To win you had to pick the 5 most popular startups out of a field of 100, and the popularity was judged by several different standards. I picked 4 out of the 5 companies to win, my top 5 were (in alphabetical order)
- Acquia
- Igloo
- Mill River Labs (owns tradesvibes)
- Sprout
- Zoho
The winning companies are all the same except the surprising result that Acquia is out and Rearden Commerce is in. Check them out and you tell me if you wouldn’t have made the same choice I did.
Thanks to TradeVibes for running the contest and offering such a generous prize!
Svetlana Gladkova is the Vice President of Business Development at Profy.com. Profy is a new and exciting entry into the hosted blog market that is aiming to outdo the current heavy hitters by building from the ground up as a one stop blogging, social network, and RSS reader. The social features and the greater customization and monetization options should put Profy in a good position after the service exits beta. There’s a lot more to recommend Profy and as long as users won’t scoff at Profy placing an ad on their free blogs, I think we’ll see a steady rise in traffic as users switch or supplement their other blogs with Profy. I do have a few Profy invites if you leave a comment I’ll see what I can do. If you want to see a Profy blog you can take a peek @ KnightKnetwork.Profy.com. Svetlana was kind enough to talk to me about Profy and share some of her thoughts about blogging in general:
What benefits do you see in going with a hosted blog service over self-hosting? Why should users choose Profy in particular? Read the rest of this entry »
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Happy RSS Awareness Day! If you don’t know about RSS and “feeds”, then today is the day to educate yourself! Head over to RSSDay.info to learn more about the day and to find a few links to get you started. Otherwise if you are a sometimes RSS Reader or a heavy “feeder” then you really should check out the Toluu sharing and suggestion service to take your RSS game to the next level. Toluu is still in beta but I have invites, just leave a comment on my interview with the founder of Toluu, Caleb Elston, letting me know you’re interested.
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Image via Wikipedia
I first learned of Triggit due to their selection as a finalist in the 2008 Web 2.0 Launchpad event. I’m really impressed with the service, it’s like Zemanta for advertising! I’ll write more on it later but for know I wanted to announce that I threw together a quick plugin for self-hosted Wordpress users who feel more comfortable adding a plugin then editing their theme files. This is also useful if you don’t want to have to re-add the code every time you change your theme.
-= Download the Triggit Wordpress Plugin Here =-
To use this plugin download and unzip it and place the file into your Wordpress plugin folder. Activate the plugin and go to the Settings Triggit screen and add your Triggit User ID.
This plugin requires your theme to have the wp-footer hook, if you it doesn’t seem to work that’s the most likely reason and you’d have to edit your theme’s footer file and add <?php wp_footer(); ?> before the /body tag (or just paste your Triggit code since you’re there anyway). If that wp-footer code is there and it’s still not working then leave me a comment and I’ll try to help.
I’ll pretty it up a touch later so check back for updates!
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Image by bgreenlee via Flickr
I was in San Francisco for a conference this week so I decided I’d take Wesabe up on their kind offer to drop by. If you don’t know, Wesabe is a website where users can engage in social personal finance. Upload your bank and credit card transaction data (it’s secure and anonymous) and then tag your purchases. With that done Wesabe delivers money saving tips based on your spending habits!
The Wesabe staff struck me as a very cohesive, intelligent, and dedicated group. All were very kind as as I interrupted the busy day before the launch of a major new feature. Great equipment (i’m sooo jealous of those monitors), a nice library of O’Reilly books, and open and natural light filled workareas all show that Wesabe cares about it’s employees and gives them what they need to do good work for their users.
A special thanks to the Marketing VP Gabe Griego for showing me around and taking me to lunch. Also, Thanks to Marc Hedlund for taking the time to show me the new Tip page enhancement before it was launched.
I’ll cover the tip page enhancements later, but to give you a general idea the new tip page uses all the collected data to help you better compare your merchants and pull in tips. It’s tapping into the Wesabe community’s subconscious frugality to save you money, a very powerful new tool for Wesabe users!
The Microsoft 2008 Launch event for Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Charlotte, NC has already gotten a negative review from Knetwork writer Franklin Pettit on his on blog. And while I do agree with some of the points Franklin makes I won’t say that the event was a total waste of my time. The free versions of VS 2008, SQL 2008, and the surprise addition of a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate made the trip worthwhile, but the presentations just didn’t have the kick that I’ve gotten used to at Microsoft events.
Let me offer the disclaimer that I don’t regularly program in MS products, I do occasionally and I’ve been considering going for the new certifications when they are released to beef up my knowledge and ability to do work on the side. Still, I love going to MS events because they are so well presented and really get you excited about the work MS is doing for developers. I usually leave an event wanting to go out and try the technology immediately even if I have no ability to do so! To give you idea of how this launch event went, I haven’t installed any of that nice new, shiny, powerful software yet. It’s still shrink wrapped a week later. I wasn’t motivated, I wasn’t inspired, and I wasn’t impressed.
All this is not to say that these products aren’t great and that the new features weren’t covered, it’s just that the coverage was a watered down rehash of info gone over at MSDN Events or was presented without any point of reference to how it was better. If you have a captive audience staring a big screen then make use of the visual! I was 75% of the way towards the back and I couldn’t read any of the code unless the presenter zoomed his screen (this only happened once while I was there). If you want the audience to Oooooh and Aaaaah like they’re watching a knife cut through a cement block then you’re going to have to give us some eye candy… why no silverlight?!? Being in Beta is no excuse, it has never stopped an MSDN Event presenter from showing us the goods.
All said I’ll keep coming to the launch events for the software, but I hope to see better presentations in the future. MS knows you can’t do much that’s meaningful in the short time we’re a captive audience so give us a quick run down if the changes, some before and after code samples, and lots of eye-candy!
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We’re just a few weeks away from RSS Awareness Day (May 1st). Given the proximity to my own birthday and my love of made up tech holidays (Programmer Day) I couldn’t pass up the chance to mention it. To celebrate I suggest that you get some RSS Suggestions from Toluu.com and expand your RSS reading. To get an invite to Toluu all you have to do is read our recent interview with Toluu Founder, Caleb Elston and leave a comment expressing your interest!
As a side note I feel the need to confess that my domain name addiction has resurfaced. GoDaddy’s $0.99 .info domains have lured me in and I’ve purchased RSSDay.Info, at the time of this posting only the blog is up but check back next week and hopefully I’ll have made some progress.
