Technology

It’s been quiet on this blog lately, for which I send my apologies. However, it’s not without rhyme or reason. We’ve been working on a great new project called NoteCut. NoteCut is will be an online note sharing platform which allows students and teachers to easily share notes. The goal is to help students learn more effectively and serve as an learning aid, not a learning substitute.

There will definitely be more to share regarding NoteCut as it develops, however, what I’d really like to do is quickly evangelize some of the technology we’ve been using in its development.

First off we have CodeIgniter which an amazing PHP framework. If you’re familiar with the Rails approach, this is pretty similar. CodeIgniter has substantially expedited our development process thanks to its built-in functionality. Interfacing with a database really can’t get much easier, and it generates clean URLs for you (query strings, I won’t miss you). Of course it does more, but those are my two favorite niceties. However, what really rocks about CodeIgniter is the documentation. Learning basics of the system was a breeze with their getting started guide, but beyond that nearly everything is documented, and documented well. I’m a big fan of the PHP documentation, but CodeIgniter goes one step further with startlingly un-cryptic descriptions of its classes and helper methods. It’s TINY too. At the cost of sounding hyperbolic, I really haven’t found anything I don’t like about CodeIgniter yet.

That’s not all though. We wanted to incorporate a FlashPaper solution on our note pages, but we found the technology to be virtually dead. We considered rolling our own solution, but then we stumbled upon iPaper from Scribd. Aside from the cliché naming, iPaper hasn’t stopped wow-ing us in its simplicity and execution. The API is awesome - simple, sweet, and effective. Plus, the thing just works. It seems obvious, but if you think about your daily struggles with software, I bet you’ll start to realize how frustrating it can be.

We’ll be sure to keep you up-to-date on all our developments with NoteCut, as well as the rest of the news from NPL Solutions. But please, someone send me a harassing email next time it’s been over 70 days since the last blog post.

Below is an excerpt from an essay I wrote recently:

It has been hard to ignore the major changes on the Internet in the past few years. The phrase “Web 2.0” has become the inherent moniker for this development, and while the meaning of the phrase has become convoluted, it ultimately represents a major departure from the Internet of five or ten years ago. I believe we are in the middle of one of the most interesting and influential periods in the history of the web.

The poster children for this generation are sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Google Maps. These and other groundbreaking sites provide rich user experiences traditionally reserved for the desktop environment. Web 2.0 is often characterized by the simplistic approach that developers have taken in both the markup of their applications, as well as the user interaction, which is constantly achieving a more desktop-like look and feel. However, what really makes this progress so impressive is the fact that most of the technology that drives these sites (HTML and JavaScript) has been in wide use for the past ten years.

While the rest of the computer industry has seen some tremendous progress in the past decade as well, these developments have been highly influenced by the improvement and introduction of new technology, not the revitalization of old. Many of the eye-catching visual effects typically associated with Web 2.0 also capitalize on greater processing capacity as well as greater broadband proliferation; however, the roots of Web 2.0 – increased user-interactivity and useful data manipulation and presentation – exist regardless of the glitz and glam.

Beyond the effect that the Web 2.0 revolution has had on users, it has also allowed a new generation of entrepreneurs to make their mark on the technology world. The majority of successful online businesses from the past decade have been online retailers. Amazon.com and eBay certainly come to mind. While these companies are still heavyweights in today’s online economy, the past few years have seen a tremendous influx in the number of firms who focus on information aggregation, interpretation and presentation. Fueled to a large extent by the popularization of blogs, companies such as MyBlogLog, del.icio.us and FeedBurner have been able to achieve great success by offering a tightly-honed service, breaking away from the long-tailed approach used by the Internet giants of the 90’s.

It’s nothing revolutionary or groundbreaking - I’d assume that most have noticed the same changes and trends. However, what really made me sit back and think “wow” is how the prevailing attitude towards JavaScript has been so drastically altered over the past several years.

I remember working on some of our first sites here at NPL Solutions, being terrified of using “big bad JavaScript” due to its poor adoption rate. Now it’s hard do to much of anything on the Internet without having JavaScript enabled, which has been a godsend to developers.

It reminds me of the cliché, “if you build it, they will come”. The introduction of compelling services which require JavaScript has been the driving force to so radically change the world’s perception of this technology - not a paradigm shift from perspective of the user.

So here’s to another decade of under-appreciated technology, and another decade after that where we will finally be able to see its true potential.

We’re proud to say that we launched two projects last week. The first was a website for a local dry cleaner, Art Cleaners. The Art Cleaners project was a lot of fun, and it’s the second site we’ve used our custom templating process on (our site was the first). I think it turned out really well, and the word back from Art Cleaners is much the same.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.nplsolutions.com/content/mt/sample.swf" height="100" width="250" fvars="myPlaylist=http://www.nplsolutions.com/content/mt/sample.xml ; skin_url=http://www.nplsolutions.com/content/mt/skin.jpg" /]

The second project we finished was an in-house development called MixTape. You can see a sample MixTape to the right, and find out more information on our Selected Work page. MixTape is a skinable, portable, xml-driven Flash MP3 player. Many Flash products offer similar functionality in areas like playback, playlisting, or customization, but MixTape brings all three of these features together in one small, easy-to-use, and free package. MixTape is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License, so feel free to download it and try it out on your site.

We’re working on a more in-depth look at how MixTape works, and what makes it unique, so be sure to come back and check that out.

I’ve blogged about Intense Debate as one of the TechStars 10 before, and have finally gotten around to re-implementing their comment system on this blog. To commemorate the occasion, I’m offering up my FIVE invites to join the ID beta. If you’d like one, please leave a comment, and be sure that I’ll be able to track you down to give you your invite somehow.

I’d like to wish Google a very happy 9th birthday and hope that their next nine years are as influential as the first.

It’s hard to believe that Google has only been in the game for 9 years, especially when you think about what they’ve accomplished and what kind of hold they have on the market. I don’t think that anyone could have guessed nine years ago what kind of reach a search engine could have. Congratulations!

I’m very excited to see what Google has in store for the next few years. If the past is any measure of the future, we’re in for a great nine years.

Recently, Comcast has been at the center of a debate over whether or not it is shaping traffic in order to restrict use of the BitTorrent protocol. According to many, but not all, Comcast users, their ability to seed (upload) torrents has been crippled. Unsurprisingly, Comcast denies this accusation.

Whether or not Comcast is shaping BitTorrent traffic is really part of a larger problem - net neutrality. The big question behind this issue is whether or not ISPs should be allowed to arbitrarily limit or enhance a users experience on the internet based on some sort of pay scale or by charging content providers a premium in order to provide their content at a higher priority than non-paid traffic.

As a content provider, our stance is that all information on the internet should be freely and equally accessible to any user from any provider. However, for many ISPs, deciding to offer a higher tier for both providers and users is becoming more and more tempting.

Imagine, your ISP, Acme, decides that traffic from the iTunes Music Store is using too much of its bandwidth. Acme then goes to Apple and proposes that Apple will pay some large sum of money in order for Acme to continue serving iTunes traffic. Acme then turns to the users and starts charging a $5 per month surcharge for any account that accesses the iTunes Music Store. Keeping in mind that music downloads on iTunes are perfectly legal and legitimate - we’re not even discussing P2P networks here. Doesn’t that just make you feel bad all over?

While this is simply a hypothetical situation, if ISPs start continue to shape their traffic, this situation, or a situation like this, might not be so far off. We’re teetering on a slippery slope here, so hopefully ISPs will decide to make decisions with the user in mind.

Today is the Investor Day for the TechStars teams. I wish all of them the best of luck.

As I noted in a previous post, each of the 10 teams will present to a group of nearly 100 Angel Investors and VCs to try and gain some more substantial funding. The work I’ve gotten to see from these teams is outstanding - I really can’t imagine they’ll have much of a problem winning over these investors. Even so, this day will surely be an anxious one for everyone participating in the program.

Kimbal Musk of Me.dium and Todd Vernon of Lijit are already doing some preliminary critique of the presentations today. The feedback seems generally pretty positive, especially for some of my personal favorites: Socialthing, J-Squared Media, Intense Debate, MadKast and EventVue.

Good luck TechStars!

I attended the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup monthly meeting tonight. I was very impressed.

I’ve mentioned TechStars a few times before, and six of their teams presented their projects for a group of about 80 people at CU this evening. Each team is going to present for a group of almost 100 VCs and angel investors next Thursday to try and get some more substantial funding (even though a few of the teams are already profitable - nice). Tonight gave this group of six a great practice run for next week. The teams which presented tonight were:

• SocialThing
• MadKast
• EventVue
• J-Squared Media
• Intense Debate
• BrightKite

My favorite presenter tonight was SocialThing. Because they’re in a closed beta right now, I’ve only had a pretty basic understanding of their project, but after their 10 minute presentation, I see that they have real potential. Chris Stock pointed out that the key to their success is offering enough functionality to not only draw users, but also to maintain a reasonable user base. It seems like their big draw right now is that they can synchronize your contacts across many different social platforms - a really incredible feature, but not quite a complete service (I know they have other features, that’s just one they really pushed tonight).

I’ve also been following MadKast and J-Squared pretty closely, so it was really nice to be able to see the people behind these ideas and their presentations definately held their own. I’m looking forward to seeing what J-Squared will serve up next for the Facebook community.

Another big highlight of the night was the live comment screen powered by BrightKite. David Cohen was a particularly avid user of this feature tonight. I didn’t get in on it this time, but looking back I can’t help but wish that I would have.

Perhaps the most prominent theme this evening was advertising. It seems (unsurprisingly) that just about every team is using some sort of advertising as their main revenue model. It’s worked so far for J-Squared so I don’t blame these other teams for following a similar route. Really though, even outside of TechStars this is becoming a more and more popular trend - as long as the developers can make some reasonable revenue, I see it as a win-win situation.

For anyone that did not get to attend tonight, I saw a video camera in the front of the room. My guess is that these presentations will be on TechStars TV in the next day or two.

Once again, another new addition to the blog today. At the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll notice the Me.dium widget. But what is Me.dium? Me.dium is a social browsing service which allows you to see and interact with people whose browsing patterns are similar to your own. In other words:

Me.dium’s vision is to reveal the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. For the first time, you can see your friends and others as they surf around you on the web.
- Brad Feld

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. Along with the release of this new embeddable widget, Me.dium also released an IE7 browser extension which opens up their user base tremendously. (Me.dium previously only supported the Firefox browser.) For a more information on Me.dium’s recent direction, Peter Buttler, part of the CNet community, has posted a terrific overview of what Me.dium is and where its going.

Want to get in on the action? It’s easy - get started here.

One of my dreams has always been to have all my documents, all my applications, all my everything available to me wherever I am. While this traditionally meant to me that I could start a beefed-up VNC session on my iPhone to connect to my home PC and check my email, listen to music, even watch hi-definition video, all by streaming the data, this would involve a major leap in the bandwidth of not only home broadband connections, but also the coverage and bandwidth of cellular data networks. A pretty large order if I do say so myself. Then I got to thinking.

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