Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery

Our clients love our products. We GIVE them (for FREE!) a competitive edge in the hard world of ecommerce.

Steve Jobs has shown that innovation is the way to lead the market. Apple has consistently been the company that shows this industry the way to go. ie Vista sounds like an expensive knock-off.

I haven't had my coffee yet.. so please forgive the slight edge in my tone.. but today I've noticed that our competitor has managed to come up with a similar ideas that we have released a long time ago. I was responsibly for one of these pieces so I'm a little irked. Well I guess it will give me more material to blog about. :)


At powerreviews we are constantly thinking of how to make the review service the best if can be. Since we give our product away (our competitor charges a ridiculous amount) our interest is directly related with the interest of our clients. We drive traffic to our merchants site and we give away technology that they can't afford to create.

As our competitor charges a lot of money for review service.. its in their best interest that their clients do not write reviews. They already have the money. Every review costs them money. Their interest are not aligned.

We are in a brave new world.. its called Web2.0 :)

Waffles

It's quite refreshing working in a startup. There's lots of freedom and initiative is often encouraged.

Case in point, my office buddy decide to do belgium waffles for everyone! No cheating with mix, real ingredients.
We had fruit, chocolate and several syrups. Superb!

I would like to see that at my old investment bank on Wall St. :-)

Nice article about people and their segways.

Tags

Tags are a real big thing for web2.0. It's a simple/clear way of seeing what people think of a product. Its one of main features here at powerreviews.com and our customers love it and see the benefit of it.

We've just created a press release about our TagSuggests (among other cool things). This is autocomplete (google-suggest functionality) for tag completion which yours truly battled with javascript/ajax.

Hopefully our fans will like it as much as I do.

New retail store on 5th.

I've been using my 12'' powerbook for the startup I've joined. It's such a pleasure to get off windows. :)

Here is an example why I like the mac. I recently wrote a little bash script that determined what files had been modified from our source code repository (by me), zipped them up , dated the file and scp'd it to my unix home directory on our development servers.

I've been thinking of even keeping a log of the work I do (daily) and including this on the zip.. Hmm.. maybe I can create a little shareware app. :-)

Every day this thing gets kicked off and I have my daily changes (remotely stored) just in case something bad happens.

I contemplated doing something like this for my fellow windows collegues, but what am I going to use? VB? or do I have to get them to instal perl on their boxes? No thankyou.

Theres talk about buying tools that keep 2 directory structures in sync, but it wouldn't maintain history, which is useful.


Anyhoo.. I've been doing a lot of the web development technologies (ajax/css) as well as backend java. Off the top of my head, tools that I have found invaluable (and which I've registered) are CCSEdit, Xyle, GraphicConverter and TextMate.

We use Intellij to do our java development, which although is a very good IDE takes a lot of resources and my 12'' is pushing it.

Apple's release of the reasonably priced MacBook has sparked an interest. It's something that will definately make my work day a lot smoother.


Apple is opening a new retail store in New York on my street! Well when I lived on the east coast a year ago.

It reminds me of that scifi film: Cube2-Hypercube. :)

The monster awakens

Just read in techcrunch that yahoo has launched Yahoo-Tech.

There going after CNET, but also offering product reviews which is in our playground. Hmm..

A bicycle made for one.

Woo-hoo.. With raible always talking about how he rides to work on his bike i've splashed out on a very nice bike from rei.

My commute is around 10 miles, which may be a little far. I really need to shed some extra pounds I've gathered over the year and this may be just the ticket.

Hmm.. maybe I can throw some technology at it.. :-) I've been think of the Nuvi 360 for the car, but its probably an overkill for the bike. Anyone know of a nice wee GPS unit ?

Tips for Productivity

Raible talks about how to be productive and happy at work.

Virtualization Software

Been a busy week. Apple announces that the macbooks can now boot windows xp with a piece of software called Boot Camp. They said they will be available in Leopard, the next version of macosx.

Also just read on eWeek about a company called Parallels which does this in a window. (no pun intented). Take a look at the screenshots or the video. Interesting..

Happy Birthday Apple! (30 tomorrow)

Bill Thompson a technology commentator, from the BBC argues "The hardware punks at Apple have changed the world more than the Sex Pistols"

Apple tomorrow will be 30 years old. Started in 1976 on April 1st in a garage, IMHO they have radically changed the whole computer industry for the better. Whether you use a Mac or not you can't help see how they have contributed to tech for the last 30 years.

TechTalks at Google

Google has very kindly posted their TechTalks on GoogleVideo. These are presentations by Googlers or guests on a wide range of subjects. I've just watched the Second Life video which I found fascinating.

PowerReviews on CNN/Fortune

The startup I'm working for (powerreviews.com) got a mention on cnn/fortune. Yeah!

For me, I make most of my buying decisions based on reviews. I want real testimony from people explaining how they use the product, what was good and what was bad. I then aggregate, take them with a pinch of salt and make an informed decision.

The article explains that our competitor charges as much as $8000 per month for the service. People have said our software is better and FREE. Yes... FREE! I guess they are after a different size of fish.

Secret pics at Google?

Digg reports these as 'spy photos'. I don't think so.

Oscar Night

Although I'm not a big fan of the Oscars, both Rachael and myself made the effort to dress up and went to see it at the Castro theater. She was Willy Wonka and I was an Oompa-Loompa. We actually WON(!) the costume contest and got a mention in the State Uni paper.

Pictures are here, here and here.

What more Google food facts?

Another article about food at google!

Life inside google

A pictorial view at google.

I guess with a $1.5M revenue per employee you can afford to be that lavish.

Out of Stealth

Well the startup that I've joined has come out the stealth-mode and announced whats its all about.

We want to be the source for product reviews. Its free and super easy for merchants to add product reviews to their sites without needing the big budgets of say amazon.

Please take a look.

It doesn't offend me

Not sure why I find this interesting, but someone has put up pictures of what the've eaten at google. Looks yummy.
Interesting article about praise at google.

The Google Praise Scale:

• Unequaled Brilliance
• It’s kind of interesting
• It seems sensible / reasonable
• It will do until we can fix it
• It doesn’t offend me
• It’s not worth talking about
• It’s a waste of time
• Unacceptable Dreck

I generally don't get too excited about things (maybe its a British thing) and if asked for feedback will often say "Not bad". For people that don't really know me, this could be construed as a negative statement, but its really a compliment!.

I think in future, I may adopt the term used in the above article.. "It doesn't offend me" :P

Desktop Manager

Very cool opengl linux desktop manager (with video) called Compiz. Although I'm a fan of the cool effects on MacosX, I think this may get a little annoying after a while.

Using Map sites

Raible describes how to use the various maps on the web in your application.

Narnia Rap

A Saturday Night Live scketch.. from the East Coast comes SNL-Narnia-Rap. Here are the lyrics.

In response from the West Coast: narniarapbattle.


Since moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, I think I can relate to both. Funny :)