Toluu

louisgray.com

Silicon Valley early adopter technology geek blogger.

Funneling The Web's Firehose of Data Through a Thin PipeToday

For the past several years, much like many of you, the fastest Internet speeds I have enjoyed have been at home. Very often, corporate networks, be they those at headquarters or client sites or shared networks at events and public settings, lag well behind my own home experience. For me, considering my devotion to being always-on, fast Internet is practically as important, if not more so, than good food or other more traditional human comforts, and any interruption of said flow is personally trying.

That would explain why when moving the family to our new house last Friday, getting access to high speed Internet again as soon as possible was a major priority, and finding a stopgap for the interim was just as critical. Luckily, Comcast took care of us Wednesday, bringing fast WiFi to our new home at great speeds, and for the five days previous, the HTC Evo did the very best it could, making the extra $30 a month I pay for its Hotspot capability, powered by Sprint, worth every penny.

iPad Development Paying Off for Friendly App CreatorYesterday

On Saturday, I highlighted the recent release of Friendly, an iPad-optimized application for Facebook that enhances the world's most popular social network to take advantage of the iPad's screen and touch interface. One of the co-founders on Friendly and Twazzup, its sister product, Cyril Moutran (@mocy), met with me for lunch today and discussed how developing for the iPad presents new opportunities to make a splash in a less-crowded field, and gain real revenue. He also said he believes the launch of more touch-centric interfaces could be as revolutionary as the mouse and hyperlink did with the first generation of the Web.

In a Week, Friendly Is Pulling in iPad/iTunes Dough

Since its launch late last week, it would be safe to say that Friendly is seeing initial success. Despite its $4.99 price, the Friendly app has bumped into the list of the top ten paid iPad applications on the iTunes store, and sits at the #13 position overall right now, and is the #15 most grossing application across all of iTunes' iPad apps, going u

Hey Foursquare, Let's Discuss a Check-in Exchange ProgramJuly 28

Dear Foursquare,

Whether it's a fad, or a trend, or the next generation of the world's currency, location based services are much-discussed these days, and there is no argument that you are in the driver's seat. Barring massive disaster resulting from failure to scale, or the introduction of much-hated new features, the current competitors are not going to shake you from your perch, and the big guys (you know who) don't look like they want to go "niche" but treat LBS as a feature. So you're in a good spot. But... hey. Let's talk.

Here's the issue. I've been "playing" with your service for the last few months, checking it at places both interesting and mundane. I've racked up my unfair share of mayorships of mediocre venues - from Grewalz Liquor & Groceries and Susan's Donuts to Carl's Jr. and the A&D Food Mart. In addition to these

Blippy Reviews are Crowdsourced Product Feedback EngineJuly 25

Some of the original feedback on Blippy, the purchase sharing service that tracks your linked spending, said the service was about as exciting as reading old receipts. But as the service matures and gains new features, we are seeing the content expand, making the network a potentially vast repository for first-person reviews of brands, products or customer service. Just as Foursquare has learned, the simple act of a status update displaying one's location or item purchase is not enough to build a community or a company. Instead, it takes personality and emotionally-tinged feedback around that experience. For Foursquare, this content comes in through tips you can leave when you check in to a venue. For Blippy, this comes when you add a purchase and can describe what you bought, and whether you would recommend it to a friend. And if you see these reviews on Blippy, you can let the reviewer know what you thought of their update.

Supertrackr Tracks "Anything" on the Web, InstantlyJuly 25

Thanks to advances in the Web's real-time infrastructure over the last few years, our acceptance of latency or delay in discovery has practically been eliminated. We don't want to wait minutes or hours or days for news and information, and the freshness of content is essential. Often, when people want a near-instant reaction to world events, they're not looking to a filtered editorially driven source, such as CNN or Yahoo! News, but instead, they are looking to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and often blogs, to get the very latest.

This drive to be completely up to date has led to the development of tools that drive instant notification of "matches" to saved queries. Early in Twitter's infancy, one had the option to "track" a word and get instant notification of its