A while back I met Jurey Chalev of Zemanta.com at SemanticCamp here in London. Zemanta is a really cool tool for content suggestion for blog posts. The company was started as part of the Seedcamp competition of last year and is one of the few companies to make it to the end of that program.

What Zemanta does is fairly simple, which is probably why it’s such a great tool. Zemanta offers a plugin for Firefox that recognizes when people are editing a Wordpress, Blogger, or TypePad blogpost. On these platforms Zemanta then adds a few features to the interface, enabling people to easily add images, articles, links and tags to their blog post just by clicking the suggestions made by Zemanta.com.

The Zemanta Interface (click for large view)

To set an example, this blog post has been enhanced with the help of Zemanta. I wrote the article and in the end just clicked on the things I wanted to add in the interface, like the links for Wordpress and Seedcamp, the images, and the “other articles” at the bottom.

Zemanta’s business model is to eventually be able to sell the links shown in the suggestion engine to third parties, going for a kind of AdWords model where the adds might be in the blog post directly. It is a difficult question to answer if this will eventually become more of an annoyance than a service, but for now I think the signal to noise ratio of the suggestions is nothing to complain about.

For now Zemanta is only available as a Firefox plugin, but more platforms will be supported in the feature.

I was talking and thinking about the recently released Apple iPhone SDK today, and realized that while I like the major idea of a controlled application platform I did have my doubts about some of the more intricate details. Selling an application for your price through the Apple controlled store sounds like solid business model for both Apple and developers, but quickly shows an contrast with how developers really build a community around their products.

Uniform Price Model

As far as I can understand, Apple let’s you set your own price, which at first sounds very cool, but is eventually very limiting in real life. Inherently this model will force anyone into a uniform price plan, which isn’t the same uniform price plan that is set in the iTunes music store where every song is either £0.79 or £0.99, but it does force every developer to stick to the same price for every customer. This poses an intricate problem for developers that might want to perform some kind of price discrimination.
(more…)

FOWA is all about webapps, so I was amazed to see a stand that had a cool piece of software running in Mac OS X. The company is Blurb, and their self publishing tool runs on both Windows and Mac. The choice for an offline editor for an online service is interesting but in the end actually quite understanding.

In a time of webapplications that make you order your businesscards using Flickr photos, and order your self published books via Lulu, it has become common practice to have an online editor for these physical products. Still, on the other hand there are tools like iPhoto and Picasa that make it more of a pleasure to use your photo library to make a physical product without doing the editing in a sometimes not perfect webapp. The BookSmart software of Blurb takes the middle road, allowing people to use online and offline libraries to publish via the webservice by Blurb.

The actual really thing that I noticed abotu Blurb was the fact that it is dirty cheap. Melinda and I have been looking at some other websites like QOOP to make a photobook or calendar for our parents for christmas, and the Blurb service is simply way cheaper. The quality is really good, as they had a wide range of their books lying around. They even did the “24 hours of Flickr” book, so the photo quality is guaranteed to be good.A simple softcover (18×18cm, 20-40 pages) photobook that you can style yourself will set you back €9.95, a large hardcover version (33×28cm, 20-40 pages) will cost you about €41,95. Compare this to QOOP this is at least €10 cheaper. More prices can be found here. Shipping is from Amsterdam, and if you use the promo code “FOWA” you will even get the shipping costs for free!

The only problem for now is that I can’t seem to get the BookSmart software to work with iPhoto ‘08, but I have reported the bug. I hope to show my first book someday soon.

Jyri is liveblogging the meeting and Robert has promised to do a writeup after the fact.

Our startup Tipit.to is nearing completion with most of the functionality in place and working. We are in the proces of making the user interface as simple as possible and finishing the implementations of the financials.

In the meantime I am demoing the application to gauge initial reactions. The app itself and the speed of reaction are getting positive reactions. Granted, the concept does need some explanation and that is not likely to change though we are trying to keep stuff as simple as possible.

Demoing for friends has the added advantage of clueing them in on what has been keeping you busy all this time and being valuable practice for when you need to give a demo for real. In the picture I’m demoing to Wimer at Eelke’s graduation party.

No definitive dates available yet but the user interface is near complete and the financials should take another month or so to implement which means we are planning an end of summer launch. Previews coming soon!

(Picture courtesy of Eelke Dekker who graduated this Friday and who is one of the most creative people I know. He should be available for hire.)

A couple of months ago I did a small review of what I thought would be the really interesting features of Apple Mac OS X Leopard. Not only were all my predictions about the user interface and the growing up of certain features true (yes, drop the balloons!), but Apple also introduced some new features including a new dock and menu and stacks. Obviously I wanted to test this (nearly) feature-full product so I managed to get my hands on the WWDC2007 build and gave it a try.

After an afternoon of playing with Leopard, I was amazed about how well this beta release works. Here and there I encountered some bugs (especially in Photo Booth which has a bunch of new effects that just crash the app) but overall everything was simply quick. Might I say it was maybe even quicker than my Tiger install? Especially the Spotlight search has really been improved to offer more of a feel that Quicksilver does at the moment for Tiger. Furthermore the new look, with harder contrasts between active and inactive windows, is just so much cleaner and with the help of Quick Look and Cover Flow the finder has just become so much more useful.

Finally I was really amazed about how they improved some of my personal Mac Whines. First of all they changed the little network menu item. It now auto-refreshes and shows the difference between open and closed networks. Another network related improvement is the automatic discovery of shares on the network, allowing you to browse open shares much like you would do on Windows. In other words: no need to explicitly mount folders, and no crashing finder when you switch network with a folder mounted.

All an all I think Leopard is worth the money as it offers a lot of improvements over Tiger. I didn’t even mention Time Machine, Spaces and all the other new features, but I think it is those small things that make you a happy Mac user.