Software Soapbox

Box.net Receives $48 Million Investment

Box aims to gain a foothold in the market for business collaboration dominated by software giants such as Microsoft Corp. and Oracle Corp.

via www.bloomberg.com

Visualizing Friendships

Visualizing data is like photography. Instead of starting with a blank canvas, you manipulate the lens used to present the data from a certain angle.

When the data is the social graph of 500 million people, there are a lot of lenses through which you can view it. One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.

 

via www.facebook.com

PocketMod: The Free Recyclable Personal Organizer

The PocketMod is a small book with guides on each page. These guides or templates, combined with a unique folding style, enable a normal piece of paper to become the ultimate note card. It is hard to describe just how incredibly useful the PocketMod is. It's best that you just dive in and create one. Build a PocketMod now!

via www.pocketmod.com

National Broadband Map

The National Broadband Map (NBM) is a searchable and interactive website that allows users to view broadband availability across every neighborhood in the United States.

via www.broadbandmap.gov

Per Henrik Lausten - Client project: XPages CMS and web shop with card payment

Nice work!

A project for one of my clients went live last week. It's a portal on heart failures and defibilator products with a related web shop where you can buy automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and accessories. The portal is in Danish.

via per.lausten.dk

The evil power of negative words

That’s the power of the negative. If you are being interviewed and you say 1000 positive things about your competitor, your successor or even yourself, but then you use one negative word like “oversold,” you can be guaranteed that the only word quoted will be the negative word.

Warning: don’t use negative words in interviews unless you are 100% confident that is what you want to see quoted. Because you can’t demand a whole paragraph, a whole sentence or even a ph

via blogs.forbes.com

So who should I use for cheap, reliable XPages web app hosting?

I'm working on a few personal XPage projects in my spare time, and I need a sandbox n the Web....It's been years since I hosted anything Domino related on the Web, who uses who and what has been your experience, recommendations? Requirements: -Hosting 2-3 XPage apps only, no email required. -Need the latest Domino server with the latest extension libraries, up-to-date at all times -Need replication and Web access w/Web login

Faceoff on the moon? Canadians hope to land hockey puck on lunar surface

They need to raise the minimum $1 million required for each launch; Dobrianski says he has $100,000 saved up so far. Once the financing is in order, the team can move on to other questions — like whether it will use a commercial rocket-launch company or put its payload on an American or Russian rocket.

Then there's the hockey pucks.

via ca.news.yahoo.com

Hummingbird Drone

The tiny aircraft weighs only 19 grams [about two-thirds of an ounce] and has a wingspan of 16 centimeters [6½ inches]. The vehicle is self-contained with its own motor, battery, communication system and a video camera. It’s being developed to be a palm-sized observation-and-surveillance platform. But instead of taking pictures of a building, it can provide a video feed from inside the building.

via www.wired.com

Can Skype Go Corporate?

Great article.  I'd say yes....just about every project I've worked on has used Skype at some level, mostly group chats, to help get things done. 

In the August regulatory filing, the company noted that a survey of 40,000 Skype users revealed that 37% "use our product platform occasionally or often for business-related purposes." That statistic underscores what the company described in the filing as "a significant opportunity to better serve the communications needs of the small and medium enterprise segment, as well as larger enterprise customers."

via knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu