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My Attempt At Becoming a Digital Nomad Resumes Posted: 06 Aug 2008 02:14 PM CDT Yesterday I posted about my Jungle Disk issue which was making it so that my Jungle Disk was no longer a central repository but was instead serving as an external hard drive. Within minutes, someone from Jungle Disk contacted me and told me that my issues was a resolvable one. Since it wasn’t completely straight forward for me, I’ll include here, how to configure your Jungle Disk so that it serves as a central repository. Jungle Disk Drive Mapping Create New Backup The first step of the process is to configure a new backup for your data. For this example I’m going to show how to sync your documents folder between and a P.C. The P.C. is already configured and now you are trying to map your Mac documents to your P.C. documents. Below is the screenshot for configuring a new backup: Select Backup Sources The second step in creating your mapping is to select the folders that you would like to map to the P.C. version of your backup. This is pretty easy, simply click the button shown in the screenshot below. You will have needed to configure your bucket on Amazon S3 already but I’ll assume that you know how to do that since you already figured out how to do that on your P.C. It’s pretty straightforward when you first install the application. Folder Selection & Advanced Options The next step is also pretty quick. Simply select the folders you would like to sync. Theoretically you could do multiple sub-folders but I figured that it would be easier to select a single parent directory that will map to the same directory on my Jungle Disk. Once you select the folder(s) click on “View Advanced Settings”. Map the Folders This part is pretty easy. In this step, you are selecting where you would like the folders from the previous step to sync on your Jungle Disk. For my backup I used the folder /backups/NICKLAPTOP/C/Documents and Settings/Nick/My Documents which mapped to my Mac directory /Users/nick/Documents. That’s it! Now you have added your Mac to your repository. Fixing the Mail Issue Now that I’ve figured out how to have this serve as a central repository, I am now back to being portable. The one thing that I haven’t completely resolved yet is mail. After watching The Learning Channel series on the start-up “Earth Class Mail“, I decided to check it out and try for myself. I’m sure it works great but I quickly realized that there is still one flaw in this system: all my credit cards require my real billing address. That means that my credit report has my real address no matter where I’d like to receive mail. All my junk mail (which is essentially a waste of trees) still comes to these addresses. So there is a solution still: mail forwarding. I could have all the mail being forwarded to my D.C. apartment directly to my Earth Class Mail address in New York. The only problem is that if I need any of the mail that gets forwarded to New York, I am creating a relatively inefficient process which isn’t the most environmentally friendly. Unfortunately for this, there is not a one-step solution to creating a central mail repository similar to my digital data repository. While you can set up forwarding, the process is not the most efficient. Have you configured any mail forwarding systems that work for you? What do you do about junk mail? This part of becoming a digital nomad will be the most challenging.

The Social Web Economy: Introduction Posted: 06 Aug 2008 09:09 AM CDT I’m not paranoid, I just ask questions. In this industry (the web industry) it is frequently difficult to understand how revenue is being generated and exactly where the money is flowing. As my life has become increasingly reliant on the good health of the “social web economy”, I’ve thought more and more about how the money is flowing. When the Facebook platform launched, many suggested that it was simply venture capitalists paying money to other venture capitalists as a large application install economy ensued. While that was how things were in the beginning, within a short amount of time large brands and advertisers started investing resources toward social applications. The social web does not just exist on Facebook but the social web economy got a significant boost when the Facebook platform launched last year. This is why I tend to reference it so frequently. As the social web continues to grow, I think it is important to occasionally step back and see where we're at. Over the weekend I have been thinking heavily about all the parties involved in the social web economy: the people and the companies. I've compiled a list of each of them, who their competition is and how they interact with other participants in the economy. The post started as a short overview but it has since ballooned into an 8 page overview of what I consider to be the social web economy. I wanted to deliver this initially as one post but there is simply no way to deliver 8 pages (and what could easily become more) as a single blog post. As such, I've decided to create a series of posts about the "Social Web Economy". I'll cover the primary individual participants and roles as well as the types of companies that exist. Since just in a weekend this turned into a larger than expected piece, I'm going to build this out as a series. If you find anything to be inaccurate or incomplete please let me know and I'll be sure to update the posts involved. Next post in series: “The Social Web Economy: Who Are These People?”

MySpace Partners to Stream Presidential Debates Live Posted: 06 Aug 2008 01:00 AM CDT Today MySpace will be announcing a formal partnership with the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), to launch MyDebates.org, a site which will interactive tools for users to engage in the upcoming Presidential and Vice Presidential debates. This is the first time in history that the Presidential debates will be streamed live online. The site will also provide a forum for viewers to post feedback live. This is a monumental announcement for MySpace who expects this site to transform the Presidential election process. MySpace has been extremely active in the political process, previously announcing the launch of Decision ‘08 back in June. As I pointed out in June, one participant who has been surprisingly less active is Facebook. Back in January, Facebook partnered with ABC for the New Hampshire debates. Nothing has been announced since. The debates will begin in September and will be broadcasted live on television as well as on MySpace. Currently MyDebates.org redirects to a MySpace landing page which has left me a bit confused on the logistics of this new site but wherever the site is located it will provide: an application which embeds the debates, on-demand playback functionality, polling opportunities and the ability to share the videos across the web. This is a huge announcement for MySpace and it highlights the increasing integration of politics and the web. There is no doubt that this trend will continue, this announcement simply being one landmark in the process toward complete digital integration with the political process.

Say Hello to 9 New D.C. Startups Posted: 05 Aug 2008 11:00 PM CDT D.C. based Launchbox Digital is announcing today the launch of 9 new startups at the LaunchBox08 Demo Day in Reston, Virginia. LaunchBox Digitial is an start-up incubator that has been months in the making. I interviewed Sean Greene back in December when the company was first announced. The 9 companies that they will be announcing today are a diverse set of start-ups. This is a huge deal for the D.C. area given that the area has been in dire need of a start-up incubator. This is the first one targeted toward early stage web startups. Whether or not these 9 are successful, it’s important that there is a company helping fund dreams based in D.C. Congratulations to the first 9 teams that are part of the first round of Launchbox Digital funding. Here are the 9 startups that will be announced later today: Founded by Satjot Sawhney and Ashish Kundra, BuzzHubb is the next generation of a mobile accessible Yahoo Groups for the college student. The company has renamed groups as “Hubbs”. You can view a screencast presentation of the site via the video below. Heekya is trying to be the “Wikipedia for social story telling.” The company’s pitch is that “The current model of story telling on the web is pretty fragmented. There are really good individual asset repositories out there (YouTube, Flickr, and Photobucket are a few), but they focus primarily on a given category (photos, video), and have limited ability to address linear story telling. Blogging is a potential answer, but while there are close to 200 million blogs, only 600,000 posts occur each day - too many blogs die the slow death of neglect.” As such Heekya encourages social story telling through: a simple multi-media story builder, the enabling of story cloning and modification, and browsing and discovery tools. You can view more via the screencast below. Founded by Andrew Lee, Arjun Lall and Ryan Wilson, JamLegend.com is an online version of Guitar Heroes and Rockband. I’ve spoken with the team from JamLegend previously and discussed their approach to this site. Ultimately, I believe the real value here is in creating the tools that help automate the transcription of songs into a JamLegend compatible format. Check out the video below for more details. Koofers was founded at Virginia Tech by Michael Rihani, Glynn LoPresti, Patrick Gartlan and Doug Feit. Koofers “allows students to make the relatively opaque process of class and teacher selection fully transparent, by providing grade distributions and teacher feedback to allow a student to shape their individual class schedule, based on their own needs and style.” Founded by Michael Powers (hence the name “mpower”), “Mpowerplayer is targeted to fix the discovery problem in the mobile gaming market today. Unlike ringtones, where the explosive growth and repeat buyer habits of consumers has built a multi-billion dollar market, the mobile gaming market is stalled.” The site provides a PC-based means for consumers to play mobile versions of the games they are interested in and provides them with an easy way to purchase the game. MyGameMug was founded by Raymond Lau and Erik Yao, two gamers “who wanted to create the match.com for online gaming.” The site will “create a fund and engaging way to find people whose ‘gaming styles’ are compatible to play online.” Razume was founded by Sam Blum, Kyle Stoneman and Ryan Geist. I met Sam at a D.C. event earlier this year and he sounded pretty passionate about his company. The pitch is that “Razume is addressing the needs of job seekers in the 21-35 year old demographic.” It’s essentially LinkedIn for a younger demographic. Check out the video below for more. Founded by Ahson Wardak and Luc Castera, “ShareMeme is an easy tool to send messages, polls, invitations and other things to your friends and associated groups on the channels that they prefer. ShareMeme is addressing a real problem today - inadvertent ’spamming’ of friends across all the channels you use to interact with people.” Finally, Zadby “deals with the intersection of two phenomena: The continued lack of effectiveness of traditional advertising to reach the 18-35 year old demographic, and the poor means independent web video producers have to monetize the value of the communities that follow them.” The site serves as a market maker for product placement in web based video. I think this idea is great and the site looks well designed. I’ll be interested to see how this pans out.

A New Era of Platforms, Is This Web 3.0? Posted: 05 Aug 2008 04:32 PM CDT Over the past year there have been significant shifts in the technology industry. In particular, there has been a significant shift from personal computing to internet based computing. While we are still at an early stage in the internet based computing phase, significant strides have been made in the past year or two that have transformed the way many businesses work. Last night I was thinking about the dichotomy of personal computing platforms and web based platforms (yes I’m a geek). While contemplating, I realized the significant impact that the new platforms will have on businesses and primarily the developers that are building businesses on these platforms. Platforms of the Past While you can go back to the mainframe years as Marc Benioff does in his recent post on TechcrunchIT, I think it is much easier to start with the most recent platform wars: Microsoft Windows versus Macintosh. I’m not going to take the time to recount the history of both of these platforms in this article. If you’d like, you can read the History of Windows and the History of Mac OS. Also, check out the movie “The Pirates of Silicon Valley” for a more glamorized version of the battle between the two companies. The most significant difference of the personal computing platforms (operating systems) is that installing applications is 100 percent at a user’s discretion. If someone wants to write a piece of software, they can get it installed on the platform whether or not the platform developer (Windows or Mac OS) want the software to run. While Microsoft and Apple monitor the applications being installed for the purpose of fixing security holes, none of the applications are effectively removed from platforms, it is up to the user to do so. Whether or not the user should have control of everything is debatable, but I surely would like to have control. The Rise of the Totalitarian Platforms There are a number of benefits from running web-based platforms. For users one of the primary benefits is portable accessibility. Anywhere you go you can instantly log-on to your platform (as long as you have internet access) and all of your data will be there. Another benefit is access to tremendous remote computing processing. For the average this doesn’t matter as much though given that the increasing processor speeds are sufficient for most. The new wave of platforms comes from companies like Salesforce.com, Facebook, Amazon and Google. They provide individuals with access to a massive amount of computing resources both from a processing standpoint as well as from the storage point of view. I would argue that the primary limitation of these new platforms is that there is no guarantee of uptime and that you need to be connected to take advantage of them. Aside from that, these new platforms provide immense possibilities and it is where development resources are shifting to. Everywhere you look in the technology space, there are people creating new Facebook applications, new iPhone applications and new services that take leverage remote platforms (e.g. S3 and EC2). Some of these applications literally run on the remote platform while others are hosted by the developer. This new wave of platforms, which I would add the Apple iPhone to, provides an immense amount of power and control to the platform owners. This creates substantial tension between developers and the platforms. While tension between these parties existed in the first wave of platforms I would suggest that the tension is even greater because the platform owners have total control. Imagine if an application that relies on S3, Amazon.com’s remote storage service, is arbitrarily determined as “malicious”. Amazon could essentially shut down that application. We’ve already seen similar cases such as Top Friends shut down on Facebook and then yesterday a legitimate application was removed from iTunes. In this new environment, the developers are at the mercy of the platform owners and while it’s not the end of the world, I think this is a riskier environment to run a business. While the shift to the cloud is ongoing and will continue to move forward, the relational logistics between businesses and platform owners still need to be worked through. When Marc Benioff describes this as a revolution, I agree. It is reminiscent of the colonial era. While I don’t think we will see the digital version of a civil war ensue, I think that we will most definitely witness ongoing tension between the two parties: developers and platform owners. As a result, new rules will be defined. However it plays out it will be interesting to watch. Do you think this new era of web-based platforms is the beginning of Web 3.0?

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