Dropbox

Their application to Y Combinator during summer of 2007 is an excellent example and a model for companies looking for seed stage funding. The recent discussion of this on Hacker News explores and analyses this. The comment from pg (Paul Graham) being

What happens when I read this:File syncing. Superset of backups, which people will pay for. Good. Single founder. Bad. But at least he’s looking for more people. Went to MIT, 1600 SAT. Probably fairly smart. Wrote a poker bot. Now I’m starting to get interested; has the right attitude. Description of the software sounds plausible but generic. Maybe it’s good, but who can tell. But little sister uses it; that’s impressive. Scroll down to what he understands that competitors don’t get. Wow: very concise and unequivocal. I’m now basically sold. Scroll through the rest. No red flags. Did not make the usual joke single founders make when asked how long the founders have known one another. Good answer to what might go wrong. A-. (Would be an A with a cofounder.)

I went back and looked at this application in our system, and I did in fact give it an A-. An A- means “I want to interview.” An A means “I want to interview, even if Rtm and Trevor don’t.” I only gave 2 As in s2007. (We funded both those companies, and both did badly.)

The description of the company in a few sentences is the best part.

Dropbox synchronizes files across your/your team’s computers. It’s much better than uploading or email, because it’s automatic, integrated into Windows, and fits into the way you already work. There’s also a web interface, and the files are securely backed up to Amazon S3. Dropbox is kind of like taking the best elements of subversion, trac and rsync and making them “just work” for the average individual or team. Hackers have access to these tools, but normal people don’t.

There are lots of interesting possible features. One is syncing Google Docs/Spreadsheets (or other office web apps) to local .doc and .xls files for offline access, which would be strategically important as few web apps deal with the offline problem.

Drew’s profile and his alternate ideas add stars to the application.

One click screen sharing (already done pretty well by Glance); a wiki with version-controlled drawing canvases that let you draw diagrams or mock up UIs (Thinkature is kind of related, but this is more text with canvases interspersed than a shared whiteboard) to help teams get on the same page and spec things out better (we use Visio and Powerpoint at Bit9, which sucks)

Overall, its great to have such quality document as a reference and example for startups aiming for the skies.

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How to use this expenses tracking tool?

All you have to do is enter any expenses you incur. Just the reason, the amount you spent on it, any notes if you its something you want to remember and the date as shown in the above picture and you are good to go.

With this you’ll be able to all kinds on interesting information like,
your monthly, weekly, daily expenses pie chart that gives you a breif summary of what you spent on;

your monthly, weekly, daily expenses graph that shows what time you spent the money on over that period.

This website also includes loads of more tools such as

• Talk to buddy – Buddy is a bot whom you can add on gtalk (buddy@mychipper.com). Just add him as a friend, send him the expenses and he’ll take care of the rest. Buddy has lots of easter eggs too, just try chatting with him sometime
• Set reminders – This reminds you with a mail. Use it to remember your due dates, bill payment dates or to just remid yourself to use chipper.
• Transactions – See you complete history by date, by week or by month
• Lending / Borrowing – Always forget to remember that 100 Rs you lent to your friend? You can now use chipper to track this. You can use chipper even if you are the one that borrowed that 100 Rs.
• Chipper on mobile – You can access chipper through mobile if you have a GPRS enabled phone.
• Chipper on Orkut – You can use chipper on Orkut too. Just click here to install chipper as an application.

Chipper also uses advanced maths and statistics to predict what you might spend this month. The more data you add, more accurate it gets.

So do give chipper a whirl, check out the demo and let us know what you think.

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Rediff Business Solutions - Rediff Hosting

Rediff business solutions consists of domain registration, hosting and e-mail solutions.

Rediff Domain Name Registration

Below is a screenshot of the home page

Rediff Domain Hosting Home Page

As you can notice, only the first tab is for managing you domains. Rest are just tabs to buy other rediff services. The following features are available in terms of actual domain management control panel.

1. Create/manage A records

2. Mail server mapping

3. Domain forwarding (CNAME)

4. URL redirection (still in beta)

5. Edit domain registry information

6. Name server mapping

Missing features that are normally provided by other registrars

1. Hidden Whois

2. Account transfer

3. Parking page customization

4. Auth code information

5. Place to renew your domain name

All the above is totally manual and is possible only through e-mail (weeks) or phone (days). Kinda ironic for an internet company.

Another interesting point I noted is that there is no place to change your account information. Want to change your password? No way. Want to change your secret question? No way. No way to even view this information. The support guys tell you this feature(?) just does not exist. Any chance we can get this anytime soon? No. Ever? No.

This is the kind of support you can expect.

Say you decide to go through the documentation/Help page yourself. This is what you get.

Rediff Support Page

So all you get is this page where the what you are looking for is tucked away in the corner. All the questions that are listed here assumes you are technically incompetant and there is no advanced help available at all. Notice the absense of support/contact number in all of the pages.

There is some decent information available in the FAQ page. But it turns out to be a sandbox.

Reddit FAQ page

So there is effectively no way to go back to the home page. Ofcourse, you can change the URL yourself but I am not so sure if kind of users rediff gets will be able to handle that.

With regard to the actual working of these features, I tested it by creating a new A record. While other registrars I have used take a couple of minutes to reflect this, rediff showed me the status as “pending” for 30 minutes and the actual record was only created 8 hours later. -1 for speed.

Conclusion: Rediff domain service is overpriced, under featured, supportless, slow running only on its previous reputation. My recommendation is to go with domainsite.com (its faster and simpler than godaddy).

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Ajax Push Engine

From their website, Ajax Push Engine (APE) is an OpenSource technology allowing to exchange data between thousands of users through a web browser, without reloading and without external plugins.

It consists of an epoll-driven HTTP server written in C as its core with a javascript framework based on mootools for the frontend. APE supports multiple patterns such as comet, XHR, long polling, forever frame etc. because of the way its designed.

APE can be used for a wide variety of applications ranging from browser based chat to updating stock quotes in real time, some of which can be seen on the demo page.

The really interesting aspect of all this is the claim that APE can handle 100,000 connections on the same server. It is also  cross browser compatible and uses all the lastest browser features and provides backward compatibility for older ones.

Related Links

Official website

Read more about APE architecture

Demos

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1. SocialHistory.js – Find out what your users are thinking SocialHistory.js – a solution (problem?) to check where your users...

Based on an old trick, Aza Raskin developed a nifty js around it to check which social bookmarking websites your visitors use. Explaining how it works, Raskin says

By using a cute information leak introduced by CSS. The browser colors visited links differently than non-visited links. All you have to do is load up a whole bunch of URLs for the most popular social bookmarking sites in an iframe and see which of those links are purple and which are blue. It’s not perfect (which, from a privacy perspective, is at least a little comforting) but it does get you 80% of the way there. The best/worst part is that this information leak probably won’t be plugged because it’s a fundamental feature of the browser.

<script src="http://aza.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SocialHistory/SocialHistory.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript"><
!--
user = SocialHistory();
var visitsDigg = user.doesVisit("Digg");
var visitsSlashdot = user.doesVisit("Slashdot");
var listOfVisitedSites = user.visitedSites();
// -->
</script>

One can extend this to do other interesting things like

Guess a user’s gender or tell whats on your user’s mind

Links:

Vote! How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use

Using your browser URL history to estimate gender

SocialHistory.js: See Which Sites Your Users Visit

SocialHistory.js: More Spyjax

Automatic favorites import using browser history

CSS visited pages disclosure

Using your browser history to tell what’s on your mind

Brain Cloud

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1. Ajax Push Engine – Javascript framework to handle 100,000 concurrent users From their website, Ajax Push Engine (APE) is an OpenSource...

Wordpress Visual Editor Problem

Even though this is a serious, annoying and quite widely observed problem, there has been no official fix for it. Lot of posts describe various possible solutions (see links section at the end), this is the one that worked for me.

The culprit here is the file “wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php” which tries to gzip the tinymce js and the output is just messed up. Disable compression in this file and you are good to go.

Open tiny_mce_config.php located at wp-includes/js/tinymce with your favorite text editor, look for an array initArray

// TinyMCE init settings
$initArray = array (
'mode' => 'none',
'onpageload' => 'wpEditorInit',
'width' => '100%',
'theme' => 'advanced',
'skin' => 'wp_theme',
'theme_advanced_buttons1' => "$mce_buttons",
'theme_advanced_buttons2' => "$mce_buttons_2",
'theme_advanced_buttons3' => "$mce_buttons_3",
'theme_advanced_buttons4' => "$mce_buttons_4",
'language' => "$mce_locale",
'spellchecker_languages' => "$mce_spellchecker_languages",
'theme_advanced_toolbar_location' => 'top',
'theme_advanced_toolbar_align' => 'left',
'theme_advanced_statusbar_location' => 'bottom',
'theme_advanced_resizing' => true,
'theme_advanced_resize_horizontal' => false,
'dialog_type' => 'modal',
'relative_urls' => false,
'remove_script_host' => false,
'convert_urls' => false,
'apply_source_formatting' => false,
'remove_linebreaks' => true,
'paste_convert_middot_lists' => true,
'paste_remove_spans' => true,
'paste_remove_styles' => true,
'gecko_spellcheck' => true,
'entities' => '38,amp,60,lt,62,gt',
'accessibility_focus' => false,
'tab_focus' => ':next',
'content_css' => "$mce_css",
'save_callback' => 'switchEditors.saveCallback',
'wpeditimage_disable_captions' => $no_captions,
'plugins' => "$plugins",
// pass-through the settings for compression and caching, so they can be changed with "tiny_mce_before_init"
'disk_cache' => true,
'compress' => true,
'old_cache_max' => '1' // number of cache files to keep
);

Change the value of the variable compress to false.

Hope this helps.

Links that might help:

Visual Editor Not Working on Upgrade

2.5 Visual Editor/TinyMCE problems

WordPress Visual editor not working stuck in HMTL mode

More problems with visual editor not working

Visual editor problem with wordpress 2.5

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Amazon AWS

Amazon CloudFront

Aptly named Amazon CloudFront, the beta version of the service went live today with a pay-as-you-go pricing model with 14 edge locations across three continents.

United States

Ashburn, VA; Dallas/Fort Worth, TX; Los Angeles, CA; Miami, FL; Newark, NJ; Palo Alto, CA; Seattle, WA; St. Louis, MO

Europe

Amsterdam; Dublin; Frankfurt; London

Asia

Hong Kong; Tokyo

Amazon CloudFront edge locations

A traditionally expensive option for websites to provide their users with data at a lower latency and increased delivery speed, CDNs can now be deployed by even small players opening up a new market area.

To get started with CloudFront

1. Register for Amazon CloudFront

2. Create a publicly readable bucket and host you most popular data in it.

3. Create a new CloudFront distribution using a simple post call. (Documentation)

4. Distribute you content using the publicly given CloudFront sub domain (format – abc123.cloudfront.net)

or through your own sub domain using a CNAME. (upto 10 CNAMEs per distribution is allowed).

The data transfer rate starts $0.17 per GB for the first 10 TB / month data transfer out for American and European edges, increasing for Hong Kong and Japan edges with the cost being $0.210 per GB for the first 10 TB / month data transfer out and $0.220 per GB for the first 10 TB / month data transfer out respectively. The cost of transferring data from the user’s S3 bucket to the edge is also metered and priced same as S3.

Addition of CloudFront to AWS adds another feather in Amazon’s cap and moves the web one step closer to running a website completely on the cloud. Perhaps one could now expect Amazon AWS to also provide tailor made solutions such as MySQL, Memcached, web servers, applications servers which can scale indefinately but still fit in the traditional model, which currently RightScale provides.

Though many herald this move as a blow to existing CDNs such as Akamai and Limelight, there are a few who reason the extent to which CloudFront will affect their business and their CDN pricing.

Related Links:

Amazon CloudFront

AWS Developer weblog

Rightscale

TechCrunch

Getting Started Guide

Technical Documentation

How to Setup Amazon S3 with CloudFront as a Content Delivery Network

Python interface for AWS – boto

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1. Amazon EC2 – Now production ready! Today is a big day for Amazon EC2- now production...

Brute Force Calculator

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Amazon AWS

Today is a big day for Amazon EC2- now production ready with SLA, windows support and 4 new capabilities.

All these long awaited features are set to go live today.Which in effect can be summarized as

• Amazon EC2 is no more experimental with the beta tag gone.
• EC2 joins S3 in having a SLA.
• Beta level Microsoft Windows is a new option.
• Microsoft SQL Server is another option.
• Plans for AWS management console.
• Plans for load balancing, automatic scaling, and cloud monitoring services.

How does all this affect the existing customers and lure new customers?

Production ready – Amazon is now in a better shape to take on traditional hosts now that its production ready. Having used EC2 for the past few months and not having to reboot any of my instances, this makes me feel that I can now run a full production house in the cloud.

SLA – The service level agreement of 99.95% minimum uptime is a great value addition. This means that a downtime of 36 hours per month is permissible. Even though this may be unaccepatable for many sites to run production machines on EC2, its a start.

This turns out to be 0.36 hours per month which is very good. I have hosted around 20 servers till now for the past several months in the could and all of them have had 100% uptime. The only downside has been that I had to migrate around 5 instances once due to “degraded hardware” of which I was notified by the EC2 team. This by itself is excellent support!

Windows Support – All the developers itching to get their hands on Windows in the cloud rejoice! The beta support of Microsoft Windows provides developers with access to the instance using the Windows Remote Desktop or the rdesktop client. The AMI for both 32 bit and 64 bit are available with the pricing starting at $0.125 per hour.

Microsoft SQL Server – Windows as well as MS SQL now provides a complete platform for Windows based computing technologies.

The Interesting part is that the things which are now in the pipeline include AWS management console, load balancing, auto scale, monitoring services, all of which is essentially RightScale‘s business.

A complete circle

As Amazon.com CTO Werner Vogels hints in his blog about “Using the Cloud to build highly-efficient systems” about the cost efficiency of these services in view of the current US economic crisis, it sure is a big day for cloud computing and IaaS.

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Google Developer Day or GDD as its called is an one day event with seminars and codelabs of various Google web technologies including Google Maps, OpenSocial, Android, Gears, Google Web Toolkit by the Google enginners who built them.

I reached there at 8:20 AM parked the bike and suddenly the atmosphere was all googly when I saw these.

After some verification, registering my name at the counter and getting some stuff that had the detailed agenda and the necessary SDK for codelabs, I headed to the grand ball room where they keynote was to be delivered.

The keynote speech for Google Developer Day 2008, Bangalore was delivered by

Prasad Ram, Engineering & Site Director – Google R&D Bangalore with the demos run by Jagjit Singh

Ram was CTO at Yahoo India’s R&D unit in Bangalore.

As the Center Head and Director of R&D for Google India, Prasad Ram is responsible for the development of Google Search, Ads, Community technologies, key search technologies and oversaw the launch the a number of internet consumer products.

The keynote addressed the main Google strategies in support and development of Open Web.

• Client – Google Gears and Google Chrome
• Cloud – App Engine
• Connectivity – Android

I sure hope to see all of the these working in unification which will bring about a paradigm shift.

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