Nerd Stalker

I had the pleasure to interview Samantha Howe of Blurb in a very dark back room at a recent SF New Tech event. Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the joy of books – reading them, making them, sharing them, and selling them. The work they produce is quite stunning, you actually get a professional final product and the best part is that anyone can produce one or many more. They have a key partnership with flickr, support pdf uploads, and have a wide array of book layouts to choose from or customize yourself.

(2 mins) While at the ever amazing Maker Faire I stumbled an as of yet to be launched startup called Rentalic. Rentalic enables online person-to-person renting between friends, family and neighbors. The company is currently developing an online rental platform that will support a marketplace where Owners can post items for rent and Borrowers can search items to rent. By offering a wide assortment of products and services that are conveniently located and cost effective, Rentalic claims it can provide a high value service to local communities.

Notes from Ben Galbraith of Mozilla Session entitled "Creating Compelling User Experiences". In my opinion this was the be best talk at the conference thus far.

JAVAONE CONFERENCE – San Francisco – June 1, 2009 – Livescribe Inc. announced the pre-release of its Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.0 for Windows at the 2009 JavaOne Conference (Booth 722). Livescribe’s SDK includes Paper Designer for Eclipse, providing software developers with all the tools, technical documentation, sample code and support needed to create, publish, share and sell sophisticated applications for the Pulse smartpen. The pre-release Platform SDK also includes the Penlet SDK, which contains an Eclipse plug-in for penlet development as well as a suite of APIs, sample code, documentation, debug tools and command line build utilities. “The release of the SDK 1.0 is a significant step forward for Livescribe’s mobile computing platform,” said Jim Marggraff, Livescribe founder and chief executive officer. “We’re anxious to see what our more than 4,000 software developers already actively participating in our developer program will create to expand the functionality, ...

(4mins) Demo of the free PrintWhatYouLike web application. This application turns any web page into a customized printable page, pdf, or html file. Make sure to watch this video at full screen.

(5 mins) Nerd Stalker interview with Jason Aiken of 99designs at the SF New Tech meetup. I wish we would have known about this company before we were hunting for a designer (although we did get lucky on Craigslist). 99designs allows anyone to prepay a small fee to launch a design "contest", for instance lets assume you need a new logo. The army of designers in the 99designs community submit designs for you to choose from, once you select the winner they facilitate payment and all the good stuff. It's one of those web solutions where you slap yourself in the face for not thinking of it yourself, just a great service. Or watch this video at YouTube , Yahoo , MySpace , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv , Veoh and i2TV

(4 mins) Nerd Stalker interviews Ben Hester, Program Manager of Architecture For Humanity at the Web 2.0 Conference. Architecture for Humanity is a nonprofit design services firm founded in 1999. They are building a more sustainable future through the power of professional design. By tapping a network of more than 40,000 professionals willing to lend time and expertise to help those who would not otherwise be able to afford their services, they bring design, construction and development services where they are most critically needed. You can also view this video at YouTube , Yahoo , MySpace , Metacafe , DailyMotion , Blip.tv and Veoh .