I would like to personally thank Facebook for making me feel special on my birthday. I received over 50+ Happy Birthday notifications via Facebook. Some were friends, others were acquaintances that I had not spoken to in years and a few from complete strangers.
Facebook Killer Feature: Providing users at least one happy birthday wish on their birthday above and beyond the Happy Birthday card from Southwest Airlines (How do they remember every year!?!).
As I watch the devastating floods in the mid-west, I can’t help but ask myself, are we still using sandbags in the year 2008? Have we not been able to innovate and come up with a better approach to blocking water during a flood situation?
Below is a photo from the “Great Flood of 1965″. Notice the highly inefficient use of sandbags. If the photo was not black and white, you might think this was a photo from our most recent floods. Keep in mind that this is over forty years ago.
Wikipedia tell me that the sandbag has been used since the 1700’s.
Com’on guys! Can’t we think of a better way to do this? Billions and billions of dollars of property damage and countless lives are at stake here. How about quick hardening foam or lightweight plastic barriers?
I’m not sure what the answer is. This is not my area of expertise but I do know that its sad that we’re still using a technique from the 1700’s.
Post a comment if you have heard of any interesting alternatives.
Here is an interesting little company called UrbanSpoon which at the core of it looks like a variant of Yelp. They provide community based restaurant recommendation and reviews. Recently, they released an iPhone application that will randomly find you a restaurant based on your geographic location. Or, what could be described as location based Yelp.
What’s interesting about this?
I’m still fully formulating my opinion on Google Android verses Apple’s iPhone SDK, but at first glance i’m more in favor of the iPhone SDK.
I better brush up on my Objective-C.
As I was poking around the Google YouTube API researching a side project, I stumbled upon this cool timeline widget by Dipity. There seems to be an endless amount of these “widget companies” that are worth much more than the name of their space leads you to believe (Slide, RockYou, etc).
Dipity caught my attention only because they came up with a very cool use of the YouTube API. However, they also came up with a very interactive widget that, if done properly, could be as compelling as Slide’s slide show widget. Basically, they allow you to create a timeline of anything and share them with the world. Here is a link to the Apple Timeline. Even cooler, they allow various views on the same timeline and allow multiple people edit the timeline.
Their biggest problem is going to be performance. I’m running Firefox 3 on a pretty beefy Ubuntu box and the rendering stinks. They’ll need to figure this out.
Bottom line, a compelling startup can be as simple as a different way to visualize something. It will be interesting to see if they are able to gain traction.
My opinion is that I’m tired of reading about this damm Micro-hoo non-merger and the misadventures of captain Wang Yang. (Did anyone notice that Jerry is appropriately titled “Captain Yahoo” on the corporate website.)
Please end the insanity and bring this story to a conclusion. Millions of trees, gallons of ink and countless blogger hours can be saved by ending this mess.
Please!
As with any startup, you never get the time to do the little things. I’ve been with Abaca Technology as their Director of Engineering for more than six months already and I just got a chance to write my bio for the leadership page. I think my focus has been in the right area because we’re making some serious progress. These are exciting times. If only I could talk about it more openly.
Renato J. Mascardo
Director of Engineering
Renato brings over a decade of experience leading engineering organizations with proven success inspiring large engineering teams to high levels of quality, productivity and innovation. Renato has extensive experience taking to market enterprise software, application lifecycle management, SaaS, commerce and mobile products. He has been involved with startups throughout his career and driving ideas to market.
Prior to joining Abaca, Renato was a senior engineering manager at Hewlett-Packard’s hyper growth software division (formerly Mercury Interactive). There he helped build two successful engineering teams and helped push the two products into Gartner’s magic quadrant. Before Hewlett-Packard, Renato was a technical leader for Borland Software where he architected and developed full application lifecycle management solutions for their biggest customers. Prior to joining Borland Software, Renato was a technical leader at Scient. There he was involved in building the first generation of large scale web applications including Sephora.com and Powerspring.com. Also, while at Scient he founded the mobile computing consulting practice while wireless technologies were still in its infancy and was one of the co-founding members of a product based company spin out.
Renato holds a B.A. degree in Computer Science from the University of Richmond in Richmond, VA.
A number of my old team members from the Mercury Diagnostics product line, which was eventually folded into HP Software went off and founded Apptio. They describe themselves as:
Apptio is the leading provider of on demand IT Cost Transparency solutions. Apptio’s IT Cost Transparency solutions provide greater visibility into the cost, utilization and operations of IT products and services so that businesses can identify ways to reduce IT costs , make better IT decisions and benefit from more proactive IT demand management. Capabilities include template driven IT cost modeling, interactive reporting and analytics, and business facing IT demand management.
I got a few IM’s today when their website went live with real content. A very compelling idea if they can execute on it. Based on the research I was doing at my previous product line, there is huge demand for this kind of software depending on the maturity of the IT organization. These guys are hunting for some big fish.
Now, take a look at their leadership team. It’s stacked! I predict these guys will get bought in a couple of years.
It seems the Apple store is down for what I’m assuming to be updates that will come out of the WWDC announcement this morning. I’m no crazy Apple fanatic but you have to hand it to Steve Job’s ability orchestrate a marketing event. He’s very good at what he does.
Let’s see what he says …
Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference 2008 starts tomorrow and the freak Apple fans are running up the rumors about the 3G iPhone, iPhone embedded GPS. iPhone with video conferencing or Mac Fusion. And of course, everyone is afraid that Twitter will go down which means people will need to actually call each other. Sucks. I don’t want to talk to anyone.
Well, let’s see what Steve has in store for us tomorrow! I’ll probably end up buying it. Dammit!
Ok, so I admit that I didn’t really understand Twitter when it came out. It seemed pretty dumb. Well, after playing around with it for the past two weeks, I’ve come to appreciate the unified communication aspect of the platform. You really need to look beyond the guy who tweets, “I’m sitting on couch eating dinner”.
The platform enables quick, easy and broad communication. It reminds me of the unified communication platforms (that have been around for a while) in a nice Web 2.0 box. Let’s see if they can get back the scalability issues.
So, if you have nothing else to do, subscribe to my Twitter feed.
http://www.twitter.com/rmascardo
