Four short links: 20 Mar 2009

Space, Space, Micromanufacturing, and Sensors:

1. Teens Capture Images of Space With £56 Camera and Balloon (Telegraph) -- DIY/MAKE culture at its best, four 18-19 year old Spanish students (with guidance of a teacher) rigged a balloon to carry a camera over 100,000 feet (that's twelve trillion and seven Canadian meters) above the earth, take pictures, and return to the ground. Here's their project's web page with a Google gadget to translate it into English. (via @erikapearson)
2. The Robot Who Helps Astronomers Identify Stars - IO9 interviewed Fiona Romeo, about the Royal Observatory's Astronomical Photograph of the Year contest and the astrotagging bot I linked to earlier.
3. Clive Thompson on the Revolution in Micromanufacturing -- talks about his experiences with Etsy. I was aware of the site but had dismissed it as some sort of urban-hipster thing—until I started seeing chatter about it on discussion boards for wealthy professionals and stay-at-home moms.
4. How The FitBit Algorithms Work -- The Fitbit’s primary method of collecting data is an accelerometer. Its accelerometer constantly measures the acceleration of your body and algorithms convert this raw data into useful information about your daily life, such as calories burned, steps, distance and sleep quality. How do we develop these algorithms? Our approach is that we have test subjects wear the Fitbit while also wearing a device that produces a “truth” value. [...].

How to build companies that matter

Eric Ries, a serial entrepreneur, most recently was co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of IMVU, his third startup. He's the author of the blog Lessons Learned, co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996), and a Venture Advisor at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. He. In 2007, BusinessWeek named Ries one of the Best Young Entrepreneurs of Tech. He'll be presenting on "The Lean Startup: a Disciplined Approach to Imagining, Designing, and Building New Products" at Web 2.0 Expo.

We're living in a time of renewed possibility for startups. Major trends - from the pain of the economic crisis to the disruption of web 2.0 - are breaking the old models and paving the way for a new breed of company. I call it the Lean Startup.

The Lean Startup is a disciplined approach to building companies that matter. It's designed to dramatically reduce the risk associated with bringing a new product to market by building the company from the ground up for rapid iteration and learning. It requires dramatically less capital than older models, and can find profitability sooner. Most importantly, it breaks down the artificial dichotomy between pursuing the company’s vision and creating profitable value. Instead, it harnesses the power of the market in support of the company’s long-term mission.

Tim O'Reilly has recently been advocating that as an industry we focus on building stuff that matters. In response, I want to try and present a way of building startups that can realize that dream. In particular, he as articulated three principles:

(1) Work on something that matters to you more than money, (2) Create more value than you capture, and (3) Take the long view.

Given the hype and easy credit that has been the hallmark of technology startups the past few years, it's been too easy for them to be unclear about whether they are really creating more value or just spending money to create the appearance of success. The lean startup approach tackles this problem from the very beginning of a startup's life. My experience is that startups need to be built from the ground up for learning about customers and what they will pay for. That means an obsessive focus on finding out "is our company vision really the path to a brave new world, or just a delusion?"

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Four short links: 19 Mar 2009

Graphics, Sin, Smart Water Grids, and Invention--just another four short links:

1. Libre Graphics Meeting -- meeting for developers of free graphics software such as Inkscape, , and Scribus. 6-9 May 2009, and they welcome sponsors. Great tools for desktop publishing, photo manipulation, illustration, etc. are what normal businesses and consumers want on their desktops. Lovely to see more Open Source and Free Software maturing in this area.
2. Druckers' Five Deadly Business Sins -- love them all. #3: Cost-driven Pricing. The only thing that works is price-driven costing. The only sound way to price is to start out with what the market is willing to pay--and thus what the competition will charge--and design to that price specification. A quick search will turn up PDFs of the original article.
3. IBM Says Solar Water Will Be A $20BB Business -- smartgrids for water, akin to smartgrids for power. And IBM sees a role for information technology in the water world that's analogous to its role in smart grid projects, Nunes said. That includes sensor networks that can track water flow and quality, water meters that can give utilities and customers up-to-date information on water use and price, and complex "predictive" modeling to let water managers plan for the future. (via Freaklabs)
4. Excogitate -- another word from Dr Johnson's Dictionary blog, this one means to invent. I love the suggestion that invention is simply the external reflection of thought. Get excited and make things.

Request for ideas: Crowdsourcing the Evolution of Congressional Websites

Guest blogger Rep. Mike Honda, D-San Jose, serves in the U.S. Congress on the House Appropriations subcommittee on the Legislative Branch.

Tim recently asked readers of this blog to help provide me with guidance on the best way to make official legislative databases available to the developer community. The question, which also made its way onto Slashdot, led to a wealth of proposals, some of which I am considering developing into new legislation. Following on the success of that initial conversation, I’d like to ask for your guidance once again.

How can Congress take advantage of web 2.0 technologies to transform the relationship between citizens and government? Instead of viewing the public as a customer for services, I believe that we should empower citizens to become our partners in shaping the future of our nation.

Sites like stimuluswatch.org, for example, have shown how the public can advise officials on which elements of the economic recovery program are most effective in creating jobs and resuscitating our struggling economy. Together we can identify and cut ineffective government programs and simultaneously support cost effective initiatives that maximize Return On Investment.

Websites like these only become possible when government data (in this case a list of project requests from the US Council of Mayors) is repurposed to enable public participation. Until more government databases become available, however, the full potential of web 2.0 technologies will remain unfulfilled. A dramatic shift in perspective is needed before that need can be met. Instead of databases becoming available as a result of Freedom Of Information Act requests, government officials should be required to justify why any public data should not be freely available to the taxpayers who paid for its creation.

As one leading e-government expert recently advised:

Free your data, especially maps and other geographic information, plus the non-personal data that drives the police, health and social services, for starters. Introduce a ‘presumption of innovation’ – if someone has asked for something … give them what they want: it’s probably a sign that they understand the value of your data when you don’t.

My constituents in Silicon Valley understand how opening up data can catalyze dramatic innovation, and I recently enacted legislation to provide free public access to legislative databases with that goal in mind. It is my hope that this information can foster the development of initiatives to empower the public to collaborate with and provide advice to Members of Congress. No longer will individuals simply petition their representatives – instead you should be our most valued advisors.

Government 2.0 is an achievable goal, and together we can make it a reality. In fact, I recently began a comprehensive redesign of my website with the goal of developing new and unprecedented ways of collaborating with my constituents.

To solicit ideas for the new website, I sent my Online Communications Director to a conference to lead a website brainstorming session. That conversation resulted in several intriguing proposals, including the suggestion that I post my hearing schedule for the week so that my constituents could propose questions for me to ask of witnesses.

The success of that session, and the quality of your answers to the last question I posted here, gives just a hint of the possibilities that can result from greater partnership between elected officials and the public. While I may not be able to implement every idea that is suggested, I do plan on providing a list of the most innovative ideas to my fellow Members of Congress.

What features could I implement on my website to tap into the wisdom of the crowds?

• Propose an idea
• View submitted ideas
• Join our conversation on twitter using the #honda2.0 tag

With your help we can empower the public to partner with Representatives in improving the policies of our nation. Let’s begin making Gov 2.0 a reality.

- Mike

Wikirank: A Zeitgeist for Wikipedia

Wikipedia is one of the most significant sites on the web. It produces vast quantities of data and the Wikimedia foundation tries to make all of it available to the public. Wikipedia's traffic data can be an insight into what's interesting on the web. Wikirank, currently in closed beta, shares that information very cleanly.

On its homepage Wikirank shows which Wikipedia articles are the most read and which pages are gaining in popularity. Additionally, you can find each article's detail page via search. On the detail page you can find and article excerpt, traffic numbers and a (soon-to-be-embeddable) traffic chart that allow you to compare traffic with other topics (up to four).

Wikirank (@wikirank) was produced by Small Batch Inc.. The design was done by Jeff Veen, most lately of Google Analytics and previously of Measure Map and Adaptive Path.

Update: In a comment Veen said: Second, the UI wasn't designed just by me, but was a group effort that included the rest of Small Batch's cofounders: Bryan Mason, Greg Veen and Ryan Carver. We also were fortunate enough to work with the very talented Dan Cederholm from Simplebits.

In an email, Veen told me that the charts were built without Flash. It's all Javascript using the HTML Canvas element . The data is being processed in EC2 and stored on S3. Tokyo Cabinet is being used to manage the data store.

With a service like Google Trends available you might wonder why this is significant. Wikipedia only has one page for the Python or Ruby programming languages where as there are a lot of other Rubies or Pythons (or George or Paul for that matter) that dirty the data for the same query on Google Trends. As an added bonus Wikirank will report on Google properties (unlike Google Trends).

You can sign up to be notified of their launch. If you don't want to wait for Wikirank to go live you could bide our time with some of these alternatives. Wikirage tracks which Wikipedia pages are being edited the most -- a good way of judging recent news or controversy. Wikichecker will produce a summary of edits for a page such as Tokyo (the page includes an intriguing "Frequent users also edit these articles" which is an unusual path to potentially similar articles). Wikitrends shows the most popular Wikipedia pages in fourteen languages.

Wikirank is a testament to good, clean design and the power of existing web tools. It's the first project from Small Batch, but it won't be the last. I expect that their other projects will also focus on data visualization

Jeff Veen will be keynoting at the Web 2.0 Expo SF on 4/3 and speaking at Ignite SF on 4/1.

Four short links: 18 Mar 2009

Open data sites, Kenyan mobile phone startup, open cheminformatics, and Uncle Sam Can't Surf:

1. Timetric -- time series data, charted. Takes earlier Pro-Am data analysis tools Many Eyes and Swivel a step further with formulaes, moving averages, triggers, and updated data. Oh, and it plays well with others: OpenID, OAuth, OpenSearch, and a useful API. I met one of the founders at Science Foo Camp a year or two ago, where he was introducing computational chemists to the semantic web.
2. txtEagle -- ETech 2009 video, Nathan Eagle on mobile startups in Kenya. The first five minutes alone redlined my awe-ometer: he's been teaching CS students and then professors, in sub-Saharan Africa, how to develop for mobile phones. Now there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of mobile phone developers where before there were few, and plenty of startups. Work on Stuff That Matters.
3. Open Cheminformatics -- in this post about a new open cheminformatics journal, Peter Murray Rust summarizes the current state of cheminformatics It suffers from closed data, closed source and closed standards, and thereby generally poor experimental design, poor metrics and almost always irreproducible results and conclusions which are based on subjective opinions and then goes on to list the rays of hope, the open data, open source, open standards (ODOSOS) projects in cheminformatics.
4. Government 2.0 Meets Catch-22 (NY Times) -- “We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.” This is the perfect antidote to those who would say that the web isn't the transformative break with the status quo: bureaucrats represent the ultimate in status quo, and if they're grappling with the web then that means the web is as different as we've always said it is.

The Paradox of Transparency

In his memo on transparency and open government, President Barack Obama said:

"My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government."

Then reality intervened. Last week, the FBI raided the offices of Kundra's former employer, the Office of the CTO in Washington D.C., arresting a mid-level manager and the head of a long-time IT contracting firm who were involved in a bribery and kickback scheme. The White House promptly suspended Kundra, three days into his new job as Federal CIO, "out of an abundance of caution," despite the fact that the FBI made clear that Kundra was not a target of the investigation, and that the corrupt official in question, Yusuf Acar, had been working for the city since 2002, well before Kundra took on the job in 2007.

While Acar's frauds were not revealed by technological means, but by an old-fashioned whistleblower, they are exactly the kind of procurement shenanigans that Kundra set out to uncover in D.C. Without talking to CW (the "Cooperating Witness", as he was named in the FBI request for an arrest warrant), it's impossible to know what role Kundra's emphasis on cleaning up the DC procurement process played in encouraging the whistleblowing, but this conviction is certainly in line with Kundra's goals, as stated in his December 2007 testimony at the Public Roundtable on Theft and Fraud Prevention in District Government Agencies (pdf).

The paradox of transparency is that it may indeed reveal waste, fraud, and malfeasance, making things appear worse before they begin to get better. This is not something to be afraid of. It's a sign of success.

Nonetheless, the political atmosphere in Washington has grown so sensitive that the Obama administration initially felt the need to distance itself from Kundra, lest they be touched by even the faintest whiff of the D.C. scandal.

We need to make sure that the transparency mission is not going to be hijacked by political considerations. What cabinet secretary, what governor, what mayor, what IT manager in local government, what supplier will support the Federal transparency initiative if whatever is uncovered will have to be weighed against the risk that the other party will take advantage?

We need a bipartisan commitment to transparency. It's ridiculous to think that we won't turn up things that we don't like, but we need the message to be: we're all in this together. We need to make sure that transparency doesn't become a political weapon, or "out of an abundance of caution," we'll abandon the mission before it has a chance to succeed.

Fortunately, we saw news today that as of today, Kundra is back at his White House desk.

Four short links: 17 Mar 2009

Startups, databases, iPhone app marketplace, and how to launch:

1. Weary of Looking for Work, Some Create Their Own (NY Times) -- a story about a new tide of entrepreneurs forced into it by the economic times. The goal for many entrepreneurs nowadays is not to create a company that will someday make billions but to come up with an idea that will produce revenue quickly, said Jerome S. Engel, director for the center for entrepreneurship at the Berkeley Haas School of Business. Mr. Engel said many people will focus on serving immediate needs for individuals and businesses.
2. Redis -- another key/value pair database, but this time with atomic operations to push and pop. The reinvention of databases continues apace ....
3. Gaming on the iPhone--Natural Selection in Real Time -- as the number of games has risen, the price has dropped. But that's where things have begun to settle, just a short time after the App Store started featuring games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Five bucks is to the iPhone what sixty bucks is to the PC: the high end of the price scale. And the expectation is that, if you're gonna tempt someone to fork over a Lincoln for your hard work, it had better be something special [...] The iPhone is a relatively easy platform for developing games, where you can generally create a game with a small budget and short development time, and be looking at potentially large returns. But the market has become so crowded with casual games that it has become incredibly hard to get your game noticed.
4. Don't Launch -- an eminently reasonable answer to the question I've often been asked. Don't chicken out and do a closed beta; get real customers in through real renewable channels. Start with a five-dollar-a-day SEM campaign. Iterate as fast and for as long as you can. Don't scale. Don't marketing launch. I love everything this guy writes. If he ever publishes a collection of his laundry lists and telephone doodles, I'll preorder it on Amazon.

Celebrities Embrace Twitter (and vice-versa)

When I pondered the future of micro-blogging last June, I wasn't paying much attention to the few celebrities from pop culture and politics using Twitter. Over the last month, the number of celebrities (from pop culture, sports, and politics) who have appeared on the Twitterholic Top 100 jumped from 7% to 46% of users on a given calendar week.

I included users who cover celebrity culture (e.g. @perezhilton) and fake celebrities (e.g. @NotHenryRollins). Given that I quickly perused the list of users, it's possible that the number of celebrities is slightly higher. TV, Music, and Film celebrities alone accounted for 30% of users on the Twitterholic 100 over the past week.

As to the reasons why celebrities are starting to dominate rankings based on number of followers, the one noteworthy event occurred in mid-January when Twitter began suggesting users to newbies. However, the suggested users feature is not the sole reason for the rise of celebrities: not all of the new celebrity users on the Twitterholic Top 100 have appeared on Twitter's list of suggested users. In choosing who to follow, I suspect that name recognition matters more to recent groups of new users.

We pointed out in our Micro-messaging report that number of followers is not the best gauge of a twitterer's influence and we proposed an alternate metric similar to PageRank. But among new users, number of followers is the way they gauge the importance of other twitterers, and by that measure newbies may have the mistaken impression that discussions in Twitter are dominated by famous people. As they soon discover, most celebrities won't be responding to their tweets.

Sunlight Hackathon at Web 2.0 Expo

Guest blogger Jennifer Pahlka is the general manager and co-chair of the Web 2.0 events at TechWeb.Earlier, Jennifer ran the games group at CMP, where she oversaw the growth of the Game Developers Conference and launched the Independent Games Festival and Gamasutra.com. Pahlka Dot is her personal blog.

I am fond of reminding people who recall the last economic crash that this time, it's not the web industry's fault. In fact, this time around, tech is the way out of the mess we're in. There are many ways to see this, including the efficiency gains of adopting 2.0 tools and practices still latent within our businesses, and many folks have rightly pointed out that innovative startups will be needed if we are to reinvent our economy. In the broadest sense, however, we're talking about a way of thinking that centers around participation, transparency, and openness. In retrospect, these were the assets that have been in the shortest supply in recent years.

But if you're not keen on launching a banking 2.0 start-up at the moment, what's one easy way a developer can start building the new economy and society we sorely need? Participate in the Open Government movement. A growing number of talented coders and designers are taking advantage of the data the government is beginning to make available and mashing it up in ways that make it accessible, useful, and meaningful to citizens, lawmakers, and any constituent you can imagine. Tim wrote about the significance of this trend here. Vivek Kundra, the new US Federal CIO (currently on leave) who previously served as the CTO of the District of Columbia, famously sponsored an innovation contest called Apps for Democracy, which invited hackers to mash up DC's data. Sunlight Labs (the development arm of the Sunlight Foundation, which "uses the power of the Internet to shine a light on the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington") has extended this concept with Apps for America, which is taking submissions now through March 31st. Expect more opportunities to build utility out of government data as this movement builds.

But Sunlight is also coming to Web 2.0 Expo. We believe that the more smart people we can get involved in this movement, the better, so we've invited the great folks at Sunlight to come out and run a Hackathon at the Expo this year. There are a dozen-odd projects currently on listed on their website; we invite you to go vote for the one you'd most like to contribute to, or suggest a new one. The one that gets the most interest will be chosen as the project for Web 2.0 Expo, and attendees can come by the hackroom and help build the app and meet some great people during the event.

You know you want to. Work on stuff that matters!

Software Engineering Folklore Survey

I love this. Two university researchers are asking real world coders how they code. They want to learn whether the theory taught in software design courses is actually used in the real world. They've built a short (20-question) survey that takes less than ten minutes to complete, and will open source the data once it's all in. I've sent in my answers and I hope all the programmers reading this do so too. One of the researchers was my lecturer for Algorithms, which must have been punishment for his sins in a past life. The other influential prof from my degree was one of the authors of Notes on Postmodern Programming, and I hope my work mixes the unexpected and the pragmatic as well as they have.

Four short links: 16 Mar 2009

Non-interop earphones with DRM, HVAC swarms, paperprints, and product constipation at GOOG:

1. Apple iPod Shuffle (3rd gen) -- "Surprise: the only third-party headphones that will work are ones that haven’t even entered manufacturing yet, because they’ll need to contain yet another new Apple authentication chip, which will add to their price." It's interesting to see Apple prioritising the different interactions with the device: the ease from using standard connectors is less important than how it looks (no buttons!), and both are less important than securing those hardware margins by tithing every corner of the aftermarket thirdparty addon space. I hope users revolt, but I suspect it'll be viewed like the needless diversity of power cords--a non-fatal inconvenience and irritation. I can only imagine the state of mind that thinks it is acceptable to irk a million people so as to be able to make a few bucks on each set of third-party headphones.
2. Managing Energy with Swarm Logic -- intelligent HVAC gear that wirelessly communicates, figures out the individual power cycles of each appliance, then coordinate (with no central control) to figure out how to optimally run the appliances for maximum efficiency.
3. Fingerprinting Blank Paper Using Commodity Scanners -- Ed Felten's latest work of genius, cranking the contrast on scans of paper at different orientation to produce a texture from which can be calculated a fingerprint that survives printing, crumpling, and moisture. (via bos)
4. Tim Armstrong to Head AOL (Battelle) -- interesting quote from former Googler, "It's very hard to take risks at Google."

Recent Posts

• Radar Roundup: Sensors | by Dylan Field on March 15, 2009
• Clay Shirky's "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable" | by Tim O'Reilly on March 14, 2009
• Climate Sinners in the Jaws of an Angry Dog | by Tim Anderson on March 13, 2009
• ETech: Wrapup | by Robert Kaye on March 13, 2009
• Four short links: 13 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 13, 2009
• ETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People | by Robert Kaye on March 13, 2009
• Etech Liveblogging: Lessons from China for the World, Rebecca MacKinnon (Global Voices) | by Quinn Norton on March 12, 2009
• The Social Nervous System Has More Than One Sense | by Tim O'Reilly on March 12, 2009
• Four short links: 12 Mar 2009 | by Nat Torkington on March 12, 2009
• Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons | by Robert Kaye on March 11, 2009
• Etech liveblogging: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People (Tony Jebara) | by Quinn Norton on March 11, 2009
• At Risk: Universal Online Access to All Knowledge | by Linda Stone on March 11, 2009