Librarian Hired

I just recently hired a librarian to manage my collection of books. She’s sexy (of course), smart, and fast. She doesn’t do the Dewey Decimal System but as long as I have some idea about what I want, she can point the way to the reference(s) I need. And she can work for you too! That’s right, head over to my librarian, grope her with a few keywords, and she’ll tell you what’s available.

So give her a try and if you like what you see, just get in touch with me.

PS Did I say “grope”??

Push The Startups

Venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham published a list of some startup ideas on YCombinator just this month and says that they want “…to list some of the ideas we’ve been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms… because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn’t anticipate.” The list then proceeds to describe some thirty startup ideas, with concerns being addressed ranging from multimedia to education to customer service. These ideas seek to uncover new ways of doing business, leveraging mostly the internet, but one or two involve hardware; they also seek to take advantage of emerging uses for the web especially when combined with compelling forces such as social networking.  

Some of the items that piqued my interest (and imagination):

• 23. More open alternatives to Wikipedia.
• 16. A form of search that depends on design.
• 13. Online learning.
• 12. Fix advertising.
• 9. Photo/video sharing services.
• 8. Dating.
• 5. Enterprise software 2.0 and 6. More variants of CRM.
• 3. New news.
• 28. Fixing email overload.

Any one of these is an interesting, and potentially lucrative, area to tackle — and they don’t only have to be on the conventional web — for example, how about 8. Dating combined with an iPhone?

So I think I’m gonna put my thinking cap on, order some beers and pizza in, and fire up my shiny new IDE for some hacking goodness.

The Apple App Store

Quite exciting that Apple has injected quite a jolt into the software development community vein by opening up the iPhone API and App Store. Despite some birth pains, it’s looking to be a smashing hit. And why not? Take the best phone platform out there, a cool idea, some developer brains, mix them up together and you could potentially get a boatload of moolah. Note to self: it might be a good idea to try to get on that bus.

Speaking of birth pains, there’s been some news about unfair practices in the app store. Sheesh, this is easy. Do a Yahoo and pull another page out of the Facebook book (Facebook book? uh, sorry) by displaying the applications in “smart-random” view, just like how when you click on “Show all friends” on a friend’s profile shows you all that person’s friends using some criteria (may be connected to you in some way, part of a group, attended the same school, etc), but it looks random so that you don’t always see people named “Wachowski” up to “Zimmerman” in the 50th page or so.

E3 This Week, So What?

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo or E3 as it’s more popularly known, has been a significant event for gamers and game providers for the past several years, acting as a springboard for such big-name providers as Blizzard. This week they’re at it again, and though a similar buzz as in years past is flying around, not many gamers are as excited. Why? Largely because many view the E3 as becoming less relevant, starting from when it became invitation-only last year, as well as the high cost of entry for a game provider. Beginning from about 60,000-70,000 attendees before 2007, there were only about 5,000 attendees last year and it’s projected to be even less this year.

Nowadays, publishers are looking at hosting their own events so that they can provide a more focused experience for gamers. Personally I think this is a whole lot better, though less exciting because it takes away the candy-store atmosphere, but definitely worthwhile especially if game providers host a number of local events.

Yahoo Doing A Facebook?

While not exactly similar to what Facebook did with their API, this is still a page out of the same book. It’s pretty exciting, and depending on if they do it right, can make a huge impact on their positioning. It’s still in the planning stage, but if it can leverage the brainpower in the community and lower the barrier for entry, it’s got the potential to be a smash hit.

A New License-Targeted Software Analysis Program From HP

HP launches open-source tracking project