Jonathan's Propaganda

“Just in time for @sxsw, Flavors.me support for @Vimeo @Picassa and @delicious is now available! We also added back profile deep links for each service.”

“The band, which despite a Grammy award has never been a huge seller, is seeing results: since the videos have become embeddable, digital album sales tripled and digital tracks sales have jumped more than sevenfold.”

“Guys, I’m definitely going to move dalasverdugo.com over to flavors.me. It just makes sense…Flavors.me is the best frontend, hands down, for anyone who wants a great personal website that’s easy to design (beautifully) and pulls in your content from all these websites we’re always using.”

“With the TiVo Premier comes a new interface that’s been designed to present web videos just like live TV. But it’s not just web videos. The whole system was reworked to allow users better access to their locally-stored content as well. Premiere’s search function queries all sources and will find content whether it’s on a web video or live TV. Pandora and FrameChannel join Netflix and YouTube as built-in apps. The new interface utilizes Adobe Flash and boy is it pretty. Think classic TiVo combined with Kaleidescape’s interface mashed up with Hulu Desktop.”

“The most logical application for Picnik at Google, would be for Google to integrate the software into their photo sharing property Picasa. That Google would allocate $$$ towards Picasa right now may signal that they are getting serious about finally mounting some reasonable effort at trying to displace Flickr as the photo social sharing King of the internet. What else makes me think this? Google Buzz. While I consider Flickr superior in a lot of ways to Picasa today, the biggest advantage that Flickr has always held over their competitors is how strong a grip they’ve had on the social aspect of photo sharing. But now that Buzz has arrived on the scene (and your Buzz photos go into Picasa albums by default by the way), it would appear that Google finally has a viable social network to compete with Flickr.”

HiiDef Inc.: Flavors.me Launch & Premium Accounts Release

“If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public. The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site. All of your linked content is pulled into your Flavors.me page so it’s easy to access, but it’s never overwhelming — the site’s templates are minimalist, and hide everything but your name and a list of your online feeds/profiles at first. If you click on one of these feeds, the content will smoothly transition into view; it’s all very slick. You can also tweak your page’s color scheme, backgrounds, and layout to suit your taste (though there are only a handful of layouts to choose from initially). You can get a feel for what’s possible by checking out my Flavors.me page, which took me all of ten minutes to set up — keep in mind that it’s entirely possible to make a page that looks better than this with a little more time. There are plenty of other services out there that let you list all of your online presences in one place, with options including chi.mp, card.ly, UnHub, and even Google Profiles. But Flavors.me really makes the process extremely simple, and the results look great. Flavors.me is free for its basic features, and will generate revenue through premium subscriptions, which are $20 a year. Premium features include the ability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and the ability to include a contact form in your page (though obviously you could just include your Email address in the standard ‘About’ field). Flavors.me was built by HiiDef, an incubator started by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and his brother, David Marcus.”

“The Heron TP drones are the size of Boeing 737 passenger jets and the largest unmanned aircraft in Israel’s military. The planes can fly at least 20 consecutive hours. At the fleet’s inauguration ceremony, the drone dwarfed an F-15 fighter jet parked beside it. “We are realizing the air force’s dream,” said Brig. Gen. Amikam Norkin. ”The Heron TP is a technological and operational breakthrough.”

37signals Job Board: HiiDef: Senior Django, RoR & JQuery Developer

“This is a scandalous story, involving one of the world’s largest banks, a powerful federal judge, and two Mexican telecom giants…It certainly appears that Carlos Slim’s investment has bought the silence of one of the world’s most important newspapers.”

“Instruments developed by Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and a wide range of other banks enabled politicians to mask additional borrowing in Greece, Italy and possibly elsewhere. In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come.”

John Wehr Joins HiiDef as CTO

“18 months ago, Rupert even emerged as a potential white-knight in the Microsoft-Yahoo struggle: He would merge MySpace into Yahoo and save Yahoo from Microsoft’s clutches…as long as Yahoo agreed to value MySpace at something like $10 billion. But even Yahoo wasn’t that stupid. Rupert’s real goal in that effort was obviously to unload MySpace before its value completely collapsed. Which it has since done. A source suggests that MySpace did about $500—$600 million of revenue in fiscal 2009 (through June) and that it lost money in the process…[Afterall], the value of a business is the discounted value of the future cash flows it produces.”

“I have run across a ton of sites in my experience of surfing the web that aim to simplify free web design, and none seem to really do it in the end. Once I get over the intrusive branding and extremely limited design editing, I am lost in the somewhat confusing back-end structure the site expects me to use. Not to mention, that even with pre built themes (which I am most always against), the site never looks exactly how you want it; and it takes significant programming knowledge to change anything about it. Well, what I found a couple of days ago changed my mind about hosted web design. The company is called Flavors.me, and the fantastic simplicity and idea behind their designs was nothing like I have ever seen before. Right from the start, their domain name is perfect; it focuses on a creative and individual approach. The main purpose of the site lets you link your external social and personal utilities (blogs, photos, videos, social networks) to a simple, yet extremely powerful website. Flavors.me is not by any means a way to add content to the web, but it takes other content and beautifully integrates it into one, concise page. The minimalistic feel, something that I always enjoy, is taken to the back-end with a simple integration of social networks, RSS feeds, photo services and more. All in all, Flavors.me is extremely easy to set up, and it focuses on external personal content. With a world of so many social utilities, I have found this to be a useful tool to make everything a little more simple.”

“Oh. My. God…The point is that these bank executives are not free agents who are earning big bucks in fair competition; they run companies that are essentially wards of the state. There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private.”

“IAC bit an accounting bullet in Q4, taking a $991 million impairment charge for its search & media business—including Ask and excluding Citysearch.”

Hybrowse by Jake Lodwick

“Why do we jump through so many hoops just to tweet a picture? No 140-character limit…No URL-shorteners. They’re stupid and ugly and they hurt the web…The hubris of Twitter is the assumption that the product is unassailable because of the features they leave out…”

“The level of employment today, at 129.5 million, is the exact same level it was in 1999. And, during this 11-year span of Japanese-like labour market stagnation, the working-age population has risen 29 million. Contemplate that for a moment; fully 29 million people competing for the same number of jobs that existed more than a decade ago. Pretty deflationary stuff. Not only that, but in 2009, we had a zero policy rate, a $2.2 trillion Fed balance sheet and an epic 10% deficit-to-GDP ratio. You could not have asked for more government stimulus. Yet employment tumbled nearly 5 million in 2009.”

“

Speaking for myself, and myself only, it is my personal belief that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.

No matter how I look at this issue, I cannot escape being troubled by the fact that we have in place a policy which forces young men and women to lie about who they are in order to defend their fellow citizens. For me, personally, it comes down to integrity, theirs as individuals and ours as an institution.

”

“

Sometime in 2002 after 7’6 Yao Ming was drafted by the Houston Rockets, a couple of friends and I silk-screened about 1,000 t-shirts with funny riffs on Yao’s identity like Who’s Yao Mama?, Deez Nutz in Yao Mouth! and Who’s Yao Daddy?

I used a hosted e-commerce platform from Network Solutions to hack together a “Yaowear” site with only .jpg images; it was one of the more frustrating, semi-technical experiences of my life, and I swore to never do business with Network Solutions again.

Fast forward to 2008. Shortly after launching Superkix, we needed a very simple storefront to sell our wonderfully comfortable American Apparel 50/50 blend Superkix t-shirts. I had read about Shopify a couple years prior and was very eager to try out their service. My standards were exceptionally low; we needed only to sell one product with a couple different t-shirt colors. Sadly, I couldn’t even create a site that I was comfortable associating with the Superkix brand. So, I asked Jack the designer via IM if he would be interested in joining me on another HiiDef adventure, and Goodsie was born!

In February 2009, Kevin Sheurs from Vimeo agreed to sacrifice his nights and weekends to help bring our little retail project to life. Our plan was to launch before Jack’s wife Marissa was due to give birth to J3 aka: “BabyJ” in June; evidently we underestimated the project scope a touch. Based on our experience with the Flavors.me beta, we realized that in order to cross the goal line, we needed to add a full-time development heavy with some real horsepower, pronto.

Enter Eli White, who joined us on Monday to lead the development of Goodsie! Eli was among the first few developers at Digg, spent time at Hubble Space Telescope and TripAdvisor, and was most recently the Community Relations Manager for Zend. He wrote the book on PHP 5 and is a tour de force in the open source community. It’s only been about 72 hours, but Eli is already wearing full body armor around his house, and Goodsie is that much closer to becoming a reality.

So what is Goodsie? Goodsie allows anyone to create a unique web presence to sell physical or digital goods. Retailers of all kinds, from eBay power sellers to artisans in handmade marketplaces, or even musicians on MySpace, can have their own branded online store, without any of the traditional hassles of setting up shop online. We are building Goodsie to modernize selling online. Built on Amazon’s cloud, Goodsie integrates the Paypal, Google Checkout and Amazon gateways. It incorporates structured attributes in product categories such as Apparel, Media, Art, Pets, Furniture and Jewelry, leading to a consistent search and shopping experience. With native support for digital file preview and delivery, downloading purchased audio, video, stock photography and e-books is seamless.

The long awaited alpha testing should finally start in a month or two, perhaps during SXSW in March, which a handful of HiiDef team members will be attending.

In the meantime, Eli will be speaking at both ConFoo and tek-X. For those in attendance at either conference, please seek him out to say hello, buy him a beer and challenge him to a medieval-style joust!

”