Pito’s Blog

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Recently three friends of mine got nice press coverage, so I thought I’d share them:

• Reed Sturtevant is doing some great things at Microsoft in Boston
• Paul Engiish and Kayak are showing the true prices of air travel
• Ted Morgan of Skyhook are performing magic with photos and no-GPS

So in fact, there IS cool tech stuff going on in Boston

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I just came across Dave Dupre’s blog. Some good reading there, for example:

“[…snip] If the single test does not show a huge improvement, the project is considered a failure and scrapped. This happens all the time, and it always stifles innovation. Why propose something new if you have to be right all the time?

Innovation does not proceed on a schedule. To maintain a culture of innovation, occasional failure must be allowed - even encouraged! As long as you learn from your mistakes and move on and get better, the team and the company will be better off.” (from Fear of Failure)

Technorati Tags: softwaredevelopment management

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Check this post 30+ Must-Have Updated Firefox 3 Extensions from Mashable!:

We’ve put together a list of 30+ must-have Firefox 3 extensions that we know you’ll enjoy, whether you’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 and are looking for something new to add to your browser, or have yet to make the upgrade and are looking for a reason.

Lots of good stuff there if you are a FireFox 3 user. Check ‘em out!

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I haven’t seen anyone pointing to this article about TechCrunch and Professor Arrington, but it’s very interesting. I remember when it was first starting and how he would write an unbelievable number of interesting and useful reviews about new products. Mike Arrington was a machine! Say what you will about him, TechCrunch is the labor of some extremely hard work:

“Of course, Arrington’s success is about more than partying like a frat boy and schmoozing like a Hollywood agent at a cast party. With the exception of a three-week vacation (during which he worked half-time) at the end of 2006, he says he has worked every day for two years straight.

He gets up at about 10 or 11 am, is at his desk 10 seconds later, and tends to the business side of his operation until early evening, seeing entrepreneurs, doing phone interviews, tracking the news of the day, and writing posts. He’s often at parties or other events until 10. It’s typically not until 10 or 11 pm, when things quiet down, that he has time to think and write more thoughtful, analytical blog entries. “I’ve actually cut back,” he says. ” from TecCrunch Blogger Michael Arrington Can Generate Buzz

Learn all about TechCrunch and Michael Arrington

Technorati Tags: techcrunch arrington

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I am on a Mac and I have lots of odd little things running, doing backups, syncs, who knows what. Every so often my computer goes “boink!” with no error message or display and I wonder, hmm, I wonder what just happened?

I have a suspicion it’s my hourly backup which is boinking because one file couldn’t be backed up. But it might be finder saying that it was done copying all those files (oh wait, maybe that’s a “bing” not a “boing”) Or might it be something else totally?

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I got the big new release of FireFox 3.0. Looks fine. Actually looks mostly the same. I am not sure what the big changes are but I am trying it out to see how it goes.

I know one regular headache with FireFox for me has been that it would pin the CPU for no apparent reason. The closest I came to seeing a pattern is that it seemed to have to do with pages being opened that had Flash scripts on them. But I can’t say I ever verified that. All I know is that fairly regularly when my system got slow, I would see FireFox at the top.

If that’s all that FF3.0 fixes, that would be enough for me.

Update: I just saw this link about FireFox 3.0

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This is a question I hear all the time. I thought I’d write a bit of an introduction to the topic. Check out “The difference between a web site and a blog” on Squidoo.

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Ever wonder what speed your internet connection really has?

Try this handy-dandy little utility!

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Adam Green points to Scoble who re-discover and discover, respectively, Amazon’s street by street, address by address, photographic coverage of the map of, what, the universe? It’s a neat new user interface of something they’ve had for a while, actually, but still, quite cool!

some nuggets:

“Will I use it? Hell, yeah, it is damn useful. I can point you to Border Cafe in Harvard Square, which just happens to be one of the best college student dives in the country.” (from Darwinian Web, Adam’s new blog)

and…

“But, if you need to know what a store looks like before going there, Amazon is definitely something you should check out.” (from Scobelizer)

and…

“Is your house on their map? It’s pretty creepy to have pictures of your neighborhood on line. Intellectually, it makes perfect sense, but it still creeps me out.” (from a comment to Scoble’s post)

and finally…

“Unfortunately, the image defaults to the side of the street with Starbucks. You’ll have to click the film strip for the opposite side of Church Street.” (again from Darwinian Web)

Which brings up Mechanical Turk, the new, totally clever Amazon service which some have written about but somehow seem to have escaped Scoble’s all-seeing-eye.

So what is Mechanical Turk (see this for the origin of the name)? It’s an Amazon service generates solutions to little problems or tasks which are trivial for humans and impossible for computers (exaggerating a little here.) What kinds of problems are these? Oh say choosing what photograph best represents the storefront of the Border Cafe!

What I imagine is this: Amazon has outsourced a bunch of SUVs equipped with digital cameras and a GPS to drive up and down all streets in the US. The cameras automatically snap picture after picture, each encoded with the current lat long. Using maps and directories each address will match several pictures. The remaining problem is to select the best one to represent the storefront. A very menial task, but one that requires a person.

Enter Mechanical Turk. Anyone with an Amazon account can sign up and request to ‘complete simple tasks that people do better than computers, and get paid for it.” I tried this and was presented with sets of 3 to 6 photos. My job: decide which one most looks like the front door of say, Ernie’s Body Shop, 1234 Main Hyway, Maine. I think each task paid something like 3 or 5 cents. Clever, eh?

Even cooler, Amazon chose to build this as a totally general mechanism, with APIs for both sides of the transaction. API’s to define tasks, check results, qualify workers etc.. And APIs to work on problems and suggest solutions. Pure genius!

So, let’s say I have a task like, answer the question: “Is this web page a blog or not?” (a question that might be of interest to BlogBridge) I could:

1. Create a list of URLs that I want to check out
2. Add them to Mechanical Turk as projects
3. Seek out only workers who could show that they knew what a blog is (by submitting to some test questions)
4. Decide how much I wanted to spend
5. And turn the problem loose on people around the globe.

You know everyone always fawning over Google. Don’t get me wrong, I think Google is great and I’ve done my own share of fawning.

However, in my book, Amazon is the unsung hero in the new Web 2.0 world. They are every bit as innovative and cool as Google, and they do it while somehow inventorying and delivering gazillions of books and other products around the globe.

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