today, i was introduced to Gizmoz - an application that a buddy used to turn a picture from being a semi athletic/female photo into a trans gender australian. now that takes talent. good chuckle. sticky, fun, and entertaining. wish it were easier to upload photos (might be a mac thing but i could not get a photo to load) and wish i was able to tweak the mashup he created. i think the latter of the two would be a great way of enabling low investment interaction - swap out the background, switch up the voices, etc...

for your personal amusement, below is the photo jawed started with and the output he created :)

Fatdoor, a website that visually displays neighborhood homes on a map, puts an icon next to each house where a registered member lives, and of course provides each member with a public profile, launched a pilot test in the San Jose area so a coworker and I thought we'd take a poke around. What we found was amazing - on my coworker's block (he lives in the area covered by the pilot) 8 of his neighbors were already registered members and had pretty complete profiles. Given that the site just launched, we were really shocked to see such rapid adoption of users in such close proximity. As my coworker's next door neighbor was registered and had entered her email address so we could contact her directly we dropped her a note to find out how she heard of it, and why she signed up. She didn't responded, so my coworker walked next door and spoke with her. Turns out she never even heard of the site and had no idea how her information (full first and last name) got there!

While it may be legal to display a persons full name next to their property, i'm not so sure it's cool to act as if that user is actually a registered member of the site. The site goes one step further and actually assigns political, among other, preferences to that person. This also makes me wonder if they are pulling our email addresses from public databases to ensure we get lots of the spam we all know and love so much.

Personally, i think Fatdoor has crossed one Fat line! Have some ethics people, well at least when you're going to be caught red handed. I doubt this will a be socially accepted move. Stupid community building act for sure if you ask me.

After 3+ months of development, one too many lessons in how I can improve my communication skills (I hope this is an age thing, ie skill acquired over time), and many uses of my new favorite phrase "i'm thinking" when caught staring into the blue or traversing the office in deep thought, Trulia Voices has FINALLY launched (for the full scoop see here). I left the office at 4AM (engineering at 6-7AM!) and came in around 10:30AM bouncing around between office cubes with an excited "we're live, we're live, we're live... guys we're alive!"

Personally I feel that if you can not acknowledge your weaknesses and focus on trying to improve them, then you can never achieve your full potential. And, I certainly learned a handful of lessons in this launch. Some of the biggest ones were:

1. If you can't explain why something won't work in a way that makes sense to others, then shut the hell up (advice straight from dad, and it saved my rear one too many times)
2. don't tell higher-ups, "no, you're wrong". hmmm... :)
3. instead of telling people what you think the best way to execute is, present the problem and ask for a solution. Maybe this one is obvious but from my eyes i think it's a lot harder to learn how to do this one well across a big organization when everyone on a team is not always involved in a product at every stage.
4. If you think you're right and everyone else disagrees, stand up and say it! This is an old one, but i always relearn it.
5. Do lots of yoga

And I'm sure i'm missing many more but what a start... If I knew better i prob.would not be posting this but personally, i don't think these issues are all unique to me. I think many my age encounter their own set of lessons and communication issues. Then again, maybe I'm wrong...

I'm totally late to the crowd here but a friends startup, smava, recently launched and I'm totally psyched! I met Alexander way back in 2005 when we were both in p2p lending and borrowing space and flew out to Germany in early 2006 to do some work him and the team. They've been slaving away for some time now jumping through all the regulatory hurdles and finally made it through!! Congrats guys! The smava team is just about the sharpest group of guys i have ever met -- i look forward to seeing some exciting things from them!

I suppose I'm old fashion in thinking that when a company launches with a big bang (well, big for startup land that is) they would at least do it with some class. Legalforce ip, which lets people trade patents online, had the smarts to do a press release on VentureBeat  covering their launch yet went live with a site that is, literally, a copy and paste of prosper.com's design. It's almost like a guy showing up to black tie event late and naked - what where you thinking??

LegalForce
Prosper.com

Apparently this is old news, but news nonetheless to me. According to this blog entry on FloHomebase [en], Digg has gone German too! No tie between the two ventures, but it's interesting to note that Yigg.de was formally known as Digg.de.

Facebook for Germany? Damn.. I really wish i could pick this language up faster. Germany has a killer group of entrepreneurs out there.... grrrr. One day