Featured Blog Posts (410)

[crossposted from Your Computer Minute blog for your convenience - thanks Dan for your support]

Hawaii's tech community is getting a rare, unprecedented opportunity to make a big impact on how the City and County of Honolulu…

I think almost everyone has heard of Skype for audio and video calls.  What some people are less aware of is that the text chat functionality can be used for persistent chatrooms like those available through IRC and other chat protocols.  Whether you've heard of IRC or not, you've surely heard of IM.  IRC is a text based protocol that supports very large chatrooms.  Anyone with a server can host multiple rooms and there are many highly active IRC servers still around.  There is huge traffic…

It's TechHui Conference time! The goal of the conference is to highlight interesting Hawaiʻi-based people, projects and organizations working in technology and interactive design. We seek to facilitate education and networking within the Hawaiʻi tech and design communities as well as educate people about the latest developments and…

The assessment, which includes a Baseline Assessment and Benchmarking Report, was conducted by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) in close…

My first appearance in Chicago Rails conference turned out to be a blast. It's been while since I was in Chicago last time and it felt great to be back in a big city.

Being surrounded by software professionals is an exciting and inspiring experience, and conservations with people working for different companies are undoubtedly valuable, I got chance to…

Aloha, TechHuians - I am happy to announce to the local tech community that Sprout has been acquired by InMobi, nearly six years to the day from when we started our dot-com venture in Honolulu under the name ChipIn. Here's some of the press about the acquisition:

 …

Short story: visit http://www.gig-u.org

Longer story (our press release):

Behavior results in experiences, experience creates emotions, emotions are recorded in memory and our memories dictate our behavior.

This loop applies every time a human is part of an interaction, whether it…

Here's the first part of an article I wrote for Streetfight, a publication covering hyperlocal. There are some incredibly cool things happening in this field. Would love comments on how you think this might work in other applications - maybe like Ushahidi except for video and images?

Is TapIn the Future of Hyperlocal?…

Quick test: what's your supervisor's cell number?  Can you recite it from memory, without looking it up on your phone?  If you can't, you're not alone. 

Although businesses are moving more and more into "the cloud," another story went unreported: our brains have already made that move.  With search engines, online databases, and web browsers that auto-fill the form fields, we rely on our own memories less and less.  That was the subject of this story in The Atlantic:…

It is about to become one of the major trends of our times and it fundamentally changes the way we live and interact with everything around us. It is the latest gift from social networks and…

When we moved into our new apartment, my wife and I opted to receive cable services through Time Warner. It was the premium package that offered countless of channels. It was a sweet deal, and we thought we were getting our monies worth. However, after a month and a half, we noticed…

There has been a flood of news on Google+, which is to be expected whenever a company as big as Google rolls out a new product.  This piece in Wired may be the definitive article to date: Inside Google+ — How the Search Giant Plans to Go Social. 

It was written by Steven Levy, a respected tech author who also…

Apple Inc is a company that has innovated and revolutionized multiple markets with a surprisingly short list of products. Apple made the iPod, the wildly successful MP3 music player, that subsequently changed the way we access a lot of our entertainment with iTunes. They've created the iPhone, which has revolutionized the smartphone market. They created their infamous App Store, which many of us are truly thankful for. Steve Jobs…

After initial failures in the Japanese market, Facebook and LinkedIn may have caught their second wind



For years US based social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn have had very poor penetration in Japan despite having more features and better UX design than local competitors. Homegrown networks such as Mixi and Gree dwarf the Japanese localized versions…

In the beginning of “Friends”, one of my favorite TV shows, Rachel left her wedding and decided to live with Monica in NYC, Monica gave Rachel a hug and said, “Welcome to the real world, it's difficult, you're gonna love it”.

That's pretty much how I feel about the first month of my…