TechEvangelists

November 29, 2007

The House that Opera Built

A couple weeks ago Opera released Opera Mini 4. This was a huge advancement in Mobile Browsers! Now I know the iPhone could already do much of what Mini 4 can do and more but only a small percentage of the population is on the iPhone, the rest of use on mobile phones need a better solution to the internet on our mobile devices. Opera Mini takes much of the same features that Safari on the iPhone does. Opera Mini gives you a full screen view of the page you are looking at and lets you zoom into the specific content you want, compared to Opera Mini 3 this is probably the biggest improvement.

This leads me to a bigger disscusion about Opera. They have been making all of the right moves, placing themselves in the three major markets: Desktop Computer, Mobile Devices and Gaming Consoles and all of them built with standards in mind. Opera has positioned themselves very well in the past couple years, I find myself browsing around the web with my Opera browser more and more. Although it is a nice browser it still has it's short commings but what browser doesn't? I spend about 1 - 2 hours with Opera Mini 4 a night and I hop on my Wii from time to time and on to the Opera browser.

Now I know what you are thinking "We get it Opera has a lot of browsers who cares? Get on with it!" Opera has in my opinion positioned themselves so well that an entire generation will now be using the Opera Browsers in many different areas in their life. A generation that is now spending more time online than watching TV. Now I am not smoking that much crack, I realize that more is going to have to happen for Opera to take over or even be considered with the big boys (IE and Firefox)

Mozilla has been slowly chipping away at IE for awhile which in a sense can only help Opera. I am by no means saying that Opera is poised to take over the Browser market tomorrow but keep your eye on them, their day will come, they are putting out great stuff on many different platforms.

Posted by revans at 12:51 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2007

MinneBar this Saturday

Now that they've posted the schedule, I'm really starting to look forward to MinneBar this weekend. OK, that and the free t-shirt, whose design is totally awesome this year.

I was scanning through all the session topics earlier and got distracted reading Planet JSAN, the blog for a project called JSAN that my friend Dave is leading a session about. JSAN is a sort of CPAN for javascript.

If I want to catch his session, I've got to get there by 11am. I'm also looking forward to the Nintendo DS meetup at 2pm, and the UofMN Robot Demo at 4pm.

Maybe I'll see you there!

Posted by Martin at 12:30 AM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2007

The LAMP stack

You are probably starting to hear people talk about "LAMP" or the "LAMP stack". This is an acronym that means Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. The P can also stand for Python and/or Perl. LAMP is a very popular and powerful open source web application development and deployment system. Linux is the operating system, Apache is the web server, MySQL is the database server and PHP (and/or the other 'P' languages), with associated HTML and CSS, provide the interface and interactivity.

This is amazing. With all of the resources that the big companies use for product development -- literally billions of dollars and some of the brightest people on Earth -- they haven't created a solution as cool as LAMP. Open source, 1, commercial software, 0.

With the adaptation of LAMP, the economy has "lost the sale" in one very narrow sense, because companies aren't laying out thousands of dollars to pay for commercial web deployment software. To build out a cluster of Microsoft servers is incredibly expensive. To roll out a LAMP cluster, by comparison, is cheap. The company spends less and gets more and part of the budget is deployed elsewhere, a serious competitive advantage.

Now throw in the fact that companies like Apple and IBM are bundling LAMP in their operating systems. Every Mac comes with apache and mysql installed. These companies are leveraging open source, too.

So LAMP and other cool open source projects create tremendous value in the economy. Open source is fueling thousands of companies that are creating incredible value in the marketplace.

Posted by Michael at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)

April 03, 2007

Twitter: Fad or Rad?

I heard about Twitter on Future Tense last week, but it kind of went in one ear and out the other. Surprising, since I'm a known social-networking whore. If you build it, I will sign up. Then my husband, Mr. Anti-Social Networking himself signed up for Twitter yesterday. So I had no choice.

Then the husband got me going on this rad Google mashup that scrolls around the world displaying the latest tweets. Mesmerizing. Just sit and watch the world tweet!

I tweet from an easy little (Mac) desktop app.

But, the question remains: What's the point? The NY Times is using this to "tweet" the latest headlines. But, is it just yet another distraction on top of my ever-refreshing inbox and IM? Dunno yet. Jury's still out.

Posted by Meghan at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)

April 01, 2007

Apple goes for it

The rest of the world hasn't completely realized yet that Apple has become a medium. They have the world's ears with their iPods, its minds with their OS/applications and now its eyes with their Apple TV. The forever up-and-coming alternative to the Pee Cee is turning into a medium. That is a huge strategical move on Apple's part, to compete with cable companies, video outlets, music stores and TV networks all at once.

I'm a well-known Apple zealot, but in my experience nothing makes buying music, TV and movies easier than iTunes. Apple figured out how to do it. They've even made it fun. They've also made it easy. I download a TV show and can watch it on my Mac, on my iPod or my TV without thinking about it.

I am predicting a big deal where someone like Google or Time/Warner buys Apple for billions of dollars. Or maybe Apple buys them. I don't know. But I've been listening to people count Apple out for 20 years and they are still wrong.

Apple, not just a computer anymore.

Posted by Michael at 08:31 PM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2007

Un-Skype: Gizmo

Your computer is your phone. I keep saying it and you keep not listening. Here is another way you can put down your phone and use your ear buds instead. Gizmo.

Posted by Michael at 01:47 AM | Comments (0)

February 27, 2007

Craigslist Mashups: Listpic

One of my favorite things about Internet technologies over the past couple of years is the ability for people to create awesome mashups. When my younger sister was looking for an apartment in NYC, I was able to send her a link to a site that placed apartments listed on Craigslist on a Google map for super-simple browsing by neighborhood.

Tonight, via Parent Hacks, I discovered Listpic - a site that allows you to browse Craigslist posts by photo. BRILLIANT! How many times have I wished I could just look through all the pictures without having to click on every post?!

If you're a fan of Craigslist, you'll be immediately addicted to this interface.

Posted by Meghan at 08:43 PM | Comments (0)

New Site: Medtronic TC Kids Marathon

I'm super excited about our recent launch of the Medtronic TC Kids Marathon web site for a few reasons:

1. Everywhere I turn, there are stories about how unhealthy Americans (and in particular American kids) are. The Medtronic TC Kids Marathon is helping parents and teachers to involve children in more physical activity. Their motto is, "Running a marathon, one mile at a time." It's a really cool idea, and I hope it has an effect on getting kids moving!

2. The site gave us @ Clockwork a chance to exercise our "conditional content" components within the Active Media Manager (AMM). Conditional content is the term we use to describe content that is displayed when certain conditions are met. For example, you can set up conditional content that says "Hi, Guest!" if a visitor is not logged in, and "Hi, [first name]!" if they are logged in. Sounds simple -- and it is -- but in the case of the Medtronic TC Kids Marathon we got to really dig in and use conditional content to power whole pages and sections.

A few examples:
- Once users have created an account, we know if they are a Teacher/School or a Family and can change the content that is displayed on every page within the Kids Training Program section. Families are eligible for one kind of incentives, while schools are eligible for others. Using conditional content, each group sees only the information that applies to them.

- As users give us additional information (like address, whether or not they want to order incentives or attend an event) we can slice and dice information even futher. We can display one kind of order form if you've never ordered incentives, and another order form if you need to add extras to your order later.

As we were working on this project with the client, the client struggled with who would get to see what information and how to organize the content. Originally, they were thinking that we would have to have separate sections of the site for Teachers and Families. Argh! Can you imagine having to maintain separate sections, and dealing with the confusion of a Family accidentally getting into the Schools section? No, thanks! It was rewarding to bring them such a simple solution.

Don't get me wrong, it certainly took a lot of thinking (and debate) internally to figure out how to put users into certain "buckets" and then how to give them information at appropriate times, but it was a fun problem to solve. And in practice, I'm excited at how elegantly it all turned out.

Enough blabbering, you should really go check it out for yourself.

To learn more about the Clockwork suite of products, visit activemediamanager.com.

Posted by Meghan at 09:46 AM | Comments (0)

June 28, 2006

Tooltips in your future

Tooltips kick freaking ass.

I mean, of course, that little help text that appears when you mouse over things. Tooltips are awesome because they are super ignorable and yet super helpful. It makes software self-explanatory in those areas where a little more explanation is necessary. The other cool thing about them is that when you know what you are doing and are moving fast, you don't see them at all! Completely invisible. When you are going slow the computer supplies you with a little more info in the exact place your eye is looking.

I predict that we'll see a rise in the ways, places and uses people think up for tooltip-like technologies. I suspect we'll see tooltips in places we can't imagine.

Posted by Michael at 05:08 PM | Comments (0)

May 06, 2006

Support your favorite independent blogs & websites - give a penny for their thoughts

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How does this work? Easy. Join the indieKarma network and add one dollar to your account (for the first 5000 accounts, this dollar is free).

Each time you visit a website or blog on the indieKarma network, your account is seamlessly debited just one cent. It's the smallest of micro-payments, directly supporting the blog or website you're enjoying.