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Bill McCoy has posted an interesting article about the Adobe and Macromedia merger (disclaimer: he works for Adobe), I like that he admits that one of the problems with PDF is that it wants to be something for everyone and that now that PDF and Flash are under the same hands, perhaps we will see this trend changing and PDF will be more focus on what it does well (a final format paginated document) and we will see Flash and related technologies as the primary Web publishing mechanism. CD

I have started experimenting wth TailRank and after confirming my account via clicking on a URL that I got by email, I was greeted by a very cool Web 2.0 W00t!!! Your account has been aproved! :-) Will report more when I have enough time to use it (not for a while unfortunatey). CD

The guys from Make magazine have posted a blog pointing to a web site containing hacks for Molekine notebooks.
In today's digital world, it was refreshing to see that I am not the only low tech person that still carries around a Moleskine notebook all the time to take notes, way more convinient than a tablet pc and a lot cheaper.

CD

It is apparently important in the tech blog world to pick a name that is as awkwardly unspellable as possible. This comment also applies to Web 2.0 companies and makes the life of foreigners in the US with English spelling problems even more complicated that it was. I guess since my blog name is in Spanish that makes it awkwardly unspellable for most non Spanish speakers so I might be on the safe side. CD

Not having a good way to group, cluster and categorize automatically blogs in my RSS reader (not even removing duplicated) this weekend, after realizing that I had more than 2,000 unread feeds from the last two weeks of travel and work and not much free time, I decided to unsubcribe few more blogs from my reader. Few individual blogs that I started reading as a result of an interesting post but that proved not be worth my time and few more general new sites have been cut out of my reading time. I had also to mark as read everything that was unread because I realized that this weekend I wanted to write but I have been spending more time reading again trying to catch up.

Can someone please create a reader that is a bit more intelligent than the ones out there so it groups things together using some clustering and link analysis, remove duplicates and ranks the posts somehow? Perhaps this already exists out there so any reference will be welcome. Or perhaps this is the next big Web 2.0 idea....

No more writting this weekend (probably), I got my alpha invitation for Riya so I am going to try it out.

CD

  Through a totally unrelated conversation with Jim on Friday he sent me a link to this web site that talks about the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird and after clicking on the link, my browser (IE, sometimes I am too lazy to switch) displayed the image on the left telling me that my browser had been deprecated and "strongly suggesting" me to swtich to Firefox!!! If you are "not convinced", you can still access the site with IE clicking a link below and missing some unspecified features. Jim is experimenting with Flock so he did not have this problem.

I have been reading with interest the recent post from Evan Williams about the "The ten rules for Web Startups", too much has been already written about this so I am not going to comment further but reading the post got me thinking about how some of those rules apply to nearly every software company, whether is a startup or a mature one or whether is Web or not so here is how I will rewrite them so that any high tech or software company can use them: #1: Be Narrow: that certainly does not necessarily apply to every company, for a large or mature company, focusing on a small niche might not generate enough revenue to be a worthwhile effort. I think that the best way to rewrite this rule to give it a more general meaning would be "be focused" (whether on a particular technology, or business model, or market, etc.). Being focused as a whole it is not easy to do so in larger companies, you have to be focused at the division or product line level though and the company can have a broader focus but in general, focus is a good thing. #2: Be different. This certainly apply to any company, he mentions that whatever you are thinking to do in the Web is probably already being done by Google but if you are a company in the software or high tech space, most of the markets are today mature enough that whatever you are thinking on doing it is probably being done by someone else in a way or another so the only way to succeed is to be different and focus on the core competences of your company to make a difference in that space. #3: Be casual: this might not apply the way is described to other companies but I think that doing thinks "without requiring lots of commitments or identity changes" can be rewritten in a more broader sense saying that software should not be intrusive, should not disrupt existing workflows and certainly should require a small learning curve and deployment timesuccessful to be successful. #4: Be picky. This is right on the spot, every company has always too many PR, partnership, biz dev opportunities, features to implement, trade shows to attend or simply ideas about new things or markets so being picky is definitely a good think because no matter what company size or stage you are, resources are always scarce. #5: Be user centric. This one certainly apply for almost any technology product (unless you produce some obscure middleware software) and most companies tend to use technologies or add features just because they are cool not because they make the user experience better. #6: Be self-centered. This one applies up to some point but I think that for the majority of the companies, being self-centered is not enough and the more appropriate way to put it will be to "be costumer-centered" and always be thinking who your product can be make better for your costumers or how you can service then better. #7: Be greedy. Well, any company is a corporation and by definition, you are there to make money for your shareholders so I agree that you always have to keep in mind how you are going to monetize everything you do, how to protect your margins by not giving away too much royalties or discounts to resellers, how to best spent your marketing money, etc. And as he says, having money flowing into a company puts you in a better position for anything that you want to do. #8: Be tiny. This does not necessarily apply to all companies so I will rewrite it as "Be frugal", you have always to keep cost in mind (whether you have 10 people in a project or 100) and how to minimize costs without disrupting the operations and companies with good cost controls are much stronger companies. #9: Be agile. Totally agree, you have always to be revisiting what you do and analyzing whether is working or not. One great quote that I heard recently from another CEO said: "the only think that is permanent in our company is change" and I really like it. Change can be disruptive but as Jack Welch says "change is an opportunity for growth" so constantly adjusting plans and targets is much better than sticking to a losing proposition or hoping that by ignoring a problem is going to go away. #10: Be balanced. This again applies to all companies, you have to balance the hard work with the fun at the company and outside it, this is key for having committed employees and retaining them which for technology companies is one of the biggest problems. I am actually myself reading David Allen's GTD after founding about it at Mind Camp in Seattle and have already installed its Outlook plugin (with the infamous Delegate button). #11 (bonus!): Be wary. My bonus one will be different, "Be paranoid" (check out Intel's Andy Gove book "Only the paranoid survive" for a good reading on the topic) about your competition, new disruptive technologies, etc. In the technology world but specially in the software world, a competitor can pop up within days that can have a huge impact on your company strategy or the revenue of a product line so you always have to be paranoid about everything that happens in the industry to react quickly. CD

I have been reading the news of a new search engine that TPI (the Spanish yellow pages, owned by Telefonica, the owner of Terra and the largest Spanish company) has just announced.
It is called Noxtrum and it merges local search with traditional search but there are few features that I have not seen in any other search engine that are worth mentioning, they are not only cool but they are surprisingly well implemented (lots of AJAX being used) and it is very Web 2.0, read below to find out why (or check it our yourself if you read a bit of Spanish):

- The Search button is not called "Buscar", Spanish for search as in any other search engine but it is called "Encontrar" which means "find", I thought it was a cool twist that conveys the meaning that this search engine will not just search but will actually find what you need.

- It offers local search and obviously search within the yellow pages with access to an AJAX based map (no satellite imagery) that is well implemented (I like the flashy circles pointing to the place that you have found). When searching locally, you have options to narrow down the province, city, etc. The local search also produces a set of categories on the left about the kind of establishments that you might be searching for so you can further narrow than the search

- There are three "a" letter with different fonts in the right-top corner of the page that let you change the font size AJAX-like without refreshing, the fonts changes are not very noticeable but the idea for this feature is really good and I am sure that we will be seeing it applied in other web sites.

- You can email the results of a search right from the engine with a AJAX-like scroll down window that appears in the middle of the screen. How many times have you cut and past one of those long and messy search results URL from the browser to send that to someone? Not anymore with Noxtrum.

- It seems to work well, I used a search for my sister's name Carmen Domingo as my extremely biased test and gave me ten links, 9 of them with her web site, her blog, places to buy some of her books, some articles about her, etc. Only one was talking about someone else. Obviously, her Web site was the first hit, something you do not get in the Spain version of Google where an article from Terra with a very old review of a book she published few years ago, the fifth result in Google is about someone in a US university, so probably not who you are looking for if you are searching in Spain.

- They have a cool feature called clip (it is actually called clip even in Spanish since people refer to clips and clips in Spanish) where you can just click on a search result and a well implemented AJAX window will scroll down in the top-right part of the screen and there you can keep clips of some of your searches and manage them. A similar windows keeps your search history but I do not know whether they are using that to improve search as Google claims. Moreover, you do not need to register to use that, it seems to be based on cookies.

- The interface is very clean and I love the logo, it has also space for paid searches so that seems to be their business model for regular searches augmented with, I guess, charging people for being listed in the local searches.

- The search engine has been released in beta version.

- They let you send a SMS for free but it is limited to one (a day?) so better than useful but not that much, I think that they are using that as a viral marketing tool.

- The news part has a list of recent news keywords that are displayed in del.icio.us tag style with different fonts sizes to visually indicate relevance, very good. 

Overall, a very fresh new search engine coming from Spain which makes me proud that people back in my country is innovating and producing something better than I have seen anywhere else.

CD

A colleague, Mike Bacus, has sent me a very interesting email that I thought it was worth sharing here. All companies that are doing software for the Mac are these days busy making sure that their software works in the new Intel boxes that Apple is planning on shipping before June next year (although rumors are getting stronger about some computers being announced at MacWorld in January). We are one of them. This could be either an easy process if you are already using Cocoa or it could be a total nightmare if you are using things like CodeWarrior. Since Mike is not blogging (not yet, I will try to get him to do so, he is one of the most articulate engineers I have met) read what Mike has to say about this here: "In order to use Cocoa on Mac OS X you must convert your binary executables into a format called “Mach-O”. The older format was called CFM/PEF (a lot of our plug-ins for example were CFM applications). Mach-O is an "executable format" for Mac OS X, what that really means is it is also a standard set of guidelines for how programs call functions, for example what each CPU register is for, what data is on the stack, and whether the caller or callee is responsible saving registers, etc, etc. That’s all not very interesting, however what is interesting is that Mach-O was really designed to perform best on Intel style, CISC, CPUs and has a substantial performance cost for some apps (10% -30%) on PPC on G4 -- this is one of the reasons people bitched about moving programs to Mach-O in Mac OS X ? performance was noticeably worse! You have no choice if you work with Cocoa, however. Everything must be Mach-O. CFM/PEF is streamlined for PPC RISC and calling library functions tends to be considerably faster. So on MacIntel boxes, with a CISC architected Intel chip applications run 10-30% faster than they did on an equivalent PPC g4/5 chip. The performance penalty imposed by Rosetta (the MacIntel emulation technology) is partially or wholly offset by the increase in performance in porting a Cocoa Mach-O application from a RISC chip to a CISC chip. When you port to the native universal binary format (UB is a derivation of Mach-O), you eliminate the performance penalty from Rosetta and your apps run 10-30% faster than they did on the Mac. Everything runs faster on the MacIntel architecture, sometimes even emulated apps ? all the developers out there will feel good about this product introduction. This explains why Apple has been pushing Cocoa so hard; they really wanted everyone to switch to Mach-O in preparation for a CISC chip introduction like Intel. It is clear that they have been working on this strategy since Jobs came back from Next ? he brought the Mach-O format with him from Next and has been planning for CISC product introduction for several years. All the pieces to put this together were in plain view ? somehow they managed to keep it under wraps though. " Blog with lots of deep-geek follow up stuff http://www.unsanity.org/archives/000044.php Could this then be part of an even larger plan to start licensing MacOS to other hardware companies as I like to speculate?

Next July, Ron Lake is organizing in Vancouver the GeoWeb conference, what used to be GML days but that given the recent changes in the geospatial market and the entrance of new players (Google and Microsoft being the most significant ones) has taken a more broader scope and instead of focusing on just markup languages like GML and OGC standards, will address broader issues like Web services, new business models and how geographical information can be adopted and used outside the traditional professional GIS community. Ron has started a blog recently that can get too technical for most non GIS geeks but that also contains very valuable, more philosophical posts about his views of what GeoWeb is. I like to think of the concept of GeoWeb (how all geographical information will be available for sharing and collaboration via the Web) as the Web 2.0 version of what GIS has been so far. Certainly companies like Google and Microsoft are taken GIS to the masses and this is a good think for this industry and this year they both will participate as our company will also do as in previous years. It will be an exciting conference and I thought that this could be a good place to start giving this more visibility. Btw, I want to have an informal contest here, do you know why Ron's company is called Galdos? (Hint, GML does not mean Galdos Language Markup in spite of that being a rumor/joke in the industry). Post your answers as comments and I will reveal the truth in a later post.