It just occured to me how FRAGMENTED we’re becoming in this day and age. Not more than 5 years ago, the “usual” means of a backup was to burn dvds or maybe an external hard drive.

As storage gets cheaper and connectivity reaches everything, backups are quickly moving online. Not only that, but also document editing, music storage and even powerpoint presentations now get “stored” and dispersed in a myriad of different “cloud drives”. My documents used to sit in a Documents folder. Now they barely see each other, with backups finding homes on services such as dropbox and sugarsync, documents spread around google docs springpad, evernote and assorted writeboards, photos scattered between flickr, facebook and who knows where else. Not to mention youtube, slideshare, amazon s3, github, icloud…

My futile attempts to “keep everything together” simply doesn’t hold anymore, as the amount of data amassed goes well beyond what I can spare in my 2tb of hard drives and I frequently find myself stumbling upon files I only have “in the cloud” and simply forgot it was there. Will it be there tomorrow? What if I simply FORGET where it was? It feels exactly like having a house filled with “stuff” you probably don’t need and won’t ever use anyway – except in this case it’s a house with virtually unlimited storage space and in which the rooms aren’t even connected to each other.

So much effort into “letting go of stuff you don’t need” and look what we’ve become. Disperse, fragmented and virtual collectors of “stuff”.

Almost one month has passed since I arrived in Chile, and as Startup Chile Round 2 approaches, more and more people send me emails asking the same thing: so, how do you like Chile?

The Country

Being a Brazilian, it’s quite ironic that all I know about Chile is that it does good wine. In fact, after talking with a few fellow brazilians, that does seem to be the “de facto brazilian knowledge” about Chile. Hell, I didn’t even know Easter Island belonged to Chile!

In a nutshell, Chile is divided in 15 territories/regions, each one with different weathers, economies and beauties. They comprise everything, from warm, tropical climates down to artic (yes, they have Penguins!).

Admitedly, the only thing I saw in Chile so far is a tiny part of the capital, Santiago. Which in itself is already fully packed of things to see and places to go.

Oh, and did I say the taxes are around 10% (versus ~40% in Brazil)?

On Santiago

The capital of Chile is the cultural, economical and administrative center of the country. It’s a big city, with diverse neighborhoods and a combination of climate and charm that makes you wonder if you’re actually still in South America. Although, differently from european countries, things DO work after past 6pm (you can have dinner at midnight). In these first 3 weeks, I’ve been pretty much confined to Santiago Centro, with rare (walking) expeditions to nearby neighborhoods such as Providencia (which resembles some regions of São Paulo a lot) and Recoleta, a (seemingly) newer part of the city that kinda reminds me Barra da Tijuca (in Rio).

Santiago Centro looks much like the center of any big, rich city, with a LOT of restaurants, bars, cafés and office buildings and A HUGE LOT of people walking around. And when I say HUGE, I do mean it.

One point of caution that ANYONE must take in Santiago is with Taxis: taxi drivers seem to be known for cheating, and in the few times I had to take a cab, it kinda confirmed the theory (stories hang from “oh, I don’t know this region” to the more elaborate “I was so concentrated talking to you I forgot where you were going and decided to drive very, very far, you idiot”). The general advice is to avoid Taxis. The subway and bus services are excellent anyway, and if you’re into walking, big, wide sidewalks and paseos (pedestrian-only streets) will do the trick.

The People

So far, Chileans have been generally very receptive (both to me and to some fellow startuppers). Asking for informations is easy and people will even go out of their way to help you some times – as long as you speak (at least a bit of) spanish. Forget english – it won’t help you communicating with ANYONE down here (not even people in professional services, such as banks, seem to dig english very much). That said, their spanish is a lot more understandable (at least to my ears) than, say, a Catalan or Madrileño speaking.

One certain category of people that really, REALLY astonished me is the public workers. It might even sound odd to say this, but public workers DO WORK in Chile. It’s NORMAL to see an officer from a government bureau or any other public service pulling extra hours, and guess what – they’re not there to drink coffee and talk by the water cooler. That alone was enough to blow me away…

Extra props for the police – the Carabineros – present everywhere (it’s relatively common to find one in the streets), which kinda improves the general feeling of safety. According to some locals, the police in Chile is among the least corrupt in the entire South America – quite a relief if you come from Brazil, where it’s actually better to bump on a robber than getting approached by a police officer.

By the way, PROTESTING seems to be the national sport in Chile: there seem to be at least one public demonstration every single day, mostly complaining about education (which is not free), service fares (busses, etc) and environment-related stuff. It’s sometimes scary, but it clearly shows how politically involved people are (a far cry from Brazilian’s “I complain on Twitter so I’m good” attitude).

StartUp Chile!

I’m guessing most people will simply skip the 3 paragraphs and come straight to this topic, so I’ll start with a bit of story to bore you to death, fellow reader. I first came in contact with StartUp Chile (“SUP” for short) a few months ago, during the selection process for another incubation program, this one in San Francisco. Back then, the team from CORFO (the Chilean’s FINEP) was conducting its first experiment, with a handful of selected companies. They decided to open an official “first call” back in May, and amidst all the turmoil that is the day-to-day of a startup, I decided to give it a shot. Why not?

The selection process was oddly simple: fill in a few forms, upload a few documents, a video pitch and that’s it. In a bit more than one month, the 92 selected companies where announced and given two months to come over, present yourselves at CORFO and start rocking. It’s really as simple as it sounds. Of course there IS competition – the applicant/vacancy ration was around 3:1 in the first selection and will certainly be higher on the coming selections – but ultimately, what makes or breaks you is your own product, team and vision.

So what is SUP after all? In short, it’s simple: it’s a big open room with tables, desks and free wifi, a lot of people working their asses of to build their own thing and, once a month, a guy that collects spreadsheets to reimburse you from expenses you had in the period (of course they won’t reimburse ice cream or pizza, which is a shame, but they do cover all business-related costs, which include the most expensive aspect in a tech startup – hiring people!). Not to mention the easy access to legal support, public relations and a camera dude always trying to catch your english slips on video.

The most important aspect of the entire program is not the 40k USD they offer you to cover expenses (although that’s NICE and really helps a lot – if anyone from CORFO is reading this, please ignore that last phrase! We need more money, more money!) – the contacts with other entrepreneurs from all over the world, with different cultures, and of course, potential investors, customers and partners. That is most definitely invaluable.

The funniest thing on all this is that a few weeks ago, I was one of the guys looking down for the blogs of people that came to SUP in the beta team and saying “what the hell, these guys are getting paid to say all that about a f*ckin’ government thing!”. And now look at me. Wow.

So is it only roses, then?

Chile is not a perfect country. Hell, after living in Switzerland and concluding it’s no paradise either, I came to Chile with very low expectations. The things that will most definitely bother any Brazilian in Chile are prosaic: the food is weird (they put avocado and mayonnaise on EVERYTHING – yes, even McDonalds). Housing is a bit expensive and apartments are usually a bit too small. It’s cold mostly all the year (I find this to be a blessing, but anyway!). There IS violence, you CAN get mugged and the local TV shows SUCK BIG TIME. All in all, small thorns for such a great adventure.

And up we go, for month two in this story – in which our hero has a nervous breakdown due to so much work, work, work, work…

Out of the blue, during a regular 18-hour-workday, my Mac suddenly decided to go on a strike.

Judging by the forum posts, it seems to be quite a widespread problem – and unfortunally, no solution fits all the cases.

So after spending over 4 hours going over all known solutions (including deleting caches and preference files, setting up new user accounts, repairing disk/permissions and finally reinstalling OSX), the solution was simply: restart the Mac in Safe Mode, count to three and restart it again, now normally. Voilá.

Now all I need is calling an Apple Store and requesting a refund for all my lost hours of work…

Back in 2007, one of the america’s most known and successful violinist decided to carry on a small experiment. Armed with a 3 million dollar violin, Joshua Bell headed to a crowded subway station in Washington DC, picked a good spot and started playing. He stood there, suitcase on the floor, and played non stop for an hour. The net result of the experiment: less than 40 dollars in passerby’s money, no more than 30 people (of over a thousand that walked by during that hour) even bothered to stop for a minute to listen.
Three days before that experiment, Bell completely sold out tickets for his performance in Washington (at an opera house, of course) – at 100 dollars each.

I found out about StartupChile around a year ago – back then, it was an “alpha” project with a handful of selected companies. This year they decided to expand the program for new companies, and we promptly signed up!

Long story short, we’ve been selected to participate on the first “class of 2011″ – along with 91 other companies (3 from Brazil), which have been arriving to Santiago since June 1st.

Startup Chile is one of the most innovative incubator/accelerator projects I know: they “give away” 40k USD with no strings attached (actually it all works as reimbursements). The red tape is also surprisingly minimal, until now: not a lot of paperwork, not a lot of regulations – just free office space, funds to hire hackers and WORK! The project is grabbing so much attention that even american foundations are sending representatives to study the program and measure its results. Yes, that means measuring US, startup rat labs. And that’s AWESOME exposure!

By the way, the second class of 2010 is opening in two weeks – if you have a good product (or even an idea), it’s an excellent opportunity to dive straight into the “startup life” and make it happen. What else could you wish for?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.
- Charles Dickens

Once upon a time, back in the dot-com days, there was a mantra that everyone and their mothers had to follow if they wanted to be in business: “the idea is everything”. People poured tons of money and signed checks into anyone that spoke highly on an idea, no matter how crazy it seems (CueCat anyone?)

Although those days are long gone, one very important cultural aspect was changed by it: ideas are not important anymore – what REALLY matters (and how dumb we were!) is EXECUTION! “It’s the TEAM, stupid!” – we hear all the time from agile preachers, wannabe angels and even some established investors. Then we burn fortunes betting in great teams executing… basically nothing. In all our wisdom, we shifted from betting the house in empty ideas to betting the house and the car in geniuses working on irrelevancies. And no, we’re most certain it’s not a bubble.

So I’m going an arm and a leg here and proclaim the next big thing: proper TIMING!

A good idea with a poor execution has a lot more chance of becoming a huge success than a great idea executed too late (or too slowly). Who cares about the idea, or the “stars team”, when you actually hit the nail in the head with a perfect TIMING?

Of course, none of that applies if you’re into games (or mobile in general, these days). In that case, just need to build it and you’ll be very rich, very fast. At least that’s what the media is saying, right?

Humans are blind creatures by nature: we have an exceptionally powerful pattern matching engine between our ears, and it works wonders making us “reason” and “analyze”. Unfortunally it also works as a charm convincing “us” (itself?) to believe and do things that are just plain crazy, and expect something other than crazyness in return.

IT’S ALL ABOUT TIMING, STUPID!

Update: after some playing around, it looks like S3 in fact DOES NOT cascade the RRS flag/option to artifacts inside buckets (thanks Matthias for pointing this out!). I registered a feature request on Paperclips’ issue tracker and will implement it myself later this week. Stay tuned!

Paperclip is a hugely popular Rails plugin that allows you to add attachments to models in a quick (and very configurable) way. One of Paperclip’s default integration options is Amazon S3 – the equally popular Skynet Amazon’s cloud storage solution. Configuring a model to store attachments on S3 is very easy – all you have to do is declare it on your model:

has_attached_file :photo,
:styles => { :thumbs=> "100x100#" },
:storage => :s3,
:s3_credentials => "#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/s3.yml",
:path => "/:style/:id/:filename"


Now comes the money saving part: maybe you don’t know, but in 2010, Amazon introduced what they call a “Reduced Redundancy Storage” option to S3. It basically stores data in less nodes, making it cheaper, but also potentially “corruptable” – a perfect option for disposable/non-critical data – such as thumbnails. Activating RRS is a matter of clicking a checkbox.

Saving up to 50% on storage costs has never been so easy!

Having recently bought a Kindle (yeah, that clunky, black & white, cheap device), I’m seeing myself immersed in a brave new world of unexpected complexity. Don’t get me wrong here – the e-ink thing is actually kinda nice (and getting nicer – can’t wait to see that Notion Ink Adam hybrid device, if it ever comes out). What really, really annoys me is how the Kindle works for basically… anything.

Try putting anything in a Kindle. Oh, that’s right, there’s the (free) built-in international 3G on it – but wait… it’s free so that I can upload my stuff and get charged FOR EACH FILE I SEND. Sure, that’s fair. But what if I have a thousand pdfs I want to load on my device? Do I have to put them all through the almighty Amazon?

Of course, that’s not an issue with Amazon alone. When trying to buy books in one of Brazilian’s biggest e-stores (Saraiva.com), I found out that they sell DRM’d epub files. That’s right – you buy an e-book that you can ONLY read in a handful of selected devices (from Saraiva’s partners) and can’t even convert to other formats (Kindle uses the Mobi format). Jolly.

All in all, it feels like the early days of mp3 distribution. Afraid of piracy, everyone decided to launch their own e-stores, DRM the hell out of them and expect people to buy digital music that they could ONLY play in specific devices.

The second surprise is the software ecosystem as a whole. The Kindle (as most e-readers) is nothing more than a disk storage, when connected via USB. It doesn’t even use any kind of crazy cryptography to protect folders or anything, so it’s theoretically simple to, say, hook it up with iTunes to get all your stuff synchronized, or even write a small app to manage that for you. Oddly enough, Calibre seems to be the only available tool for that purpose – and god, it’s UGLY. A thousand tabs and buttons, half a dozen menus and settings and configurations… And it doesn’t even SYNC with your device (you can DOWNLOAD from it or UPLOAD to it. No two-way sync, not even manual). Now, don’t get me wrong with the criticism. Calibre is the work of a single guy and it’s free, so it’s already an amazing achievement in many aspects (specially the format conversion thing, which kicks ass). But why aren’t there any alternatives? Is everyone basically ignoring non-ios/android e-readers out there or managing them manually (like those old thumbdrive-mp3 players)?

Really?

(hmm… I smell opportunity here!)

Big news these days: new numbers on Apple’s iPads shipments indicating it already represents 7% of the entire PC market  and the estimate is that it will grab as much as 25% of that market on the next 2 years. Add the entire line of Android tablets being released every day (along with the smaller players – Win7, WebOS and RIM’s) to the mix and suddenly we’re facing a unprecedented move from keyboard-centric devices with none to a few hours of battery life to a world where everywhere-computing is a strong and undeniable reality. All that in less than a couple of years.

Who knew a “bigger iPod” could spark such a revolution, heh?

An interesting trend that took flight in 2010 and is set for full bloom in 2011, LBS (Location Based Services) seem to be here to stay.

There’s no denying that startups like Foursquare, Gowalla and SCVNGR are, little by little, conquering the mobile phones of many, many people (Foursquare alone has just crossed the 5 million users mark!). And then there are the giants, like Google’s pervasive Latitude “platform” and the newest shark in the pool – Facebook, with it’s already huge-in-the-womb Places.

A lot of people are fast on proclaiming all these ‘location-based social networks’ as ‘frivolous’ and ‘just boring’. Those with half a memory might recall that some of the most pervasive trends on the web these days – including Twitter and Tumblr – were also easily dismissed by a lot of ‘experts’, in a not so distant past.

With the rise of ingenious apps that allow businesses to measure traffic of their physical locations and the multiplication of interesting ideas to leverage one’s location, it feels like it’s the beginning of something huge.

These are the Geocities days of Location Based – and that’s just plain *awesome*!

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fring Support

Now THAT is a hard to implement/never used feature…

A couple of friends recently asked me why I’m not writing ‘often enough’ anymore. Come to think of it, I guess it can be summarized as a bit of a ‘reality check’ with the whole blogging thing and the kinds of blogs that live out there on the Internets. And what kind of stuff I’m not really interested on keeping up.

There’s no surprise most blogs out there (specifically the IT ones) exist basically to fulfill on a handful of very specific ‘agendas’:

- There are the aggregator blogs, which basically works as an echo chamber, adding one piece of though here and there (that’s usually rare). Admittedly, this is mostly what’s done on this blog - which in my point of view is more and more a huge waste of time since there are so many aggregators already out there, specially designed with that in mind (Google Reader’s ‘Share this’ feature being my favorite, hands down!)

- Then there are the hateblogs and FUDblogs. Ah, infamous guys and obscure girls that are so decided on showing their love for all things under the sun with cursing, swearing and trying to grab attention by generating noise - and nothing else (ok, maybe a little something in some infamous cases… But definitely not on their blogs :-)). Actually I guess I would do a very good job on that sense due to my tendency for sarcasm and all. Maybe get some additional Adsense revenue stream just for criticizing everything and everybody! You know: “Windows sux, this is the year of Linux”, “10 reasons why Java is dead”, “Why Cobol is the only real programming language”, etc, etc. Pointless.

- The third most common type of blog out there (and probably the one that is growing the most, if you ask a ‘SEO expert’ - what kind of weird career is that anyway?) is the egoblog: presenting one or two bits of useful stuff and A FREAKIN’ HUGE bias to self propaganda, the main objective on egoblogs is to sell yourself out. You know, get famous and stuff. I consider networking and self-promotion really important and all, but frankly, having to be the sole advertiser of yourself just feel so sad and desperate I can’t help but feel a bit ashamed for the egobloggers out there (not that they NEED my condolences, since some actually do pretty well by saying how great they are over and over again). My ego is not big enough to dig that, and (thankfully) I never needed to feed it with self-indugence anyway. Everything Zen!

I’d finalize my poor man’s categorization of the blogosphere with the real useful ones, usually maintained by people that are deeply involved on neat projects/sites, write useful stuff and are not impaired by some sort of NDA that would hinder them from publishing their discovers. Those are the blogs to follow, in my humble little opinion. And they are VERY rare.

Yeah, yeah - there’s always the ‘write to yourself’ blog (you know: you discover something interesting, blog about it, yada yada, let some friends know). That’ll probably keep poppin’ up around here from time to time.

Update: Just after publishing this I found this Wired article that goes way beyond all that I think about blogging and kinda proclames blogging to be “dead”. Ahh, FUDmagazines…

Funny how new ideas tend to revert back to the old ways on the web, as the trend-movers realize that they weren’t as bright as they seem at first sight. Dot-com is the only flavour that apperantly works (even at the brink of an opening for more flexible url formats in process at ICANN. Old Internet, all over again.
Poor little me, trying to understand why services like geocities Google Pages or IRC Meebo are always reborn, no matter how much the early adopters claim that the ‘old ways’ are dead…

Not cool… Not cool at all.

Or it might happen that I’m just not relevant enough. Yay!

I’ve been looking around for a solution for a rather common problem: suppose you have a form that you want to make sure is not double-posted (say, a credit card processing form). Rails offers a javascript tool to avoid double posting by disabling the form (:disable_with parameter on submit_tag). Since the only alternative I could find was a plugin that doesn’t seem to be there anymore, here’s my tiny little contribution to the realm of little-and-very-specific-plugins: double_submit_protection.

Criticism, suggestions and beers are welcome!

An excellent collection of little songs using OSX’s internal speech system. Now THIS was a triumph!

osascript -e 'say "oh This is a silly song silly song silly song this is the silliest song ive ever ever heard So why keep you listening listening listening while you are supposed to work to work to work to work its because i hate my job hate my job hate my job its because i hate my job more than anything else No its because youve no life youve no life youve no life and you better go get one after forwarding this crap" using "cellos"'

I guess I feel a bit relieved for knowing I’m not the only one that misses a “quick search” button on paper books. Nicholas Carr’s brilliant essay on how the way we crunch information on the Internet is changing the way we think is simply scary, because IT IS HAPPENING. Not necessarily a bad thing (as the author points out), but still, a major turnkey. Scary as only the unknown can be, big as an unannounced revolution can be.

In case you’re into fiction and can still actually READ a book, go on and grab this one. Purposefully written in the way that “simulates” how our minds are starting to think: short, cryptic, hyperlinked.

How come people fool themselves to think that they are intelligent beings and won’t repeat the errors already done in the past - that is still a complete mistery to me…

Ah, the new Internet and their participative users. While some focus on helping OTHER users better use the services they love, others form real fanclubs to support their web heroes, working around the clock to keep services alive and resisting the bad weather of diggin’, slashdottin’ and plain usage hammering. Pizza and Twitter FTW!