Archive for June, 2007

Bruce Waldack Memorial Site, Video Interview

Published by Eric Litman on Friday, June 29th, 2007 2:06pm

Eric Moreno has put together the Bruce Waldack Memorial Site for friends and family to reconnect and keep in touch. If you have a web site or blog, he would appreciate a link to boost the site's Google ranking above some of the riff raff out there. And separately, Federico Ini posted this clip of an interview he did with Bruce for his TV show in Buenos Aires: Thanks to everyone for all of the comments, emails and phone calls.

Bruce Waldack

Published by Eric Litman on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 7:25am

Bruce Michael Waldack, my good friend, cohort and colleague for the past 16 years, died this past weekend at his home in Buenos Aires. He was a bright star who burned out well before his time, and I'll miss him dearly. Update 7/17/07: I've posted photos of the memorial and wake. Update 7/5/07: Memorial services will be held next Tuesday, July 10, from 1-3 PM at the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, VA. (Map and directions) UPDATE: If you knew Bruce and would like to share any thoughts or a message feel free to use the comments here. This post ...

Apple, Cingular and the Case of the Missing iPhone SDK

Published by Eric Litman on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 12:29am

At Apple's annual developer event this week, Steve Jobs announced that there was no native SDK for the iPhone and that developers wanting to add functionality to the device could write web applications with limited hooks into some of the phone's native functions. Steve has cited concerns for the sanctity and stability of Cingular's network, but that's a veil for other, far more salient reasons behind this. Let's walk through some of the more interesting ones. The Apple/Cingular deal represents a significant departure from the typical relationships found between device manufactures and mobile operators. To close their deal, both companies had to evaluate and learn ...

Admin: math comment spam plugin disabled

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 7:36pm

I've been running a plugin that displayed a simple math question (i.e. "what is 2 + four") as part of my comments form, but apparently it worked on a far more limited set of browsers than I had realized. So consider it gone and comment math-free to your heart's content. Sorry for the inconvenience. Update: coComment is gone, too. Simplicity prevails. My blog isn't nearly popular enough to be able to afford missing comments. [tags]admin,wordpress[/tags]

Photosynth Visualization System

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 7:14pm

This is a very sexy demo of a few really interesting technologies for viewing and understanding large - really large - sets of visual data. Photosynth, the application behind the demo, was developed by Seadragon and purchased by Microsoft about a year ago, and is now available as a demo on the Microsoft Labs site. They're combining computer vision with spatial awareness and analysis to stitch together photos from virtually any source - high resolution digital SLR, camera phone, satellite, municipal camera, etc. - and allow ...

Mahalo’s Untapped Opportunity

Published by Eric Litman on Monday, June 11th, 2007 5:15pm

I've been watching the early progress of Mahalo, the new “human powered” search engine launched by Jason Calacanis last month, more than I normally would a search-related startup in no small part because I'm impressed with and fascinated by the type and intensity of buzz Jason's been able to create around it with so little cash outlay. As I spend more time considering the basic model of identifying and gathering the most interesting/relevant/current/popular/uniquely useful/etc. sites related to popular searches, I can't help but think of just how important context is to search, and that while Mahalo's broad-based approach to adoption may be ...