Todd Sampson

Congrats to the Thingfo team. Grissy and co. were able to take Thingfo live ahead of the planned Tuesday launch. An early launch!! That NEVER happens with web applications. Check out Thingfo and Kristen’s early Thingfo review on Mashable.

Congrats again guys.  I’m thrilled to see Thingfo get out into the wild.

Google’s launch of the Social Graph has confirmed it for me — the API is becoming the product; or service as the case may be. And, if not the full product, at least the first wave of a product’s release.

Back in the day, and still today at many overly-large companies, there was the massive software application. Ideas were sold up the chain (or pushed down it) and appropriately massive budgets were allocated. Hundreds of beautiful interface mockups and user flow diagrams were constructed. Each artifact the team made was hung on the wall of the project War Room in a giant John Nashian nightmare. People on high made the call for what “the users” wanted in an [insert latests software buzzword here] application. Every contingency thought of and planned for — or so they thought. The classic, “Ready… Aim… Fire.”

Next came open source projects and Web (2.0) applications. Take a few months putting together the basic ideas, flesh out the user interface and release. Listen to what the users want and iterate frequently to give it to them. As they have been called, “Ready… Fire… Aim.” or the more extreme, “Fire… Fire… Fire.”

While I am a fan of launch & iterate, I think that Google is quietly perfecting the next-generation application development model. Forget the product guys. User interface — who needs one?!? We want the data. If our API offers enough value, everyone will use it. Developers get to build their *open* “standards-based” applications faster. Users get exactly what they want. After all, having a few dozen teams or more building on the infrastructure is sure to create something closer to each user’s ideal offering, right? Besides, as everyone know, there are always more smart people working outside your company than in it.

The new model as I see it, “Ready… Point to a Vision of the Future… Let others fight the war with you as the ammo supplier.”

I think it is brilliant. Let’s keep an eye on Google’s OpenSocial, Android, and Social Graph to see if it works as well as I am expecting.

Mike “Grissy” Grishaver, former Yahoo! and programming wiz extraordinaire, told Eric and I over coffee at Philz yesterday that he was taking his new app Thingfo live next week. When pressed for a release time, he committed to 1pm on Tuesday.

Congrats Grissy. Can’t wait to see Thingfo running in the wild.

So, I just had my second tech+movie related issue in the last week. The Nintendo Wii can’t play DVDs?!?

I know, I know. I probably should have known this — somehow. But you just figure, it is 2007 2008 and it uses disks that at least resemble DVDs. I also know that the Wii doesn’t cost anywhere close to the XBox 360 or Playstation 3; so I am sure that it doesn’t use Blu-Ray or HD DVD disks. Is it a proprietary disk format or did they just not worry about movies? I’m guessing it has to be the later.

Oh well… I just wish I had checked before I took down the old XBox. I was really looking forward to seeing Blade Runner for the first time too. I have no idea how I have haven’t seen what is, by all accounts, one of the classic sci-fi movies of all time.

The blogosphere is abuzz with talk about the stock market tanking tomorrow.  Outside the usual credit crunch, real estate, and weak dollar people are pointing to Monday’s largest one-day drop in many markets since 9/11:

• Bombay’s Sensex -7.4%
• Frankfurt’s DAX -7.2%
• Hong Kong’s Hang Seng -5.5%
• London’s FTSE -5.5%
• Shanghai’s Shanghai Composite -5.1%
• Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 -3.9%

So, what do you think?  Are we headed for a crash?  If you didn’t jump out of the market last week, is it too late to do so?  How can you play this market to win?

P.S. Those looking for a hedge against the crash, the BlackTuesday.com domain name is already taken.  Too bad.  John suggested 000tuesday.com, but that is a bit too geeky.

P.P.S.  Rafer, let me know when you are done with your crystal ball… You are just scary man.

Writing the TechStars 2008 post earlier today reminded me about the video the team shot of Eric and I while we were there last year. As Eric mentions in the video, this was really the first time since selling MyBlogLog to Yahoo! that the two of us discussed the whirlwind adventure. It was a great time.

Warning: The video is a bit long. So hit the bathroom, pop some popcorn and enjoy.

MyBlogLog Founders at TechStars from David Cohen on Vimeo.

I love this… Aside from Seth Godin sharing some of his brilliance, it helps to explain why I hated school so much.

Eric Marcoullier and I were fortunate enough to help mentor the 2007 TechStars. It was a fantastic experience for all involved. Eric and I got to meet, encourage, and help focus some budding entrepreneurs. The startups gained invaluable advice, some A-list contacts, and the chance to do something amazing — which many of the companies have already done. In fact, 80% of the companies at TechStars 2007 have received funding or acquisition offers.

I just saw on TechCrunch that TechStars has stared accepting applications for TechStars 2008. Congrats to David, Brad and the rest of the TechStars crew on the announcement. If you are an entrepreneur, developer or someone with a great startup idea you should head over to the TechStars site and apply for TechStars 2008 asap.

Lissy and I decided to try out the new iTunes movie rental last night — a service I first mentioned a few days ago. Since the AppleTV upgrade will not be out for a few weeks, we rented Superbad in iTunes and planned to move it to AppleTV to watch. According to the Apple website this should be easy:

“Once the movie is downloaded, you can watch it on your computer or transfer the rental to a supported iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV“

Since I had already upgraded my iTunes to version 7.6 the rental option was available. I click to rent the movie, agree to the new Terms of Service, and start the download. The download ended up taking about 50 minutes over my Comcast cable connection. However, as advertised, I could start watching the movie in iTunes within a few seconds of starting the download. Great so far…

Once the movie finishes downloading, I go to transfer it to the AppleTV so Lissy and I can watch the movie together. Since I didn’t see a way to do this right away, I pulled up the instructions on Apple.com.

“1. Connect the device and select it in iTunes.”

Done. Easy enough.

“2. Click the Movies tab (for iPod), or the Videos tab (iPhone or Apple TV)”

Pulled it up. Great.

“3. Select the movie, and then click Move.

You must be connected to the Internet to transfer a rented movie.)”

Uh oh. The movie isn’t there. All I see are the holiday movies I transfered to my laptop for my son to watch on our flight to Orlando.

So, I do what any self-respecting gadget geek would do…

1. Make sure that both iTunes and AppleTV have Internet access.
2. Restart iTunes.
3. Restart AppleTV.
4. Set the laptop as the primary sync device for AppleTV.
5. Try to create a playlist to sync.
6. Try to create a Smart Playlist to sync.
7. Tweak iTunes settings.
8. Tweak AppleTV settings.
9. Repeat steps 1-8 with minor variations several times.
10. Admit defeat and go to Apple support.
11. Can’t find any help there, get frustrated, give my wife the laptop to watch the movie, and go to bed early.
12. Write this blog post the next day.

Has this happened to anyone else? Or, even better, has anyone else actually made this work? If so, please share your magic.

According to Nielsen Online, Google’s domination of the U.S. search market dropped slightly in December. Google’s search percentage fell to 56.3% from 57.7% the previous month. Yahoo’s search share also fell .2% to 17.7%. Microsoft gained a not-insignificant 1.8% to 13.8%.

So is this a holiday anomaly, the impact of Microsoft Live/Vista, the rise of specialty search engines, or something else entirely? I’d love to hear your thoughts.