Author: jedcssn768

The week of 25–29 January 2010 is going to be absolutely awesome in Cambridge. There are three great events that you need to attend.

Of these, it’s most important that you come to the Cambridge Tech Meetup. We’ll be kicking the year off with a bang and six “wicked awesome” technology demos, from people/companies based in Cambridge.

Tuesday — January 26th — Enterprise Tuesday

Time: 6:30–7:30pm lecture (registration from 6pm, networking afterward)
Location: Lecture Theatre 0, Engineering Department, Trumpington Street
Speakers: Neil Davidson, Co-Founder and joint CEO, Red Gate Software; Steve Barlow, Co-Founder, Alphamosaic; Alex Mehta, Communications Director, Judicium

Enterprise Tuesday is a great event, and the topic for next week is “Building a Dream Team.” I recommend this specifically because I think incredibly highly of Neil Davidson, who co-founded Red Gate software and continues to serve as co-CEO. (In addition to founding the Business of Software conference, serving as Chairman of the Cambridge Network, and starting the Springboard programme at Red Gate.)

Link: http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/programmes/enterprise/timetable.html

*** Wednesday — January 27th — Cambridge Tech Meetup ***

Time: 6:30pm doors for 7pm start of demos (additional Q&A and discussion afterward)
Location: Lecture Theatre 1, Judge Business School, Trumpington Street

If you have to pick one event, come to the Cambridge Tech Meetup! (Yes, I started it with the help of many, many others.)

Six products will have has seven minutes to demo their technology/product; all of them developed in Cambridge! Everything from new display technology to cool video search technology to audio analysis and 3d model building via webcam will be demo’ed.

Demo companies/technologies are:

• Light Blue Optics — http://lightblueoptics.com
• Taptu — http://taptu.com/
• Cambridge IPTV — http://www.cambridge-iptv.com/
• AudioAnalytic — http://audioanalytic.com/
• ProFORMA — http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/my_papers/BMVC09/
• Prismastar — http://www.prismastar.com/

Link for info and to RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Cambridge-Tech-Meetup/calendar/12221063/

(The sharp-eyed among you will notice that this takes place shortly after the big Apple announcement on the 27th. I’ll be sure to have the screen tuned to a live-blog or tweet-stream until the demo’s kick off.)

Thursday — January 28th — Cambridge Business Lecture: Dan Pink

Time: 6pm start (networking afterward)
Location: Robinson College, Grange Road
Speaker: Dan Pink, best-selling author, writer, speaker

This event is a Cambridge Business Lecture, hosted by the Cambridge Network. Dan Pink is a great author/writer, and I think it’s just fantastic he’ll be speaking in Cambridge. If you’re in town, go.

Link: http://www.cambridgenetwork.co.uk/events/article/default.aspx?objid=65628

A lot of people have been talking about and playing with location-based applications these days. I wanted to put my two cents into the debate, specifically on Flook, Gowalla, and Foursquare.

Flook

Flook is the least-known of these three apps, but potentially the most interesting. Users take photos (which are automatically geo-tagged) and then add captions and information about the photo. What’s cool is that if you go somewhere new, you can quickly pull up the interesting places nearest to you. That might be a pub, a cool shop, or virtually anything else. And of course there’s a comments section around each card, too.

For me, the current downfall of Flook is that it’s iPhone-only, and I’ve recently moved to an Android phone. It’s also difficult to find and follow people you know, unless they’re in the same area and you see their cards normally.

Fundamentally, Flook is a hugely rich source of interesting information, with a *fantastic* user interface. I highly recommend that you download it for your iPhone and try it out. (Disclosure: I know the founders/investors of Flook, and think highly of them.)

PS- They’re currently running a competition to win a MacBook Air by just making cool Flook cards… check it out by clicking here.

Gowalla

Gowalla competes directly with Foursquare, and I have to definitely give the edge to Gowalla. It’s a beautifully made application, and what I love about it is the metaphor that Gowalla uses: a passport. Users are encouraged to get “stamps” in their “passport” for visiting new places. You earn and collect cool items from commissioning/founding new places, and can drop them off and pick up other cool items anywhere you visit. It’s definitely helped me think about new and interesting pubs, restaurants, etc. near me. (And of course see where your friends are checking in, too.)

While Gowalla has an iPhone app, their Android interface is through a web application. (http://m.gowalla.com) It has 80% of the functionality; the only major thing it’s missing is the ability to see and drop off your “items”.

[UPDATE]: I forgot this in my original post, but Gowalla lets you add locations anywhere in the world, and not just in particular cities like Foursquare. For example, I was at a conference at a huge convention center in southwest Ireland recently and added that to Gowalla, no problem. (Unlike Foursquare.) Foursquare may be rolling out to new cities all the time, but Gowalla can be used anywhere in the world right now.

Foursquare

Foursquare is bigger (in number of users) than Gowalla and has top-flight investors (Union Square Ventures), but I just don’t care for it. Its design is good, but not beautiful like Gowalla’s. But the biggest thing is the metaphor of points & mayorships that Foursquare uses. Each week a user’s points gets reset, and you have to keep checking into places to get and keep your “mayorship.”

To me, the metaphor of “mayorship” is a recipe for stagnation. It encourages users to go back to the same places over and over, and the mayorship will likely only rotate amongst a small number of regulars. For me, I quickly became the mayor of places where few other people checked in, and was out of the running for mayor-ships where I went regularly but where others checked in far more frequently. In both cases, my incentives were to stop using it.

Now, Foursquare does have a native application for both iPhone and Android, and it has excellent advisors. The founders previously started Dodgeball, a similar application which was bought by Google (where it stagnated) a couple years ago. It will need some better execution to get over its current problems. While Foursquare might be popular now with early adopters, I think it will have serious problems if/when it goes mainstream.

Summary

So I’m a Flook user when I have my iPhone handy, and I’m definitely a Gowalla user. Gowalla is great to track cool places I’ve been and where my friends go, and Flook is great to find interesting stuff that I might otherwise miss. Definitely give both a try.

So the reason I haven’t posted here in a while is because I got a new job!

As of about six weeks ago I started working full time with Google as a Strategic Partner Manager, in the EMEA Reseller team. It’s been fun, exciting, and a lot of work and material to learn and (hopefully) master in quite a short amount of time.

If you’re curious what “Reseller” means at Google, here are a couple of links:

• The Reseller program description
• A YouTube video pitched at potential new Resellers

Finally, a disclaimer: The views and opinions I post here on my blog are mine, mine alone, and not those of my employer. I don’t (and wouldn’t presume to) speak for Google. (And no, I can’t talk about any cool new stuff that hasn’t been released. Most of the time I only find out about it when it’s released, anyway.)

It’s going to take a while before I get back to posting regularly, but I’ll eventually find the time.

While WordPress is great software, its ubiquity means that a lot of script-kiddies and general hackers like to attack it. All of the different settings, options, plugins and the rest mean that it takes quite a bit of work to balance letting people participate (through comments, postings) while keeping spammers and hackers out.

About a year and a half ago, my blog was hacked. I was notified of it by Google’s webmaster tools, and it took quite a while to go through all the different files to find the offending code and strip it out. It ended up being located in a number of different places, so it took a few go-through’s re-submitting the site to Google before the hack-detection software declared it clean.

I was always a little worried that I hadn’t gotten it all. Recently, I came across a great couple of blog posts that I highly recommend:

• This is a good general description of why you need to be worried and links to a couple of tools you can use.
• This is a link to a WordPress plugin called “Exploit Scanner.” I uploaded it to this blog and found a number of files that were clearly hacker-installed. I’ve since un-installed them, but want to post some things to help anyone else that might face the same situation in the future.

— — — — — — — — — — —

Files that were uploaded:
fx_akismet.php
fx_blogger.php
fx_I10n.php
fx_menu.php
fx_wp-config.php
fx_wp-db-backup.php
… and a folder of 70 html files and a javascript file meant to steal Google PageRank

All the php files were nearly identical. Here’s the code:

I don’t code in php, so I don’t really know what this says, but hopefully it might be useful to anyone afflicted by the same script.

I highly recommend if any of you have WordPress blogs to take these same steps to see if you’ve been hacked.