Martin Wells

And whilst I hate to jump in on hype… here’s a video portraying Microsoft’s “origami” device. I’ve wondered for ages why there are so few devices that are practical to carry around (light), but with large enough screens to be useful (unlike PDA’s)… if this device works as it does in the video, I’m in. And maybe the iPod finally has a competitor.

I wonder if Tangler will run on it.

I have about 20 years of technical experience (if you count my first software company selling games as a teenager). Having done this for that long tends to make one a little cynical about supposedly earth shattering new technology. Most of what I see announced as unique isn’t pushing any boundaries. In fact, when you really get down to it, most of the time “new” technology simply exposes the inexperience of the inventor — Marty’s Law #12 states: an inventor’s perceived unqiueness of a product is usually directly proportionate to their lack of experience in a market. Note the inclusion of the word “usually” - It’s the exceptions to this rule that are the true gems.

So after that lengthy qualification, here goes: the recently announced service, Edgeio, is unique. And I think it deserves some recognition… Let me explain.

RSS is a standardisation of web content that has resulted in three big things happening:

1. A new channel has emerged to effectively leverage the incredible flurry of information – such as blogs. This makes RSS popular, and therefore gives it the legs to become a standard.
2. Content is now available in more manageable and flexible way than HTML (simplified content delivered using XML).
3. Pushed content means that accessing new information as it emerges is now practical. Rather than readers having to visit a site and try to determine if something new has appeared (something that is extremely difficult to do efficiently and reliably with HTML). Calling this the “content edge” is actually a pretty accurate term.

So up until now we’ve had tools (mostly search engines) that have leveraged POWC (plain old web content) to the best of their ability. But as you extend beyond the structure of information you get a higher and higher error rate. This makes trying to leverage content harder and harder. With RSS the content is dramatically simplified (no flash, DHTML, JavaScript or dynamic results to wade through) and the format is rigid and structured, so it’s much faster and easier to leverage.

It’s not only RSS that’s doing this. The blogging platforms are playing a big part in standardising web publishing. All blog posts are simplified content (”middle-class” text); have date, title and body separation; and a generally accepted set of meta-data, such as tags. And like all standards, blogs and its love child RSS, is a simplification of content to a level of acceptable function – just the facts mam.

Surprisingly though, not many new tools are really leveraging this new standard. We have RSS readers, and mostly RSS search. But that’s thinking in the old terms. We haven’t yet seen any tools that take advantage of RSS’s features beyond readers, until now.

Edgeio is a system that scours RSS feeds for information that people want to expose via their web sites (typically blogs) and then organises it all into something useful. So practically you can create a blog entry with the title “Used Cat For Sale — Will Swap For USB Memory” and tag it with the keyword “listing”. Edgeio will then detect this tag and insert a listing into its site. In this way you’re putting up the ad, you own the content, control the feedback, edit it how you like, and edgeio will bring you an audience based on a focused categorisation of your listing. It’s unique, it’s cool, and it’s brilliant. Nice one Keith and Mike — I’ll talk to you at parties (even if Amanda won’t).

Will edgeio succeed? Now that’s a different question. And we’ve all seen cases of new techs getting rolled by a better execution (Napster/iTunes, Netscape/IE, Friendster/MySpace). Watch this site, feed or (now) tag from the edge.

For more reading check out the Buzz Machine along with comments by founder Keith Teare. TechCrunch also has a nice review.

I’ve been wondering about what’s going to be really useful in Vista (since they seem to have dropped most of the really cool technical stuff. So here’s a list of things that will actually make a difference:

• Performance measurement
• An automated defragmenter
• Useful power configuration
• You can use attachable USB memory
• Built-in speech recognition
• Good games
• A new media player
• A revised start menu system (which includes keybaord support)
• A standardized sidebar system
• Integrated backups

None of this is earth shattering, but it’s all pretty cool and useful stuff that will be nice to have as standard. This stuff alone will ensure record uptake.

Ask any number of people off the street what their ultimate goal in life is and most likely 9 out of 10 won’t tell you they want to be featured by Amanda Congdon on Rocket Boom. Actually most have probably not even heard of Rocket Boom. For the rest of us though (and I mean that in a very non-elitist-you’ll-be-a-fan-soon kinda way) it was lovely to see Tangler have 15ns of fame during today’s feature (watch carefully about 60 seconds in). I wonder if Amanda will talk to me at parties now…

Tangler was featured on TechCrunch yesterday and I have to thank Nik for a great write-up, especially considering the little information we were letting him release. We’ve since received nearly a thousand tester registrations (in under 24 hours), as well as lots of emails and calls – amazing what one blog post can do for a startup.

I’m really pleased with how much Nik “got” our product concepts, especially in understanding the uniqueness of what we’re trying to do and the technology behind it. Being a new concept makes it hard to describe sometimes, and people tend to leap to conclusions. Nik took the time and had the ability to understand the difference (and no, we are not simply an ajax web chat system – not that I have anything against web chat systems).

When Nik first suggested we disclose some details on TechCrunch I was concerned it was still too early for us. I’ve seen startups get bubbled up on hype (with no substance), so I wanted to make sure people didn’t perceive us this way. Ultimately though we can’t do this alone, and the chance to attract some quality testers and other support was too good to pass up. After seeing the flurry in the past 24 hours I can’t thank him enough.
Anyway, enough gushing.

Thanks also to Ravneet from Emergintex and Ahmed Bilal, who both did some congitating on what instant grouping might mean for the future.

Foldera has an interesting product that looks to take a project-centric approach to organising information.

Whilst this has been tried in the past, Foldera might have finally reached the right balance — if only they were a desktop application. But they’re not; it’s a web app, albeit a pretty ajaxian one, and I think this is an example of basically choosing the wrong platform.

Maybe they didn’t want to challenge Outlook, maybe they thought zero-install was the only way to distribute a product now, maybe they thought businesses are just waiting for the right application before moving their most important data onto an unknown providers infrastructure, maybe they thought the small-just-starting-all-we-need-is-a-web-app (something I like to call the SJSAWNIAWA sector) is a big unknown “long-tail” market… But why hamstring terrific ideas like this with the scale, speed and privacy issues of a web app.

Web 2.0 has it’s advantages, but I think sometimes the allure of being part of a new generation of web applications blinds us to the practicalities of choosing ultimately what’s best for the user.

Sometimes ideas come along that are all at once crazy, useless, inventive, inspired and profoundly geeky. Like this one:

“In a darkened Las Vegas conference room, a cheering audience waves cardboard wands in the air. Each wand is red on one side, green on the other. Far in back of the huge auditorium, a camera scans the frantic attendees. The video camera links the color spots of the wands to a nest of computers set up by graphics wizard Loren Carpenter. Carpenter’s custom software locates each red and each green wand in the auditorium. Tonight there are just shy of 5,000 wandwavers. The computer displays the precise location of each wand (and its color) onto an immense, detailed video map of the auditorium hung on the front stage, which all can see. More importantly, the computer counts the total red or green wands and uses that value to control software. As the audience wave the wands, the display screen shows a sea of lights dancing crazily in the dark, like a candlelight parade gone punk. The viewers see themselves on the map; they are either a red or green pixel. By flipping their own wands, they can change the color of their projected pixels instantly.”

I’ve been a long time fan of the Standford Technologies Ventures Program. It’s a regular seminar run by Stanford where successful entrepreneurs are invited to give presentations. You’ll find people like Larry Page, Guy Kawasaki and Fern Mandelbaum.

What’s great is they record everything (either video and mp3) and make it available for download. I’ve found the interviews and presentations to be interesting, insightful and fun for anybody in the startup business. Well worth a visit.

Matt, a fellow aussie, made a wonderful spoof page to have a little go at web 2.0 page design. Hilarious.

Someone emailed me asking if I know of a mobile RSS reader and that prompted me to mention something I failed in my previous post. You can use Attensa to feed RSS articles into Outlook folders but you’ll find these will not be available for sync when using ActiveSync (in the email folder options).

To get around this, reconfigure Attensa and point the parent folder to be underneath your personal folder (such as your Inbox). Restart everything, including ActiveSync and you’ll see all your RSS feed folders popup. Next time you sync, bingo, all those RSS articles will appear as email on your mobile. The only real drawback is you have to manually select folders, ActiveSync doesn’t allow you to select a folder and have it sync all children. Oh well, I’ll wait for Attensa Mobile.