Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

Today I had dinner in Portland (we had great curry by the way) with Jon Maroney, an ex-Extensis marketing/biz dev guy that now is the CEO of a totally Web 2.0 company called Free Range (what a change!!). His company develops a RSS Reader for mobile devices ("Blackberry, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, Palm Treo, Nokia, Samsung, Motorola, LG or any Java phone" according to their web site) and offers a server side service where your feeds are stored, catch and served effciently over a mobile connections (catching, compression and all that) into the free client RSS Reader. They accept OPML files as a way to upload of your feeds there and get them available in a cell phone via their service. The demo looked cool in spite of being done with a shitty Motorola phone over a slow T-Mobile connection (it was actually surprinsingly fast due to the catching and preloading info into the phone I guess). The interesting thing is that his company is also targetting corporate applications where they want to use RSS and cell phones with RSS Readers as a way to keep employees updated of particular relevant corporate information. So he is actually thinking on innovative ways where RSS and mobility can be used for corporate purposes (like keeping employees updated of changes in the HR policy) which was a refreshing thing to hear after an overwhelming usage of RSS for consumer applications.

We also discussed about Amazon Mechanical Turk and how that is a great platform for building a mobile device enable interface to access those job opportunities (Amazon has yet to release a Web Service API for that, so far the only API is for the companies posting jobs but Jeff Barr mentioned at Mind Camp that they were going to do so).

I recommend you to try so Jon can make money and eventually invite me to dinner instead of the other way around (just joking Jon

CD

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Alex Barnett has put together an OPML list with the blogs of the attendees of the Seattle Mind Camp (thanks Alex!!). You can get the file here. Unfortunately, it does not work in my computer unless I take the first two lines out, it gives a syntax error there. My RSS Reader (Jet Brains Omea) will also not read it unless I remove those first two lines and the same issue displaying it in my browser. At first I thought that the issue was because I am using a Japanese OS laptop but today I tried on Jim’s laptop (a US one) and he is having the same problem. I do not want to edit the file locally but point to the one in the server so when Alex updates it the changes will get reflected in my RSS Reader as well (that is in fact one of the cool things of having a OPML file) so modifying the local one is not a solution. The error says that the tag xml:stylesheet in the second line is invalid. Any one having problems with this or has any idea of the solution?

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I attended the meeting organized by Chris Phirillo were he was showing gada.be (a search engine that is like the Web 2.0 version of Meta Crawler) and that was supposed to be about OPML. On the gada.be topic, I think that the cool part of it is the idea of using the URL as a way to pass the search term. That is really innovative and I have not seen it anywhere else and it will certainly help when you are in a low bandwidth device (avoid going to the search engine page first) or on a small device like a cell phone (less typing). I also like how OPML is used as the main interface, that allows me to track a particular search topic from my RSS Reader using multiple sources without myself manually adding different feeds as I was doing so far. As for aggregating search results, there is nothing much new there (besides searching into Web 2.0 sites rather than just the "conventional" search engines) and the real value added I think that will come if the site can actually cluster or merge the search results and provide a consolidated view rather than a laundry list of all results. Meta Crawler actually does a decent job on this (yes, they are still around). Chris mention that he is looking at adding this into the future so look forward to see it. On the OPML discussion, I think that people focused too much on the technology itself rather on the problem which again is how to get access to the information that we need, deal with the information overload and avoid the inherent biased provided by any particular search engine. When the discussion was getting interested, we were kicked out by the people coming to the same space for the next meeting. Other interesting thing is that while we were having this deep discussion on OPML there were projecting Manga on a wall in the room next to us, welcome to the world of Mind Camp….

Btw, here is a pick from that session where Jim and I are sitting on the far right.

mindcamp

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