Fri, 16 Jul 10

Should Google share its index?

Posted in Technology and Society at 8:24 am by moore

Dion Almaer points to an interesting article about search engine indices,  proposing they be shared across search engines.  The article is worth a read, but the points are:

  • bots use a tremendous amount of bandwidth across the internet
  • they all get the same pages; the value is in their algorithms
  • therefore, the capacity of the internet would be increased if a company were to make their index available for all search engines to use
  • Google has the largest index, therefore it might be best if they did the sharing

I think there are a couple of issues with this scenario, but the largest is that having the biggest index is a competitive advantage for Google–why would they give that up merely to free up internet bandwidth that isn’t costing Google a penny? Stephen O’Grady succinctly sums up this issue.

In addition, I’m sure that any search engine company that was basing their results on an index would want to have a hand in controlling the index; Dion later suggests a third party index, but I’m not sure where the impetus comes for that.

I think this idea falls under the “wouldn’t it be nice” category, but don’t see any way to get from here to there.  Good intellectual exercise, though.

Wed, 13 Jan 10

Online Tools for Enriching an Offline Community, CSA edition

Posted in Social Media, Technology and Society, Useful Tools, Web Applications at 1:44 am by moore

I had a meeting yesterday with a Anne Cure, a farmer, and her web specialist.  She grows food that I buy via my CSA (community supported agriculture) share–I have a list of Colorado CSAs if you’re looking.  Anne, and the rest of the farmers she works with, has created a great offline community as part of the CSA.  There are multiple events at the farm, including an end-of-year pig roast.  As a CSA member, you get great veggies, you are part of a community and you support a local farm.  It’s win-win-win.

I asked Anne to meet with me because I felt that, while there was some member to member interaction, it wasn’t as prevalent as it could be.  Often, at CSA pickup, I wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Anne, or one of the other farm workers.  And I rarely observed any of the other members having any interactions either.

Being a web guy, I thought that bringing the community online might help.  Of course, there are always challenges around that–it takes work to maintain an online community too!

Here’s a list of all the ideas I thought of to leverage the offline community Cure Organic Farm has built, as well as some we discussed during the meeting.

Some of these ideas take little effort, some take a lot.  Some bring in revenue, some don’t.  Some put all the effort onto existing staff, others leverage excited community members.  Some had been done already, some they had never heard of.

Hopefully anyone else who has created an offline community can pick and choose useful tools and ideas, from below, to enhance that community online.  If you have additional suggestions, please feel free post them in the comments.

  • Use posterous to create a dead simple blog.  Leverage its auto posting capabilities to push content into other social networks (twitter, Facebook, etc, etc).  Use twitter/FB to drive traffic to their farmstand.  Cure Organic Farm does already have a Facebook page.
  • Use email list management software, like MailChimp, and look at the reports to see if email is a useful (aka ‘read’) means of communication.
  • Promote carpooling to pick up CSAs–save gas and promote interaction between members.  Consider using a tool like Divide the Ride.
  • Add a page of ‘Cookbooks Anne Uses’ (they already have a links page of various recipe sites).  Have that link to Amazon and you could possibly make latte money from it.
  • Cure Organic Farm puts out a great weekly newsletter during the CSA season, full of quotes and recipes.  However, searching it is an issue (I suggested Google Custom Search).
  • Also, making those recipes available in some kind of ingredient specific manner would be useful.  Even if the recipes aren’t broken out, just knowing that I can find a recipe for garlic scape pesto in newsletter #5 from 2008 is useful.  This could be done with a simple database or even plain HTML.
  • Forums, of course, are great community building tools.  They also are great for spam.  I imagined forums being used for sharing food knowledge (recipes, ‘how do I use 3 lbs of beets?’), though you could also share community events and even barter goods.  The issue with forums, as ever, is moderation–how to make sure that people are not abusing the forum (or each other).  This qualifies as a high input/high possible return tool.
  • An online calendar.  Both for specific events, such as the aforementioned pig roast, and informal knowledge, like when tomatoes are expected to be ripe, would be great to have on a calendar.
  • Online registration for CSA membership and other event payment.  They do online registration already (if the shares haven’t already sold out).  They currently use paypal, and the fees can really eat into the farm’s profits, so they don’t see a bigger effort into this area being useful.
  • Classifieds.  Kinda like the forums but for money or free.  Same model as craigslist, but aimed at a self selected group of people.  Again, moderation and ensuring appropriate use are challenges.
  • Using a ready-setup community building site like ning could help accelerate online community building.  I also pointed them to the great Transition Colorado Ning site, so they could see what a related organization was doing.
  • Use wufoo (or email) to let users submit newsletter content.  Just sharing what other businesses and professions other CSA members are in can help knit the community tighter.
  • Advertising on the site.  They weren’t too keen on this, but I think that the correct type of advertising would be useful.  Again, possibly too high effort to be possible.
  • List of links to local resources.  They are already doing this, but should make it easier for people to request addition.
  • Write a blog.  This is a higher input version of the posterous suggestion, but I think it would be fascinating.

Cure Organic Farm is a niche producer of vegetables, with a fiercely loyal CSA membership (shares almost always sell out within days of being open to the public) and proximity to Boulder, so their toolset will necessarily differ from another organization (imagine a farm just starting off, further out, with less reputation).  Hopefully some of these ideas and tools will be helpful to others thinking about strengthening offline community using online resources.

[tags]community supported agriculture, online tools, offline community, pig roast[/tags]

Wed, 02 Dec 09

December 2009 BDNT writeup

Posted in GIS, Jobs, Mobile Technology, New Tech Meetup, Social Media, Technology and Society, Web Applications at 12:01 pm by moore

I went to the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup last night, and as always, had a good time.  I ran into Brett Borders, and had a good discussion with him about why BDNT is worth going to.  I only go every couple of quarters, but I always learn something, and meet some interesting people (last night, including Marty Frary), and get jazzed about technology again.  This particular episode was packed–standing room only.  In addition, in the spirit of the season, there was a food drive, which was a nice touch, and a giveaway.  One additional change was that the twitter stream was off during presentations, though available during the q&a period (here’s a twitterstream horror story from the presenter’s point of view).

Brad Bernthal gave an overview of Silicon Flatirons (and asked for $ support).  This is a center focused on tech, law and entrepeneurship, which puts on a number of programs supporting the Boulder tech scene (I attended and reviewed one a while back: IP Crash Course for Entrepeneurs).  Which raises the question–where is the CU CS department?  Why is the Law school hosting BDNT and other users’ groups?  The CS department does host Colloquia (I attend about one a year), but I don’t think those compare to BDNT, et al.

After Brad, we moved on to jobs and events.  I was glad to see a number of jobs pop up.  Over the last year, at BDNT there were always some developer jobs available, but this time there was also a marketing job.  Hope it’s a sign that the Boulder tech job market is thawing (for folks other than developers).  There were 8 job announcements, though one of them was equity only.  About half of the presenting companies said they were looking to hire as well.  As far as events, KGNU is having a fundraiser called ‘Beers With Brad’.  Ignite Boulder 7 is only a week away (here’s an interesting post on how to organize Ignites).

On to presentations…

  • The Blog Frog presented on their platform to turn blogs into communities.  This is an interesting space–you can see competitors in Ning, MyBlogLog and Google Friend Connect, though they all approach the issue from a different angle.  The Blog Frog is aimed at automating community creation, and have focused on mommy bloggers (as a large, valuable group).  We did not get a demo from them, and I haven’t signed up for their service for any of my blogs, but they definitely have a cool value proposition–helping niche content providers build their communities and reach advertisers and interested people.  You can see a presentation from them 7 months ago; it sounds like their business model has evolved significantly.
  • The Unreasonable Institute presented next.  They bill themselves as ‘Techstars for social entrepeneurs’, but they have a few differences.  Instead of picking applicants and providing them money, they want applicants to fundraise to provide a fee and idea validation.  After applicants are selected, they do get funds throughout the 10 week program, as well as mentoring, chance to pitch, etc, etc. The presentor said that the applications already received were split equally between the for-profit, non-profit and hybrid models.  So, the funding pitches would include VCs/angels as well as foundations–an interesting twist and a great way to increase connections between those communities.  They are accepting applications for the 2010 summer until Dec 15th.
  • Letitia Pleis, from Metro State College of Denver, gave a great talk on the tax implications of equity as payment.  She covered three scenarios.  Unrestricted (‘here’s 10% of the company, please write software!’) which is taxed as income at the time of the grant and also implies a great deal of trust in the payee.  Restricted (‘here’s 10% of the company, it vests in 3 years’) which is taxed as income at the time the grant is vested, possibly leading to a massive increase in taxes due, unless you perform an section 83(b) election within 30 days of the grant (one person spoke up and said they’d be bitten by this).  Unrestricted profits interest gives the grantee claim on a percentage of future profits.  She was at the end of her time, so we didn’t hear as much about this option as I would have liked.
  • Next up was a gadget review.  I’m not a gadget head, so I didn’t take notes on this, but they did give away a Sonos system.  Well, the winner earned it by knowing what the original cost of a Apple I system was ($666.66).
  • Public Earth presented next.  They are a wiki of places; the presentor said just like Netflix lets you collect your favorite movies, Public Earth will let you collect your favorite places.  (And they hope to have scale like wikipedia–he said that they plan to move beyond the ‘where’s the nearest restaurant’ level.  I looked for ‘slot canyons’ in UT, for example, and they had some.  I think they need to work on their linking, because I couldn’t get a link for my query to post.  But, on the upside, they don’t support IE6!)  They have 5M points in their database already, and just went live.  The wiki aspect is very interesting to me; I wonder whether they’ll get a critical mass of users to do spam policing.  It’s an interesting contrast to Google My Maps–PE has a slicker interface and more sharing features.
  • Last was RTP, with their sick iphone app, Real Ski.  This is an augmented reality application that helps you locate points of interest (bathroom, particular runs) when you’re out skiing.  They obviously couldn’t demo it at BDNT, but they had a video demo, and it looked killer.  It should be on the App Store soon–5 area maps free, 99 cents for every other ski area map.  They also asked for advice from the community about selling a B2C app; RTP apparently is a B2B company.  Pricing, scale, and accuracy were mentioned, but nothing really profound.  This question might be a better asked on twitter, or in some forum that allows more interaction.  (I searched, and was interested to see that no one had posted advice for them on twitter.)

The only complaint I had with this BDNT was that there were no demos (apart from the gadgets).  Several pseudo-demos (aka powerpoint slides/videos), and interesting and relevant presentations, but I think that live demos really add a lot and are in the spirit of the meetup.

Wed, 11 Nov 09

Anyone you know care about society?

Posted in Business, Social Media, Technology and Society at 10:12 am by moore

As a society and democracy, we don’t need newspapers, but we do need journalism.  Please send Clay’s article to anyone who reads or writes for newspapers.  We all need to start thinking about how to preserve journalism through the internet revolution instead of hiding from it.  Oh, and this too: most of a local newspaper is not journalism.

Thanks to Clay Shirky for a cogent, scary, realistic analysis of this issue.  Via Barry Ritholtz.

PS: I hope the universities know that the internet is coming for them too.

Tue, 10 Nov 09

Dan Pink discussed the sad state of employee incentives at TED

Posted in Presentations, Technology and Society, Video at 9:00 am by moore

Fantastic video from Dan Pink about motivation in the workplace.  He examines the science of motivation, and knocks business for not adapting new methods of encouragement for the new, right brain type problems that face us.

This quote pretty much summarizes the talk:

There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse,  is that too many organizations are making their decisions,  their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science.

You can see a transcript of the talk by clicking on the ‘Transcript’ link on the right hand side of the video.  It’s actually pretty cool–clicking on a sentence and it updates the video to that part.  It’s not linkable, though–FAIL.

A few takeaways:

  • If/then rewards work well for simple tasks…they concentrate the mind and narrow your focus.
  • From a study by the FRB of Boston, “once [a] task called for ‘even rudimentary cognitive skill’ a larger reward ‘led to poorer performance’”
  • Management is not a tree, it’s a television set.  We invented it.
  • Atlassian used to give their engineers autonomy at least a few times a year to choose what they work on (FedEx Days), and now gives workers control over 20% of their time.  (Joel has something to say about Atlassian too.)
  • Autonomy, mastery, purpose are what people are looking for (once money is taken care of)
  • Results only work environment–people can work when they want, as long as they get their work done.  Here’s a stub wikipedia article about ROWE.
  • Encarta vs Wikipedia–who won?  The encyclopedia that leveraged people’s desires to work, not the one that paid them.

Now, my thoughts.

  • First, watch the whole video.  It’s only 18 minutes and is well worth your time if you are an employer or an employee (which covers most of us, I think).
  • ROWE reminds me a lot of college, especially higher level classes.  No one cares about when you do the work and I don’t remember being required to be at classes, but the results (passing a test, turning in a paper) were very important.
  • He only talks about the autonomy component of the new ‘motivation trilogy’ (autonomy, mastery, purpose).  I wish he’d chosen to talk about ‘purpose’ because to me that is the hardest bit–someone needs to do grungy jobs.  I guess granting workers autonomy is pretty revolutionary too.
  • “once money is taken care of” is a huge elephant in the room that he again does not address.  When the work is high value add, it makes sense to take money off the table (software developers are very lucky in this respect).  But what about a worker at Target, for example?  A Target store can’t afford to pay someone enough to take the money issue off the table, but can probably benefit from the ‘motivation trilogy’
  • The whole Encarta vs Wikipedia example that he gives is great, but he ignores the fact that Wikipedia has very few paid employees and that Wikipedia only won because of volunteer labor.  It’s not a solution that scales across a society.

Overall, in general, a thought provoking talk (expect nothing less from TED).  I would say that he is describing the future of work as consulting.  You are paid for what you know, the problems are fuzzy, answers are unexpected and at times unclear, and results arrived at matter far more than hours put in.

Is the future of work consulting?  If so, the business world is about to be upended, because, to borrow Dan’s phrase, “the operating system of business” isn’t designed to handle a workforce of consultants.  Heck, society isn’t either.

[tags]work, employment, gtd[/tags]

Sat, 07 Nov 09

StackOverflow and Community

Posted in Business, Social Media, Technology and Society, Useful Tools at 11:05 am by moore

“Hey, have you heard?  StackExchange is the new faq/forum.  It’s the cat’s pajamas, with SEO friendly urls, lots of web 2.0 features (including a realtime wysiwyg editor) and social goodness baked in.” — Dan, trying on his hipster hat

If you’re a programmer, and you use the google to look for answers to your programming questions, you’ve probably seen stackoverflow.com pop up in the search results.  This site, started as a collaboration between Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood last year, is a better way to do question and answer sites, aka FAQs.  It opens the FAQ asking and answering process to anyone with a browser, has anti spam features, some community aspects (voting, editing answers, reputation, commenting, user accounts), and great urls.  And, incidentally, a great support staff–I emailed them a question about my account and they responded is less than 24 hours.

They’ve done a good job of generalizing the platform, and now you can create your very own.  There are a wide variety of stack sites: real estate, your pressing Yoda needs, small business, space exploration.  Here’s a list.  I love the fact they are charging for this software–$129/month for a 1M pageviews is not very much for software that lets you build your community and lets your community share knowledge.

And that’s the key.  Like most other social software, what you get out of a stack site is highly correlated to what you put into it.  If, like the folks at Redmonk, you create a stack site about a topic on which you have expertise and publicize it where you know interested people will hear about it and spend time answering questions on it, I imagine you have a good chance to build a community around it. And once you get to a certain threshold, it will take on a life of its own.  But you need to provide that activation energy–it’s an organizational commitment.
If, on the other hand, you create a stack site and don’t have a community which can get excited about it, or don’t do a good job reaching out to them, you end up with an abandoned stack site (worse than an abandoned blog, imho).  I’m hoping that Teaching Ninja won’t be in this state for long, but right now there’s only 3 questions and no answers there.

The proliferation of social software infrastructure sites (I’m looking at you, ning) has made it easier than ever to create the foundations for communities online.  But, you need to have people for community software to have any value!  Because it is so easy, getting others involved is not a case of ‘if you build it they will come’ (if it ever was).  There are too many competing sites for other’s time.  Software can make it easier and easier to build the infrastructure around community, but it’s the invisible structures (bonds between you and your users, and between them) that will actually create ongoing value.

If you’re looking for an outward facing FAQ site and willing to invest the time in it, a stack site seems to be one of the best software platforms for building that right now.  (I have some qualms about who owns the data, but it seems like they are planning export functionality.)  Just don’t believe the hype: “The Stack Exchange technology is so compelling, sites can take off right away.”  No software can make a social site ‘take off right away’.

[tags]no silver bullet for community,ask yoda,stackoverflow,community[/tags]

Sat, 03 Oct 09

Boco: Colorado’s SXSW?

Posted in Business, Conferences, Social Media, Technology and Society at 6:32 pm by moore

I spent yesterday at boco.me, a one day, one track conference in Boulder Colorado. The focus was on three different areas: food, tech, and music.  Apparently, South by Southwest (SXSW) has a similar multidimensional focus.

I was looking forward to meeting people from different spheres with different interests, and it certainly delivered that. Most attendees I talked to were tech people, however. Many thanks to Andrew Hyde and company for organizing this. I hope it’s the first of many.

Before signing up and actually before the conference, I did not have a very good idea of how much I was getting.  It was actually quite affordable: $99. For this modest price, attendees received:

  • entry to a concert: value $15
  • $30 worth of dinner at one of Boulder’s many fine restaurants
  • happy hour with beer and wine and apps
  • three sessions with about six speakers per session
  • three breakout sessions
  • a free T-shirt
  • a thank you note from Andrew(!)

Boco was, to put it mildly, a hell of a deal.

The conference had, as first year conferences tend to, a few flaws. The things I would change were:

  • allow users to ask questions of the speakers
  • have the breakout sessions be a bit more organized–they felt very ad hoc.

What follows are my notes from yesterday.  Here’s what the Daily Camera had to say.

First up was Rachel Weidinger (her slides are here). She mentioned the “big here and long now” and talked about tools that make our here bigger–”handheld awesome detectors”.  The tool that excited me the most was the Good Guide. This site offers what I’ve been looking for for a long time, which is detailed information on products, so that price and marketing are not the sole guides when you purchase something off the cuff. This guide has an API so that third-party developers can access their data. Oh, and Rachel is also looking for someone to build snake detecting goggles.

Next, Mark Menagh spoke on the differences between eating organic and eating locally.  I paraphrase, but he said that folks who eat organics are pessimists who want rules to prevent bad things from happening to their food and locavores are optimists.  He also emphasized that this November, Boulder voters are going to be asked to extend the Open Space sales tax ( till 2034! [pdf]) and that while we do that, voters should let the county commissioners know how they feel about GMO crops on open space land.

Then, Justin Perkins, from Olomomo Nut Company discussed some of the similarities he had noticed between building a band fanbase, as he did in the 1990s, and building one for a local food company, as he is doing now.  I can tell you from experience that his nut products are quite good.  He talked about engaging users in the product so that they feel it’s part of their story. Takeaway quote: entrepreneurs “have to be consistent and persistent as hell”.

Cindy O’Keeffe spoke about her experience fighting the GMO beets on Boulder County Open Space land.  I had heard about this issue before (Mark also discussed it), but she gave a good overview of the issues, and she had a compelling story about her personal journey from detached global environmentalist to local leader opposing the GMO planting.

Rick Levine, an author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (read it if you haven’t!) and now chocolatier, gave an overview of the Cluetrain ideas, and then talked about his new venture into high end chocolates, including some of the physics of chocolate.  Seth Ellis, his company, have shiny candy bar wrappers that he claimed were home compostable.  When talking about the Cluetrain and his experiences in technology, he offered up the observation that while he had been really interested in technology, his really great moments were talking to people.

The Autumn Film, a two person Boulder band, talked a bit about their experiences in music creation at this time.  Takeaway: music used to be “work hard, get lucky, hit it big”, but the industry changes have now just made it “work hard, hit it big, work harder”.  You can check out some of their music for free (well, you have to give them some of your personal information). Then, one member of the band performed.

I enjoyed the first breakout in which five of us gathered outside and discussed a wide variety of topics.  It was great to have a framework for getting to know the other conference participants.

Amber Case led off the second session by talking about cyborg anthropology–basically the idea that humans extend themselves via their tools, and that the malleability of current tools (think iphone) far exceeds the malleability of previous tools (think hammer).  Several of the other attendees found her ideas fascinating, but I wasn’t as astonished.  I guess I have thought about this topic, though certainly not with the rigor that Amber has.  (reading Snow Crash is no thesis.)  She did have some neat pointers to other work going on in this field: human-blender ‘communication’ and hug storage. Humorously, her email sig reads “Sent from my external proesthetic device“

Rich Grote and Dave Angulo then talked about what makes an online influencer–relevance, audience, access and one other thing I forgot to write down.  They are working on a company, which I was unable to find a link to, to leverage online influencers for marketing purposes.  It reminded me a bit of what Lijit presented on in June at the BDNT.  They also talked a bit about Dunbar’s number, which is the “theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”.

Scott Andreas discussed his experiences building social software for non profits.  The takeaway for me was that when you have a cohesive group and you provide them social software, it can enrich the community.  The most important thing is that the community (and their norms) exists and is enforced outside of the software.  He also talked about Sunlight Labs, an open data source about the US government. Also, Andrew Hyde mentioned at this time the idea of floating your revenue through Kiva.  I certainly am not earning a lot of interest on my business savings right now, and using the funds to do microloans could be a great social good.  I would be a bit concerned about loan losses, though (98% loan repayment is a bit worrisome).

Sean Porter of Gigbot gave a breakdown of the live music industry ecosystem.  There’s a lot of middlemen between the fan and the band when it comes to concerts–ticketing agencies, promoters, management.  He started down the path of explaining how much of the ticket price you and I pay each of these folks get, but didn’t go all the way; if he had, I think his presentation would have been much stronger.

Ingrid Alongi talked about how she learned about work life balance, and techniques for maintaining it.  Good ideas in there–having a status meeting with coworkers while on a bike ride was probably my favorite, though.  Incidentally, she was laid off on Monday and had found a new job by the time she talked on Friday

Grant Blakeman and Reid Phillips (the latter being a member of The Autumn Film) talked about the new music business models.  Takeaway quote: “things always change”.  Sounds like Abe Lincoln. They are building tools that allow musicians to use some new media to market and connect with their fans. I enjoyed their insistence on musicians retaining control of their work, and using new technology to facilitate that.  It reminded me of this great article by Joel Spolsky where he talks about how your business should never outsource core business functions.  Fan interaction seems a pretty core part of the band business, so I doubt it should be outsourced.

Ari Newman of Filtrbox talked about the realtime web: how we’ve reached a technology tipping point and that Twitter and its open API pushed the real time web into the forefront, but that it is larger than the Twitterstream.  Ari also mentioned how the real time web actually isn’t all that real time–even if the technology delivers news to your computer in half a second, if it is not in front of you, it doesn’t matter.  Maybe he should collaborate with Amber on some goggles that would push realtime news to you all the time :) .  He had real neat slide effects, too.  I chatted with him a bit and it was great to hear stories of his old sysadmin days–Linux on a Mac 8500!

The second breakout session was over lunch.  Was really interesting to talk with Ryan and Angie of Location 3, a Denver interactive agency, as well as Andrew Hyde, Ef, Rahoul(sp?) and Dan Kohler; wide ranging discussion and not too focused.

The third set of sessions was more informal.  Half of the speakers did not follow their topics on the program…

First, Emily Olson, from Foodzie, discussed how she had turned her passion (food) into a job (Foodzie, among others).  Her main points: pay attention to what you do in your free time–that’s an indication of your passion; find a mentor; be willing to work for free, especially at first; don’t try to find the one true vocation.

Dan Kohler, of Renegade Kitchen, discussed how to not have your blog/website suck.  He had 3 people up on stage read 3 different posts, and critiqued them.  Takeaway–”put your voice into” your blog.  I have a pretty vanilla voice on this blog, but part of that is due to professional concerns; however, Dan made the point that really, if you do drive some people off with the tone of your blog, the people you have left will be fiercer fans.

There was a panel on where the local music scene was heading, moderated by Sharon Glassman, a local bluegrass musician, and featuring Jason Bradley and Ira Leibtag.  I stepped out during this panel, but I do remember Jason Bradly discussing how “lots of people live in a box” in reference to his bringing an accordion to a bluegrass jam (and the reaction of the other players).

Brad Feld discussed the startup visa movement.  The idea is anyone who wants to move to the United States and start a company would get a 2 year visa; it would be automatically renewable for achieving certain goals (raising more funding, employing a certain number of people).  The founder would have to show proof of funding.  More information here.  I like anything that gets more smart folks to move to the USA.

Elana Amsterdam spoke on her experience turning a blog she wrote into a recipe book, and stated that her experience showed how you could really build a full fledged business out of a blog, using your passion and the blog as a platform to publish.  She also recommended “Write the Perfect Book Proposal” by Jeff Herman.  Updated 10/4: I asked a friend in the book publishing business about this book and she said: “Yikes. Any book that says “it’s easier to get published than you think” makes me want to hurt myself. Proposals aren’t about capturing a publisher’s attention. They’re about showing your expertise, your marketability, and just plain having an idea that fits within what a company actually publishes.”  For what that’s worth…  I think that she’s absolutely correct, for certain kinds of blogs.  I know that Eric Sink did the same thing with “Eric Sink on the Business of Software”, a fine book that has a collection of blog posts at its core.

Finally, Lilly Allison, a personal chef, spoke about eating seasonally and consciously.  She is using the web to extend her reach (and her brand!) as a personal chef–if you sign up, she’ll send you meal weekly plans with in season menus.  I signed up and will let you know how it goes—I do have lots of food from my CSA (here’s a list of Colorado CSAs).

There was a third breakout session, but I had to run some errands, so I missed it.

Then, it was happy hour time.  Off to the Boulder Digital Works, above Brasserie 1010.  It’s a beautiful space in downtown Boulder, and I talked with some of the incoming students who are doing the first 60 week advertising certificate.  In addition I had conversations on a variety of topics from the success of boco to how to scale a custom chocolate business to whether presenting at BDNT helped business (answer, indirectly, yes) to what to do with consulting requests that interfere with your core business (with the Occipital folks)

At the end of happy hour, we gathered into groups of four.  I had dinner with with Scott Andreas, Dan Kohler, and Jen Myronuk; a fine meal at Centro http://www.centrolatinkitchen.com/ and then to a concert at the Boulder Theater: Paper Bird.

All in all, a fantastic conference.  It was eclectic and not as focused as other conferences I’ve been to, but for that reason alone has value.  I get bored if I only educate myself in one dimension.  Thanks again to the boco team, and here’s hoping that next year is as good, if not better.

Thu, 03 Sep 09

Samasource: Outsourcing as social enterprise

Posted in Business, Jobs, Technology and Society at 3:07 pm by moore

One of my clients (Twomile Heavy Industries) is building a large website.  He is involved in the non profit technology world (NTEN, CTNC, etc), and ran across Samasource, which is a social enterprise to bring outsourcing work into the developing world.  And not just Bangalore–they have work centers in refugee camps. They will be providing some testing services for this project.

Samasource offers a wide variety of services, all via screened partners.  I seem them as a cross between Odesk (which an interviewee touchs on here), Elance (which I joined, mostly to see what kind of jobs are available) and Kiva (which I learned about via Andrew Leonard).  See Samasource’s take on comparisons to Odesk and Elance in their FAQ.

What a great idea!  Very ‘the world is flat’.  This type of social enterprise overcomes my main objection to Kiva, because Samasource could provide a cost savings to their clients; compare that to Kiva, which provides no monetary return to lenders.

Anyhow, I’ll try to update when I’ve actually engaged with the folks that Samasource led us to, but it was such a cool business model I had to give them a shout out.

[tags]social enterprise, outsourcing, developing world[/tags]

Wed, 01 Jul 09

Solix website launch

Posted in Technology, Technology and Society, Web Applications at 8:20 am by moore

I was able to help launch a revamped website on Monday.  Solix Biofuels is an algal oil producer moving from R&D into production. I’m not really a biology person, but I did enjoy reading about their technology.  To my layperson’s eye, algal energy sources seem much more sustainable than crop fuel sources.

It’s been a while since I’ve been the prime mover behind a deployment–there’s always a bit of nail biting when you finally reveal work to the world–but this one was fairly smooth.

[tags]solix,site launch, algal energy, oilgae[/tags]

Fri, 12 Jun 09

GWT encryption options

Posted in GWT, Technology and Society at 10:08 am by moore

I was looking for an encryption package for GWT.  A client had some mildly private information that they wanted to encrypt in transmission.  Now, of course, this is ultimately futile.  Anyone who wants to get at this information can, because we send the source code (however obfuscated) that decrypts the information to the client.  To borrow Corey Doctorow’s words, the attacker is also the recipient.  But, sometimes just making getting the information inconvenient is good enough.

I looked at a couple of encryption options.  There’s are a couple of nice javascript libraries that do encryption: Gibberish-AES and javascript.crypto.library, but they hav no GWT hooks (and javascript.crypto.library is released under the AGPL which has some unclear legal ramifications).

However, there is a project from about two years ago that does Triple DES encryption and is written in pure GWT.  It’s even called gwt-crypto.  Unfortunately, it hasn’t been maintained recently.  I was able to download the files, apply a fix (for issue #1) and move some files around in such a way that it works.

Here’s how you use it:

on the server:
TripleDesCipher cipher = new TripleDesCipher();
cipher.setKey(Constants.GWT_DES_KEY);
try {
enc = cipher.encrypt(String.valueOf(value));
} catch (DataLengthException e1) {
e1.printStackTrace();
} catch (IllegalStateException e1) {
e1.printStackTrace();
} catch (InvalidCipherTextException e1) {
e1.printStackTrace();
}

On the client, make sure you inherit the module:
<inherits name='com.googlecode.gwt.crypto.Crypto'/>
Then:

TripleDesCipher cipher = new TripleDesCipher();
cipher.setKey(Constants.GWT_DES_KEY);
String dec ="";
try {
dec = cipher.decrypt(enc);
} catch (DataLengthException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (IllegalStateException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (InvalidCipherTextException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}

I just use a constant DES key, which is not all that secure.  I’m sure you could do something more secure like hashing the request time, filename and some other secret key, but you need to make sure that both the server and the client agree on the key, otherwise you’ll not be able to decrypt the info.

Update 6/13: I got permission from the project owner to update the google project, so I’ve done that.  You can download the new gwt-crypto jar there.

The modified gwt-crypto jar file is here.  I’m hoping the administrator will let me at least check in the changes I’ve made so that it works on GWT 1.5.3 (can’t speak for GWT 1.6).

[tags]gwt,tripledes encryption,hiding in plain sight[/tags]

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