-
Published on 09 Mar 2006 from
I checked my mail just now and got a message from the CEO of Meetup.com, Sott Heiferman, explaining that his company has just closed an investment round with eBay. He doesn't say how much, and stresses that they've not been acquired.
Here's the relevant part of the mail.
"Meetups are going so well that, alongside our existing investors, eBay just invested in Meetup.com! I love eBay. They use the internet to empower and connect people and make the world a better place. That's exactly what Meetup is all about! They did NOT "buy the company", they simply invested money that we'll use to run and grow Meetup.com. Our hope is this will make everyone's Meetups better. This news is something for us all to be proud of!"
It wasn't a personal mail of course, but my congratulations to Meetup.com anyway. Why do I care? I use them whenever I RSVP for the Seattle Webloggers Meetup. I went to another the other night. Good fun again - met up with Anita, Jack, Tommy and was introduced to Dennis and Ram.
No official word from eBay on the deal yet.
-
Published on 09 Mar 2006 from
While everyone is worrying about the difference
between version 1.0 and 2.0 of the web, perhaps there are more fundamental questions
we need to answer - Internet Explorer made this worrying claim today:
Good that Windows Live Mail doesn't work in IE, though...
-
Published on 09 Mar 2006 from
I've spoken to many IT Professionals to find out whether there's a security user group in the UK that provides the opportunity to meet peers and share ideas - I've not been able to find one in the UK though have found many active groups in America.
Am I missing something here? Do you have experience of UK based information security oriented user groups? Why do you think they don't seem to exist?
The nearest to UK based security user groups I've come across are professional bodies such as the British Computer Society, the Institute of Electrical Engineers, ISACA et al though IMHO whilst they provide excellent resources they have barriers to entry such as cost or qualification.
Other areas of technology have thriving UK based user groups - take the developer community for example, amongst others they have VBUG which is a highly active group who meet at locations all around the country to share ideas.. The UK Database community have Tony's excellent SQLServerFAQ user group. If you get a moment please take a look at these existing user groups to see the sort of benefits they offer - surely those of you who are based in the UK would benefit from something similar for Information Security.
Please comment on this post to share your thoughts.
-
Published on 09 Mar 2006 from
Well everyone knows all about the over hyped evil Origami PR and marketing campaign. And no I am not going to talk about that. All I will say is next time don't over hype things, it just leads to disappointment and extremely high expectations from users which have no foundation! What I am going to talk about here are a few potential issues that we should be considering with battery, CPU and screen limited devices such as the UMPC.
The issues that will arise with Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC's) that will need to be addressed are very similar in many senses to the Windows Mobile and Windows CE devices. But it works on XP I hear you say! Well actually that is a benefit! However there are still issues that XP doesn't think about in it's underlying platform. Firstly it was never really designed for low powered systems and as such doesn't mange it's power as efficiently as Windows CE. So why did Microsoft choose it... Well I can only speculate that it makes the platform more accessible to the standard applications developer and cut down the time to market for getting the basic features needed for a quick uptake on the device. Maybe someone from Microsoft could confirm this or update us on these details.
The issues with screen size, orientation and real-estate have always been some of the key HCI issues with PPC and Windows Mobile devices and I for one know that there are resources out there to guide the standard developer to design usable interfaces for such devices. One thing I want to remind the devs is that dockable controls are very clever and if you use them then you should hopefully not have to re-design interfaces for the smaller screen. Keep things simple for the user. The input methods are important to the user... they don't like to spend a long time inputting data so make it easy for your users... give them the options of keyboard or the on screen input but minimise actual input where you can!
With the UMPC think about memory, power and CPU utilisation. it is good development practice at the end of the day. If developers at the moment start thinking about power utilisation with this device and maybe even with laptops when doing their development work then they may actually find that they can use the device for longer. I for one know that my laptop only has a set amount of power on battery and really it is not usable for prolonged time periods. Bear this in mind, you don't want to lose data at the end of the day!!!
Something I have to say at this point is that the above are only my personal guidelines (ie I have put these up here for me so that I remember that when I do get to design for this sort of device I remember these key facts!) and that I don't yet have one of these funky new devices to play with and find out the full limitations of them. If I did have one who knows what other useful things i could find out and advise on. :)
-
Published on 09 Mar 2006 from
Anthony has blogged about the upcoming release of a technical case study that