17December2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Technology.
The other day I traded a few emails back and forth with Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, about their new service FeedFlare. I have been really impressed with FeedBurners ability to adapt and release innovative tools around what used to be a very static service. For people not familiar with FeedFlare, its a new service that allows the integration of web services and interactivity into your feeds. It is an interesting development on many practical fronts, but also speaks to the developments around RSS. Dick recently released a market report about the new model around RSS and talks about “how feeds will change the way content is distributed, valued, and consumed”.
17December2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Personal.
I finally migrated my blog away from Typepad and over to a Media Temple-hosted version of Wordpress. I have been wanting to do it for a while to give me more control over the install, but just haven’t had the time to do it until this weekend. I was having problems with importing all of my old posts from TP into WP, but finally brute forced them in. I also found this great advanced theme called Squible and it’s been great so far. It’s a very nice, seamless integration of templates and a set of good plugins, which I hope to hack as I get some free time here and there.
I wrote some mod_rewrite rules to try to smoothly migrate the old permalinks over to the new structure, but it seems to still be having some problems. So bear with me and hopefully I’ll get the kinks worked out.
13December2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Mobile; Technology.
Cingular today launched their new Push-to-Talk service with some unique features.
Some of the great new features include Presence Management, which they call availability, Convert to Cellular and Voice Messaging. Its great to see them integrating services like presence into the application and it should allow for some great new applications to come. The more a phone, and thus the applications, can know about the environment that it is currently in, the better tuned the features can be to that setting.
Currently it looks like they are only releasing it with one phone, the LG F7200, but have plans to release a Bluetooth-capable, clamshell phone — the Samsung D357 — capable of the new functionality in the near future.
5December2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Personal.
Tim and I are in San Francisco this week taking on a few meetings, catching up with friends and Tim is working with Macromedia to get Flash Lite certified. Some of the meetings we have lined up are very promising and I am looking forward to see what comes out of our west coast swing.
I am also meeting up with some of the fellow Gatherists — David Hornik and Auren Hoffman — and it should be good to catch up and hear what they are up to. David’s blog continues to be a fantastic read, so I am really looking forward to hearing his feedback.
Between meetings and dinners, we are hoping to get to see the city. Ill post pictures up on Flickr as we take them.
16November2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Mobile; Technology.
There has been a lot of buzz lately about the upcoming offerings from some MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operator). Most notably ESPN, Disney, Amp’d and Helio will be releasing virtual networks directed at specific market niches.
For those of you who don’t know what a MVNO is, MVNO’s are mobile operator that do not own their own spectrum and usually do not have their own network infrastructure. Instead, MVNO’s have business arrangements with traditional mobile operators to buy minutes of use (MOU) for sale to their own customers.
Most interesting to us are the offerings from Amp’d and Helio. Both companies are targeting the 18-35 year-old demographic and hope to gain traction by acting as the antithesis of the incumbent carriers. Where the carriers lock down advanced phone features and typically are slow to roll out high-end phones that are available in other countries, Amp’s and Helio take the position that if the phones supports it, they support it. That means streaming video, music, games… all driven via their content portals.
This opens up some interesting possibilities for Qiio and we look forward to the inevitable shake up of the mobile industry.
16November2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business.
Its official… we finally launched a site, albeit thin, and a blog for Qiio. Tim and I have been working over the past few months to really drill down to the fundamentals of our product and exactly how we want to go about the execution of the platform. We have pretty much finished up the Executive Summary and business plan and our beginning our seed fundraising.
We will be traveling to San Francisco in early December for a week or so. We lined up some great meetings and we are really looking forward to what may come of it. I want to thank everyone for their continued support.
So be sure to check out the sites:
www.qiio.com
www.qiio.com/blog
And if you use an RSS aggregator, you can add the following feed to your list
http://www.qiio.com/blog/feed/atom/ (powered by FeedBurner)
Thanks again for the continued support.
16November2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Technology.
GoogleBase is finally up and all I have to say is, bleh. The current interface has taken their “less is more” approach to far and it is just plain ugly. In its current form, I just don’t see users who want to create a job posting or post a recipe online to think of going to GoogleBase first. This is where targeted consumer sites work best. If I want to post a job, I go to Monster or Hot Jobs where I know it will get the most visibility.
The concept of a structured data store is a good idea, but they need novel ways (think APIs) of getting content into it from 3rd party providers. The providers would be incentivized since they know that their content will be getting indexed properly on Google and in the end they would still be the broker for the service, thus retaining their users and possibly gaining new ones.
9November2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Entrepreneurship.
Last night I attended the Boston Web Innovators meetup at Tommy Doyle’s in Cambridge. It was organized by David Beisel of Genuine VC and Masthead Venture Partners. I have long complained about the lack of tech/entrepreneurship events in the Boston area. For such a small and densely intelligent city, there are few events that bring together people doing innovative, forward-looking things. I have always been jealous of my friends in SF and even NYC where these type of events are common place.
Read the rest of this entry »
2November2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Mobile; Technology.
Nokia, in a major milestone, successfully achieved the first seamless hand-off from a cellular network to a VoIP WiFi network using UMA (Unlicensed Mobile Access). In laymen’s terms this means that when you enter a WiFi hotspot, say at home, your current phone call could be handed off from Cingular’s cellular network to a much less expensive packet-based WiFi network. Read more here
2November2005
Posted by Ryan Sarver under: Business; Technology.
I haven’t had a chance to finish my "2.0 be or not 2.0 be" post… coming soon, but in the mean time…
Microsoft has hit the Web2.0 community with a bang and a resounding echo is hopefully being heard at your nearest Googleplex. Microsoft has announced an early, yes Beta, release of Microsoft Live at a recent event. Some features are available now, with a planned rollout of additional tools in the coming months. There are many, many articles all over the web on it right now from people who actually attended the event, so please read up on those. But the one release that really impresses me is their next generation MSN client. It fuses web-based chat, MSN Mappoint, VoIP-to-POTS calls, your address book and your email all in one slick interface. You can check out a review and screen cap through TechCrunch
