Tech for Lunch!

I’m sure most of you have heard of (and probably used as well) Napster. Napster changed the way we trade, discover and, most of all, download our music forever when it was launched in June 1999. After a very successful run and a whole bunch of lawsuits and pressure from the record industry, Napster closed in July 2001. It was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Even though traffic was abundant and the sharing services were practically flawless, there were many other problems and Napster was not a very profitable business. In fact, after the final blow of lawsuits, it had to file for Chapter 11 and liquidate it’s assets.

One of the founders of Napster, Shawn Fanning has been hard at work on a new startup called Rupture: “All Games, All Platforms. Connect, Share, Achieve. Rupture builds a profile for you based on your game play. It’s not like other profiles, however. We automatically pull information from many video games. Did you beat the Drums Tour in Rock Band on Expert? All your friends will know”. Rupture has been in beta for quite some time and so a public release hasn’t happened yet.

It turns out that Shawn Fanning will finally get some payback for his hard work because Electronic Arts has been keeping an eye on the site. EA is buying Rupture for $30 million in a deal that should be announced soon. They are looking to integrate this technology in their business plan because the social networking aspect based around Massively Multiplayer games is something EA has been wanting to add for a while now.

Shawn will be working for EA once the deal goes through. Looks like setting up a few Internet Startups may eventually get you someplace cool!

Once again, I’ve come across a really cool online application that can be very useful to some readers out there. This one is called Presdo, which you can try for yourself at www.presdo.com, no need to register to see it in action.

Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. So basically, it is an online scheduling tool that you can use to invite people to an event (as simple as a cup of coffee to anything else..) and it helps you work-out the details so that the most people can attend without conflicts.

The thing that’s really cool about Presdo, and what makes it different from some of the others, is that it uses natural language to enter your events. When you get to the front page of the site, you are presented with a Google-inspired input box and not much else. You type in what you want to do using plain english, like “have lunch with Josee and yanick tomorrow at noon” and Presdo will take you to a screen with everything already filled out according to what you entered. At this point, you can modify what needs to be modified and enter the email addresses for the people you want to invite. If you have a sign-in, you would only need to do this once and you could re-use many of the things you’ve entered previously. You can use Google maps to find locations in your area and that map is included with the event to let everyone know where to go.

Once you send our the first invitation, everyone can confirm or suggest new times and locations to better accommodate them. When everyone agrees or you have the best date/time/location to get the most people, you can save the event directly in your calendar. You can export the event as an Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar items.

Presdo works extremely well and is a free service. Eventually, the founder would like to offer a premium service.

It was thirty years ago, on May 3rd 1978, that the very first spam message was sent out. I’m not sure if this is a wonderful event to remember, but the first message was not of malicious intent contrary to the ones we sometimes get today.

Back then, the internet as we know it today was not quite born just yet.. The network was known as the Arpanet and was still government-owned. According to Wikipedia: “The ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) developed by DARPA of the United States Department of Defense, was the world’s first operational packet switching network, and the predecessor of the global Internet.” While I was digging around for this story I ended up reading a few documents on the origins of the internet and it’s original purpose and I’ll probably write an article about all of this later on.

Let’s get back to the subject at hand, the first SPAM message. Gary Thuerk, the guy who sent the message had to use a text-based email client (there was no Windows at that time ;-)) and had to type all of the addresses manually. Compared to today’s spam attacks, it was a very limited number of recipients. It was an advertisement (or actually an invitation to come see) for the new DEC Computers. DEC does not exist anymore, but not because of the spam. The message was sent to a whopping 393 people and was not sent without problems. The person who sent the message was not very familiar with arpanet and its rules, nor with the software to send messages. He typed in all the addresses in the TO: field but after 320 names, they started overflowing in the body of the message. The first recipients then received the email with a bunch of addresses before the actual message. When they figured out that the last 73 names had not been included in the first broadcast, they sent another one!

The response was not very friendly to Mr. Thuerk’s pioneering message. Because the Arpanet was only used by researchers and the U.S. Military, he received many replies telling him that the system was not for his business purposes. In fact, he had managed to connect one of his DEC Computers to the Arpanet, which was also a violation of the rules.

It was approximately 10 years before another spam message was sent out in another form, and the evolution of spam followed the networks. Spam was used on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and today as we know it on the internet, where they account for about 90% of all emails sent in one day.

You can see the full transcript of the original message as well as many of the replies that followed here.

Earlier this month, Yahoo! announced “ Onesearch 2.0“. Onesearch is Yahoo’s search software for Internet connected mobile devices. The newly released version allows users to use voice commands to search the web.

Now you can use your voice to get answers on your phone. With Yahoo! oneSearch™ with voice, it’s fast and easy to search for anything you need when you’re mobile. Just speak into your phone and get relevant and accurate results from Yahoo! oneSearch, an industry leading mobile search product.

Onesearch is a pretty cool product because it allows you to find things faster than you normally would on your mobile phone. No need to browse to yahoo, search and then hope the results are relevant and well formatted for your phone. OneSearch runs directly on your mobile phone and lets you launch a search faster and returns relevant results that you can actually use.

Yahoo has partnered with 29 mobile telephone service carriers, representing 600 million customers, since the first version of oneSearch launched in early 2007. The second-generation oneSearch software is free for download and installation to mobile telephones linked to the Internet.

For those of you who have been paying attention, Microsoft is slowly moving towards using the internet as their platform rather than the actual machine you use to access it. Basically, in the long run, we should be able to access all of our stuff from anywhere, using any kind of computer, whether it’s a PC, Mac or even mobile devices. Techcrunch has a very complete article about it and I wasn’t quick enough to get into the first beta round so I’ll just write a summary of features here.

Imagine all your devices—PCs, and soon Macs and mobile phones—working together to give you anywhere access to the information you care about. With Live Mesh, you can spend less time managing devices and data and more time connecting with family and friends or collaborating with colleagues.

Live Mesh provides you with an online virtual desktop to which you connect your computers and any other device you want to use to control it. Right now, only Windows XP and Vista are supported but Macs and mobile devices should be added this year, as well as the capability to connect your xbox or even a picture frame.

The current product is definitely oriented towards developers and supplies all the necessary APIs to start building applications that will make good use of Live Mesh. Essentially, you could use it to not only sync files and folders, but entire applications. This would really take the desktop out of your local PC and move it online, allowing you to truly work (or play) from any machine you choose.

I can’t wait to see more of this product, but I will have to wait for openings in the beta which is full right now. In the mean time, the article I mentioned above is very thorough and has some screenshots.

I know that this was a few days ago, but since I posted an article about selling domains for profit recently, I thought it was still interesting to mention it here. If you were quick enough to get your hands on a good, catchy and relevant domain name a few years ago, you might want to start being proactive and not just wait for someone to make an offer on it. Putting it up for auction, could be a good way to get rid of it and make some cool cash while you’re at it. This article has the full story on how it all happened.

Chris Clark bought pizza.com in 1994 for the usual reservation price of 20$ and has kept it all these years. He originally bought it for his company to try and get contracts with local pizza businesses but it never worked out. He still held on to it thinking it wouls someday be useful. A couple of years ago, he and a friend used the domain to make it a pizza directory with ads returning about 5000$ a month.

The natural traffic on sites with single words like these is impressive. Without ever having to advertise, sites like tees.com, vodka.com, sex.com and pizza.com get regular monthly traffic just because people are curious and because the domain names match exactly the keywords being typed into search engines.

After earing about the sale of vodka.com for $3 million on the auction site Sedo.com, Chris Clark decided to see what the interest might be for his domain. The auction started slowly but then shot up to the $2 million reserve price that was set and ended a $2.6 million for the final sale price. Sedo keeps 10% for running the auction and running background checks on bidders because of the high numbers being rolled in.

Just as previously reported, Facebook has begun rolling out their IM client on some selected networks. This was the only available information since the complete roll out schedule has not been made public. it is to be released to limited networks first for load testing and bug-hunting, and then rolled out to broader networks.

The new chat bar appears at the bottom of every page and cannot be removed. The client has all the regular functionalities that you would expect such as the ability to show yourself as offline and lets you know who is available for chatting.

The integration is very well done and should prove to be a great addition to Facebook. I know that it will give a good reason to many people for leaving a browser with Facebook open all the time.   You can find a full post about the features with screenshots here if you can’t wait to try if for yourself.  You can “pop-out” the chat windows to allow many chats at the same time and a better visibility and the status window shows your friends letting you know who is active or not.

Mini-feed items will also appear directly in your chat windows for the person you are chatting with if they are related.  So if you are chatting with someone who does something on your profile, you get instantly notified.

I hope the networks I am in get this very anticipated IM Client rolled-out because I am really anxious to try it out. Not that I have that much chatting to do, but I like the technical integration that they have made and I want to try it out even more for myself.

There was a post on Mozilla Lab’s blog to announce that they have partnered with Last.FM to offer a prize package for the “Extend Firefox 3″ contest. They are looking for “the best new music-related Firefox Add-on that demonstrates excellence in user experience, innovativeness, and use of open standards“.

The prize package includes a very cool trip to London and VIP tickets to attend one event presented by Last.FM and, for the gadget lover in all of us, a Logitech Squeezebox network music player.

Of course you need to know a little bit about what you’re doing and code something nice for Firefox 3, but since I’m a confirmed geek and love the technology/music mix, I feel that the more people know about this contest, the better the chances I’ll get a really cool extension for my Firefox!

The panel of judges will include Toby Padilla, Last.FM’s Vice-President of Client and Desktop Software.

Official rules and details on this new addition to Extend Firefox are available at www.extendfirefox.com

It turns out that Spongebob Squarepants isn’t the only one who loves April Fool’s day! Google plants a few interesting pranks on this day every year and if you’re not careful, you can get caught believing them for a moment or two. Here are the reported pranks for this year…

ADsense for Conversations: Google can now place advertisements in your conversations (although that one wouldn’t be all too surprising..). When you sign up, they will send you head gear to wear on which the ads will display, based on your current conversation.

Gmail Custom Time: This “feature” was implemented in Gmail to allow users to select a date on which to send your emails. The great advantage here is that you can send emails in the past, so you never miss a deadline again. The new feature “utilizes an e-flux capacitor to resolve issues of causality“.. they really thought of everything and that one launched a Wikipedia debate.

Virgle: This is a fake collaboration between Virgin’s Richard Branson and Google for an “open-source” Mars expedition. The first users should be able to get to mars by 2014. You can see one of the videos here.

Youtube’s Rickrolling prank: Rickrollin’ is a geek-culture phenomenon in which users send falsified links to others to redirect them to a youtube video of Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give you Up”. For the prank, all the featured videos on Youtube’s page redirected everyone to that video.

Google Wake-up Kit: This one was on Google Calendar(you can see it here), offering users new ways to get a wake-up call. “First it will send an SMS message to your phone. If that fails, more coercive means will be used“

I’m Feeling Lucky Dates: Google Calendar also added the famous “I’m feeling lucky” button to allow users to add random events to their calendars, usually dates involving celebrities.

Future Search: Google Australia joined the fun by adding a button under the search bar allowing users to search the web as it will be tomorrow. See the description for gDay here. The technology behind this revolutionary search method is aptly called MATE (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).

Google Paper Airplane: This one was on Google Docs and was a new option in the file menu labeled as “New Airplane”. It opened up a document with instructions to fold and make your paper airplane. You can get the PDF document here to fold your very own airplane!

We’ll see you next year for the next pranks…

Well, unless you are using a blogging software or looking to start using one, this article may not be very useful to you, but it is still interesting to hear about a great piece of software when it comes along. Techforlunch uses Wordpress, so everything you see is managed and/or generated by wordpress. Wordpress 2.5 was released on March 29th and if you are waiting to upgrade, you shouldn’t…

I ran the upgrade procedure on techforlunch.com following the documentation and it was flawless. The steps are pretty straight-forward and basic:

1. Backup your database and current site files
2. Disable all your plugins
3. Upload the new files to your site (making sure not to overwrite the plugins and themes folders.)
4. Update the database schema (http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php)
5. Enable all your plugins one by one
6. Enjoy!

The improvements are not as visible on the user’s side so that is why practically no one will notice the version upgrade on the frontend. For the administrators though, it’s a different story. The interface is much cleaner, faster and less cluttered than before and adds many new features.

I strongly recommend this upgrade and can vouch for its ease of installation. The one click plugin upgrade feature is worth the upgrade by itself!