By now most people have seen the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) bill (referred to as ‘Cash For Clunker’s). The stated goals are:
Get gas guzzlers off the road to help sustain the environment
Stimulate the economy by increasing car sales
Unfortunately, the fine print on the article will cause neither of these things to happen. In fact, I can’t think of any effect this bill will have. Read More
We just finished a two part blog post covering the reasons why the various smartphone platforms make sense to develop for from both a technology and business perspective. We have a chart showing the user base and store size of each platform which I think is pretty cool. Check it out:
a quick recap of some of the things I personally found interesting or worth noting about all of the various smartphone announced / releases over the last few weeks:
1) TomTom is not the first GPS maker to have a mobile app
When it was announced at WWDC that Tomtom was making an application for the iphone 3G it generated a good bit of buzz. The blogs wrote, the twitters tweeted, and so forth. Turn by turn directions on a mobile device has not only already been done for free by Microsoft but it has also been available commercially from Garmin for at least the last year.
2) Cupcake still doesn’t open up Bluetooth to developers
It is very clear that Apple is attempting to leverage the iPhone’s Bluetooth capabilities to get hardware makers to create iPhone apps to drive all sorts of curious hardware. The best example which comes to mind is medical equipment in hospitals but I would be that plenty of devices will come with a Bluetooth interface and a matching iPhone app over the next year. This is why I think it is so absurd that Android still hasn’t opened up this world to its own developers. Perhaps they are waiting to perfect the API but if they wait long enough it won’t matter anymore!
3) The Palm Pre’s Dev mode is engaged via the Konami Code
Seriously. See this video. This alone has amused many developers and shows that Palm is trying hard to make this device memorable. I find myself unable to talk about the recent releases without mentioning this.
Playing Doom on my G1 got me interested in what the speed run community has done with the game. I did some quick searching and the best video I could find is this completion of Doom 2 in 17 minutes. I don’t have any other details, such as what system they are on but from watching the video it seems like this is tool assisted so I would assume it’s a console. They also appear to be mucking with layers such that they can see the invisible demons which is a bit cheap. However, it’s still a very fun run to watch. I haven’t played this game since roughly 1997 but watching this brought back memories of a few moments.
As I mentioned in my previous post, we have moved our office to Central Square in Cambridge. It’s definitely a colorful area. No matter what time I arrive at the office there are always people standing in front of the Can Tab Lounge waiting to get well before their day of work. Yesterday, after walking somebody who came to meet with us to the door, I spent five minutes listening to somebody explain to the sky that god is a piece of a poo (he used a different word) in Spanish. Amusement aside, there are a lot of really good companies located within walking distance of Central Square and with the huge selection of places to eat I am pretty certain I’ll run out of contacts long before I run out of restaurants. I’m also very pleased at the affordability. All the food places are within my meager startup budget!
However, this post isn’t about Central Square, it’s about Cambridge in general. Andrew, got himself an apartment and decided to get a Cambridge resident parking permit. To qualify for this permit he must provide all the usual paperwork: updated vehicle registration, proof of residency, processing fee, and so on. Well, take a look at the proof of residency requirements: http://www.cambridgema.gov/Traffic/ResidencyProof.cfm they accept a utility bill with the resident’s name on it, which is pretty standard. They also accept two letters, dated within the last 30 days with Andrew’s name on it. This means that to prove to Cambridge that one is a resident one simply goes the post office, buys two stamped envelopes, write their name and address on them, and sends them to one’s self.
So, process for getting a Cambridge sticker:
call the RMV and change your addres
mail two envelopes to yourself
present this along with your $8 and accept your permit
At no point in this process is one required to do anything which actually requires moving to Cambridge. This seems very broken to me.
At BarcampBoston today I realized I needed a URL that points to me that isn’t just my company website. With this as my inspiration I finally sat down and updated my site to have recent information (such as a link to the startup I’ve been talking about for the last year).
If you missed it on the front page I encourage you to take a look at our company, Localytics. Our first product is a mobile application analytics engine which actually works and has a number of users. We’ll see where it goes but it would be wonderful to one day have a suite of mobile developer tools which work together to help mobile developers make successful businesses.
Other than that, I did a good talk today at the Barcamp with Yoni from Active Frequency. I’ll put the slides up in a few days. (I can’t post twice in one day after not posting for over half a year).
I just made a simple mistake which I figure would be good share with anybody new-ish to Ruby. I wrote the following code to create an array of hashes and fill in some values. Can you guess what the output is?
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
testArray = Array.new(5, Hash.new)
0.upto(4) do |i|
testArray[i][:value] = i
end
0.upto(4) do |i|
puts testArray[i][:value]
end
If you said:
4
4
4
4
4
then you are right. The problem with this code is the Hash.new only creates one hash. And then each element in the array is a reference to that hash. So when any value is changed, all are changed. Instead, moving the hash creation inside the loop fixes everything:
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
testArray = Array.new(5, 0)
0.upto(4) do |i|
testArray[i] = Hash.new
testArray[i][:value] = i
end
I have written a couple of useful posts on here, but I don’t think any are going to be as helpful as this. I was recently introduced to El Bulli a Spanish restaurant that is on the absolute bleeding edge of the really crazy field of molecular gastronomy. I can’t describe it, so just read the wikipedia page. Most importantly note that:
800,000 people try to eat there per year, of which only 8,000 are accommodated
That aside, this brings me to my point. The reason this restaurant is so popular is the absurd creations they create in their laboratory. (Yes, this restaurant has a laboratory). They invent new ways of serving foods by breaking them down and reconstructing them. The results are of course very tasty, but also absolutely stunning to look at (photos taken from www.elbulli.info. Go there for many more)
Now, every few years the restaurant puts out their cookbook with details about how they create their amazing foods and many absolutely fantastic pictures. There is a reason some people call it ‘food-porn’. It’s very pricey, but if you know somebody who is seriously into food and has an appreciation for colorful presentation then you will never ever find a better gift than one of these:
Apologies
First off, apologies to anybody who reloaded this page in the last 2 months hoping there would be some new content. As it turns out, starting a business, participating in the usual summer hobbies, and working a part-time job can be pretty time consuming. Now that I finally have a moment, I figured I’d write a post. Shockingly enough I have several more coming because I actually have things to write about. Be advised!
updates
Andrew and I incorporated our business in Delaware. The company is called Char Software, inc. and the company website is www.charsoftware.com. Don’t expect anything exciting there until we launch our first project. We expect to launch at the end of the summer. We have an almost-usable beta version of our technology and hope to have customers soon.
The Pansy Patrol is gearing up for its most absurd publicity stunt to date. I can’t say too much, but it involves two Proteges. Expect some absurd videos before the summer ends
I broke down and decided that even though I’m on a budget, I can’t go a summer without some track time so I’m doing the August 18 and September 22 track days with the SCDA. If anybody is interested drop me a line!
Djatmaterra
In college I roomed with Adam Kaufman. He was a great roommate and I have plenty of fond memories of the time: (Absurd arguments at 6am, covering the hallway with cups of water, taking trips to the suburbs, etc). Now he is in a band called Djatmaterra. He asked me to come to one of his shows and I decided to check it out. I was really skeptical about what I would find because my memories of Adam as a singer were not particularly grand. So, you can imagine my surprise when Adam and his band put on an incredible show. They still have some bugs to work out, but I was genuinely entertained and will go to see them again; which is more than I can say about most things on this planet. One of the things that I did not realize was how much like running a startup creating a band can be. They have to drum up interest, get ‘customers’, keep focused, work out scheduling problems, deal with a budget, etc. I guess I can appreciate this angle of things now that I’m in a similar boat and so I hope to watch succeed. If you are even the least bit interested in small bands and local music you should take a look at their MySpace page (yes, I hate Myspace pages. But this is the one of the absurdly rare cases where it is acceptable) and maybe even see them in person.
I have to admit that walking into an elementary school at 9am had me in a pretty grumpy mood with low expectations for Boston Barcamp 3. As is sometimes the case (in very, very rare circumstances, I assure you) I was wrong. The event was great. Absolutely everybody there was interesting and had something cool to say. The talks were great and I came away with a renewed passion for my own work. I spent a lot of time pursuing topics that were interesting to me and had no impact on my business. I also spent time talking with other people interested in the mobile device space as well as startups in general and got a tremendous amount of valuable feedback.
It’s impossible to talk about everybody I ran into and everything I saw, but here are some of my personal highlights:
Dan Grover from Wonder Warp did a fun and really informative talk on iPhone programming. Scarey stuff.
Matt from Pandemic Labs did a talk about viral marketing. At first I was concerned that nobody at a tech meetup would want to talk about such things but I was surprised to find this presentation was a great success.
Attended an interesting talk about turning twitter into a distributed service. This was interesting because I have not been following the drama around twitter but apparently this is quite an exciting topic.
At least three different people that gave Andrew and I clever things to think about when trying to sell the service we are creating to businesses.
Got the founder of MyPunchBowl.com’s opinions on a number of issues including SEO and the importance of creating only one product.
