How cool is that?

After Word and other bloated “writing” software, WriteRoom was a refreshing (and more productive) change. I’ve used in for 5 minutes and I have decided to just use this when I write.
It’s free (only for the Mac) and lets you focus on the writing.

[via SvN]

Slow news day…still testing Xacktunes.

[via Yay Hooray]

I couldn’t resist…I added the “man-made” part.

Incredible pics.

[via reddit]

I just read Kathy Sierra’s post on Ignore the competition and it got me thinking that most of our potential competitors are either in beta (and thus inaccessible) or are still going to Stanford so we couldn’t “copy” features.

On reflection, we have been more innovative and more forward thinking on our feature selection and what we want to do with Xacktunes and Xackmail due to the “forced” product hibernation.

Thank you for all you (non) competitors and to Kathy.  I hope most entrepreneurs try to think this way.  It has taken me almost 10 years to do so

Hmmm…Engadget thinks so.

We need to get ready and upate our mockup (already)!

Tesla all electric sports car goes from 0 to 60mph in 4 seconds and drives for one penny per mile!

Some pics… 

If you use Outlook and had always wished for a simple remote backup for it, here’s your chance to get first dibs on such a product.  Become a beta tester here.

That’s a serious inquiry.

We developed Xacktunes on a 14-inch iBook G3 (!) and we want to save our money so we need to borrow someone’s Intel-based Mac for one month.
In return, you get access to Xacktunes (and our other WIP products) and we will give you a free one year subscription to Xacktunes.

If you want in, send an email to intelmac at xackup dot org.

We have a Xacktunes survey.  Help us bring you a first-class product.

We are brewing a lot of improvements with our work from xacktunes and we’re in near completion from being a prototype to beta. Go signup if you wanna be the first one to get notified from xacktunes.

We finally got our xacktunes.com domain and we can discuss more of what we are doing.

In a nutshell, we are building a playlist-based iTunes backup.  Why playlilsts?

One of things we wanted to build with all our backup apps was to make it more “integrated” with the actual app/data it is backing up so that backing up is not a “separate” activity.  Let’s face it, a big reason (other than my HD won’t crash) that people don’t backup is that they are just too lazy.

People know they should backup but they just don’t.

By integrating the backup with the actual application and not changing user behavior, the chances that the backup will actually be useful and that people will actually use it increases by a lot.
Xacktunes will initially be Mac-based and will be competing indirectly with .mac and backjack and directly with manual backups to CDs and DVDs.

Will it even?

The debate on net neutrality has been raging now for some time and most broadband providers claim that giving them the ability to “charge” for more expensive data packets like voip or digital tv or something is a good thing b/c of better quality, etc., etc.

What happens to online backup providers like us?  If this actually happens, will the telcos/broadband providers force an extortion tax (pay up…if not, we will relegate your packets useless!) upon us?

How will (not having) net neutrality affect our service levels with customers?  Will we have to build in a more fault tolerant file transfer mechanism?  Thoughts?

Here’s a video paid by some net neutrality opponent: InternetoftheFuture

I’m posting this for two reasons:

Carson of carson systems just revealed the new app he has been working on and “laid bare” on one of his blogs. I find that blogging about the app you are building from start to finish does two things: 1) it creates a buzz when you actually launch 2) you share your ‘work in progess’ with the community and get instant feedback on things you want. What a cool way to spread word of mouth!  Why didn’t we think of that?!

Secondly, his actual service (which matches newsletter publishers with advertisers) is so very cool and could be super effective to actually getting real customers.  Like adwords, the point here is not about quantity but quality of each potential customer you want to reach.

Everyone has been talking about targeted advertising using personalized this and personalized that and I can’t believe that no one has actually done this because next to knowing everything about your potential customer (and what he uses to brush his teeth), this comes pretty close to “personalized” advertisting.

So simple and effective!  Congrats to Ryan and Gillian

We’ve got some exciting projects coming up, and we’re very excited for their release.

Check back regularly for updates.

AJ has posted a fund-raising link for our in-house geek here.

Contribute to the fund!

This post is a culmination of a lively discussion on online storage/backup by Fred Wilson, Nik of Omindrive and Techcrunch all written around Dec/Jan 2006.
I agree with Nik that web-based email vs. online storage vs. online backup are all very different economically because of how people use it. I disagree with Mike that 500GB for $20/year is feasible (at least not this year )

Here’s my 2 centavos:

1. Web-based email can be free because it is an “app” that is accessed often and with proper technology, CTR will be high on text ads. Model: high reads/writes, small storage. Storage is consumed “a little bit at a time,” not all at once.

2. Online storage is effectively a big “Internet-based” hard drive. Just like your local hard drive, there will be many reads/writes so bandwidth costs come into play. Storage costs will only come into play if users decide to use online storage as their online backup. If not, a free model is feasible as it becomes a place where “always needed” files are stored for easy online access (think mobile workers). Model: “not as” high reads/writes (but bigger chunks of data), “slightly higher” storage. A free model is possible here with effective ads (unless used as a backup mechanism).
3. Why sustainable online backup will never be free…

Note - I’m not referring to small storage like 2GB, etc. This could be sustainable in the long run by getting users to receive email newsletters or even their storage stats via email with advertising on them. Mozy I think is doing this (at least their free version). Don’t know, I use a Mac

True sustainable online backup has very different uses from email and online storage.

• Initial consumption of storage is high. You don’t start off with 5GB of stuff and then move to 250GB. It’s usually the opposite.
• Bandwidth usage is low (except initial backup and when you restore all).
• The files are rarely accessed via the web so a sustainable ad model is out the window. Even if it where accessed, how many times will you access it to make this a free solution?
• It’s possible that non-multimedia backups could be free or cheaper b/c of the compression applied to word files, text files, etc. But applying compression to mp3, jpeg is very very hard, if at all. Maybe the key is to come up with amazing compression technologies.
• Most people’s “big” use of disk space consists of multimedia files (music, videos, photos), not word docs or even email. My music files alone take up something like 50% of my hard disk space!

Anyways, hope you got something out of my post.

Another note - I don’t know Nik and we could be competitors in the future. I just wanted to add (any value) to the discussion b/c I think online backup is important.

Cheers!

Technically speaking, http is an “application” layer in the OSI model. The problem with http is that you can only use ASCII to transfer data (when using XML-based protocols like SOAP, REST) so binary data essentially needs to get encoded to what is known as base64, which essentially converts binary data to ASCII data.

Unfortunately, in the process, the original data gets bloated to something like 135%, not very cool when you are charged for bandwidth or you want to speed uploading, which is typically asymmetrical (download is generally “fatter”).

While I’m a big fan of Amazon S3 web service for creating a scalable grid storage and bandwidth system, their protocols only support http (SOAP, REST) and since you have to pay for bandwidth separately, this base64 encoding adds up.

In any event, we have created our own “transport application” protocol that does not have to utilize base64 encoding, which lowers bandwidth usages, speeds up downloads + uploads and overall makes things more efficient.

Any thoughts from the community?

I don’t want to sound callous but aren’t the 7 rules common sense (common sense ain’t so common?). I would actually say that 4 rules is all you need. Let me break it down…

1. Instant value: if you don’t offer something that doesn’t solve a pain point, why build it (unless for fun and for personal consumption)?
2. Viral adoption: if you really solve a pain point above, word-of-mouth follows. It’s crossing the chasm and going big beyond your niche is the challenge.
3. Minimum IT footprint: does anyone have any working Siebel install? Yup, a no-brainer.
4. Simple intuitive UI: I think rules 5 to 7 apply to this rule as well. I mean if you have to configure say a mobile phone for a location presence app, then what’s the point? The UI should automatically do it for you (i.e., it’s simple and intuitive).
5. Personalized user experience: see 4
6. Easy configuration based on app: see 4
7. Context aware: see 4

I will rephrase DD’s Aesop’s fable:

if i >= 4 {

$foo != bar

} else   {
$foo = bar!

}

I have a web 2.0 idea and I’m looking for a rockstar web 2.0 programmer (preferably RoR), mysql, LAMP.

I will provide the cash and idea and give out x percent of the company.  Ping me at terpua at xackup dot org if interested.