By the time most people read this post I will have stayed in three different hotels in New York, New Jersey and Maryland while trekking along with Challenge X teams for their final competition. That means I have had a chance to glance through several terms of service agreements for various hotel internet connections. Continue Reading »

I recently started using RescueTime after hearing about it countless times on Hacker News. Simply put, RescueTime is like Google Analytics for your time. It automatically tracks where you spend your time while computing and helps you become more productive by Continue Reading »

Summize, a company I am quite familiar with following my review of their review aggregator product, has substantially changed their company direction since I have last been in touch with them. They are now focusing on a Twitter search tool - so much so that it is their main product and the review aggregator has been moved to Continue Reading »

Final exams are around the corner and I can’t help but think how useful Google Docs has been for me this year. They may not have implemented the print layout view (although it is surely nearby) I have been longing for, but Google has completely turned Docs around since their acquisition of Writely in March 2006. Continue Reading »

One of the all-nighters I have pulled for school work in the last week has been for the last computer science course I need to take at Georgia Tech. It’s called Design of Online Communities and while essentially a slightly toned down version of a graduate course and the most reading-intense computer science course offered here, it is also among the more interesting. Continue Reading »

Building a community-driven site? You should consider implementing a points system. Why? I’ll try to show you why in this post, but in a nutshell points systems are an ingenious way of taking something with no tangible value and turning it into a prized virtual currency of sorts. Continue Reading »

The cat’s out of the bag and Flickr has officially launched their foray into the video world. I was fortunate enough to be a part of the “super secret” beta test along with ~260 users a few weeks ago (Thanks Richard!). In that group we were given info about the video Continue Reading »

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon’s web services arsenal. You’ve probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the “elastic compute cloud.” In layman’s terms, it’s a server. In slightly less layman’s terms, EC2 lets you easily run Continue Reading »

As cliche and trite as I might sound saying this, music streaming services are hot right now. For the past week or so I haven’t even used iTunes. I’ve just been listening to the Muxtape playlists of friends and random people. If that doesn’t do it for me, I tune into The Feel Good and see what’s popular. The list goes on. Continue Reading »

While I’m not quite sure that’s the most fitting title, I’ve recently been thinking about online anonymity in regards to web applications. In this time of social networks, social media, OpenSocial and what not, I find it a bit annoying that so many people go about using these social tools as anonymous users Continue Reading »

Viddyou, a video startup focused around vlogging, has been beta testing their premium services account over the last week. I’ve been in contact with Aaron Wadler, one of the guys behind Viddyou, ever since I wrote Make This Startup: HD Video Serving Service so I was interested in hearing Continue Reading »

I’ve always struggled with selling advertising on this site. I have tried some things here and there but most resulted in not enough revenue for the value they detracted from my site. Selling my own ads made decent money Continue Reading »

There aren’t too many websites that irritate or annoy me other than the usuals; MySpace and the like. Unfortunately, I am adding a new site to that list today, Guy Kawasaki’s latest venture called Alltop. Since Uncov.com is no longer around, I will critique Alltop on their behalf. It’s horrible, or as they would say, FAIL. Continue Reading »

After working on Skribit for the last 4 months, I have gotten a grip on my workflow and the tools I as well as the other co-founders use. The scope of this post is to give potential starter-uppers an idea of how to get work done collaboratively with others Continue Reading »

One of my secret passions in recent years has been learning about startups - how they run, what they need, how they reach their audience, the value-prop they offer and so on. Some people have a thing for GTD but I have a crush on startups. Why do I love them so? Continue Reading »

Last September Yahoo! announced they had acquired Zimbra, a leader in email and collaboration software focused towards businesses, ISPs and universities. It was with that same announcement that Yahoo! said Georgia Tech would be one of the first universities to adopt Zimbra’s webmail application. Georgia Tech’s Continue Reading »

No I’m not talking about Apple’s Time Capsule backup device, rather a new project from the folks at Photojojo called the Photo Time Capsule. Just set it up with your Flickr account and every month you’ll receive an email highlighting some of your best Flickr photos from around a year ago. Continue Reading »

OpenDNS, the only DNS service I trust with my Internet experience, recently rolled out several notable features including from domain tagging (also known as “People-Powered Security“) and an idea bank. The former lets OpenDNS users categorize domains by content and eventually, accurate domain categorizations make Continue Reading »

Today Mozilla, the company behind your favorite open source web browser and email client, has launched a subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, focused entirely on email and Internet communications. Mozilla Messaging is the name and ignoring prevalent Continue Reading »

John Ratcliffe-Lee writes in with a question about how to use Subversion to easily keep tabs on a frequently updated software CMS he wants to use. First off, what is Subversion? It’s a widely used version control system, or in Continue Reading »

This very well might be one of those moments that defines tech news in 2008, especially if Yahoo! accepts Microsoft’s 44.6 billion dollar offer. For the past few years Yahoo! has been suffering. In 2006, this became more widely known when Continue Reading »

As a product review connoisseur myself, I immediately became interested in Summize when it first took wind. Summize is a trend-tracking, review-aggregating, verdict-visualizing product review portal of sorts, with the focus being on their unique information visualization methods. Continue Reading »

RSS is great for when you’re at your computer or actively reading feeds on your mobile device but it’s not as pervasive and intrusive as SMS text messages. That may seem great, I mean who would want to be constantly bombarded by Continue Reading »

Here I am, the night before Christmas, thinking about what I’m going to do with the high-definition camcorder I bought myself. Naturally, I am going to use it to share some HD video on this site to spice up reviews and so on. The problem lies in how to get that large amount of content from the server to your display. Continue Reading »

I got an email from Nike’s ad agency back in November. After many more emails, quite a few calls, a demo video, film scouting and then a day of shooting, I became the star of my own Nike+ conversional ad. There are currently 5 conversionals up and they briefly take you into the life of a real Nike+ user that converted Continue Reading »