The Team Behind Snarky Startup Blog Uncov Reveals Its Own Startup, Persai
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The authors of Uncov, a recently-shuttered blog that heaped abuse upon many Silicon Valley startups, have unveiled a startup of their own. Called Persai, it's a sort of search engine that promises to help users find content that interests them.
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Still in stealth mode, a company looks to use open source to make it easier to build social applications on the Web.
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Ben Ramsey has a new post over onm his weblog about the "soft launch" of the Atlanta PHP group.
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A startup claims to read people's minds while they view ads.
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Catapulted to geek stardom literally overnight at this high tech confab in 2006, inventor of mind-blowing touchscreen technology gives Wired News a glimpse into life as an entrepreneur and his new company, Perceptive Pixel. Kim Zetter reports from Monterey.
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Facebook, a social-networking site that has become an open development platform, announced Thursday that it purchased startup Parakey for an undisclosed amount. The company, started by Mozilla Firefox cofounders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, has been creating products to unify and integrate desktop applications and the Web.
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Company lays out booty for nonpirates who prove their Windows software is the real thing.
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The Web page building company forays into social networking with a new site that allows you to create an ultra-customized profile.
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Company's employees have been posting their thoughts on tech topics.
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Can a new Seattle-based open source start-up become &quot;the Dell of the software industry&quot;? That&#39;s the question being asked by analysts commenting on the sudden publicity being given this week to SourceLabs, a
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A Montreal startup has a plan to make online identity theft a thing of the past. The only problem? No one gives a rat's ass.
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Evan Williams, the Blogger guy and Twitter co-founder, gave a talk at LeWeb3 about keeping software small, and how sometimes you can create a product by removing features from an existing product. He showed how Twitter is less than Blogger, no permalinks, titles, comments, templates, etc. It's almost nothing compared to Blogger, but we're using it and liking it. It's not a new story. When I was coming of age in computer science, the newest computers were minicomputers. They were called that because they were smaller and did less than the mainframe computers that came before. They were followed by microcomputers which did even less and were a lot more popular than minicomputers (which of course were more popular than mainframes). Scaling things down can make them more useful. But it's a paradox because once a feature is in a product you can't take it out or the users will complain so loudly that you put it back in right away. I know, I tried, a number of times to back out of features that I thought of better ways to do. You can always add features to products, it will make the existing users happy. But it often comes at a cost of making the product more complicated for first-time users, and they don't have a voice, they can't complain, they just go somewhere else, usually quietly.  So Evan has a point. Software design, if you're creating wholly new products, is like haiku. Find the smallest subset of a mature product that will attract people and ship it.  But there are certainly features they could add to Twitter that would have no impact on the steepness of the learning curve (i.e. how easy it is for a new user to get started). For example users are good at skipping over prefs they don't understand. But you have to think carefully about what the default should be, so there's no penalty for not caring.  Also features that only appear in the API have no cost in complexity of the user interface. They might make it possible for a developer to build a new product on top of the existing one. Since the user of the base product can't see the feature, it can't make it harder to learn.  Some users say they don't want new features, but I bet most of them would be very happy to use a new feature that made Twitter more fun or useful. And there are  alot of users who don't say anything about it, and don't think much about it. Most people aren't interested in theories about why products catch on, they like it or they don't, and don't know why they do or don't.  It's always good to ask questions about why things work, but if I could offer the Twitter folk any advice, I'd say don't hesitate too much to put in new features that will make users happy. Ultimately users like new features in products they use a lot. There's a reason why products tend to bloat over time, it's because users demand it. The trick is to not compromise too much on ease of learning.
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Automattic and KnowNow hook up to deliver hosted WordPress blogs to the enterprise set. With Six Apart offering a similar service, the age of the corporate blog is dawning. And check out how a
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A Silicon Valley start-up is  gearing up to embed free, Web-based telephone services on a  variety of popular social networking and blogging services,  including MySpace, Friendster and Blogger.
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Caroline McCarthy's brand new blog on every social angle of the tech universe, from the unwritten etiquette of Facebook to hilarious misadventures in text messaging.
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The creators of Globus open source grid software have set up a software and services company, Univa, to capitalise on their work on grid computing.
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Blog: Bloggers wonder if the lesson's learned from the start-up are applicable to anyone besides Guy Kawasaki.