I love this script from Cabel. Very cool Javascript zooming. Similar to the Prototype Lightbox, but I think I actually prefer this.

Just click on any of the thumbnails below. These are screenshots from the work we have been doing for Mountain Dew recently around turning much of their content into widgets that can be distributed to various platforms, such as NetVibes, iGoogle, Facebook, etc.

Is it just me, or has there been a significant decline in broadband capacity lately? Shouldn’t it be getting faster, not slower? I started to think it was just my network or possibly an issue in my area, however, I have spoken to other people on different ISP’s in different areas, experiencing similar issues.

There is a common misconception about broadband connectivity. Your connection is like a pipe, this is generally static, the size of the pipe won’t change. If you get 2mbps downstream and 500kbps upstream, that is fairly static, with ADSL, which most home users have, it will change when you restart your router. For connections like fibre or DDS, it is absolutely fixed. ADSL does vary, and there can be a number of factors that affect the actual bandwidth you get, including distance of your connection from the local exchange, other broadband connections in your area (we all still sharing the same copper), local lines issues, and a host of others.

The size of your pipe though, does not determine the performance you get. It is a factor. Chances are, you have plenty of capacity on your "pipe" between you and the ISP’s equipment in the local telco exchange. The problem with the Internet, is that it will only be as fast as the slowest part of the connection. The weakest link in the chain if you will. If there is a major bottleneck in part of the core ISP’s infrastructure, for example, they have a router or switch that is completely at capacity, then this will determine the actual upload and download speed you get. Don’t get me wrong, if we could all have fibre into our houses, that is absolutely the best option, but it is not the entire solution. Wellington has wide availability of fibre optic cable connections for nearly over 10 years, but there are customers I know on that type of connection with major performance issues because whilst fibre is a very high capacity connectivity option, it is now, at capacity.

It could be that you are connecting to a server in the US somewhere, in which case, it might have nothing to do with your ISP at all. It could be the data centre where the web server is hosted has network capacity issues, or any hop along the route. All you can expect from your ISP is that they take all reasonable measures to ensure no bottlenecks on their domestic network, and they should be able to get you out through the international gateway to the major International destinations, particularly the West Coast of the USA as many, many services will be hosted there.

I eliminated the possibility of a local network issue and I checked my router and the actual connection between my house and exchange is fine. So next I did some testing on my actual throughput at Speedtest.net. Here are the results:

Auckland to Auckland

This is very disappointing. With XADSL connections, which is what we all have now, you should not really have a connection less then 2mbps. The upstream is even more disappointing. If all you want to do is download, then it is not such an issue, but I have many applications where I need fast connectivity in both directions.

Auckland to San Francisco

This is even worse. The further away you are going, the slower it will be, but any way you look at it, this is not good.

The Dirty Little Secret of ISPs

I used to work for an Internet Service Provider years ago, and so I know a lot about how that type of business works. This is how it breaks down:

• As an ISP you are basically buying big "pipes" and then looking to sell usage of that pipe to lots of customers
• So you start out by buying a pipe big enough for 1000 customers to use it concurrently
• When you have 100 customers, you are losing money, but the performance for those 100 customers is unbelievable.
• Based on this, you actually get a great name in the marketplace and get more customers
• When you get to say customer 500, you are starting to make a small profit because you are now more than covering the costs of your big fat pipe
• The performance is not quite as good though, but still good enough that the customers are happy
• Once you get to customer 1000, you are making good profit. You count on not all 1000 customers using the pipe at the same time, so that you can maximise profitability. The problem though, is that when they are all using it, the performance is not good.
• Once to get to customer 1500, you are making mad money, because your costs haven’t really increased, as you’ve still got the same pipe. This is where it gets tricky, and some ISP’s can choose to just keep costs low and monitor the churn rate (the rate at which customers leave versus new customers signing up). You tell the help desk to tell the customers it is their router, the telco, their WiFi network, anything other than the truth, which is that they just don’t want to pay for extra capacity because it will screw their profit margins.

Now this isn’t necessarily true of all ISPs, however, my personal experience has been that when new companies enter the market, their performance is fantastic, but as they obviously gain more traction and market share it seems to decline. This has been the case 3 times in the last 6 years that I can recall.

Therefore, the best thing to do is to keep moving to the newest ISP in the market and once performance starts to decline, move on to the next new one.

Some developers have figured out how to turn the new Nokia Jaiku phone into a portable WiFi hot spot that you can use to share your 3G cellular connection.

This is a brilliant idea, and must surely be possible on the iPhone from a hardware perspective. I hope someone is busy working on that now.

As an existing user of both, I’m very excited by this new integration. Key benefits are:

• Your email (which is basically Gmail) is automatically linked to your contact records in Salesforce. No more adding emails manually!
• Your calendar will synch with Salesforce.
• Documents can be stored online with Google, taking care of the expensive excess data storage charges that you get from Salesforce if you exceed your allocation

I’m sure there are many more. I’m very much looking forward to doing a trial of this as I think it could be a wonderful solution for small to medium businesses.
Check out the details on Salesforce.com.

Thanks for listening to my presentation.

If anyone would like to be involved in the beta, please leave a comment and I’ll contact you as soon as we are ready.

This should be helpful for Mac users who use Gmail and/or Salesforce. For various reasons, I sometimes use all of these apps/devices for accessing email and contacts.

• Address Book on Mac OS X
• Outlook 2007 on XP (on Parallels on my MacBook Pro)
• Google Apps - IMAP (Gmail)
• iPhone
• Salesforce.com - All our customer data is in this system

How do you get all your contacts in all these places?

Step 1

You have to use Address Book as the primary data store. I have contacts in here that I don’t need in Salesforce, because they are friends and family.

So the first step is supplementing this with all my customer data from Salesforce. No problem in Outlook 2007 as you just install Salesforce Outlook Edition and sync with Salesforce. However, there is no equivalent solution from Salesforce for Address Book on Mac OS X.

Luckily, these clever chaps are working on an open source tool that does this:

sfCubed

This is in beta, but it works fine for me.

Step 2

Now I just sync my iPhone via iTunes and I have all my customer information on my phone. Easy.

Step 3

Now I want everything in Gmail as well so that I can access all the contacts, if for any reason, I can only use web mail.

Download A to G

This simple utility exports your Address Book to a .csv file that can be imported into Gmail.

Conclusion

This is a satisfactory but still manual process for getting all contacts data everywhere I want. Ideally this would be all achieved via iSync on Mac OS X, however, I think this will probably be a little while away.

YouTube has annnounced major new features for their API. These include:

• Upload videos and video responses to YouTube
• Add/Edit user and video metadata (titles, descriptions, ratings, comments, favorites, contacts, etc)
• Fetch localized standard feeds (most viewed, top rated, etc.) for 18 international locales
• Perform custom queries optimized for 18 international locales
• Customize player UI and control video playback (pause, play, stop, etc.) through software

So what does this mean to you? Essentially this makes it even easier for you to leverage YouTube as a video platform. You can directly integrate YouTube into your own website. The key difference is essentially YouTube has to date only really offered Read access to their videos. You can pretty much do everything you can do on YouTube itself.

Example

You want to allow visitors to submit video content to your site for a competition.

• Visitor fills in the competition entry form on your site.
• Visitor uploads video on your site.
• You use YouTube to transcode the video to Flash and store it on their platform (for free!).
• You retrieve the videos and display them on your site in a customised player.

It now makes even less sense to try and build your own online video capability. What’s not clear, is what advertising might be delivered around your video content, however, I imagine they’ll introduce an advertising free albeit paid option in the future.

What do you think you could use this for?

Technorati Tags: youtube

Google is churning out the code as usual:

Contacts Data API

Google keeps a common contact list in your Gmail account which is shared with Google Reader and Google Calendar. They are now making this available so that any developer can access this data programmatically. This includes read, create, edit and delete functionality. Potential uses for this are:

• Sync tool for your Address Book or Outlook Contacts
• Tool that adds all your LinkedIn contacts to your Gmail
• Use Gmail as a cheap database and store survey or competition entry form contact data into a Gmail account
• Using this plus the existing Google Calendar API, you could potentially build quite a powerful but cheap event registration solution

I would like to have all my contacts in Gmail, I have never bothered to do a manual import but if it was synched up with my main contact list, I would be happy.

Google Gears Mobile

Google Gears is a framework released by Google last year that will allow you to build web applications that run offline then synch back up with the web server as soon as you are online again. This is the really the last frontier in web application development, as we have never been able to get around the issue of requiring connectivity back to the server for the app to work. Google Gears Mobile is a port for Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile 5 and 6.

Whilst this means a limited amount of handsets could actually use an application that you developed using Google Gears Mobile, this is undoubtedly going to ported to other mobile operating systems in the future.

In theory, mobile handsets shouldn’t be offline, but Gears Mobile will allow you to run an app when you in Flight Mode on a plane, or when the coverage is very poor. Even you are fully connected, Gears Mobile allows the developer to take advantage of the local data cache to improve performance and get around potential latency issues on a slow data network.

Here is a video on Google Gears Mobile if you would like to know more, or check out the blog:

What ideas do you have for how these new tools could be used?

I finally got my beta invitation for Xobni. This plug-in for Outlook promises to make Microsoft Outlook better by:

• Fast email search
• Analytics on my email usage
• Summarises all attachments by the contact (particularly like this one)
• Extracts phone numbers from the body of email messages
• Navigate through my email by people
• Threaded conversations
• Fast email search
• Automatically suggests meeting times in a click of a button based on free space in my calendar

Here is their demo:

I have to say, I like it. Compared to say Google Desktop, which includes an Outlook search function, it takes up a lot less disk space and seems to be just as effective. It seems to work fine with IMAP, which is surprising, but great. It fits perfectly with how I use email, which is to archive everything and then just search when I need to retrieve something. I try to get my inbox down to zero every day and I don’t file emails in elaborate folder structures, although I do use Labels in Gmail, which is effectively just a folder.

Overall though, this is the new and I believe the most efficient approach for email. Forget about filing it, just dump everything into an archive folder and then just use search and a tool like Xobni to retrieve messages for you when you need them. Why Outlook doesn’t just have a search feature that works, I’ll never know. Xobni is definitely going to be acquired by Microsoft though, what other possible exit could they have?

Overall then, a big recommendation for Xobni. When you get between 50 and 100 messages per day, anything that saves you some time is a must have. If you want a beta invitation, just let me know, I’ve got 5 left at the moment.

NewsGator, who in my opinion produce the best RSS software, have announced that they will make all their consumer products freely available.

Here is a full list of the products available:

Mac OS X

• NetNewsWire - This is my chosen RSS client and it is by far the best product available on that platform as far as I am concerned. All my feeds get backed up to their online service and I can access them via their website if I need to.

Windows

If you are on Windows here are the products available:

• FeedDemon - a dedicated desktop client
• NewsGator Inbox For Microsoft Outlook - get your feeds within Outlook. Outlook 2007 already has this functionality.

Web

If you prefer a browser based service, because you have multiple computers or can’t install software on your PC at work here is a good option for you:

• NewsGator Online

Google Reader, is also a very popular web-based alternative.

Mobile

• NewsGator Go! for Mobile (Blackberry, Java capable cell phone, Windows Mobile)
• m.newsgator.com - iPhone Web Application