Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

All Blog Posts (786)

No more business cards?

I subscribe to too many RSS feeds (via a nice RSS-to-email script on my email server), and every so often I go through and delete a pile of them. One of the most-deleted is 'VentureBeat', a log of who got funded, and who wants to be funded. Once in a while a really interesting post comes through, though, and I think this is one of those: Get rid of business cards.

I'm in favor of eliminating the practice of giving… Continue

Added by Kurt Sussman on August 19, 2008 at 9:57am — 4 Comments

TopCoder Software Engineering Competition

Exciting news! The University of Hawaii Information and Computer Sciences Department is putting on a coding competition (see http://www.ics.hawaii.edu/news/department-of-information-and-computer...). This is great news and should be a really fun experience for the students.

To help the ICS department we have decided to do two things.

1) form an ICS alumni association

2) lead the organization and planning to support the coding competition by providing mentors and prizes for… Continue

Added by aaron kagawa on August 18, 2008 at 11:31pm — No Comments

Asia's Social Web

One of the challenges presented by the joint US/Japan/China debut we are planning for ooi is the necessity of keeping our eye on three rapidly evolving markets. Although its time intensive, it is fascinating to observe the differences in each country. As Scott observed in the …

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Added by Daniel Leuck on August 18, 2008 at 6:00pm — 6 Comments

Social Networks, Anonymity, Reputation & Aloha

Last night I was chatting with Laurel and the guys from

Chi.mp about online identities and anonymity. I had a similar discussion with

Roxanne Darling about profile pics. Social network mediators are often faced with… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on August 17, 2008 at 7:30pm — 13 Comments

FADE

Fade

I see them fading, in and out. Must be the heat and the distance. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.

It was hot, but oddly, not humid. The two soldiers in sun faded tropical fatigues stood on the ridgeline; they were motionless. Their web gear was unbuckled and hung loose around their hips. Likewise, their hands hung empty; no weapons were slung from their shoulders. They were unarmed. The one on the right was tall… Continue

Added by Dave Takaki on August 17, 2008 at 1:53pm — No Comments

Adobe ConnectNow: Free Web Conferencing

Running a small web based software-as-a-service (SAAS) company, most of my customer contact is via the web (website forms and email). Only a select few of my customers actually have my telephone number. However, it's high time to add web conferencing and video as a means of improving communication with customers. If pictures speak a thousand words, perhaps video speaks ten thousand. In the past, I've researched… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on August 13, 2008 at 4:00pm — 5 Comments

PBN Book of Lists (Web Design) - Analyzed...

On Friday, Pacific Business News published their list of Web Designers, it is always so interesting to take a more in-depth look at the details to see what they really mean. The list is quite deceiving as it is ranked by annual revenue without regard for the percentage of revenue actually generated by web services. So for instance if Hawaiian Airlines decided they were going to give their Hawaii bound travelers a website to post vacation photos and a forum to blog on their favorite places… Continue

Added by Rob Bertholf on August 12, 2008 at 3:00pm — 5 Comments

Startup weekend?

Sid Savara and I have been talking about planning a startup weekend -- you and your geekiest friends, making something for the internet in a weekend. You can read more about the sort of event we're thinking of here.

If you'd be interested, post here, and if you know someone else that might be, forward this to them. If we get enough "heck yeah"s we'll put together a date (possibly early sept) and venue. (Also, let us know if you have… Continue

Added by Shawn Drost on August 7, 2008 at 3:07pm — 16 Comments

Perhaps it's time for a seed fund incubator in Hawaii?

This latest TechCrunch post, "LaunchBox Unleashes Its First Nine Startups" really got me thinking of whether we could do something like this in Hawaii.

Ever since I met Paul Graham back in 2004 when I presented at MIT's Spam Conference (fast forward 21 minutes to see me make a presentation in… Continue

Added by Peter Kay on August 5, 2008 at 8:00pm — 42 Comments

August Featured Techie: Clifton Royston

I met Clifton in 1995 shortly after he launched LavaNet with current HTDC Executive Director Yuka Nagashima. It was immediately apparent Clifton had a rare mix of great tech skills and keen business acumen. At the helm of award winning LaveNet Clifton helped bring quality internet service to Hawaii. He is… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 30, 2008 at 10:00pm — 3 Comments

i18n: From Day One

Companies that fail to internationalize their web applications at an early stage often miss out on big opportunities. With China having recently passed the US in terms of total web users and European online advertising revenue rising 40% annually, it is absolutely crazy to ignore international markets. It constantly amazes me how many successful US web app companies… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 28, 2008 at 6:30pm — 8 Comments

Hazards of Machine Translation: Eat at the Server Error (yum!)

Apparently there has been some hasty Babel Fish translation going on in China in preparation for the Olympics. The Chinese characters pictured mean "restaurant". The sign looks rather expensive! :-)

(from Geekologie) Having worked in the… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 21, 2008 at 4:00pm — 8 Comments

Amazon S3 takes down SmugMug

This morning, as I tried to view my photos on SmugMug, I was surprised to discover that their site is offline. Here is their blog post about it.

SmugMug's entire site is down due to Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) being offline due to elevated error rates.

Storage, bandwidth and… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on July 20, 2008 at 7:30am — 1 Comment

What Was Your First Programming Language?

Following up on last week's " What was your first computer?" question (the

VIC-20 was a clear winner), this week's question is "What was your first programming language?" Thinking back, I initially thought it was Level Basic… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 14, 2008 at 2:00pm — 38 Comments

GWT: Finally A Java Web Framework That Doesn't Suck

Although Ikayzo does web development, I've personally been doing mostly desktop development for the past five years. I've worked with Swing, SWT, WinForms and WPF. Every time I was forced to work on web projects I cringed because the UI piece was so much uglier and less evolved than any of the aforementioned desktop frameworks. Recently… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 11, 2008 at 7:30pm — 6 Comments

What Was Your First Computer?

The first computer I used was a TRS-80 back in grade school. They had a dozen of them at the local science center where I took classes after school. I learned to program in BASIC and store my inventions on a cassette tape.

The first machine I owned was an… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 9, 2008 at 5:30pm — 51 Comments

Google Launches Virtual World Builder

Google just announced a virtual world builder called Lively. Although its currently more of a 3D chat room type app I can easily see it evolving into a hyperlinked universe of rooms that competes with

Second Life. Lively environments can be embedded in web pages, which is a huge advantage… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 8, 2008 at 11:30am — 7 Comments

Successful Offshore Outsourcing

At this point in my career I've worked on quite a few outsourcing projects. I've worked for companies in Japan, the UK and the US doing outsourcing to Russia, India, Argentina, and various countries in Eastern Europe. I've seen projects that benefited greatly from offshore outsourcing, and I've seen projects turned into unmitigated disasters. In this post, I thought… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on July 4, 2008 at 11:30am — No Comments

July Featured Techie: Bruce Kim

I've always had great respect for Bruce, both as a technologist and a business man. He built

Inovaware from a piece of billing software he wrote for a local ISP into a leading provider of billing and CRM applications with customers from New York to Tokyo. Now Inovaware… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 30, 2008 at 9:00pm — No Comments

How to Banish Facebook Ads

I was annoyed today by the content of some ads on Facebook, so I decided to see if I could get rid of them. It was astonishingly easy. I used a Firefox add-on which makes it easy to add site-specific CSS styles. I know this technology has been around for years. However, it made me wonder what ramifications that bodes for advertising-only business models for Web 2.0 companies. Will tools soon become popular amongst the general Internet population that will allow them to add a single browser… Continue

Added by Truman Leung on June 30, 2008 at 2:15pm — 3 Comments