A New Way to View Pictures Online

As I was perusing my feeds today I came across this post on Web Worker Daily. It was titled “Visual Web browsing Starts to Take Hold”. I thought it looked interesting and starred it in my reader for later viewing. Anyway I tyook a look at it this after noon and found this gem, PicLens. It is a Firefox extension, I downloaded and installed. All I can say is “Oh MY God !!” It has to be one of the most incredible things I have seen in a while. I can’t do it justice in a few words, but basically it works on sites like flickr and smugmug. After it is installed and you visit one of the sites it works with, as you hover over a pic, a play arrow appears, just hit the arrow and enjoy.

Like I said I cannot do this thing justice, so check out the video, it will blow you away.

It reminds me of an Apple add with the wall of photos, yet you are able to interact with it, grab a photo, move down the wall, make it full screen, etc. Please go check it out, you will not be dissapointed.

How Many Times ..

Does a web service have to go down and be very unstable before we all decide to leave their sandbox and go play in someone else’s ?

As I am sure all of us Twitter’holics are aware, Twitter has been a bit of a dubious uptime record. Especially lately with the growth in users, big events like the primaries, etc. We touched on this back in an earlier post. Lately it seems however, that I have been seeing more and more of the “Something is wrong” message when I go to access Twitter. According to the Twitter blog they have been undergoing some much needed infrastructure changes, which is a good thing, but with continued downtime, it is not.

The good news is we finished a major infrastructure project tonight, which we’ve been working on for months and that we think is going to help a lot. I’m sure there will be some glitches in the coming weeks, but we’ve laid some important foundation that’s going to help us build toward the future.

We Web 2.0 people can be a fickle bunch. We have latched onto Twitter with a vengeance and use it in oh so many ways. It has the potential to be a foundation for many things to come, but how long will people tolerate the instability before moving to the next great thing ?

So what do you all think ? How much longer does twitter have to work it all out before people start heading for the exits ?

UPDATE:  Just after publishing this, I went over to Twitter to find the following “Something is Technically Wrong”

DC Flickr Photowalk

I took some time and headed downtown yesterday to check out the flickr DC Group and do a little photowalking. The group met at the RocketBar at Gallery Place. At around 4:00pm people started hitting the streets for a few shots.

Go check out here for some of my shots.

Another East Coast West Coast Thing

I am always fascinated about the talk of the differing cultures between the east and west coast tech scenes.  There are many posts about this phenomena.  I saw one shared in Google Reader today, by the way the shared items in reader is awesome and I always get to read great stiff shared out by my friends.  Anyway, today Andrew Wright pointing to an article in Valleywag which referenced a Forbes list of the tope venture capitalists.

According to the post, New York VC’s only made up 2% of the list.  They had an interesting take on some reasons for this:

asked many VCs why East Coast investors don’t prosper to the same degree as those based here, and the answer is consistent: Back east, VCs are too focused on the downside, on squeezing something out of a startup that has failed, on turfing out entrepreneurs when a young company hits a bump in the road. In the balmy clime of northern California, venture capitalists are a sunnier lot: They’d rather have a small piece of a large pie, or so they claim.

So is it patience ?  Is that the reason VC’s on the east coast do not fare as well as their west coats counterparts ?  Maybe this is true.  The east coast VC’s are obviously a bit more conservative with the $$ and maybe they do pull the string a little too early.  Any thoughts on this out there ?  Whats your take on the east vs west coast vc scene ?

My Name is Jimmy: I Live in Mayberry

I was totally looking forward to hitting the Social Matchbox Meetup in McLean this evening.  Unfortunately, someone had different plans for me.

Some of you who know me are aware that I live pretty far out of the city, but not that far.  In any case we were informed yesterday by the local fire company that there was a manure spill upstream of the water treatment plant and we should not drink any water until further testing was done … manure spill ?  Where the hell am I living.

So today we got the results of the testing back and were told there is in fact contamination of the water system and to only drink/use boiled or bottled water.  Gee how fun.  That is why I was not able to make the event.  Instead, I had go buy tons of bottled water.  Apparently there has been a hurricane like buying frenzy of water around these parts. Maybe living in the serene farmlands on northern MD has its drawbacks.  I feel like I am living in Mayberry right about now.

And to think, tomorrow morning my decision point will revolve around  if I want to smell like sh*t or shower in it .. either way I come out smelling like a … well you know.

8 Random Things

I was tagged once again by @gotbob, Frederick MD’s favorite tech savvy real estate guru. So here we go:

1. I was born in Augusta, GA sometime in the early 70’s …

2. After high school I attended the University of Maryland, and promptly failed out during my sophomore year. Mainly due to lack of interest .. I played golf and watched the basketball team practice instead of going to class.
3. I am starting a new job on Feb 11th working for the FAA in downtown DC.  I will have all that train time to write these insightful posts you have become accustomed to ….
4. Married with 2 lovely girls (5 & 3)

5. Joined and served in the US Army for 8 years. I was an Arab linguist.

6. Graduated from University of Maryland University College in 2005, a short 18 years after high school graduation. It felt good, took a while but I did it.

7. I love to take pictures and wish I did it some more. Here is some of my pics HERE.
8. I started a company 2Plus11 Technology, LLC and am working on building a web service that I plan to launch in the next month or so. I am working on Executive Summary and emails to send out to local VC community.
So in a nutshell, that is me.  Pretty damned boring if you ask me.

Thanks Bob.

PodcampDC: Registration Open

I saw today that the PodcampDC event registration has opened up.  Head over to the event’s registration page HERE and sign up. Here is a brief description according to the event page:

Podcamp DC is an “unconference” focused on educating participants on how to use, implement and share any/all new media tools including, podcasts, videocasts, blogs, Second Life, Facebook, and YouTube.

It is great to see some cool events coming up in the area.  The other day Geoff Livingston announced BlogPotomac in June and that looks like a great time as well.

Here are the details for the PodcampDC

Begins
Friday, April 18, 2008 at 7:30 pm ET

Ends
Sunday, April 20, 2008 at 2:00 pm ET

Location
Art Institute of Washington/ Rosslyn Spectrum Theatre
1820 Fort Meyer Drive
Arlington , VA 22209

Make sure to get over and sign up and add your name to the growing list.

January 30th: International Delete Your MySapce Account Day

I have never been a real MySpace user, mainly because it was spam riddled, etc.  Well apparently it has hit critical mass.  A blogger Simon Owens of Bloggasm, has gone and proposed January 30th as the International Delete Your MySapce Account Day.  He has a list of things for why you should delete you account

1. You rarely log in to Myspace except to delete spam friend requests from nude webcam girls.

2. You spend five minutes writing a wall post only to hit an error message when you try to post it because of all the website glitches.

3. You’re a girl who constantly gets marriage proposals from random men in the middle east.

4. You visit someone’s Myspace profile only to suddenly have music start blasting out of your speakers. Bonus points if it happens to you while you’re at work.

5. You have to make redundant clicks to perform simple tasks because Myspace keeps taking you to advertisement pages where you have to click on “return to myspace profile” in order to continue what you’re doing.

6. You visit someone’s profile only to have your eyes bleed because of terrible page layout with non-matching designs and font colors.

7. Your experience is hindered because of intrusive banner ads that either talk to you or try to reach out and block your view of what you’re trying to look at.

8. You read yet another news account about how some child predator using Myspace has abducted a little girl or that some hoax myspace account has caused a teenager to commit suicide.

9. You’re frustrated with the fact that Myspace doesn’t allow you to post your contact info, meaning to contact someone you can only use Myspace’s glitchy Instant Messenger, message/email system, or wall commenting.

10. You’re tired of seeing Tom stare out at you from millions of friends lists and just wish he would change his fucking profile picture.

If you are as fed up as Simon, then mark it on your calendars !

What Are Your Ideas For a Better World

Why don’t you let the new President know ? I was tipped off by a friend to a cool new social type web site sponsored by the UN Foundation called “On Day One“. As the title so succinctly states, you can let the future President know on day one of his/her term what is most important to the American Public and what is expected of them. The groups aim is to:

build a stronger relationship between the United States and the United Nations. Over the course of the next year, we’ll be building a discussion, based on your ideas, about how the next president can offer a bold new vision for American foreign policy, and how international cooperation can be harnessed to address the world’s most critical challenges.

You can fit your idea into one of 9 categories or issues ranging from US Image in the World to Global Women’s Issues and others in between. Once you have picked your category you can simply type in your suggestion and away you go. Another great feature is the ability to add YouTube videos to your idea that you submit, giving a great visual to go along with your agenda.

The site is well laid out and easy to navigate. There is some great communication going on between users commenting on the submissions. If you are intoRSS, then simply subscribe to the Ideas RSS Feed to see all the great things being posted.

I signed up and submitted my idea to “Set Attainable Alternate Energy Goals” in the Climate and Energy issues category. Stop by and check it out.

I also challenge each of you to visit the site and make a suggestion to add to the growing list. Be sure to check back here and leave us a comment with a link to your idea. Make sure you let all your friends know so they can help contribute.

DC Reminder: Social Matchbox DC

Just wanted to give everyone a quick reminder before we got to the weekend about a cool event taking place next Monday, January 28th at 6-8:30 PM.

The event is a great idea that plans to

bring together DC startup community members to discuss jobs, ideas and collaborative opportunities.  Participation is free.  Registration is required.  This event is not open to staffing agency representatives.

I am looking forward to going and getting a glimpse of the DC startups that are out there making things happen.

Here is an update we received today from the event organizer

With eight days to go before the event more than 20 companies from the startup community have signed up and plan to send representatives.  Among them are: ClearSpring, CrossMine, CustomInk, HotPads, iBelong, Hungry Machine, Intridea, Mixx, Ozmosis, Positive Energy, Razoo, Visual CV, WorthPoint.  comScore was also invited and will be joining us.

Over 100 people are expected to attend.  Registrants include at least: 41 developers, 2 development managers,  1 user experience designer, 1 QA engineer, 5 systems engineers, 5 marketing and PR professionals, 3 sales reps, 4 operations managers, 10 executives, 3 corporate recruiters, 2 data/business analysts, and more than 31 others who we can’t classify based on their registration information.

Location:
TeqCorner, 3rd Floor, 1616 Anderson Road, McLean, VA 22102

Schedule:
6-7 networking
7-7:30 startups get 2-3 minutes to talk about who they are and what they are looking for (no demo)
7:30-8:30 networking

Let us know who plans on going ?

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