Microsoft Live Labs Creates Web “Synth” For 3-D Photo Tour | Walter S. Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD

Microsoft Live Labs Creates Web “Synth” For 3-D Photo Tour | Walter S. Mossberg | Personal Technology | AllThingsD: "This week, Microsoft Live Labs is releasing its first broad consumer Web service, called Photosynth. This service turns multiple photos of a scene or site — say, an art gallery or a building — into a 3-D scene you can virtually “walk” through on the Web."

Photosynth, based on technology Microsoft acquired in 2006, is entirely free, and it’s entirely based on the Web, at photosynth.net. At that site you can view not only your own synths, but the synths created by every other Photosynth user.

ongoing � REST Questions

ongoing � REST Questions

Has REST Been Fortunate in its Enemies? · I have been among the most vocal of those sneering at WS-*, and I’m comfortable with what I’ve said. But that doesn’t prove that the core WS-* ideas are wrong. Here are some of the handicaps WS-* struggled under: ¶

Gmail Account Hacking

Gmail Account Hacking Tool | Hacking Truths: "A tool that automatically steals IDs of non-encrypted sessions and breaks into Google Mail accounts has been presented at the Defcon hackers’ conference in Las Vegas.

Last week Google introduced a new feature in Gmail that allows users to permanently switch on SSL and use it for every action involving Gmail, and not only, authentication."

How To Demo Your Startup

How To Demo Your Startup: "For the past 10 days I’ve sat through 200 company demos for the TechCrunch50 conference. These demos are mostly done over the phone for 10 minutes using the phone and web conferencing software like WebEx or Adobe’s wonderful new “Connect” service.

After doing 2,500 minutes of demos (40 hours) this year and many more last year for the conference, I’ve learned a lot about what makes for a great demo and what makes for a horrible demo. Since demoing your idea is a key to your success as an entrepreneur, I thought I would share everything I know in a few simple bullet points."

Business Requirements are Bullshit

Another rant from Steve Yegge of Google

Stevey's Blog Rants: Business Requirements are Bullshit

trueSpace7, Introduction

trueSpace7, Introduction: "trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth."

It's also free.

A Scalable Non-Blocking Coding Style

InfoQ: JavaOne: Cliff Click on a Scalable Non-Blocking Coding Style

The goings on behind the iPhone application blacklist (Updated)

The goings on behind the iPhone application blacklist (Updated): "Several sites have reported on the discovery of an apparent application blacklist by iPhone forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski. Allegedly, Apple would be able to keep a blacklist of certain apps that are not allowed on (or that the company has revoked from) the App Store, and therefore be able to kill the apps remotely on customers' iPhones once a certificate has been revoked. Naturally, this has caused some hand-wringing and tinfoil-hat-shaping among iPhone customers who don't want to sacrifice that level of control of their devices to Apple. Here, we dig into the rabbit hole to see if we can figure out what's going on."

ongoing � Mobility Blues

ongoing � Mobility Blues: "These days, I’m gloomier and gloomier about the prospects for the mobile Internet; you know, the one you access through the sexy gizmo in your pocket, not the klunky old general-purpose computer on your desk."

Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone: Introduction to Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone

Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone: Introduction to Safari Web Content Guide for iPhone"Because Safari on iPhone uses the same web engine as Safari on the desktop, your webpages might work well on iPhone without any modifications. Some differences exist, however, so at a minimum you should ensure that your webpages are compatible with Safari on iPhone. Next, you might optimize your webpages for iPhone simply as a convenience to the user. For example, ensure that your webpages work over both Wi-Fi and EDGE, scale correctly when rendered, and contain media that is viewable on iPhone. Finally, you might build custom web applications for iPhone that look and behave like native applications."

Bloggers Are Hard to Please and Hard to Pitch: Some Mistakes in Pitches from Startups | Profy | Internet news and commentary

Bloggers Are Hard to Please and Hard to Pitch: Some Mistakes in Pitches from Startups | Profy | Internet news and commentary: "I am sure that every blogger has a rather extensive list of his or her preferences about how they want to be pitched by startups looking for the blogosphere coverage. And from time to time we all discuss the most funny or atrocious cases right in our blogs - probably hoping that startups will finally learn that we don’t want some things or we do want very different things. So I have decided to compile my own list of the most common mistakes that startups make when pitching bloggers (or at least what I consider mistakes myself)."

Patch for Internet Security Hole May Not Do the Job - NYTimes.com

Patch for Internet Security Hole May Not Do the Job - NYTimes.com: "On Friday, a Russian physicist demonstrated that the emergency fix to the basic Internet address system, known as the Domain Name System, is vulnerable and will almost certainly be exploited by criminals."

Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail

Gmail Suffers 15-Hour Partial Fail: "“The Gmail Team is currently aware of a subset of users being affected by the 502 error on login. Our engineers are actively investigating the issue, and we will provide updates as soon as we have them. We appreciate your patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”"

About Google Page Creator

About Google Page Creator: "We are no longer accepting new sign-ups for Page Creator because we have shifted our focus to developing Google Sites, which offers many of the capabilities of Page Creator along with new features like site-level navigation, site-level headers, control over who can see and edit your site, and rich embeddings like calendars, videos, and Google docs.

If you are currently a Page Creator user, you can continue to use Page Creator and your pages will automatically be transitioned to Google Sites later this year. We are committed to making this transition as smooth and easy as possible, and we will post more details as we get closer to the transition time. You can also manually move your web pages from Page Creator to Google Sites or other service providers at any time."

ENGINEERS' DREAMS

Edge: ENGINEERS' DREAMS By George Dyson: "And why trace the connections in the brain of one individual when you can trace the connections in the mind of the entire species at once? Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?"

Cloud versus cloud

Cloud versus cloud: A guided tour of Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid | InfoWorld | Review | 2008-07-21 | By Peter Wayner: "Cloud computing offerings differ in depth, breadth, style, and fine print; beneath the heady metaphor lurk familiar pitfalls, complex pricing, and many questions"

Google enrolled for schools email deal

Google enrolled for schools email deal - BizTech - Technology - theage.com.au: "Google has snatched what is believed to be its biggest single client in the world - the NSW Department of Education - away from its rival Microsoft to claim up to 1.3 million new users of its free email product."

From __utma to __utmz (Google Analytics Cookies)

From __utma to __utmz (Google Analytics Cookies) | Analytics and Site Intelligence: "When someone visits a website that is properly coded with Google Analytics Tracking Code, that website sets four first-party cookies on the visitor’s computer automatically."

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008

Amazon S3 Availability Event: July 20, 2008
down for about 8 hours

Microsoft Office Live Home

Microsoft Office Live Home: "Quickly build your Web site with ready-to-use templates and simple yet powerful Site Designer"

SiteKreator.com - Professional web site creation solution. - Home

SiteKreator.com - Professional web site creation solution. - Home

Weebly - Create a free website and a free blog

Adding Content
Content elements, such as videos, pictures, maps, and text are added to your website by simply dragging them from the Weebly bar to your webpage. We have a bunch of cool elements and add more all the time. Are we missing an element you'd like? Suggest it, and we'll include it as soon as we can.

Choosing a Design
Deciding on a look for your website couldn't be easier. Click over to the "Design" tab and you'll see thumbnails pictures of available designs. Hover your mouse over a thumbnail to preview the new look instantaneously or click the thumbnail to select it as the design for your website.

Customizing the Content
Once elements have been added to your page, customize everything just by double-clicking. Double-click a picture to upload a new one, double-click text to change it, or double-click a map to set the address. Rearrange the elements by dragging them into an new order.

Managing your Pages
Adding and organizing your website's pages is completed in the "Pages" tab. When you add new page to your website, it's automatically added to the navigation bar. Reordering pages is simple, just drag and drop them into place.

Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser

Picnik - edit photos the easy way, online in your browser: "Photo editing made fun
Picnik makes your photos fabulous with easy to use yet powerful editing tools. Tweak to your heart’s content, then get creative with oodles of effects, fonts, shapes, and frames.
It's fast, easy, and fun."

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage

Handling Flash Crowds from your Garage: "web applications which may rocket to popular success - or sink when the flash crowd that arrives melts the web server. In the web context, utility computing provides a path by which the innovator can, with minimal capital, prepare for overwhelming popularity."

This is an outstanding practical paper on the current options for scaling web services.

Free Page Creator Tools From The Big Three: Trash or Treasure?

Free Page Creator Tools From The Big Three: Trash or Treasure?: "Have a small business in need of a website, but no budget for professional design services? Yahoo, Google and Microsoft all offer free small business site creation tools that can help you develop a professional online presence. Keep reading for an in-depth review of what Office Live Basics, Google Page Creator and Yahoo SiteBuilder include and how they work. Additionally, we'll consider ease of use, positives and negatives, and recommended uses for each tool."

MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme

BBC NEWS | Technology | MySpace signs up to OpenID scheme: "MySpace members will soon be able to use their login details to get access to some other websites."

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Protocol buffers: the early reviews are in [dive into mark]

Google (my current employer) has finally open sourced protocol buffers, the data interchange format we use for internal server-to-server communication. The blogosphere’s response? “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”

Aaaaanyway…

Protocol buffers are “just” cross-platform data structures. All you have to write is the schema (a .proto file), then generate bindings in C++, Java, or Python. (Or Haskell. Or Perl.) The .proto file is just a schema; it doesn’t contain any data except default values. All getting and setting is done in code. The serialized over-the-wire format is designed to minimize network traffic, and deserialization (especially in C++) is designed to maximize performance. I can’t begin to describe how much effort Google spends maximizing performance at every level. We would tear down our data centers and rewire them with $500 ethernet cables if you could prove that it would reduce latency by 1%.

Besides being blindingly fast, protocol buffers have lots of neat features. A zero-size PB returns default values. You can nest PBs inside each other. And most importantly, PBs are both backward and forward compatible, which means you can upgrade servers gradually and they can still talk to each other in the interim. (When you have as many machines as Google has, it’s always the interim somewhere.)

Comparisons to other data formats was, I suppose, inevitable. Old-timers may remember ASN.1 or IIOP. Kids these days seem to compare everything to XML or JSON. They’re actually closer to Facebook’s Thrift (written by ex-Googlers) or SQL Server’s TDS. Protocol buffers won’t kill XML (no matter how much you wish they would), nor will they replace JSON, ASN.1, or carrier pigeon. But they’re simple and they’re fast and they scale like crazy, and that’s the way Google likes it.

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML

BetaNews | Google releases its data encoding format to compete with XML: "In an effort to solve the bulk and time-consumption problem when encoding large databases, Google developed its own alternative to XML. Yesterday, the company began evangelizing others to use it as an alternative to the industry standard.

There's an argument that open standards are only truly useful when one standard applies to any given category of service -- an argument that was raised in the matter of application formats. Now the broader category of data encoding -- handled nowadays by XML -- is about to receive a big challenge, ironically from the group perceived as the champion of open standards in Internet communication: Google.

Yesterday afternoon, Google publicly released documentation for a system it has been using internally, called Protocol Buffers, inviting others to use it as well. And in a surprising blog post, one of its own software engineers argued that its system was preferable to XML because it's less expensive to deploy, and can more easily scale up to very large databases."

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb

Bit.ly: Please Use This TinyURL of the Future - ReadWriteWeb: "URL shorteners like TinyURL are a wildly popular way to share long links over email, IM, microblogging and other contexts. The millions of shortcuts that have been created through such services represent a huge opportunity to capture interesting data - but to date those opportunities have all just gone down the drain.

Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service from the innovation network Betaworks, is launching today with a staggering feature set for both end users and forward-looking developers."

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

TechCrunchIT � Blog Archive � A Million Businesses on Office Live While Generic Hosting Slides

At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out - the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth.

Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as Wordpress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity.