February 2011
1 post
Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually... →
An interesting article about colour theory, from photons to colour tags (#FFFF00).
January 2011
8 posts
TED: Visualizing the medical data explosion →
Today medical scans produce thousands of images and terabytes of data for a single patient in mere seconds, but how do doctors parse this information and determine what’s useful?
Amazon.com announces "Elastic Beanstalk" for AWS →
Amazon Web Services have made yet another announcement for increased functionality (its just about weekly at the moment!). “Elastic bean stalk” is an automatically scaling solution for Java. Despite its awkward name (I thought it was a joke at first), this looks like an interesting development, going after Google App Engine, Heroku and other managed hosting providers.
Java means we...
Facebook's 3rd Biggest Advertiser is a Bing... →
Things don’t look too good for the revenue and earnings outlook of the worlds biggest social network. Not only do most of its revenues appear to come from “Social Gaming” (Zynga), but now it appears that its 3rd biggest advertising client is for a site that is VERY scammy.
Makes you wonder if it can really justify that $70 billion dollar valuation!
SQL Server: Use of Rank and/or Cross Apply in... →
Here is a great article from a former co-worker, Khaja on the performance benefits of using Cross Apply in sub-queries.
Goldman Sachs invests in Facebook at $50 Billion... →
Goldman Sachs has reached out to its wealthy private clients, offering them a chance to invest in Facebook, the hot social networking giant that is considering a possible public offering in 2012, according to people familiar with the matter.
Google's Chrome climbs its way to 10% of the... →
NetApplications published its year-end market browser share numbers today which had Google’s (GOOG) Chrome nearing 10% of the overall browser market share. If you look a the last two years, you see a steady decline in Microsoft’s(MSFT) Internet Explorer which has lost 12 points in that time. At the same time, Chrome has gone from almost nothing to 10% of the browser. Firefox peaked...
Google's Chrome climbs its way to 10% of the... →
NetApplications published its year-end market browser share numbers today which had Google’s (GOOG) Chrome nearing 10% of the overall browser market share. If you look a the last two years, you see a steady decline in Microsoft’s(MSFT) Internet Explorer which has lost 12 points in that time. At the same time, Chrome has gone from almost nothing to 10% of the browser. Firefox peaked...
November 2010
1 post
Evolution of Lean: The MEAN Start-up
The concept of the “lean start-up” has got a lot of traction recently. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the lean start-up methodology, it centres on building products that are relevant to consumers. It does this by suggesting you test your assumptions about customers by building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), taking it to customers and changing it (or Pivoting) until you have reached...
August 2010
9 posts
8 things I wish I knew before starting a business →
A great simple list of things to be mindful of in any venture. I especially like points 7 & 8.
“7. Avoid the myth and misery of sunk cost” Basically, if some things not working perhaps you need to let it go. Don’t get emotionally attached to anything that may weaken your business.
“8. Fill the pipe, always fill the pipe!” Not only ABC (Always be closing),...
thatsburto asked: Hey how did you replace the title with your own image? I understand the <img> tag but how did you provide it to their server?
thatsburto asked: Hey how did you replace the title with your own image? I understand the <img> tag but how did you provide it to their server?
http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strate... →
Australia gets its own Y Combinator-type fund... →
Australia gets a web start-up incubator, http://www.startmate.com.au/
Their primary offering is in mentoring early stage start-ups, but they also provide $25k worth of seed funding.
Could be just the thing for the next GrowingData project!
Facebook launches "Places" - LBS going mainstream?
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/403
Finally Facebook has entered into the “Location based services” market, choosing to partner with, rather than compete with Foursquare, Gowalla and Yelp.
Currently location based services are very much a niche product, with only a tiny (albeit growing number) of people using it. Describing Foursquare for example, to someone who...
Startup marketing →
Resources for getting noticed!
Why free plans don't work →
If you are going to offer a free version of your service, its prudent to make it somewhat hidden. After all, who is going to pay for something when they can get X% of it for free?
Why do start-ups fear their idea? →
A really interesting article on why many start-ups create bloated, unfocussed products rather than going with their instincts and focussing on one key pain point.
July 2010
5 posts
Optus iPhone 4 pricing →
Hmmm, do I just take the free 16GB version or spend extra $10 /month to get the 32GB version? Decisions, decisions!
Failing to scale is a good problem to have
Much is written (e.g. on Hacker News) about different architectures, programming languages and frameworks and their ability to scale, as if scalability is one of the most important considerations when which language / framework / architecture to choose.
Its not.
Pretty much any programming language available today is flexible enough to provide extremely good performance and scalability, or...
The joys of landlording: Evicting a tenant in...
The call
So I get a frantic call last friday morning from the body corporate of my investment property telling me that there is a problem with my apartment.
There is now no front door.
Well that’s an exaggeration, the front door now has no bottom half.
So I organize with my tenant to meet her down there, and we inspect the damage. Not only is there a massive hole in the door (big...
Finally GrowingData has a web presence!
What kind of software start-up doesn’t have a web presence?
a) A crappy one?
b) A busy one?
c) Or one who doesn’t know how to prioritize?
I’d like to think the reason is more of a) than anything else, but the reality its probably more of a / c!
Work on the Intranet DASHBOARD app ViewbiDataScorecardReporter (catchy name eh?) is taking up pretty much all our energies at the...
VS2010 Language Specific Backgrounds
Download Language Specific Backgrounds here
One of the annoying aspects of web development is juggling between languages. Writing all your code in C#, markup in HTML, scripting in Javascript and design in CSS, it can be tricky to locate what file, or what part of what file you want to modify.
Obviously its not a huge problem, but it does effect the speed at which you switch between tasks (in a...
