Hawaiʻi's Technology Community

All Blog Posts (799)

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

TinEye Image Search Technology

I just learned about a new image search technology called TinEye and it reminded me of the things I heard about ilovephotos.com so I thought I'd share it here. (*I know very little about both companies so I'm not sure if these two technologies are really comparable)

If you watch the video on the TinEye site, you can see that it is a brand new way to search for images on the net. It doesn't search for images based on tags and file names but rather uses… Continue

Added by Scott Murphy on June 28, 2008 at 1:30am — 6 Comments

Microsoft + Yahoo, Take 2

This morning TechCrunch and

CNET reported talks are back on, with conflicting stories on the exact nature of the deal. CNET reported that Microsoft proposed a more favorable search-only deal. TechCrunch… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 24, 2008 at 5:30pm — 1 Comment

computer brains

if someone says you have a computer brain, that person is insulting you, saying you have the smarts of a relay switch.

Added by Wayne Hirata on June 22, 2008 at 1:00pm — No Comments

Rise Of The Mobile Widget

Emerging Mobile News

Mobile Widgets are taking over the mobile industry and will soon change the way we use our cell phones and mobile computing devices.

Less than a decade ago our phones changed from portable telephones into mobile computing platforms providing us… Continue

Added by GenePhillips on June 18, 2008 at 3:54am — No Comments

9 Ways TechHui Can Benefit You

I know TechHui is a community for techies in Hawaii, but what can TechHui do for me? The answer depends on who you are and what you do. Whether you are a Linux enthusiast, an EE professor or a Java developer thinking about moving to the islands, there is something here for you. We've compiled some ideas that cover employers, employees, socialites and nerds… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 15, 2008 at 7:30pm — No Comments

OS X Menus Anger Me

I recently changed from a Windows laptop to a MacBook Pro for my main machine. I have always been familiar with OS X because others in the office use it and I test Swing applications on OS X for customers. The transition to OS X on my primary machine has been relatively painless. For the most part the UI is elegant, aesthetically pleasing and provides a great user… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 12, 2008 at 7:30pm — 8 Comments

3G iPhone Nice, But Still Missing Key Features

This week the blog featured several good iPhone 3G posts. Finally the wait it over. The most important improvements are 3G network support, GPS, support for third party apps, Exchange push support and a significant price cut. These are all great, but I can't believe we still don't have basic features like cut, copy and paste. I wonder if this is because they haven't figured out how to reconcile text selection with the fact that click and drag gestures… Continue

Added by Daniel Leuck on June 9, 2008 at 6:30pm — No Comments