NPL Solutions Blog

Our new site is closer than ever to launch. Within the next week you should see a brand new NPL Solutions making waves slip silently onto the web. This redesign has taken a painfully long time, but I think it’s been absolutely worth it.

Right now we’re working out the last of the browser compatibility bugs, and I’d like to personally invite everyone to come take a look and let us know what you think. We’re currently hiding out at http://beta.nplsolutions.com/.

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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There’s a new addition to the blog today. It’s called madKast. You’ll notice the little green icon next to the title of every post.

madKast is one of the many great ideas coming out of Boulder this summer. The team is part of a program called TechStars, a really cool program to help startups get their ideas off the ground.

Installing madKast was a snap, just paste their code somewhere before the </head> tag in your blog template and madKast does the rest. The service is currently in beta right now, so I expect some minor improvements before their official launch, but even in its current form, it seems like an awesome blog-sharing tool.

Great. Another post about the iPhone. Don’t worry, this isn’t my ranting (dis)approval of Apple’s new device, but rather a sad realization after my first encounter with one last evening.

Since the dawn of time, or so it seems, web developers have been required to be well versed in both programming, and juggling. Now I don’t think that many developers would have a very good chance at making a living as street performers, but we are cursed blessed with the obligation to make our sites display properly on different browsers. While we can all rejoice in the fact that IE 5 on the Mac OS has become an increasingly smaller headache, Apple just threw us another curveball.

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Ever since I made the XHTML/CSS switch, I, like many people, have been terrified at the idea of using tables. However, I’ve tried to keep a relatively open mind about using tables to display tabular data (it is what they were made for after all). Now I have a very good reason not to.

What happens when you try to move data around within a table? Nothing good. Other elements stay put, <tbody>, <tr>, and <td> tags are bound to get lost in the confusion, and chances are, you’re going to end up putting in a little too much work. So what can you do?

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This is my inaugural post for the NPL Solutions blog. You’ll start to see a lot more from me as the days and weeks continue on, but I’d like to take this first opportunity to comment on the creation of this blog.

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