I can’t believe the level of innovation going on at Apple. It’s really a breakthrough technology – Another whole new level.  

Apple stands for electronic devices, what Google stands for web innovation. No further comments.

Ruby was too… magical for me to understand at times; and it was too magical for me to comprehend how they worked at the back. I missed the database schema migration on Rails though. Unit testing was done easier.

Django is written in Python, which for the most part is comprehensible to me, except for certain introspection and meta-programming involved when I tried to write form modules on Django.

Hacker News | Ask YC: Django vs Ruby on Rails

Next Gen Apps Won’t Be Pushed Around By the Browser – ReadWriteWeb

Hatebook – Welcome to Hatebook ]]> http://woonzai.com/blog/2008/05/hatebook-anti-social-utility/feed/ 0 http://woonzai.com/blog/2008/05/virtual-reality-views-using-the-wiiremote/ http://woonzai.com/blog/2008/05/virtual-reality-views-using-the-wiiremote/#comments Thu, 15 May 2008 04:28:17 +0000 WoonZai http://woonzai.com/blog/2008/05/15/virtual-reality-views-using-the-wiiremote/ Awesome innovation by Johnny Lee – Virtual Reality using the WiiRemote!! This will change the future of 3D gaming more. Super exciting!

Other than gaming, what other uses can this technology be used for? Virtual conference? Can’t imagine having virtual conferences with this technology. Hmm..

YouTube – Head Tracking for Desktop VR Displays using the WiiRemote

RFID reader can now identify velocity, position of tags

The new software will be able to discriminate between different bags, and provide such information as where the bag is going and whether a certain piece of luggage is supposed to be searched by Customs.

Alien’s new software, a free update available for the models ALR-9900, ALR-9800, and ALR-8800, also has a flexible reader distance, ranging from just millimeters to 100 feet.

“You can also use it in the military,” Stelter said. Helicopters picking up cargo can use a reader to locate the load, an often arduous task when visibility is poor. The reader distances have increased fivefold during the last five years, according to the company.

Amazon seems to be stronger on the infrastructure side – The flexibility to integrate with most client-side codes (as opposed to Google’s sole support for Python) and their S3 + SimpleDB database.

How Google App Engine Stacks up to Amazon EC2

With the platform-as-a-service revolution getting into full swing, developers (especially in start-ups) have more options for creating and deploying applications without the hassle and more extreme cost of setting up and maintaining infrastructure.Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNet compares Amazon’s approach to providing infrastructure services to Google’s. He found that Amazon’s set of services is more flexible but not as integrated as Google’s App Engine.

Does a Business Guy have a Place in Software Startups? – Tony Wright dot com

It turns out that it’s not so simple as that. Startups are diverse– each startup has different needs. How do you think SalesForce.com would’ve done if it’d been started by a bunch of hackers? How do you think Zappos.com would have fared if it wasn’t started by a zealot for customer service and support? There are plenty of examples of great software startups with a critical founder who wasn’t really a technologist (arguably, Apple is a great example of this).

Peter Christensen toyed around with a few concepts to expand the YC philosophy to other niches. What struck me was how Singapore was one of the countries off the top of his head for a YC clone to be set up. And Singapore is the only Asian country that he mentioned in the list. Not China. Not Hong Kong. Not Taiwan.

I know I might sound childish here. I should be asking him the questions directly as opposed to blogging it but I’m lazy to do so. Wow – Has Singapore made a name for herself in the web technology space? Has he met any Singaporeans? Does he know anyone from NUSEA, ruby-sg, Singapore PHP, garag3? What have he heard about Singapore so far? Or was it just a coincidental random call?

Can YCombinator Be Beaten At Its Own Game? » What’s In Peter’s Head

The other discussion was about selecting founders to fund. I summarize YCombinator’s selection criteria as: “Young, Smart, Cheap, Determined, Acquirable”. This fits in with Paul Graham’s philosophy and worldview, and by focusing on these kind of founders, they deliberately pass on many other ideas and founders. Are there any other investment niches in the space ignored by YCombinator? Of course, but it will take another creative individual to come up with that business model. Here are some ideas:

* A YC clone in (Toronto, Sydney, Singapore, Helsinki, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, etc) for founders that can’t get US visas. US immigration policy keeps lots of smart people out of the US, so that’s an unexploited opportunity

* A hardware-centric fund that funds quick, small solutions based on FPGAs instead of burned-in hardware

* Focus on revenue generating startups as opposed to acquirable startups and collect dividends instead of exit payouts. This would create completely different companies than the ones YC has funded

* Encourage teams mixed with technical and business/marketing people to promote faster adoption people. Test the hypothesis that business adds value to early-stage startups

* Target more experienced professionals that are farther along in life and wouldn’t live on such a small amount.