enrich each listing and give each user a better perspective of the history and local nuances of the property. A recent study showed that a typical home buyer spends 7 weeks working with a broker to make their purchase while a buyer that has done their online research spends an average of around 2 weeks to make their purchase. This means a lot to us and our goal is to help educate every buyer during their search.
We also don’t want to forget the power of community. BlueTrim is very focused on building a tight network of users around their specific community and hoping to foster communication amongst them. If you have questions about a specific street that you are looking at and the amount of noise at night, we want to put you in touch with users that might have an answer for you.
This all becomes possible by initially focusing our efforts in a specific metro and in our case the Boston Metro area. Not only do we live in Boston, but we have a passion for the area and feel that it is an ideal place to launch. Boston offers some of the highest quality of living to professionals, students and educators alike while still being very nuanced and that can make a search a very difficult one at times.
There is so much more to talk about, but we can’t give everything away just yet So stay tuned…
So if you are local, we hope to see you at the WebInnovators event coming up on March 20th. If you are interested in that event, you can find out more information and RSVP by going to the site for WebInno5. You can also submit your name and email on the BlueTrim website so that we can keep you informed as we approach the public beta.
24January2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Mobile.
There has recently been a lot of buzz (MobileCrunch, TechCrunch, Tom Hume) circulating in the mobile space about the product launch from bluepulse. bluepulse has launched what they call “the easiest way to access the internet services you need from an ordinary mobile phone”. Oliver has made some really lofty predictions for bluepulse, which I personally feel is putting unfair expectations on their product.
What they have attempted to do is create a basic platform on top of which you can deploy mobile information service applications that avoids fragmentation at the device and OS level. For that task, I think they have made a great accomplishment. Having to deal with mobile development on a daily basis, I know how much of a non-trivial task that is. Mobile developers, to date, have been hampered by software and hardware fragmentation and have at best been able to deploy solutions to ~40-50 devices. bluepulse claims it can deliver to around 250 devices, which I totally believe.
What makes this possible is that they seem to have built a framework, called the Open Application Delivery Platform (OADP), on top of which you deploy your apps. This framework limits the amount of functionality and abstracts most of the display and workflow logic away from the actual application and places it onto the bluepulse “runtime”. This consequently allows developers to deploy an application to a large number of devices, but obviously prevents any single application from taking advantage of any features that would be considered anything more than the “lowest common denominator”. So with that being said, developers now have a great platform for building basic information apps, like RSS readers, IM gateways and so on. But to Olivers point of the bluepulse platform being the “first category dominant players in mobile 2.0″, I have to emphatically disagree. bluepulse has admitted that their platform has to deal with MIDP1.0 phones gracefully, and thus is limited. As more MIDP1.0 phones move off the radar, its possible to update their platform to take advantage of features available across all handsets. I see bluepulse as being the first company to perfect mobile 1.0, with a platform that can move towards what we hope to be mobile 2.0.
The real barrier to mobile 2.0 isn’t software developers, its the operators, “standards” groups (Sun), and ultimately the consumers that are responsible for the fragmentation. As long as the market demands phones of such varying capabilities, operators will produce them, and companies like Sun will play a cat and mouse game of trying to force the operators to standardize, but ultimately will succumb and retroactively build development platforms that try to “more elegantly” handle the fragmentation. I wish there were a simple answer to this issue, but unfortunately I feel the battle of functionality and compatibility will always be fought.
The guys over at bluepluse have also done a great job about actively communicating with the community that supports, and criticizes them and they bring some great light to the debate. So be sure to check out their blog, and specifically the post, bluepulse strongly polarizes the mobile community.
10January2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Mobile.
Yahoo! has launched their Go initiative with an initial Symbian Series 60 client.
“Introducing Yahoo! Go - a new suite of products and services for your PC, mobile phone and even your TV.
Yahoo! Go allows you to access the information and content that is important to you on whatever device you choose.
So wherever you go, your photos, your music, your email, – your life – is right there with you. Ready to go.”
4January2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Mobile.
The Beta for Flash Lite 2 has finally been released on the Adobe Labs site. We have all been waiting with bated breath for the updated to Flash Lite 1.1, which was based on the antiquated Flash 4 platform. FL2 is based on Flash 7 which means Actionscript 2.0 and XML and a whole new emulator. Be sure to pick up the update for Flash 8.
Flash Lite 2 will greatly increase adoptions by engineers due to its rapid development and rich interactions. What could take someone weeks to do in J2ME can be done in days in FL, in terms of a UI. FL has stayed at a high-level in terms of hardware support, which means that you will need some type of lower-level “server” running on the phone to access features like bluetooth or the camera. There are already a few projects in the wild that show how to make this happen on S60 phones and I hope to see more as FL2 matures. I am really looking forward to seeing the strong community of flash developers get a chance to start making applications for phones. Phones have been lacking a rich, intuitive and engaging experience which has hindered broader adoptions, so it will be interesting to see if FL can help mobiles turn the corner.
More later… but in the meantime, here are the links:
http://labs.macromedia.com/
http://labs.macromedia.com/technologies/flashlite2_update_flashpro8/
http://labs.macromedia.com/wiki/index.php/Flash_Lite
3January2006
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Technology.
As has been reported all over the web more and more of the “Web 2.0″ companies are beginning to show cracks in their uptime and infrastructure. I am a huge proponent for these lightweight architectures but there have been increasing problems. Now to be fair, it sounds like the problems that Six Apart was experiencing was due more to hardware-related issues, but nonetheless, they were experiencing unacceptable downtime and data hiccups. Things were disappearing off my site, reappearing, only to disappear again. For extended periods of time I was unable to modify my site or to login to the Typepad interface. As a result, you are now reading my blog on a new server that is using Wordpress.
A few weeks ago I also was experiencing problems with del.icio.us and it has reared its ugly head again. Their RSS feed displayed the following message:
Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear a number of continued hiccups. We’ve taken everything offline to properly rebuild and restore everything. I apologize and hope to have this resolved as soon as possible. Thank you for your continued patience.
It’s a problem when a major site is totally “offline” but why, oh why, are they displaying non-rss content in what is expected to be a feed? It broke a bunch of the scripts that I have written and I can only assume it broke others. I can only hope that the Y! acquisition will help stabilize the service.
