Inspirational Technology

This is a surprising thing to see, but Yahoo is saying they’re going to open source their new webmail application. That’s a huge curveball aimed directly at Google and seems like a great move. I imagine the complexity of their code base is pretty high, but having that code out there could be a huge boost to Yahoo’s platform especially coupled with the recent announcement of a distributed authentication system that allows you to use Yahoo IDs on other sites. This announcement opens a lot of questions, like exactly what are they releasing, under what license and so on, but it could also signal a good trend in the growing war for the “internet operating system”.

Just came across an announcement that there’s going to be a Startup Camp in Mountain View Ca. Nov. 2-3. Looks pretty interesting, we may just have to squeeze that into the schedule.

Some of the JumpBox crew will also be attending the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Oct. 11-12. If you’re going to be attending I’d love to meetup while we’re there.

Also a reminder we’re working on a unconference/BarCamp for Arizona. Still no date, but it looks like it will be held at UAT in Phoenix sometime in the next couple months.

This looks pretty slick, it’s a little app called Mousepose that uses your mouse to highlight portions of the screen. Looks like it would be really useful while giving a demo, vs. using something like a laser pointer.

The latest Grid7 Venturecast is a conversation with LeSean Smith who shares his experiences about the life and death of africa.com along with some advice for budding entrepreneurs.

Parallels has just released a new update for their Mac OS X virtualization software that removes the previous limitations that had hampered usage on the latest Mac hardware. In particular it had a very significant limitation on the amount RAM that could be used. The latest release supports all Intel Macs including those maxed out with 16GB of RAM. Given that having plenty of RAM is the single biggest contributer to a happy virtualization experience, this is an important release for the OS X platform. Now if Apple could just figure out how to cram eight edo-dimm slots into a laptop…

Virtual Appliances, something we’ll be hearing a lot more about round here.

Grid7 Venturecast #5 is now online. This one was a really interesting conversation with Brad Webb CTO of vSocial. He talks a bit about how the company started, their recent funding and how they’re not really a YouTube competitor like everybody thinks.

With this Venturecast we also moved away from using Odeo to host the podcast and started using the PodPress plugin for Wordpress. If you were subscribed to the old Odeo feed you’ll need to resubscribe to the new feed. The Venturecast is now also available directly through iTunes.

A new website for the Ruby language has been launched. It may now win the award for the slickest looking site of any programming language. A dramatic improvement over the old Ruby site.

The latest installment of the Grid7 Venturecast podcast is online. This time Sean had a conversation with Joan Koerber-Walker from CorePurpose Inc.

Up next will be a pretty interesting interview with Brad Webb, CTO of VSocial, one of the more interesting startups here in Arizona.

Well it looks like Sean and I opened our mouth about holding an unconference here in Arizona and now people are starting to expect it to happen. Oops I guess we better try putting it together then. We don’t have a date or location for this thing yet, but it will probably be in a couple months, either Nov. or Jan. and it will be somewhere in the Phoenix area. There’s a wiki page setup on the Referesh Phoenix Wiki to start collecting topics and the names of people interested in attending. It’s possible this might end up becoming BarCamp Phoenix, but I’m not sure at this point.

The target audience for this thing is designers and developers working on internet based applications and it’s open season on the topics. The real goal here is to just collect a bunch of smart people together in the same place and get them talking about stuff that they find interesting. If you’re in Arizona and would be interested in participating in this event please signup on the Refresh Phoenix Wiki. And in the true spirit of the unconference concept everyone who attends will be expected to help out in some way. The most obvious way is to lead a discussion session on a topic of your choice, but you could also do less nerve racking things like helping to clean up after it’s over.

Anyway, we’re just getting started, but before we get too far we definitely want to see more people signup and some more additions to the list of topics. So who’s interested?