The Video Egg team arranged a rock-n-roll party bus trip to The Salt Lick Barbeque, supposedly the ultimate bbq joint in the Austin area. I ran into them between sessions at the Hilton, and they had some last minute cancellations so they did the hard recruitment on me. Despite my desperate need for a shower, [...]
Etech and South by Southwest are a study in contrasts. Etech is old school. It’s a serious affair, with a reverence for the tech industry and its history, a gaggle of software companies convening with the usual 9:1 male/female ratio and mild-mannered “receptions” to match. The annual theme (this year was the Attention Economy) gives [...]
This bartender at the Consumating/Adaptive Path/Odeo party was something to behold. To order a drink you literally needed to bark it out like a marine commando, and then he’d begin flipping bottles and oscillating wildly like Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Alas, he didn’t always catch the bottles he flung through the air. A classic SxSW [...]
Reminder to self: tie up important project details before going to a big tech conference. As it was, my time in San Diego was full of meaningful conversations and meetings, plus a handful of memorable sessions. But I spent too much time doing intense project work, which had me in the hall with my laptop [...]
Jonathan was interviewed by Dan Fost of the SFChronicle at SXSW.
“Do we want to make money? Absolutely. I want to make big stuff,” said Jonathan Grubb, 26, a co-founder and design director of Ruby Red Labs, a San Francisco Web and mobile product design firm. “But I’m tired of making stuff that’s the most profitable [...]
When a group of us initially discussed the idea of scrAPIs at Mashup Camp it was in the context of turning our scrapers into proper APIs and collaborating in their maintenance. However, Assaf points out that there is another way of defining a scrAPI: the implicit API in the html patterns that contain the [...]
Some people have asked how important it is that scrAPIs be open source. Put simply, a scrAPI is simply a screen scraper with an open API. But because of the nature of maintaining a scrAPI of any complexity, parsing pages that may change with some frequency, it should ideally harness open source-style collaboration by [...]
Let’s be honest with ourselves. It‘s the crappy technology no one cares about that so often changes everything. MP3s, for instance, sound pretty awful compared to the CD tracks they’re ripped from. But as a format MP3 was good enough to blow a big smoking hole in the music industry…once there was an easy [...]
I just discovered Co.mments and am excited to talk about it. The obvious comparison is another web app with a similar name, Cocomment, which allows users to track the conversations around comments they leave on other blogs. It received a lot of attention last month from the blogosphere, thanks to a now-famous wining and dining [...]
Several of us from Rubyred attended Mashup Camp last week (in fact, we were the official grapefruit sponsor of the event), and we were fortunate to meet some of the real pioneers of mashdom, all showing off what can be done with an API or two, some regular expressions and a bit of vision. [...]