Microsoft Azure is The New Outlook

November 17, 2009

I just received an email invitation to try out a new application. I get a lot of those these days, but this one was different.

It was from Microsoft.

It picked my interest. A Web Platform Installer? Microsoft doing PHP?

I went to the URL provided and I was blown away with the concept behind this application. Basically Windows has introduced point-and-click cloud computing for the masses and it’s doing it in a way that resembles the iPhone application directory but for web applications.

I hate to say it but it’s brilliant.

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Web Platforms, Not Web Portals

November 17, 2009

In talking to different startups in the past weeks, it’s very clear to me that businesses haven’t grasped yet how the Internet has shifted from the destination paradigm to the platform paradigm.

In a post titled “The Web in Danger”, Anil Dash compiles and adds to the thoughts of Tim O’Reilly, Doc Searls and Chris Messina about how the web is in danger of losing its essence: the destination URL.

So far people have thought of websites by the URLs they enter on their browsers to consume its services. But today, they are thinking of businesses as omnipresent services. They want to be able to do everything they normally do on the URL, using their iPhone or on Facebook or on their Chrome OS powered netbook.

They want to fire up your application using an icon; not enter an address on a URL window.

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AWS Import Tip: Don’t Do It On Windows

November 16, 2009

I just spent the last ten days trying to do an import on Amazon S3 using their Import/Export service. Basically Import/Export allows you to send a drive to Amazon via snail mail and they will hook the drive to their system and import the data locally. It’s much faster than trying to upload the first [...]

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Twitter Retweet: A ‘Like’ Function in Steroids

November 11, 2009
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One of the pillars of Social Tools is discovery. You have built a network of like-minded (or influential) people around you, you start striking conversations with them and you start getting the feel of belonging.

But of course, your network is 10 times bigger and more interesting, because of the second and third levels of people’s connections.

“Like” is one of the killer features of FriendFeed. It allowed me to discover new people’s content and I made really close connections to dozens of them. Facebook eventually copied the functionality, even though is not as useful in context as FriendFeed’s.

Since the beginning of Twitter, people found a way to hack the system, by introducing the ‘@’ sign to address users and putting ‘RT’ in front to give attribution of an interesting piece of content.

It took a while, but Twitter has finally given us a way to standardize the process and support it from within its data model. And it’s still called the same: Retweet.

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Ding-Dong, SEO and PageRank Are Dead

October 30, 2009
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Even as users still question whether real-time is hoopla or really transforming, I think the future is clear: real-time’s most impact will be on search.

And Google is showing up signs of distress.

First they tried to buy Twitter. That was the best move they could’ve tried. Unfortunately its founders were not impressed and really believed in their company. Reportedly they said they wouldn’t sell for a billion dollars.

Google could just scoff and carry on, right? Wrong. They need real-time because that’s where search is moving.

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Have Fun and A Community Will Follow

October 29, 2009
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When you are trying to create a community around your brand (personal or corporate) there is an important consideration that you need to have in mind.

And that is your “fun factor”.

I’m not sure if it is something we are programmed to detect (like those tales of pheromones and the cavemen and stuff) but I think people like to hang around happy individuals or fun brands.

If you are writing content, uninspired or because you’re doing a chore, or meeting numbers, or increasing followers, people will smell your fakeness from a mile.

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Curated or Real Time? Facebook’s Live Feed is More Like Confusion Feed

October 26, 2009
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Facebook announced on Friday that they were changing the design on their home, finally jumping to the real-time wagon. I was one of the people that were excited about the announcement, as I am big believer of the real-time web.

The problem for Facebook is that I believe most of its users never really wanted real-time.

The other problem is that the approach is really confusing, as they have basically introduced two homepages instead of one.

That’s why today we are beginning to roll out some changes to the home page that simplify your experience by offering two views of News Feed: a summary view of the most interesting activity that’s happened in the last day and a real-time view that shows you what is happening right now.

That sounds like a discussion between Zuckerberg and his top Engineers that didn’t come to one conclusion.

Why two views?

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Mobile is About to Explode, Is Your Startup Braced?

October 20, 2009
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Mobile computing was a segment that was very much in Yahoo!’s roadmap when I worked there back in 2005. The problem with mobile was the variety of cell phone manufacturers and carriers which made it close to impossible to develop anything that looked like something useful.

Fast forward an outstanding 4 years and we see a completely different picture, thanks to the two major punches we’ve all witnessed: Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android. It is not crazy to know that mobile is poised to surpass PC’s as the main consumption point for users. Just read this quote from Google’s CFO in their most recent earnings call:

On a quarter over quarter basis, mobile searches grew 30% on Google. It tells you something about the mobile space, the smartphones, and how they are transformative. They are basically transforming how people live on a mobile basis. If we move forward the adoption of these mobile phones by lowering the cost because it is open source, think of how many searches that will produce.

Google’s CEO mentioned on the same conference call that “Android Adoption is About to Explode”. Some reference that Schmidt was talking about Verizon’s launch of the Motorola Droid, the best competitor, according to people who have tested it, to the iPhone.

I disagree. I think Schmidt is looking at the big picture.

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Why Ranking Matters

October 15, 2009
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We live in a world full of statistics. We’re always measuring ourselves against our competitors and most of the time success is tied with performance and relative positions.

The web is specially a place where everything is measurable. Every click, visit, pageview, source can be added, combined and reported.

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Building Startups Following the Bruce Lee Philosophy

October 14, 2009
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I’ve been watching (little by little, as I’ve been very busy) a great documentary I DVR’d about Bruce Lee’s influence on other artists and in Western culture in general and I’ve found out that Lee was actually very much into philosophy.

In one of his few televised interviews (see video below) he mesmerizes us with this thought:

Be formless… shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend…

I immediately thought how this could be applied to any entrepreneur thinking of building a new startup and how this is the best approach you could have. At the start (and hopefully throughout) you need to be a flexible enterprise with the ability to morph to your customer’s needs.

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