Techcrunch broke the news this morning about slideshare.net, the new web app from Uzanto. Slideshare is a site for the social sharing of slideshows (PowerPoint and other types of presentations).
Anyone who wants an invite, sent me an email (jon AT uzanto DOT com) and I will hook you up! (Currently the site is invitation only: each account gets 10 invites to forward on to others). And you can read more of my writings about slideshare on the slideshare blog.
The cool thing is that you can embed slideshows into your blog, like this talk by my friend Ali, who is a teacher:
Author: jonathanboutelle
Going to AJAXWorld / Real World Ruby on Rails
I’ll be going to the Real World Ruby on Rails conference in Santa Clara tomorrow. The seminar is co-located with the AJAXWorld conference, so there should be lots of rich client geeks to hang out with. Fun!
Embedding Flash into Web Apps
The Uzanto team has been hammering away at an awesome new social web app that we will be releasing into the wild “real soon now”. One of the things we’ve learned while building it is that Flash is an absolutely essential component of the modern web.
Uzanto office: new and improved!
Uzanto just finished our move from our crappy old office to our awesome new office. We are really psyched about this new space: it has 3 rooms, brick walls, and cool neighbors (the Mountain View Voice is in the same building, and Flock is next door). Most importantly, it has an awesome view of the Mountain View train station. Watching the tides of commuters come and go is fascinating, and we’ll have to be careful not to get distracted! If you’re looking for us, just go to the Mountain View train station and look across the street: we’re in the brick building pictured here:
In honor of the move, I’ve made a google mashup that shows our new location, as well as some other points of interest, including the all-important Dana St Coffee House. The mashup was made with photo source from maps.A9.com, photostitched together and hosted on flickr. Geocoding was from the always-useful geocode.com . And of course the maps are from google! So it’s a 4-way mashup, more or less.
Utility Computing is here: meet the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
Amazon has been pushing the limits of distributed computing, offering very useful, reasonably priced computing services like their awesome online storage service (S3), and their queuing service (SQS). Now they’ve released something MUCH more generic and powerful: a hosting infrastructure that lets you preconfigure your desired servers (by giving Amazon a disk image of a Linux machine). It’s called the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2 for short. When you want a server, you can then order it via the website and have it online within minutes. Pricing is a very reasonable 10 cents an hour (72$/month) plus bandwidth. Each instance provides the computing equivalent of a dedicated system with a 1.7Ghz Xeon CPU, 1.75GB of RAM, 160GB of local disk, and 250Mb/s of network bandwidth.
New mullet in town at topofthemountains.net
Ben Crowder has implemented the mullet on his blog. Looks like he used Kapil Mohan’s wordpress mullet layout, and Gopalarathnam’s long tail archive template for his long tail archive. Makes me wish I used wordpress for my blog! Nice job Ben, the mullet looks great.
Webyantra … the techcrunch of india?
Webyantra.net launched last month, and is profiling the indian web startup scene better than any other site I’ve found. Especially interesting stuff on Indimoto (online carpools), Picsquare (flickr of India), Tezaa (online polls), Wallet365 (online payments), and OLX (classified ads). My personal favorite? Onyoma, a local search site that has been founded by some IIT Delhi kids.
HOW-TO: Make an AJAXified Digg-It button (with bonus RSS subscription!)
I made a little widget for my blog that supports both bookmarking (to popular bookmarking sites like Digg) and subscribing to my site (via popular RSS readers like BlogLines). The widget uses a little javascript to hide the (hideously tacky) icons of the various sites until the user clicks on it. Check out the top right corner of my blog, or the bottom of this article, for a demo.
The cool things about this widget are:
1) It is much less ugly and distracting than current solutions (which embed a gaudy list of icons into your blog).
2) It is independent on any server-side environment: because it’s all in javascript, it can run in WordPress, Moveable Type, Drupal, or any other blogging engine or CMS. In fact, it can run in any web page at all.
3) It frames RSS subscription in language the user can understand (e.g. “Add this to Bloglines”, rather than “XML”).
Delhi Ruby Geek Dinner
Manik and I will be hosting a Delhi meetup for Ruby enthusiasts this Friday. It’s completely informal: we’ll be drinking beer, eating food, and talking about Ruby and/or RubyOnRails. In that order.
We’re meeting up at the Piccadilly, in PVR plaza, Connaught Place 8PM this Friday (June 2nd). Needless to say, it’ll be dutch (Manik and I aren’t buying). If you’re a Delhi geek who grooves on Ruby, Rails, or domain specific languages in general, come on down! You have nothing to lose but your sobriety.
Blogging from 30,000 ft
It is human nature to be unsatisfied. When we get a new technology, it may initially impresses us a lot. But we habituate extremely rapidly to whatever the new norm is and start complaining again.
Case in point: my flight to Delhi is on Lufthansa, and Lufthansa planes now are wifi-enabled. Holy cow! OK, for 20 minutes I was impressed. But now I’m complaining to my seatmates about the download speed (162.1 kilobits per second? pathetic!), and the fact that not all ports are open (no skype? WTF?).
I’m sure 20 minutes after they develop cold fusion, we’ll find some reason to complain about that.
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