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On the heels of Apple releasing iTunes 4.9 with built-in Podcasting support into the wild, Venturus has jumped on the Podcast bandwagon. Expect unique views of Internet business from both established and new companies. This week we sat down with Aaron Levie, Founder of Box.net. Box.net is an online storage company that offers very unique services tailored to their users. We talked with Aaron about the product, what it took to go launch amidst financial issues, and how important customer service is in a Web 2.0 company. Click here to download the MP3, or you can just subscribe to the Venturus Podcast feed, ensuring you will always have our latest show ready and waiting.
Voices: Andru Edwards, Aaron Levie - Founder, Box.net
Length: 31:13, 28.6 MB
Listen | Box.net Interview
Click to continue reading Venturus Podcast: A Talk With Aaron Levie of Box.net
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Adam Curry gave the closing Keynote, recording Daily Source Code Episode #200 live. He began with talking about Woodstock, now we are almost 25 years later. We have several hundred of the most talented, creative minds in content creation. Flickr and Technorati are overtaken. There are still cameras, video cameras, voice recorders, etc. all throughout the audience. What message should we be sending to the world from Gnomedex? That we want to take back our media.
The interenet is very powerful as both a communications medium as well as a marketing medium. The internet will always be both, not one or the other. We need to bring in our audience. We are not early adopters, we are lunatic fringe. We need fuel from Microsoft, Audible, Apple, and Real. We are telling them what we want. How do we get them to work with us?
Dave Winer and Adam spent 4 years sending large media files to each other after the rss:enclosure tag. In 2004 the magic happened when they switched places - when Adam as a user became a developer, and Dave became the user not the developer. The result was that these programs/shows/audio posts would come down automatically, and they would be so enjoyable because they were amateur.
More after the jump.
Click to continue reading Adam Curry’s Gnomedex Keynote
Gnomedex 5.0: Denise Howell, Buzz Bruggeman, Jason Calacanis on Today’s Digital Legalities
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories:
As it turns out, Supreme Court has already cited a blog in a major decision. This should give you an idea of the power you have nowadays as an independent content publisher.
Jason talked about getting a legal letter from posting a Windows Mobile 5 screenshot. His advice was to pick up the phone and call the lawyer directly. He called and was told it is a trade secret, with his response being that he took a shot of a message board. He had no NDA with Microsoft, so the shot shouldn’t need to come down. We are journalists and we write about stuff. If someone walked across the street with a new iPod and someone snapped an image, would that be a trade secret infringement? The lawyer said no, and Jason rests his case. Internet entrepreneurs need to know that they shouldn’t be easily scared by the power that be. A legal letter can be scary, but Jason forces the lawyer to file the papers. Lawyers don’t want to discuss it, they just want you to do what they say. Stick to your guns.
One way to protect yourself is to say how you know something if you don’t know that it is true. For example, you can use words like “claimed” or “allegedly” if you want to report on a rumor. If you make a mistake, update the page. They also made mention of the EFF Legal Guide that we told you about a few weeks ago. Another great tool is Wikipedia’s Fair Use page.
Mark Fletcher, Scott Rafer, Bob Wyman on Tomorrow’s RSS at Gnomedex
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories:
Mark Fletcher, Scott Rafer, Bob Wyman spoke about the evolution of RSS at Gnomedex. This was a very important panel to be a part of, and I think that if you are in internet business, or if you are thinking of getting into business online, the following is something you should read and evaluate. With Microsoft announcing that RSS is going to be built right in to Longhorn, it is time to pay attention to the medium.
Scott Rafer says that Feedster is placing ads in RSS feeds, and that he is surprised by how little the medium has evolved. Now that RSS is turning into a real business, only large economics can change it, like an urge to create RSS-only publications, and the take-off of RSS on mobile phones. Both will likely create new extensions. Mark Fletcher agrees that there hasn’t been much extensions to RSS. He sees RSS as the universal inbox, pulling in any type of info into an inbox. A way to deal with information overload.
Bob Wyman says he searches the future (PubSub). As they evaluate new documents from feeds and blogs, they are matched against standing, persistent queries. The results are transmitted as rapidly as possible to the users. He also agrees with the comments of the other guys - RSS isn’t just for text anymore. PubSub does airline status, earthquakes, etc. It will be a very important change in the environment. The other trend he believes we will see in RSS is not RSS. The future of RSS is Atom. Its a format that a lot of vendors have interest in. All aggregators read all formats, so there is less and less of a reason for anyone to use the antiquated formats.
One good point, that all readers need to pay attention to, is that web publishers should just choose one RSS format to link to. I whole-heartedly agree with this. Your average visitor has no idea what RSS is, and giving a choice between RSS 0.92, 2.0, and Atom is not offering any type of service. All aggregators nowadays can parse any type of feed, so choose one and run with it.
I asked them about monetizing RSS. Asking users to pay is dreadful says Bob. Dave Winer comments that placing an ad in the feed is like picking up a nickel on the floor, and ignoring the millions flowing by in front of your face. He then mentioned he would subscribe to a Best Buy feed. Jason Calacanis then commented that no one would ever opt-in to advertising, as it is ridiculous. The room then responded in mass disagreement, with a few commenting that they subscribe to Woot!’s RSS feed, which advertises a new product for sale every day.
Click to continue reading Mark Fletcher, Scott Rafer, Bob Wyman on Tomorrow’s RSS at Gnomedex
Hobie is new to the world of blogging. He has found that it allows employees to communicate with each other, and customers. The company is 11 years old, growing mostly by word of mouth. Client based application, currently only PC but will have Mac version in a year.
People don’t think linearly. A lot of the tools on the market are linear, whereas MindManager allows you to think. It is a branch structure with which you can drill down. As opposed to a PowerPoint slide, it is almost like a Visio layout. It can be published as a PowerPoint or Word, or export as XML. It is the place you go before you use your apps - the place you go to think about things.
Demo: Design a floating bike. He asked the audience to throw out ideas, and it became a frenzy as he was giving away free copies of the $350 software for good ideas. After entering a bunch of random ideas, we were able to drag-and-drop then into three separate categories - features, materials, misc. Very, very cool the way it worked. You can even put an RSS feed into a bubble, and expand it to see the actual entries.
You can even put search results into a bubble, and drill down whenever you want to see those search results. There is an IE icon within it which allows you to go to the search result page. This includes local PC search results (desktop search).
Did a drawing of the pedal in a new sketch category. Showing an idea of how you can also manage visual thinking. Copied the drawing a couple of times and added different aspects to it. Again, all is collapsible. You can now define task info, how long each task would take, the resources needed for each bubble, start date, due date, etc. There is an ink-to-text converter, which actually worked very well. There were just a few errors, but it was obvious that it was just a letter or two in a complicated word.
I asked about the IE icons, and if they were for IE or the default browser. They were IE launch icons, but the API is very configurable.
Hobart (Hobie) Swan is Manager of External Affairs for Mindjet and co-author of The Cancer Code, the story behind the creation of Mindjet, the company, and MindManager, its software. Before starting at Mindjet, Hobie produced health programming for CBS Radio’s The Osgood File, and was a freelance writer and video producer in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has since left that burgeoning megalopolis for the wide sidewalks of Boise, Idaho. On a Tablet PC, Hobie will be presenting “Mapping the Floating Bicycle: An audience participation presentation using Mindjet’s MindManager to design the next extreme water sport.
Click to continue reading GnomeDex 5.0: Hobie Swan MindManager Summary
GnomeDex 5.0: Longhorn Hearts RSS, Dean Hachamovitch Keystone
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories:
Syndication is powerful and amazing. Microsoft tried with Active Desktop and Channels in IE 4.0 and 5.0 back in 1997. He jokes about the success of Active Desktop. In 2002 Don Box blogged on GotDotNet.com, and in 2003 they hired Scoble. In 2005 feed are everywhere. MSN Spaces has 15 million users, 1500 MS employee blogs, MSN Search feeds on every query, and hundreds of feeds on microsoft.com, MSDN, and other Microsoft sites.
This all started with browsing, with the blue underlined text. After browse came search. Search is still being innovated to this day. Today, the thing is subscribe. Subscribe is more than a feature, it is really a new approach. I can subscribe and say what is interesting to me, and the machine will bring me what I like. People will keep browsing and searching, but it is how they will find more things to subscribe to. Compared to the first time someone sees a TiVo. It changes the way you use the Internet. Full summary after the jump.
Click to continue reading GnomeDex 5.0: Longhorn Hearts RSS, Dean Hachamovitch Keystone
Dave is the opening Keynote at GnomeDex, and he believes that it should be done non-conference style. His idea is that his Keynote should be more like a discussion rather than a speaker/audience type of relationship.
In the mid-90’s he wrote an essay called Bill Gates vs The Internet. The Internet has changed the way software vendors do business, as it has simplified the way a lot of the things that we do today are done. eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon all competing with each other in one way or another, yet the platform they use is the same - the Internet. None of these companies developed the platform, so it puts them all on an even keel. That is the power of the Internet.
Talking about eBay, they thought they would be absolutely dominant, going so far as to purchase PayPal to keep everything internal. Nowadays, people are realizing that they don’t need eBay as much as they thought they did. I actually agree, as nowadays everyone I know uses the free Craigslist rather than going to eBay to pay their exorbitant fees.
Dave says the W3C was ineffective. There has not been any effective evolution of the web. Not that they are stupid, but rather the dominant Internet vendor had the power to say whether the net would evolve or not. This is why the people took the power back through things like RSS.
After about 20 minutes of not being able to grab an IP address from the wireless network (too many PC’s!), Dave was finally able to get on the network. Now he begins his demo - an OPML based blog publishing tool. Shows the backend of ScriptingNews. He can edit an OPML file, and it edits his website in realtime, and it is ridiculously quick. He then showed how he edits his Smart Blogs area, again just using an OPML file and clicking save. It really has the look and feel of just typing in a text editor and clicking the save button - it’s that quick. Even changing the header graphic is as simple as browsing to a file and clicking on it. Refresh the browser and it is there. Truly amazing.
Even better, Dave added an MP3 Podcast to the blog simply by browsing to and selecting an MP3 file. The blog publishing software then creates the RSS feed with all appropriate enclosures. This really looks like it will allow anyone to do these things that previously only us techies have been able, or willing to do.
The network is once again down, so Dave discusses why this is open source - which is fantastic news. Users can add on features, such as a spell checker. Dave thinks this is the next phase of the web. News changes, but there are plenty of things that don’t change, such as the names of the Major League Baseball teams. He is trying to develop a tool for both needs - changing information as well as information that does not change. He does not think that you can get top of the line development for something like this from a corporate environment. Open source is the way to go. There are about 60 testers using this - he hoped to launch it at Gnomedex, but it isn’t quite ready. He will open the doors when he knows that at least 80% of those who download will have a great experience with it and be excited about it. They are working on both a Windows and Mac version - Windows is farther along, but they will have both.
Someone asks a question about why Dave doesn’t have permalinks, comments, trackbacks. Dave responds that he does have comments, but only on posts where he wants to allow them. Usually, they are all flames. Flamers want to get you entangled in their mess. He doesn’t want to put up with that, but he doesn’t have an objection to trackbacks, comments, etc. on a blog.
Someone asks what Dave was demoing, invoking laughter. He forgot to name the product. It is called “The OPML Editor”. Someone else asked about the name. No one knows what OPML means, less than 1 out of 100 people. That could be a turn off. Dave says that people don’t know what RSS is either, but if you use NetNewsWire, you don’t need to know what RSS is even though you are using it.
After talking about The OPML Editor a bit more, Dave ended the keynote by having everyone sing Yellow Submarine. No, I did not participate. Not a Beatles fan.
Click to continue reading GnomeDex 5.0: Dave Winer Keynote
Chris Pirillo opened the show, welcoming everyone to GnomeDex 5.0. Below are some of the key points of his opening. Interestingly enough, the Bell Harbor Conference Center here in Seattle had to upgrade their WiFi system for all the GnomeDexers. The best part was his mom came down to start snapping images, distracting Chris and causing a breakout of laughter. Chris took it in stride, walking over to give his mom a kiss. The GnomeDex WiKi is up as well.
Thank You’s:
- Ponzi, Lockergnome’s CEO
- Bob Fogarty, LockerGnome’s Editor
- Jake Ludington, Chris Pirillo Show Partner
- Steve Gillmor, The First IM
- LockerGnome Contributors
- GnomeDex Sponsors
- Every Single Gnomedexer
Ground Rules:
- Always use the microphone
- Blog, Cast, Snap, Share
- Take extended rants/agendas outside
- Play nice, play fair
- No unnecessary upload/download
Click to continue reading GnomeDex: Chris Pirillo Opens The Show
GnomeDex will be under way in just under five minutes. Lockergnome.com’s yearly People Aggregator aims to have their best year yet, with influential Internet minds, a large group of entrepreneurs, and a few announcements as well. I expect Attensa to announce a Microsoft Outlook RSS reader at some point. Check back with Venturus throughout the day for live GnomeDex 5.0 updates.
Click to continue reading Live Blogging GnomeDex 5.0
It’s been a while since sub $100 ink jet printers were first available, you know, the ones that cost $65 and suck down $55 worth of ink cartridges every couple of months. Well, thanks to Dell, you can now swap out your ink guzzler for a more cost effective laser printer without having to shell out $300 or more. Their new Dell Laser Printer 1100 does 15 pages per minute at a resolution of 600 dpi, and can print 2,000 pages per $65 toner cartridge.
Of course, this printer won’t be printing color at this price, but for those of you looking for a good home office/small business workhorse for printing text, give the new Dell a look.
Click to continue reading $99 Laser Printer From Dell
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