Stewart and Caterina
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Verizon/Vonage Lawsuit As A Proxy For What's Wrong With The Patent System
With the news that the federal appeals court has granted a permanent stay on enforcing the injunction placed on Vonage preventing it from signing up new customers, Tim Lee has written up a good article about how the case demonstrates many of the problems with the patent system, from software patents to obvious ideas getting patented to overly broad patents to the fact that companies are now using patents for nuclear stockpiling purposes rather than for innovation. It's an idea that we've discussed here quite a bit, and as Tim says, "Vonage's fundamental mistake was that it chose not to join this arms race. As a result, when Verizon sued, it was completely defenseless." We keep asking for people to explain to us how this is beneficial for promoting innovation, but no one seems to have a good answer. On a related note, Tim points out the latest ridiculous patent on tabbed windows, wondering "would anyone seriously claim that granting legal monopolies on the general characteristics of windowing systems is either necessary or helpful to the progress of the software industry?" Anyone?
Group Of Banks Sues TJX Over Data Breach
One of the reasons that big data breaches, such as the one at TJX, keep occurring, is that there aren't sufficient incentives in place for companies to take this issue seriously. The key then is to develop ways for companies to see value in data security, and to be properly punished for their carelessness. At this point, the government doesn't seem to be doing much on this account, and even if it tried to do something, there's no guarantee that it would be effective, since many government regulations fail to achieve their desired goals. Now, a group of New England banks have filed a lawsuit against TJX, in hopes of receiving compensation for their own expenses from dealing with the situation. Their complaint seems legitimate since it's known that the breach has contributed directly to fraud, which is something that the banks themselves have to combat. As one representative from the group put it, "Right now we've had major breaches from major retailers, and there's very little recourse and little incentive for them to change." While the tort system is often abused, it can be used by legitimately injured parties to get compensation. If the banks are successful in winning damages, it's likely to open up a new (and hopefully effective) avenue in punishing companies that mishandle their data.
Got A Good Credit Score? Rent It To Someone In Need
One of the common consequences for victims of identity theft is that they can see their credit scores get damaged, and because the big credit agencies don't offer much help in monitoring and fixing this, it can be a major hassle to get the problem resolved. Barry Ritholtz to an interesting story about a different kind of fraud, whereby people with good credit scores can sell their credit histories to people who want their own score boosted. Basically, the law states that people are allowed to add an unlimited number of individuals to their credit card accounts; it's mainly intended for parents who want to put their kids on the account. But, various websites have emerged to take advantage of this loophole, enabling people with bad credit histories to improve their score by getting access to a good credit history. It's not clear how widespread this actually is, but it pretty clearly violates the whole point of a credit score, since it's supposed to give the lender some idea of how reliable the borrower is. Fair Isaac, the company that developed the FICO score, says it's currently in talks with the FTC to stop the practice. The question, then, is whether shutting down this loophole will do the trick, or whether credit history brokers will simply find another loophole.
Zipcar + ParkatmyHouse
London is host to one of the coolest and most functional partnerships we've seen recently. A collaboration that lets people share cars and parking places! It's hard to believe it's taken so long for something like this to come around...
ParkAtMyHouse is a new service that provides affordable and penalty-free parking around public venues by enabling property-owners to rent out their empty driveways, garages, car parks and other spare pieces of land to drivers needing somewhere to park. Anyone can register to rent out their parking space to consumers and/or businesses.
The new service has just partnered with ZipCars - another progressive company that allows users to rent cars by the hour or day. Users can book a Zipcar online or over the phone at any time, any day of the week. Then all you have to do is walk to the nearby car, unlock it by swiping your unique Zipcard across the windscreen and drive away with the minimum of fuss.
BACKUP: Create easy online backups with Jungle Disk and Amazon S3
Tech columnist Mike Elgan has found what he considers the ultimate backup solution: Jungle Disk, a front end for Amazon's S3 storage service.
Jungle Disk puts a virtual drive on your computer that looks like any another hard drive. Unlike "regular" backups systems, you can browse, open, check and confirm the validity of every file in your backup by simply opening the folder, and using the files as if they were on your local hard drive. They're not locked away in a cryptic, proprietary system.The Jungle Disk application lets you set up automated backups, which looks for any file changes in the files or folders you specify, then backs up any modified files at the frequency you set. You set it and forget it.
Jungle Disk is free while in beta; down the road it'll cost you $20 or $1 per month. As for S3, it's a pay-as-you-go service that costs 15 cents per gigabyte of storage and 20 cents per gigabyte of data transferred.
Those are pretty affordable rates, but you can accomplish almost exactly the same thing with MediaMax and Mozy, both of which are free. What do you think? Put your online-backup thoughts where they belong: the comments! —Rick Broida
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Create Animated GIFs Online - Photo Slideshows without Flash
GIF Animations [multiple picture frames in one file] can be used for creating image slideshows, screencasts, text banners or even stop motion animation movies. Some MySpace and MyBlogLog users also use animated GIF avatars to attract eyeballs.
To create an animated GIF online, all you need is a set of images (in any format like jpg, png, etc) and Glickr.com, a free site that will convert them into an animated GIF movie of predefined sizes that you can use as profile avatars or post them on blogs.
Individual images can be as large as 1 MB and you may directly grab your Flickr pictures inside Glickr.com. You may also change the speed of your animations [like how frequently the image transitions happen]
Some people find animated images as annoying as blinking webpages but they are a good medium for sharing photo slideshows in situations where Flash is not an option.
Glickr.com - photos in motion.
To create an animated GIF online, all you need is a set of images (in any format like jpg, png, etc) and Glickr.com, a free site that will convert them into an animated GIF movie of predefined sizes that you can use as profile avatars or post them on blogs.
Individual images can be as large as 1 MB and you may directly grab your Flickr pictures inside Glickr.com. You may also change the speed of your animations [like how frequently the image transitions happen]
Some people find animated images as annoying as blinking webpages but they are a good medium for sharing photo slideshows in situations where Flash is not an option.
Glickr.com - photos in motion.
Getty Images vs. Flickr
excerpted from
Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Getty Images vs. Flickr
Let's take this a step further though and look at Creative. This is the side of stock photography where marketers go to get images to sell things.
Below are three searches that I selected at random. Las Vegas, candle and clouds. Now click through to the search pages for these terms at Flickr and at Getty Images. Which one is better? Is it clearly better? If you were a marketer would it make a difference to you which one you pulled your images from?
Las Vegas Getty
Business 2.0 - Can Amazon.com Play Nice with Others?
source: http://blogs.business2.com/beta/2007/04/can_amazoncom_p.html by Owen Thomas excerpt "FlickrCash, a service which searches Flickr, likewise neglects to mention Yahoo's interest in the name."
Founders, Founders and More Founders
by Darren Herman (4/4/2007)
Paul Graham of Y Combinator success has released an insightful essay about traits he’s studied with the early stage entrepreneurs he deals with each day that are part of his program up in Boston.
The essay didn’t just strike me about founders, but it struck me about Y Combinators success rate as well:
We’ve now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have been acquired: Reddit was a merger of two, Reddit and Infogami, and a third was acquired that we can’t talk about yet. Another from that batch was Loopt, which is doing so well they could probably be acquired in about ten minutes if they wanted to.
That’s pretty darn solid if you ask me. I do not know anyone personally who has been through the Y Combinator, but based on the essay that Paul has written and the statistics, the numbers certainly look positive.
In the essay that Paul has written, he talks about many reasons why people do not become entrepreneurial and talks about why those reasons should be ignored. The topics covered are:
- Too young
- Too inexperienced
- Not determined enough
- Not smart enough
- Know nothing about business
- No Cofounder
- No idea
- No room for more startups
- Family to support
- Independently wealthy
- Not ready for committment
- Need for structure
- Fear of uncertainty
- Don’t realize what you’re avoiding
- Parents want you to become a doctor
- A job is the default
Download of the Day: HandBrake (All platforms)
Windows/Mac/Linux: Rip DVDs to your iPod with HandBrake, the latest version of the program previously known as MediaFork.
HandBrake can turn DVDs into iPod-friendly MPEG-4 or H.264 video files. It includes iPod, Apple TV and even Sony PS3 presets, but you can also customize various audio and video settings to your liking. (Needless to say, the ripped files will also play on Zunes and other devices.)
Windows users can choose between GUI and CLI versions; both require DVD43 to be installed if you want to rip copy-protected DVDs (the ones you own, of course). Also, be sure to choose the VIDEO_TS folder when you browse the DVD, and then select the "title" that contains the actual movie (it's usually the longest one). For Windows users in particular, HandBrake definitely makes easier work of copying DVDs to your iPod, though the overall process still takes a few hours.
Still in beta, HandBrake is free; it's available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. —Rick Broida
Samsung builds a better, smaller 4GB DIMM
OCZ may have recently laid claim to the title of some of the world's fastest RAM, but Samsung seems to have found room to do a little boasting of its own, trotting out its first 4GB DDR2 DIMM based on WSP (or wafer-level-processed stacked package) technology. According to the company, that process not only makes the module smaller, but faster and more energy efficient as well. Not so clear, unfortunately, is what effect the seemingly cure-all technology will have on pricing or availability, with no word on either from Samsung as of yet.
The Miracle Polymer for the New Millennium
This Video Says A Lot About Where The Music Business Is Today
When I see a lot of Google traffic coming to my blog, I check the feedburner stats and yesterday the search term Fluorescent Adolescent was generating some meaningful traffic. Flourescent Adolescent is the name of my favourite track on the Arctic Monkeys new record which is coming out next week. I don't have the record, but I've heard most of it on the Hypemachine.
So I googled Fluorescent Adolescent and sure enough my post linking to the track was number one. Number two was this video, taken at an Amsterdam show last month, probably on a cell phone or something like a cell phone.
First of all, this song has not been released. But this video has been viewed almost 16,000 times on YouTube in the past month. I am sure some people have watched it multiple times, but surely over 10,000 people have gotten introduced to this song in the past month, some portion of whom are likely to buy the record.
Second, this is not the first single, that would be Brianstorms, a good track, but not my favourite. But in effect, there's already a "video" on YouTube promoting this track.
Third, this was shot by a regular fan, uploaded to YouTube, and the quality and sound are pretty damn good for someone five or six bodies back.
Fourth, this was shot at a club in Amsterdam and is available to the entire world via YouTube instantly (or as soon as the person who shot it uploaded it).
Fifth, check out how many others in the crowd are taping the performance with their cell phones and cameras. Has to be at least five or ten others in the video doing that.
Lefsetz says in one of his recent posts:
And trust only grows person to person now. NOBODY trusts the machine.
Let's look at what just happened here. Somebody got a hold of the Fluorscent Adolescent track and uploaded it to their blog. It made the Hypemachine. I heard it there and reblogged it. My post went to the top of Google for that search term. I googled it (but you could have too) and found the YouTube video posted by another fan. I saw that and reblogged it just now.
Person to person marketing. No machine other than the web and google at work here. The rest is us, enjoying a song, a band, and music on the web.
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