go street view

Have just been catching up with the latest at Where 2.0 on Radar.
Go check out google maps - "street view" rocks - looks like its only US cities at the moment.
Very cool indeed!

Site of the day

I remember when I first stumbled across interactive design on the web (that must have been when Flash 5 had just been released) I used to be a fan of Macromedia's 'site of the day'. I haven't checked it out in years, I guess its still going at Adobe.

Here's my pick for today, Australia.com, their revamped site is really well done. You can find out a whole lot of interesting things just by changing the map layer options, very cool and intuitive interface design.

Put the pedal down

Got to love the internet, haven't heard from Boogie for a while, just been chatting to him on Google Talk. He's currently living and working in Zurich. His blog is a real gem ......Speed sailing is another passion of mine, looking to get out on the water a lot more soon to put the pedal down!

A winning formula - can some young kiwis take a slice of the pie?

Just read an interesting interview in Business Week with Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigs List. The company is one of the top 10 busiest sites in the world, yet only has 25 staff. Revenues are about $US25M. One would think a similar site would work well here in NZ due to our small size of country and small town feel. Most kiwi's don't even know what Craigslist is. Australia and New Zealand seem to be quite unique in the way that the big media giants have basically carved out the online market for classifieds and are charging good money for it.

Since the lead up to their sale, Trade me cleverly turned itself from an auction site to an auction/classified hybrid and started to cash in on real estate and more recently jobs. Good on them for doing so, lets hope a lot of that sale money gets reinvested back into the NZ economy to get the tech sector really cranking.

But now that the dust has settled and Trademe is owned by ozzies (Fairfax) surely a local startup that has no news media links whatsoever could take on the classified space and just leave auctions to Trade me (winner takes all for sure, Trademe rocks for auctions).

Its not gonna be easy as the other ozzie media giant on our shores (APN) is trying to take Fairfax on with Sellmefree which hasn't had any real uptake, especially in Wellington. Shows how good the Trademe brand is in the nations capital.

Food for thought huh? Any young whizzes out there, a good after school project.

The man who does it all

A cool article in the Wall Street Journal about Markus Frind, the sole guy that runs PlentyofFish. His dating site pulls in between $5-10M US per year from ad revenue. And its the 96th most busy website in the US according to Hitwise.

We are so in a flat world now. So if you're thinking of doing a startup, this proves those wrong that say you can't do it all by yourself.

Office replacement is getting closer

I just checked out Virtual Ubiquity's site, which has had a makeover. Looks like they are getting close to launch Buzzword. Have just applied to be a beta tester, hope they let me in.

Here are some screenshots.

Just found a 9 minute screencast, they have done an awesome job, so much functionality that we just haven't had in web based word processors to date. They've added some great small touches as well. This will definately be up there for app of the year. It will be interesting to see what their business model is. They could go down the free route and wait till one of the heavy weights buys them out, or it may just be good enough to go solo and charge a price if you have say more than 5 docs. I'd be willing to pay an annual fee for this for sure.

Update - I've been accepted to be a beta tester. So to try this out I've just popped into Wellington Library for an hour before I catch a bus home. Went to cafenet.co.nz and purchased a 70mb token and logged into Buzzword. This is great, sitting here in the library, lots of light, big space and silence. So I've just started to create a product specification document. I am pretty blown away at the functionality (of Buzzword that is), its great. It looks like borders aren't in this version but I've managed to write the start of a spec, import in a wireframe protoype PNG exported from Fireworks CS3. The doc looks great and its all stored in the cloud. I'm in a good mood - so thumbs up to Virtual Ubiquity. This now leads to me say that I am now a happy mobile worker, the dream of online office apps is here. This is quite exciting, they've taken the bar to the next level.

Justin is still going

I can't believe it, Justin is still going, 63 days, 15 hours, 50 minutes and counting. The guy deserves a medal!

New thinking

Came across a great article that gives the youth of the business world one up on the established players. I think this theory can be equally applied to young vs established companies as well. Just look at the new battle in the accounting software market in NZ - the established player doesn't think the game has changed, they see the bag of balls is still mainly black and white.

Caught with wrong degree ?

An article in the Infotech today mentioned a student that graduated from Vic with a BCA in Info & E-Commerce but could not get a job since he graduated in October last year. Apparently he had the "wrong degree", graduating with a BCA rather than a BSc or BIT.

Let's face it, having a degree is not a guarantee of a job. Maybe the applicant should have got some part time work experience in the industry while they were a student. I'm sure most employers would view a BCA student favourably if they had some "runs on the board" in their chosen field.

My suggestion to the student, is to be more pro-active and apply for jobs that don't exist, this really shows an employer you want to work for their company.

We don't need these sorts of stories in the press, there is a massive skills shortage and to discourage students from doing a major in Information Systems is ridiculous.

True rumours

Truemors launched not too long ago, the "greatest" list is now pretty good for those that want to be up with the latest "True Rumors". I'm going to trial visiting the site everyday for a week and see if it can help me keep my "surfing" time compacted. Does anyone know if there is a RSS feed for just the "greatest" section" so I can just pull it into my reader?

Quite a lot of people think the site is not so hot, well that's what the entry on Wikipedia says anyway.

I guess someone needs to make "truemorvision" with regional and tagged filters. So lets say I was interested in "politics" but only in "NZ" then that could work quite well.

So how long is a truemor before it's just called news anyway?

How cool is that

I've been fascinated with mapping websites for a while now, I guess I just like exploring new places. Twittervision3D has got to be the coolest mashup yet which utilises FreeEarth, try the full screen mode...how cool is that!

New web economy starting to crank

Nice article in Time mag about 37 Signals and the success they've had to date. Interesting to see they hint at building financial software in the future.

Apple prank

Its amazing how quick news travels, Apples stock dropped by $4 billion in one day when news came in that the iphone wasn't going to ship till later in the year and new version of OSX until next year.

But it was a Hoax, Apples stock is still down $1.25 billion for the day

Improving the workflow

Just had a good session using Fireworks CS3 for some screen mockups.

A few notable finds :

1) You can now have multiple "pages" in one PNG file which is great for organisation and improving your workflow. So each page can have multiple frames and you can share layers across frames and pages (e.g. you'd use that for your navigation, any site wide backgrounds etc). Being able to keep an entire project in one PNG is great. Its like having a desk with an infinite size paper tray.

2) Nine slicing can now be added to your components (so when you scale components like Flex buttons they look great at any size). All the bundled Flex components have 9 slicing on by default so behave really nicely on your page. I often resize assets during each round of GUI tweaks so now my mockups still look as good as the day I first made them.

It would be great to be able to automatically convert a PNG with multiple frames and pages into a PDF with every screen combination - not sure if that is a feature in CS3- will have a hunt for it.

Tracking user sessions the easy way

Tape Failure has just come out of beta - its not an online backup service as the name may suggest, but a very cool way to track users on your website, just play the tape and watch. Here is a video demo from Centernetworks.

Its one thing thinking you know what your customers are doing, but now you can watch every move of the mouse, just add a bit of Javascript to each page and you're rocking.

I hadn't heard of Crazy Egg either which allows you to see where users click on your site using a heatmap.

So, no excuses for not knowing what your users are doing on your site.

Startups living it rough

One things certain for sure, Y Combinator's startups has got lots of people talking. Paul Graham has been getting a fair bit of criticism which I reckon is totally unjustified. From the sounds of things Y Combinator is the ideal launchpad for web startups. I just read a classic article about the residents at the "YScraper" living it rough that was published in the San Francisco Chronical . Well worth a read, as it explains to the outside world what life is really like at a startup.

2007 - the year of the RIA (finally)

RIA's (Rich Internet Applications) seem so old school now, I was excited about them back in 2002, when the term had been newly coined by Macromedia.

A few trends to take notice of, O'Reilly Radar has just announced that their Flex 2 book has absolutely flown out the door.

There are also some great improvements in the overall workflow with the new CS3 suite from Adobe. I've been using Fireworks CS3 for a few days now and stumbled upon all the Flex UI components in the library, which now allows you to export your PNG straight to MXML. On the face of it that sounds awesome but I think it is a bit 'version 1' to be called decent just yet, though the thinking is definately going in the right direction. I'm so behind the idea of allowing analysts to build rapid prototypes, as they say a picture tells 1000 words.

The upgrade for Flash, now called Flash CS3 allows you to export your flash movie clips (with component like functionality) as SWC's and import them into Flex. This is really cool.

Just downloaded Dreamweaver CS3 last night, so haven't taken that for a run yet. Will post a note when I have.

Well, anyway, things are finally hotting up in this space. Microsoft with their recent Silverlight announcement and now Sun with Java FX. There are some really impressive demos posted on the JavaFX site. Its totally open source. The only glitch I've noticed is the initial lag to view the apps - seems real sluggish to me. But the output is damn impressive. The Tesla site rocks.

Mega Mergers

Rumors have started again of Microsoft wanting to buy Yahoo, this time the price is at $50 billion.

As much as I like Google which I think is great for basic search, email storage and rss reading I think there is much room for improvement in their online apps. With the amount of developers and wealth they have, surely you'd think they would have come up with some decent eye candy online apps by now. I don't think the ultra conservative GUI is the best for office productivity apps.

I know that Google still tries to run projects in small teams but I just wonder if their size has got to them.

I guess this is the cool thing about the internet, the more successful an online company becomes they no longer are at the cutting edge of innovation which opens up plenty of opportunities for the garage startup.

Here is an article from the New York Post on the "rumor" (is that the us spelling of rumour?)

Marathon Blogger

I hope my last two blog entries keep the fella in Germany going until my next post, how dare he acuse me of going quiet on the blog front :) I've been busy trying to teach and inspire the up and coming IT sparks of our nation! Thumbs up to my 2nd year classes - you guys are really starting to get into the groove of questioning what you are told - thats great - I love a class that keeps me on my toes.

Plumbing, Plasterers and Traffic Jams

I've been thinking about the internet connectivity problem we have in New Zealand.
I'm not sure actually how bad it is, I know a lot of people are kicking up a fuss and I know personally I've had hours of lost productivity.

I'd be keen to see a simple map (similar to a road map showing SH1 etc and interconnecting routes eg. SH58) of the NZ internet highway. The map should show the speed limits and how many lanes the roads are (i.e. how much traffic throughput the links can stand). I don't really have a clue but expect the make up is a skeleton of fibre that runs the length of the country and links to all the cities off the main back bone. I suspect there are 2 or 3 main backbones owned by Telecom, Telstra and maybe someone else. I'm guessing the fibre goes into all the Telecom owned exchanges and then its copper for the last 0-10 km (for those stuck with ADSL), and those lucky enough to have Telstra Cable get the cable to their front door. I take pity with the rural folk. I know companies like Citylink have fibre that spans the length of the CBD in Wellington and parts of Auckland. Does such a simple map exist? Can someone make one with a simple google map, make it public so people can update it to make sure its accurate.

So on to the current problems..... getting disconnected, getting lag, getting slow download and upload rates. I experienced all of these when I switch back to ADSL last month. Two years ago I quite happily talked on Skype to a friend in Japan while at the same time be remote desktoping into their computer on a 256kb jetstart plan. Getting disconnected 8 times in a day (I had to reconnect using my router control panel) and experiencing massive lag and not being able to talk to someone less than 30km's away on Skype was a bit of an eye opener when I recently had Jetstream turned back on. This is in a house 10 doors up the road from where I used to live, so all the variables had stayed constant. What had changed?

Basic! So we have an overloading problem at the exchanges, its probably easily fixed cause I don't expect the fibre to be overloaded just yet. ADSL2+ is way overdue and their isn't enough equipment in the exchanges. Is this the guts of the problem that would give most of the nation temporary relief? I hope so. Its like deja vu - remember back in 1998 when we all have 20 buck paradise dial up and all of a sudden one day started getting kicked off the net? That was cause of overloading.

How can a startup expect to launch a global business in NZ at the moment with such bad infrastructure? I'd really want to launch a new idea in New Zealand (as the small population would be great for a test market) but my business is flawed without good internet connectivity. How much is this actually costing our economy, just think if the next 700 million dollar gorilla doesn't get off the ground cause it can't be proven in NZ?

To fix the equation there needs to be reliably cheap internet connectivity for the citizens. Online hosted apps make sense but only if we can be guaranteed we can always access those. Its a bit of a frustrating time for web architects, its like being a plumber that creates a master piece in the bathroom but the pipes are leaking everywhere. Just because we can't physically see the water dripping from the T joints with the internet doesn't mean that as a nation we can let this drop. If they can build the bypass through Wellington for a 30 second improvement to get across town then surely they can sort this problem. If the anti smacking bill can get rushed through then surely can't the anti slow internet bill get given some attention?

I'm not into Telecom bashing, they are a commercial operator and their shareholders expect a return on investment. The problem is that the people at Telecom weren't visionary and gutsy enough to lay fibre everywhere. They should have but they didn't. They would have got their return on investment cause there would have been demand. Build a new highway and people will use it, we all know that.

So what to do now? Simple. Get Telecom to tell the nation exactly what the current problem is in simple terms so my mum can understand why she can't talk to me on Skype. I.e is it just a lack of ADSL 2+ exchanges with enough plugs or do we have a problem with fibre links around our nation? Tell the government how much and how long it would take to fix this. The government then decides if it should own the infrastructure or buy a huge chunk of Telecom and invest the funds and let the experts get it sorted in the shortest time period.

I welcome comments, cause I really want to understand the extent of the problem we have. Have I been too simplistic in my thinking? Are there flaws in my assumptions, please let me know.

In case you're wondering about the title, I've covered plumbing and traffic jams. If any knows of any good plasterers then let me know, the cable guy fell through our ceiling when installing cable the other week. Thats right we have a massive whole in our kitchen , living room now. I thought it was pretty funny and sums up the state of the internet in NZ quite nicely at the moment....broken and need of a decent handyman to fix the cracks.

EC2 and S3

Great, the computer industry is famous for its crazy acronyms and now to confuse us all they're chucking numbers in there too.

Thankfully the latest from Amazon, S3 (Simple Storage Service ) and EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) translate to readily understandable names that the rest of us can at first glance get what they're on about.

EC2 has particularly grabbed my attention as it has basically shaken up the hosting market and changed the rules. In the era of Web 2.0 we are now seeing the emergence of sites that are generating high traffic rates straight out of the blocks. This is great, but quite a headache for the two kids that have hijacked their flat or parent's cable plan to run a dedicated server to save costs. The only reason they did this was cause getting a dedicated server was too expensive. Any real geek wants full control of their server so virtual hosting is not an option.

But now with the emergence of EC2 and S3 from Amazon we are seeing that the cost of getting a fully fledged server up and running the way you want it is really cheap.

There are examples floating around on the Net of monthly hosting using EC2 and S3 costing $80US a month for running something pretty decent (lots of traffic), so thats about $NZ105. I think thats pretty awesome, cause a dedicated box in a reliably supported NZ data center is going to set you back at least $500 per month (I said reliably supported).