Category Archives: startups

Twitter Screws Up Again. 2

Twitter is down again… this time a partial outage due to S3. However, this time it’s their own fault for not using a caching proxy in front of S3. This is just getting to the point where it’s embarrassing.

Categories: startups,web2.0

Published:
July 20, 2008 – 1:21 pm
Author:
By admin

Monitor110, Spinn3r, Spam, and Blog Analysis Post Mortem 1

Roger Ehrenberg posted a post mortem of Monitor 110: Writing a post mortem is hard, particularly when the result is failure: a failed deal; a failed investment; a failed concept. That said, without a post mortem, without deep reflection, honesty and introspection, how can we get better and do better the next time? Quite simply, [...]

Categories: spinn3r,startups,web2.0

Published:
July 19, 2008 – 2:47 pm
Author:
By admin

More Compromised WordPress Blogs 0

Hopefully, this large WordPress 2.5 release will cause a few people to upgrade. We just found another 200 or so sites that have been compromised today. Not fun.

Categories: startups,web2.0,wordpress

Published:
March 29, 2008 – 7:19 pm
Author:
By admin

High Performance SSD @ < $15 / GB 0

When I started looking at SSDs I compared the various Mtron models and they have a 32GB drive (vs 64GB) that prices out at $15/GB. That’s a sweet spot so I decided to go with that model. Well now it looks like that specific model is being discontinued in favor of the higher end mode [...]

Categories: SSD,startups

Published:
March 28, 2008 – 3:54 pm
Author:
By admin

Zeus IOPS – Another High Performance SSD 0

It looks like there’s another competitive SSD on the market. The Stec Zeus IOPS. I foolishly dismissed this drive before because I thought they weren’t disclosing their write rate (which all the other vendors are doing to lie about their performance). Turns out they’re claiming 200MB/s with 100MB/s write throughput. If these numbers are accurate [...]

Categories: clustering,linux,mysql,open source,startups,web2.0

Published:
January 26, 2008 – 6:12 pm
Author:
By admin

Reliable CMS Generator Detection 4

I’ve been planing around with microformat and nanoformat[1] parsing today using real world HTML. One feature I’d like is the ability to reliably detect the CMS version a website is running. For example, the Moveable Type site is running some version of Moveable Type (probably not Typepad) but which version? They’ve stripped the generator meta [...]

Categories: sixapart,startups,typepad,web2.0,wordpress

Published:
January 8, 2008 – 8:41 pm
Author:
By admin

Announcing Spinn3r 2.1 0

I’m very excited to announce that Spinn3r 2.1 is now available. A number of major new features have been implemented in this release which has taken us more than three months of hard work to get out the door. We’ve also finished up another stage of our backend and are planning on buying a few [...]

Categories: clustering,open source,spinn3r,startups,web2.0

Published:
January 8, 2008 – 2:17 pm
Author:
By admin

Nice Xmas Present for the MacAskill Family 0

This LA Times article is a great xmas present for the MacAskill Family: The company now employs 28 people — all MacAskills, family friends and SmugMug customers they hired — in five countries. The MacAskills have signed up more than 100,000 paying subscribers despite mounting competition from free services, in part by emphasizing their family-friendly [...]

Categories: open source,startups,web2.0

Published:
December 25, 2007 – 9:15 pm
Author:
By admin

VC Propaganda vs the Wise Entrepreneur 3

Since the new Web 2.0 dot boom (yes… boom) I’ve noticed a new strain of entrepreneurs who’ve taken the new strategy of bootstrapping and avoiding VC at all costs. Tailrank is one of them. Both Spinn3r and Tailrank are actually profitable companies who have customers who love our services (in this case our web crawling [...]

Categories: startups,web2.0

Published:
December 9, 2007 – 5:57 pm
Author:
By admin

The First Rule of Lobbyconn 0

Is that you do NOT TALK ABOUT LOBBYCONN!: “The sessions at technology conferences are often like plots in porn films,” said Ben Metcalfe, a technology consultant from San Francisco who said he lobbycons about four conferences annually. “It’s required for the context, but it’s not really what you paid for.” … In any case, Rafer [...]

Categories: san francisco,startups

Published:
October 24, 2007 – 1:05 am
Author:
By admin