Dalton Caldwell (of I Meem and Pic Plz) thinks that a paid version of Twitter would have better focus on delivering value to users (End Of Free). *I believe so deeply in the importance of having a financially sustainable realtime feed API & service that I am going to refocus AppNet to become exactly that. I have the experience, vision, infrastructure and team to do it. Additionally, we already have much of this built: a polished native iOS app, a robust technical infrastructure currently capable of handing ~200MM API calls per day with no code changes, and a developer-facing API provisioning, documentation and analytics system. This isn’t vaporware. (more)

Online Storage service (more)

Social Networking through Photo Sharing, but of other people's photos (and images) - so almost like Social Bookmarking (more)

survey WebApp (more)

If you've barfed from The Flu or other reasons, what should you eat? (These same guidelines seem to apply when you just have diarrhea.) (more)

Vinay Gupta believes Frack Ing probably holds the global economy together long enough for cheap Solar Power to take over by 2020.

John Robb thinks we're facing "D2", a new global Great Depression. Long Emergency? You can't outlast D2 by stockpiling canned goods/bottled water, buying gold, or arming yourself to the teeth (Survivalism). It will stretch on for a decade or more. The way to survive, even thrive, during D2 requires a different approach. It requires a vibrant and productive local economy. It requires people with the skills/equipment to contribute to it and the wherewithal to defend it if necessary. Some interesting comments, esp as to whether Resilient Community-s need to stay hidden (Dark Net, Daemon) to avoid getting drained by BigGov. For skills, see 2008-07-15-SteffenOutquisitionHeroes.

Jim Highsmith starts a thread on Planning and Estimating under Agile Software Development. I've spoken to a CEO, the director of product development and VP of marketing for a medical instrument company, and the director of development for a large software product organization. When I talk to them about dates and how they use them -- to understand the degree of uncertainty, to constrain the project, and to help the development team as early as possible -- I've heard nothing that sounds like arbitrary dates. These executives have a fiduciary responsibility to manage the investments of their companies, they have to make product release and product line marketing decisions (often months ahead of completion), and they have to balance resources across multiple products and projects. Telling them we can't give them dates and cost figures is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.

James Tauber has released v1 of his PyJamas library to build AJAX applications with Python! It's essentially a port of Google's Java-oriented GWT. (more)

After a less-structured history, Thirty7 Signals is structuring as a couple Teams. Each team will stay together for two months (a “term”). When two months are up, the teams split up and form again with different people. This way everyone gets to work with everyone else. During the two month term, there will be four Iteration-s. An iteration lasts for two weeks. An iteration can tackle one feature, a variety of smaller features, or part of a bigger feature that will require multiple iterations to complete. Each team will be asked to work on the same product for the full iteration. (more)

Coffee Script is a Programming Language that transcompiles to JavaScript. The language adds syntactic sugar inspired by Ruby, Python and Has Kell[1] to enhance JavaScript's brevity and readability, and add more sophisticated features like list comprehension and pattern matching. Coffee Script compiles predictably to JavaScript and programs can be written with less code, typically 1/3 fewer lines, with no effect on runtime performance.

author of Creating Innovators

Thirty7 Signals has made a couple interesting Sketching tools (more)

I wonder whether an Issue Tracker needs a Time Sheet system? As long as you're documenting your work, it seems to make sense to integrate time tracking into it. (Personally, I haven't had to track my time in any detail for a long time. Though for Extreme Programming you should be Estimating ticket times, then tracking reality...) (more)

Joe Wikert interviews Christina Katz about the Author Platform concept. If others already recognize your expertise on a given topic or for a specific audience or both, then that is your platform. A platform-strong writer is a writer with influence... I work mostly with writers looking to develop a platform from scratch, as opposed to established experts looking to expand or modify a platform, so I find it helpful to define a platform as a promise writers make to not only create something to sell (a book), but also promote it to the specific readers who will want to purchase it... After clarifying a platform, creating a Context becomes the next step. Creating context is key to platform development because writers need to attract a base of readers... and naturally this takes time and patience... and eventually content. But without a context for your content that resonates with readers, a writer is really missing a wonderful opportunity to create Community. Her book is Get Known Before The Book Deal ISBN:158297554X

Late-2008: Scanning photo-film-negative (typically 35mm) to digital format... (more)

Software to help people commit Project Management. (more)

Whether to include debt-holder Hair Cut/Cram Down/ReCap in the Bail-Out plan is still being debated.

aka Christian Langreiter (more)

Survey Monkey is using a ReCap to providing a Cash Out for some of its investors without having to do an IPO. Of course, now they have lots of Debt Financing... (more)