Free Your Data and The Rest Will Follow

April 30th, 2007 • 1 comment Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology

I’ve been meaning to write about Swivel for a while. I mentioned the site to someone today as a cool site and used it to generate some ideas for a presentation. Both of those things jogged my memory to write this post.

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Kiva Success!

April 26th, 2007 • Entrepreneurship + Startups, Reviews + Recommendations

I’ve previously written about Kiva but thought I’d do another plug for the site. I recently had a loan repayed back to me and was thus able to take my $25 and loan it back out to another third-world entrepreneur. Kiva has grown dramatically lately (still no micro-loans to India though) and really does warrant a look. If you’re reading this blog, you should be able to dedicate at least $25 and loan it out to others. Consider it a hand up instead of a hand out.

Twittering Away

April 24th, 2007 • Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology

After SXSW, Twitter exploded into the popular use (okay, relatively). Heck they even got a BusinessWeek article written about them (with the author’s Twitters included inline). I got roped into Twitter via my friend Susan Wu. So if you care to know what I’m doing randomly, check my Twitter stream out. I update it much more frequently than the blog but the updates are pretty limited (140 character limit on updates imposed by Twitter supposedly due to the space limit on an SMS message).

Stuff I Like

April 22nd, 2007 • Reviews + Recommendations
Tags: Amazon, shopping

People often ask me about my opinions on random products that I’ve either used or bought.  But a lot of the products that I absolutely love, people would never know to ask about.  So I’ve put together a little Amazon store made up of products that I love.  Feel free to peruse the store and see if there is anything that might help you out.  If you have questions on any of the products in the store, feel free to leave me a comment.  I’ll try to post reviews on some of these products in the near future.

Now This Might Be an iPhone Killer

April 21st, 2007 • 15 comments Technology

Okay, so the title of this post was really just there to get you to read the entire post. I’m really not sure how you can have a yet to be sold product be a killer for another product which is also yet to be sold.

The product in question is the Neo1973 which is built on a Linux backbone named OpenMoko by the Taiwanese manufacturer FIC. The device isn’t yet available but the initial specs are pretty promising. The device is intended to be completely open (unlike the iPhone which will initially only work on the Cingular network). So if you’re on a GSM network, you can use this phone. The other open part of the device is that anyone will be able to build applications for the device. Initially, I thought this was true of the iPhone as well but I’ve now heard conflicting reports (seems like it is true though). The folks working on OpenMoko are definitely building a community around the platform by having a site for developers which links to projects (none yet but I don’t think any development hardware has shipped yet) and a wiki. One example of using the community for this platform is shown on this page about the lack of WiFi support. The folks behind the project apparently need help finding a suitable chipset for the platform and have shared a lot of the information they have about the chips currently available.

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