It seems the new buzzword these days is Cloud Computing. Years ago it was called "ASP" then moved to "SaaS" and now it’s "Cloud Computing". While some have talked about Web 3.0, it seems like cloud computing is this year’s hot topic. The most simple definition of cloud computing is that it’s a way to access files and services outside of your own space.

With that said, we received the following video today which I thought was worth sharing:

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iPhone application development house taptaptap has published sales figures for the first month of sales for their two AppStore applications, bringing further insight into overall sales volume and figures for the online store. The two applications developed by the company are WhereTo, an application that provides a more general GPS interface to the iPhone with […]

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What it does

What if you could turn your iPod Touch or your iPhone into a wireless storage terminal? That’s the concept behind Veiosoft.com’s DataCase app. It will turn your hand held Apple device into a wireless disk for you to store all your files in. Since it’s wireless, you can quickly access it and store important files that you want to carry with you. When you want to access the files again, you’ll be able to quickly upload them to any computer connected to a wireless network. Like all other apps, you can buy it from the Apple’s App store. Another great feature is the fact that you’ll be able to create multiple data volumes, so you can store separate types of files into separate disks. If you got the app, but need some help working with it, there are instructional videos on the site that will guide you through the process.

In their own words

“DataCase keeps your files close by turning your iPhone or iPod Touch into a hand held wireless drive.”

Why it might be a killer

“DataCase keeps your files close by turning your iPhone or iPod Touch into a hand held wireless drive.”

Some questions

Does it work the same with PC as with Mac? Isn’t easier to have a removable disk?

Link: http://www.veiosoft.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/veiosoft-com-home-of-the-datacase-app

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While those of us in the social media might like to believe that information is open, transparent, and free, the fact is that for the larger Web outside of this niche that this isn’t necessarily the case. This has been made more than apparent with the current legal action against TheFunded.com by EDF Ventures as they sue for the identity of one of the site members. Another example came this past weekend, when three MIT students were gagged from giving a presentation about the security weakness they found in the fare cards used by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.

While the incident with TheFunded.com may end up being a replay of the recent lawsuit against Torrent Bay, the court order to stop the students from giving their presentation at this past weekend’s DefCon 16 get together in Las Vegas is a different matter. As Declan McCullagh reported on the Security blog at c|net:

U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock on Saturday ordered the students not to provide "program, information, software code, or command that would assist another in any material way to circumvent or otherwise attack the security of the Fare Media System." Woodlock granted the MBTA’s request after a hastily convened hearing in Massachusetts that took place at 8 a.m. PDT on Saturday.

The MBTA, which has not been saying very much publicly on the matter, did suggest in their court filing on the matter that this was a matter of public safety

The MBTA, which is a state government agency, alleges in its lawsuit that "disclosure of this information will significantly compromise the CharlieCard and CharlieTicket systems" and "constitutes a threat to public health or safety."

They were also more than up to the task to threaten the students with an FBI investigation as part of their tactics to muzzle the three:

But then the conversations took a hostile turn when MBTA mentioned an FBI criminal investigation of the MIT students. In the "initial contact, they said the FBI was investigating and that was not–we didn’t find that to be a very pleasing way to start a nice dialogue with them. And we got a little concerned about what was happening," said Anderson, one of the students

It would seem that while the MBTA managed to convince the original judge who issued the restraining order that this was all about public safety I think it is far more about them protecting their revenue stream instead. This has nothing at all to do with public safety and this fact hasn’t escaped the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who have supplied the MIT students with legal assistance to fight this gag order. For them and security researchers; who are watching this case closely, this is more about the First Amendment rights to publish freely.

In response the MBTA has filed a motion to amend to the order to only cover non-public information, which is almost laughable considering that the CD handed out to attendees of the DefCon convention contained all the information that would have been a part of the presentation. Along with that, in their filing for the gag order the MBTA included some of the very information that the students said they would have withheld from their presentation

But the students have maintained that they planned to withhold key information from their talk that would have allowed someone to replicate their tests in a manner that could be used to defraud the transit system. (Some of that key information, however, has since become public because the MBTA included it in documents that it submitted to the court.)

So, while for all intents and purposes the information that the MBTA wanted to keep out of the hands of the people is already out there for whoever wants it, they will be going back into court the have the gag order extended. In response the EFF has gotten eleven computer scientists and researchers to draft a letter in support of the students to be presented to the court

The letter supporting the students is signed by Dave Farber, who holds the title of distinguished career professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and is purveyor of the popular Interesting People mail list as well as a trustee of the EFF; and computer scientists Steve Bellovin from Columbia University; David Wagner from UC Berkeley; Dan Wallach from Rice University; and Matt Blaze from the University of Pennsylvania. Wired.com columnist Bruce Schneier is also a signatory to the letter.

I could almost see this action by the MBTA to seek the court order if this was truly a case of protecting the public, but it is more than obvious that this isn’t the case. This move by the MBTA is nothing short of using the courts to protect their revenue stream. Rather than working with the students and make their fare cards better and more secure, they intimidate them with threats of the FBI and use the power of the courts to muzzle them. I would bet that based on past cases like this the MBTA will end up losing their request for an extension of the gag order but then again the courts aren’t always know for their common sense.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Governmentdocs.org Adds Social Twist to the Freedom of Information ActBid Adieu To Format Chaos. Raise A Flag For Document Freedom Day.China Allows Bloggers Freedom Amid Earthquake AftermathGoogle: Helping America’s Intelligence Agencies Find StuffHow AT&T Provides the FBI with Terror Suspect LeadsComcast Asks the FCC: How Stupid Do We Look?Bloggers Rejoice! We’re Now Covered by the Freedom of Information Act.

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What it does

What do you call a tech company that doesn’t sell you a specific product? You call it Bug Labs. They sell consumers the components they’ll need to create their own consumer electronics. For instance, say you want to build your own mp3 player, you’ll find the tools you need here. Don’t panic, you don’t need to know how to assemble things from scratch. Each component is easily coupled with other ones, so you don’t need a soldering iron to put things together. They also carry the software you’ll need to make sure your tools work perfectly. If you are out of ideas on what to build, you’ll be able to get some through the site. The forums are stuffed with people who love to build their own components, just like you. There’s even a wiki section, for you to write about some of the things you’ve created with your Bug Labs components.

In their own words

“Bug Labs is a new kind of technology company, enabling a new generation of engineers to tap their creativity and build any type of device they want, without having to solder, learn solid state electronics, or go to China.”

Why it might be a killer

From the looks of it, this seems to be like a fun way for tech savvy people to have custom gadgets. The price is a little steep, but this could be really popular among the tech crowd.

Some questions

Why not just buy a finished product? Are there plans to sell something that works by itself?

Link: http://www.buglabs.net
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/eCommerce/buglabs-net-a-new-breed-of-tech-company

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Kelsey Blodget / Beet.TV:
NBC Online Olympics Viewing Soars, Nielsen Reports….Beet.TV Gets Olympics Workflow Story from Microsoft  —  The number of unique visitors to NBC Olympics video site soared to over two million on Monday as viewers tuned into the Games from the workplace, Nielsen announced today.

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Anil Dash / Movable Type:
Movable Type Pro and 4.2: Where Blogging is Headed  —  Today, we’re releasing the latest update to Movable Type, version 4.2, and along with it we’re announcing the launch of Movable Type Pro, a profoundly powerful new set of capabilities that shows the web where blogging is going next.

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Adam Ostrow wrote this weekend on the horrible state of advertising targeting on AdSense for RSS, which as we’ve learned today is the replacement for the FeedBurner Advertiser Network. Allen Stern at CenterNetworks noted exactly how disappointed he has become in this transition from Google’s $100 million folly which is FeedBurner.

As Allen says, cost-per-click advertisements just don’t seem to be that great of a fit for RSS feeds, particularly Google’s AdSense units, the stingiest of all the ad formats.  Google, in what’s becoming a trademark fashion, bought up FeedBurner and trashed the company. Instead of loudly gutting and relaunching the company, the primary draw for FeedBurner’s existence was very quietly eulogized on a Google Group posting, as noted by Valleywag today:

This is a quick note to confirm that FeedBurner’s former, independent ad network, FeedBurner Ad Network (aka “FAN”), is officially closed. No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense (including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential.

The system worked, as many have noted by personal experience, to deliver ads that payed out around a $10 CPM or even higher. Most folks are lucky to have an AdSense account that pays a fraction of that amount, and will be even more hard pressed to find joy there given the poor targeting and traditionally poor placement of ads in a typical RSS post item.

Given how long I’ve utilized AdSense, I have no expectations for its improvement, unlike some of my fellow bloggers.  Simply because the strongest reason (their monetization) for keeping FeedBurner no longer exists doesn’t mean it’s time to dump the service as Steven Hodson suggests today. It does make Google particularly weak in this product sector, and leaves them wide open for strong competition. Steven outlines the reasons:

When you consider the following

Google closes down the FeedBurner Advertising Network

The FeedBurner site metrics don’t even come close to jiving with other services including Google’s own site metrics service

FeedBurner subscriber counts are not consistent or can be gamed

So tell me why are we still using this service?

The only purpose at this point in keeping FeedBurner around it portability and compatibility of data. Having a system that can read all the various flavors and manglings of RSS and Atom out there in the world and then serve it back up in an appropriate manner almost flawlessly is still a rare thing. I can’t think of another competitor to FeedBurner, in fact, that does this.

More importantly, FeedBurner accounts serve as a nice shield from the often transitory nature of Web 2.0 products.  Any time I generate a feed I want to expose to the public, I don’t care if it’s hosted by Google themselves, I run it through FeedBurner, because I know if the original feed goes away, I can instantly re-point the feed the public subscribes to towards another source.  I don’t have to lose subscribers.

This, though, is a relatively easy thing to code and get running. What isn’t easy is building a business around monetizing RSS. The first company to come up with the silver bullet in that department has only a few small hoops to jump, and they’ll be able to slay the mighty Google.

In the meantime, I suggest folks roll their own solution. RSS files are a great place for brand advertisements, and both pundits quoted in this article (Steven Hodson and Allen Stern) have cited success in selling their own ads for their feeds.

—Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:Google AdSense in Feedburner RSS Feeds, Coming. Soon. Seriously!Feedburner Adds Self-Publishing AdsFeedburner, aka The Splog SlayerFeedburner Acquires BlogbeatFeedburner Allows Bloggers AdSense AccessGoogle Acquiring Feedburner?FeedBurner Handling AOL Network’s Feeds

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Staff researcher David François Huynh has created an interesting tool for browsing semantic database Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Written up by ZDNet’s Oliver Marks, the video Huynh recorded demonstrating Parallax (below) will knock your socks off.

Unfortunately, actually using Parallax demonstrates just how far from solid Freebase, one of the semantic web’s poster children, really is. The idea is to allow you to apply multiple filters for your searches and embed live charts in a blog. It’s a beautiful idea, check out the video.

Here’s the video below, if you find yourself saying “get to the point already,” then skip to about 1:30 in the timeline.

Unfortunately, when we tried out a number of searches in Parallax, very few subjects were well populated at all. We found duplicate subject titles where one held solid data and the other didn’t, but even that was a best case scenario. In search after search, we found next to nothing in Freebase.

The example above is nice, but let’s say I want to find out something about black women scientists. No luck. History of the internet? Not much information there. Venture Capitalists? Blank profile pages.

This ought to work. Freebase has taken more than $50 million in venture investments, they have a small army of volunteer and computer scientist contributors, they’ve got robots pumping their database with information automatically. There are now 60% more articles in Freebase than there are in English Wikipedia. So what’s the problem?

We wrote last week about ontological concerns about the semantic web, but Parallax shows that there are more superficial problems. An unfriendly UI has been Freebase’s excuse for a long time, despite recent improvements to it. We love the idea of the semantic web, but give it’s grand daddy website a usable UI like Parallax and we’re left questioning just how much there really is inside Freebase anyway.

For an alternate view see Alex Iskold’s Freebase: Dispelling the Skepticism, and some fault here may lay in the coolness ratio of the video to the Parallax app, but for now - we feel inclined to look elsewhere for the “semantic web killer app.”

Disclosure: The author has consulting relationships with a number of pre-launched semantic web companies.

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What it does

Remember those mind maps you would make in school? Besides being fun to make, they were a great way for you to remember stuff. Wisdomap.com brings back that concept, and makes it fun for everyone to enjoy. You can create free mind maps on the site, and store them to come back to them later. This will allow you to think up ideas and then store them for when you want to think of them some more. If you like the service, you can upgrade to the premium and get unlimited access to maps. This is particularly good for anyone who has a mind that works too fast and needs to remember many things. If you’re still unsure about how good the service is, you can preview it. This demo is great, and sheds light on many aspects that make this service great. Over all, this should be a good way to store knowledge and ideas.

In their own words

“Wisdomap organises information and thought processes and stores them in a visual, memorable and convenient format, while managing media and resources like videos, pictures, websites and files.”

Why it might be a killer

Mind maps are a good way to remember things. Making them on the internet and storing them should be really useful.

Some questions

Why not take notes? Or draw a map and see it later? Is the premium worth paying for?

Link: http://www.wisdomap.com
Our Review: http://www.killerstartups.com/Web-App-Tools/wisdomap-com-organize-your-thoughts

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And here we go again. Less than a year after a venture capital firm tried to sue the VC ratings site, TheFunded.com, another VC firm, EDF Ventures in Ann Arbor, Michigan, has sent a subpoena to the site to try to identify a critical commenter.

This is, of course, the exact wrong response.

First off, TheFunded doesn’t keep records of who its anonymous commenters are, so the subpoena won’t help much. But, much more importantly, in filing the subpoena, EDF has now broadcast to the world this anonymous review on TheFunded.com:

Worked with these people on several deals and they are to be avoided unless you are desparate. Beaus Laskey, the only honest straightforward person in the bunch, has left the firm.

That’s pretty clearly the opinion of one anonymous commenter, and most readers of TheFunded.com would take it as such — an anonymous ranting from someone who had a bad experience. Look at the listings on TheFunded.com and you’ll see that almost every VC firm has a few such comments from an angry entrepreneur. People looking over the site understand that and take that into account. It’s hard to see what’s actually libelous about the statement, as it’s pretty clearly just this guy’s opinion.

But, of course, beyond drawing a LOT more attention to this one silly angry post than it ever would have received otherwise, EDF has also shown the world how it handles a little bit of criticism. If entrepreneurs didn’t have a reason to avoid the firm before (even after reading the reviews on TheFunded.com), I’d imagined this thin-skinned guaranteed-to-backfire response that shows little understanding of how to respond to internet criticism will probably convince many other entrepreneurs to stay away. Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of what the firm probably wants.

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Two Seattle-based VC firms, Maveron and Voyager Capital, have recently brought on new partners to extend their reach to the south.Maveron, which hit a homerun with an early investment in eBay, but has yet to match that success, has expanded its San Francisco office by making Amy Errett (pictured above) a partner. Errett is the […]

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I’ve got some bad news for you if you’re addicted to the micro-messaging service Twitter and don’t live in the United States, Canada or India: You’re about to get shafted. Twitter killed outbound SMS (text message) updates to all but those three countries today as rising costs made it impractical.Twitter had been footing the bill […]

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narramissic writes “We all know well the perils of password reuse. But what about the information used to reset passwords? Many sites use a standard set of questions — your mother’s maiden name, the name of your best friend, what city you grew up in, or what brand your first car was. And you probably have a standard set of responses, making them easy to remember but not very secure. ‘The city you grew up in and your mother’s maiden name can be derived from public records. Facebook might unwittingly tell the name of your best friend. And, until quite recently, Ford with its 25% market share had a pretty good chance of being the brand of your first car,’ says security researcher Markus Jakobsson. But ‘password reset does not have to be a weak link,’ says Jakobsson. ‘Psychologists know that people’s preferences are stable — often more so than long term memory. And very few preferences are recorded in public databases.’”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Six years in the making, the 1.0 version of Open Source Web and desktop info organizer Chandler finally arrived last Friday. It was not met with thunderous acclaim, nor did it get the kind of press its development cost of eight million dollars and tens of thousands of volunteer hours was supposed to generate.

Chandler consists of the Web-based Chandler Hub, and desktop clients for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is meant to be your everywhere digital notebook for organizing appointments, tasks and notes. Chandler lets you import and export calendars to just about any iCal-compliant application, such as Google Calendar and Apple iCal; it creates alarms and reminders; and it provides simple task management.

I can remember back then when Mitch Kapor — the founder of Lotus Development and Lotus 1-2-3, the man who gave reason to put a PC in every office on the planet — started this project. It was going to free the masses from domination by Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server and triumphantly herald a new age of open-standard killer software.

Chandler is a capable to-do list manager, but its design and capabilities are dated.

Despite some innovations in brings to the category, it has not delivered on the promise. Here’s where it fails:

• Whether you’re working in the Chandler web app or using a desktop client, you enter to dos, appointments and notes in a single entry field, then add detail. But the devil is in these details, and you will get tired very quickly of the slow interface for entering calendar items.
• While Chandler lets you triage your items into Now, Later and Done buckets, this is rudimentary task management at best and will leave practitioners of David Allen’s Getting Things Done wondering where the rest of the application is.
• Chandler’s big selling point - seamless web app/desktop synchronization and backup - works as advertised (although it did not work for me out of the box), but a competitor, the free but commercial Evernote, offers superior features, like picture and sound recording, and Web-based OCR of images stored.
• Chandler organizes your information into collections - but unlike say Google shared calendars, there’s no way on the Chandler Hub to discover collections others want to publicize.

With any 1.0 app you can expect rough edges and unimplemented features: neither Wikipedia or Mozilla Firefox were much to talk about in their early days. The question about this open source project is whether Chandler 1.0 is the start of something great or the last gasp of a party no one wants to be at.

I talked with Mitch Kapor, who underwrote five of the nearly eight million dollars that went into Project Chandler, He said, “It’s been a long, long journey. So long that a whole book was written about a part of it. It’s obvious to anyone who is familiar with the story and the history that it is one of the project that, to make an understatement, did not turn out the way it was originally planned.”

Kapor pulled the plug on the free money and office space for the Open Source Application Foundation back in January. “Last January I reached the conclusion that I was really ready and needing to go on to other things. And the team on the project had a really strong desire to see it through to competition. The team shrank in size pretty dramatically then. I put a little more money into it in order to enable this transition to happen in 2008, part of which was they were going to ship 1.0,” said Kapor.

“You asked if Chandler has lived up to the dream I had six years ago. And I think the fair answer to that is in part yes and in part no. What has actually been delivered delivers on part of what the original dream was. There’s a cross-platform, fully open-source, innovative personal information manager with a very strong calendar. Those were among the original goals. Obviously it’s taken dramatically longer than I thought it would, which I would attribute to not good judgment about how long it would take or the complexity of the project.”

Now Project Chandler is on its own. “It’s more of a conventional open source project in the sense that its momentum hereon is going to depend on the extent there is a community of volunteers who find it valuable enough to contribute to it and move it forward.” Are there enough volunteers to do that? “The short answer is I don’t know, but there are promising signs. The numbers of people involved, while modest, are non-trivial and growing. If you view it from the point of view as something that would replace Outlook and Exchange, it has completely and utterly failed. But from the point of view of having built something that tens of thousands of people are happily using, and were using before there was a 1.0, by those metrics, it’s pretty promising.”

And any advice to the new generation of Internet wannabe millionaires running around the valley? “Well yeah, actually. It’s easy when you’ve been successful to lose calibration about what you can accomplish, about how hard it can be, about how long it will take. There’s lots of people on the second time around that have dug themselves into one or another kind of hole. Part of what allowed Chandler to get traction and to get to 1.0 was when people on the project, myself included, where able to have more modest objectives, to have more realistic planning and to get into a more agile cycle of development, on the principle it is far better to deliver something than it is to have huge dreams and deliver nothing. That would be my advice.”

Disclosure: Bob Walsh occasionally sells a copy of a Windows desktop task manager he wrote three years ago.

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