Truman Leung's Blog (12)

Amazon announced last night that it bought Zappos for about 10 million Amazon stock, worth $807 million, and $40 million in cash and stock to Zappos employees.



In the following video, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos tells an interesting story of what he has learned and why Zappos is a great fit for Amazon. It seems that Amazon bought Zappos because they have the same values (i.e., customer… Continue

Amazon

Amazon's file storage service is called S3 (or Simple Storage Service). Files stored on S3 can be downloaded directly from S3 servers to your end user's browser. Amazon has a

content delivery network (CDN) called

CloudFront which can take your files stored in S3 and… Continue

Last summer, I made the switch to a MacBookPro as my main web development system. Since then I have been slack in testing my web designs with Internet Explorer. It's time now to start making sure my web designs are cross-platform compatible, not just Firefox-friendly. I have

VMWare Fusion installed on my Mac with Windows XP and Ubuntu. Running Fusion slows down my system (with 4 GB of SDRAM) so I use it sparingly. However, with Fusion I… Continue

I have built a SaaS company based on PHP and MySQL running on cPanel accounts with each customer running their own separate MySQL database. At some point I would like to create various applications for searching of data across customers. That's not possible right now because each customer is using a separate database.



I just discovered… Continue

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

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

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

I'm a little late but I just discovered Street View in Google Maps. You can explore Quicktime VR like 3D "photos" of a location on the ground.… Continue

Just made my first open source contribution. It's a javascript class that uses the MooTools JavaScript framework which allows you to add an in-browser DHTML popup, tooltip or dialog (modal or non-modal) to your page.

Check it out and feel free to use it if you like:

http://www.ascribedata.com/moo/dialog/

Have you seen seenly.com? It is a flash site which prompts the user to allow the flash plug-in to access the user's webcam. Then the user can snap a photo of himself/herself which is then saved on the web.

This would be a great addition to any social networking or event management web app.

Any flash experts out there done something like this with flash in their web apps?

I just came across a fantastic piece of Javascript wizardry which would work great in the content management portion of my web app. It's an in-browser Javascript/HTML editor text editor called CodeMirror written by Marijn Haverbeke. The editor highlights code as well as auto-indents.

Check it out: CodeMirror.

I was on the Hawaii State Library website today and happened upon their Digital Book page. It's a service powered by overdrive.com. It allows you to borrow e-books and CDs for three weeks at a time. So far I've checked out books about doing business in China and website design technique. And I'm listening to some Beethoven right now, too.







For books, it uses the… Continue