Read the original story here: Predator-Inspired Ammo Backpack Cobbled Together By Soldiers In Afghanistan (shared from Google reader).
Really awesome video showing off techniques for inserting artificial objects in to photographs of real places. Crazy stuff!
I’ve had the pleasure of watching Brett go through several iterations on his idea and I he’s going to do great with Hall.com.
Despite the “big” players in the space like Jive (my old employer), Yammer, and Salesforce, there is still plenty of room for innovation and disruption in group collaboration, including in the enterprise.
It doesn’t hurt that his investors (Founder’s Collective and PivotNorth) are a great bunch. Good luck Brett!
Read the original story here: HALL.com Raises $580K From Founder’s Collective And Others To Transform Realtime Collaboration (shared from Google reader).
I’ve seen Chronon and it’s really cool technology. Hoping to try it out on BrowserMob soon!
Read the original story here: Chronon 2.0 Offers Post Execution Logging (shared from Google reader).
Pat Meenan continues to offer up simple and practical advice for anyone looking to build a professional, high performing website.
Here he provides a fantastic example of how a simple thing like Twitter being offline can have disastrous effects on your own website.
Read the original story here: frontend SPOF survey (shared from Google reader).
Really glad to see that people are still trying to figure out how to effectively personalize news.
A few years back I worked on a startup/side project called mioNews. It never quite got full lift off but the intent was to combine your social graph, your reading habits, and your reason feedback (like/dislike) and be able to deliver the top X stories you should read today.
I still think this is a huge opportunity and might eventually try to tackle it again (if someone else doesn’t nail it first).
Read the original story here: WSJ Gets Personal With Gravity (shared from Google reader).
I just read a really interesting story about a tribesman from Papua New Guinea, whose tribe just recently discovered that feathers make arrows fly better, re-connecting with an old friend over Facebook. The author asks: Should we mourn the passing of a phase in our history when bands of human minds still lived in isolation, or rejoice that we are finally all on the same page? My answer: we should rejoice that we’re all able to connect, as I truly do believe that a more connected world is a less dangerous world (ex: it’s unlikely we’ll ever see WWIII due to our global economy). But we should also mourn the fact that Facebook is the tool they’re using, as it tends to appeal to the lowest common denominator. My personal contribution to the world is to try to avoid Facebook as much as possible these days!
My friend Arin (a fellow entrepreneur) and I were talking the other day and as we were discussing Steve Jobs’ death and trying to understand why it was affecting us so much more than a regular iPhone/iPad/iPod/Mac owner, he said something that really struck a chord with me:
Steve Jobs is like Michael Jordan or Magic Johnson or any other mega super star: he made those in his field want strive to be better.
I think that’s exactly the right analogy. While a lot of people were sad at Steve’s passing, most were sad because a guy who built great products died. But for people in the startup world, like Arin and me, Steve was one of the few people in software who encouraged everyone else to be better.
So just as Michael Jordan encouraged generations of people to improve their game (regardless of whether they were high school players, college level, or even “regular” super stars in the NBA), Steve Jobs inspired everyone from Marc Benioff (a “regular” super star) to aspiring entrepreneurs to folks like me who are somewhere in between (successful startup career, but probably more like college level or maybe Earl Boykins-level).
But regardless of your level, if you were in the software startup world, Steve Jobs likely encouraged you to raise your game. Without him, that world has a lost a legend.
Good to see Google focussing and saying “no” to distractions. This is something Apple has been excellent at in the last decade and something I try to apply to my own career as much as possible.
Read the original story here: Google Axes More Services: Jaiku, Buzz, Code Search & More (shared from Google reader).
