Back again and on a different tack

I’ve decided to revive this blog after two years absence.  Many things have changed in that brief time, not the least of which a new professional title (winemaker).  Stay tuned for thoughts about being a craftsman in the attention economy world.  Tune in and see what happens next (Urban Legend Cellars opening soon).
We’ll be barrel sampling our 2008 Barbera at UWX next month UWX – Urban Wine Experience come by and say hello!

 

About time….

Michael Arrington has Google’s latest salvo in the open API wars:

Google Taunts Skype, Releases GTalk API

Posted by Michael Arrington | Discussion: 22 comments

Google has just released a set of components called Libjingle that allow third party applications to interact with Google Talk. The components, which include some source code, are being released under a very liberal license allowing for free incorporation into commercial and non-commercial software.

It’s about time that Google started opening their API to commercial applications. This should be avery interesting time for all.  As other’s have noted this gets even more interesting with the integration of AOL IM and Gtalk – I presume this will mean that any Jabber client with Libjingle integration can talk to any AOL IM client?

 

Pandora’s Box…Have it your/our way

I’ve recently started reading David Hornick’s Excellent Venture Blog. He recently discussed Tim Westergren’s trials in creating Pandora a music “genome” site.  Having read the story  I’m even more impressed with the site.  There’s obvoisuly a lot of hard work behind the musical ontology.  I’m experimenting with it even now, trying to understand how the search alogrithm is working.  If Nothing else I can see this is going to be personally expensive.  I’m not sure how much of it will go to Amazon or Apple yet (the buy now choices) but I know this is going to lead me to buy more music than I have in years.

Tim and team well done!

There has been lots of speculation on what’s next with search or what is “web 3.0″… this is it.

 

On Pitch (The VC Pitch)

Daniel and I met with our friend/ angel (a Si Valley VC that shall remain unnamed for now) a week ago Tuesday. We’ve just been trough a tough couple of weeks trying to define exactly what is was that we had here. We’ve got a good direction, some unique and valuable technology ideas and rough understanding of how to monetize it but we hadn’t even come close pulling it all together. We left wit ha much better idea of how to put the pitch together. Ouch – not so much that we got beaten up but that I did such a poor job of presenting. We’re getting closer to having “business�? but there are still lots of pieces not tied together.

Our friend is being unbelievably patient with us (but very direct with feedback), what is doubly embarrassing is that Daniel and I are both good at working on these pitches; being able to stand back and see the big picture… it’s a lot harder when your doing your own from ground zero.

 

Ruby Friday

Daniel and I have been deep in the details this week. We’ve bounced through apache, java, javascript, tomcat, linux, tapestry, eclipe, netbeans, ruby, and rails.

The latter pair are proving to be very interesting, I wonder if ruby is the basic of the early 21st century (see http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Edsger_Dijkstra)? It is delight to be freed from the necessities of sturctured programming (strong type casting, clear proceedural operation) but I’m a long way from being convinced that any code will survive to production. How bad are the memory leaks?