From: “Google Shoots For The Moon – Forbes.com“:
The company on Thursday announced the first 10 teams of competitors in its $30 million contest to send a spacecraft back to the moon to gain greater insights into the solar system and to find new sources of clean energy.
More info is available on the Google Lunar X Prize web site.
Google. Space. Clean Energy. $30M. What’s not to like?
Via Digg.
From “SXSW 2008 on BitTorrent: 3.5 GB of Free Music“:
The South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival is one of the biggest and most popular in the United States. For the fourth year in a row, SXSW has released a DRM-less collection of songs that – thanks to Greg Hewgill – can now be downloaded for free via BitTorrent.
A little consolation for not being able to attend this year. :)
From Brian Suda’s “XFN encoding, extraction, and visualizations“:
In this article I will take a good look at XFN – the microformat for describing relationships between people. I will look briefly at what it is and the basic markup needed to add the information to your sites, before then going into depth, looking at the benefits you can get from that data by extracting it and using it in different ways. Extracting the data is easier than you think – there is probably a library for your favorite language already! If not, there are also some web services that could do the job that I’ll show you below.
Via a Microformat tweet.
From “GigaOM: How Not to End Up as an Anachronism“:
There are always seemingly good reasons to continue doing things the way they were done in the past, and transition always presents challenges. As ironic as it may be, we continue to see software applications deployed as a service but which fail to use any service-based infrastructure themselves. They are two basic reasons for this situation: Change of existing operational services is hard. So is changing people behavior.
One of the advantages of working for a startup is that there is no baggage to deal with, leaving you with great freedom of innovation.
On the other hand, vendor and infrastructure lock-in is something that we, as technologists, have all had to deal with in one form or another. The challenge is to develop an ability to spot nascent trends and innovations early on, so as to gage and potentially leverage them as they emerge, rather than miss the boat and be left behind.
I think I’m not too bad at what I do, but then again, there are people like Sylvain, Joe and Chris (to only name a few) who always help keeping me modest on this front.
Funny the pace plans can change at, isn’t it? I was all organized and looking forward to formally announce my return to the world of independent consulting when things started to take an even more interesting turn instead.
I am in fact very happy to announce that I have now officially joined the ranks of the Praized Media team.
Praized Media is a startup company working on a web-based application that will enable you to find and discover local places and merchants with help from people you can trust. It’s also a tool that will structure local conversations within blogs and a new platform for local search providers to generate leads from the untapped social media market.
I’ve been following Praized since mid-2007, when they really started to show up on my radar as a serious[ly fun] and innovative venture, oozing with potential, and backed by a winning trio of entrepreneurs: Sebastien Provencher, Sylvain Carle and Harry Wakefield. A fact which was only reinforced when Garage Technology Ventures decided to fund the company last September.
I’ve been given the opportunity to increasingly involve myself in the company as a consultant since last December. The way things were evolving, I could not longer deny the clear fact that this is a project I want to be an integral part of. Something I can unequivocally see myself focusing on, even providing segues into some of involvements in the web and open source communities.
Luckily for me, the feeling seemed to be mutual and today marked my first day on staff. Suffice to say, I’m sporting a mile long smile about it all.
Praized is currently in stealth-mode, so although I can’t say much more, I can definitely hint that great things are coming! And with the people already on board, I’m in for a fun ride, striving to keep up with and help them in their efforts.
Thanks for the opportunity, team! But shame on you though. Now I’ll have to can that site I worked on for my consulting biz’… ;-p
tekArtist 