fluxcapacity

The Boulder County Business report ran a spot on Fluxcapacity and the other nine 2008 TechStars companies earlier this week.  Our snippet is below, but click through to read about the others.

Let’s say you’re creating a photo uploader for your cool new website. You need this because you decided that profile photos are totally the way to go. (Hey, you think, Facebook was all about profile photos and it worked for them.) You let the user select a profile photo from their computer, and then they invariably pick an 8 megapixel monster photo. (No, not a monster photo, a monster photo.)

Now you’re kind of screwed. That big photo is going to take a long time to upload. This is going to annoy your user. And it’s not good for you, either: You’re going to pay for, easily 100 times more bandwidth than you actually needed, because the first thing you’re going to do if you’re smart is resize the photo down to an itty bitty thumbnail (You thought about this, and you decided that the ittier, the better, because you’re going to have to display hundreds, if not millions, of these photos as soon as Feld decides to do a month-long series on your cool new website.)

You wonder how Facebook solved this problem, and you discover that they have a special browser plugin thingy. Crap. You don’t know how to make a plugin thingy. And obviously your website is going to be really big on all the major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS 6.22), so you’d need multiple. But even if you had one or more thingys, you haven’t quite achieved the household name status. (Except in your household, where your name is easily in the top ten household names.) Where were we? Oh yeah, even if you had an upload plugin thingy, nobody would trust you, and you’d be back to uploading monster images.

What now?

Fortunately, you remember reading about FJCore on a bathroom stall at the bar last night. FJCore, of course, is a JPEG codec that works in Silverlight and supports JPEG resize in the browser. Sweet, so now you can shrink the profile photo before you upload it without scaring off the user. Hell, maybe you’ll even allow multiple profile photos (there’s no chance your competition will see that one coming.) You could even squish the photos together to create one ultra profile photo strip. You feel so empowered that you decide to buy the FJCore guys a beer the next time you hit up that dive bar.

What’s the catch?

Right. There’s always a catch. Silverlight itself is a Microsoft browser plugin thingy… so your users still need to have Silverlight installed. But, like Flash, we expect it to be more or less taken for granted (For one thing, the Olympics will be webcast with Silverlight.) And we’re fans of Silverlight; It can do some cool things Flash can’t do (notably, FJCore relies on the ability to access a file before upload. This isn’t possible in Flash today.) And competition with Flash is good for driving innovation.

Why are we posting this today?

We just released the full-fledged source code to FJCore (on Google Code) today, so although we've had a working example online for a while, this is the first time you can just grab the code and build your own uploader.  Better yet, you can join our open source project and contribute an uploader for everyone to use (except your competition, they are way too dumb to find it) based on FJCore.

My birthday just ended (thanks for the beers Vikas, and the 'Say It Ain't So' Rock Band production), and I really lucked out because it coincided with the TechStars collective "exhale" day, which began last night at St Julien (thanks David and Howard for drinks), and continued with a poker tournament (congrats Austin, Aziz), and a little party with Sidney's and friends (nice handstand, Kayla). I don't know about everyone else, but I think relaxing feels a lot better when it follows several days of no-letting-up intense hyper-productivity (we haz buzzwords, as PSC would say).

Andrew Hyde recently put up a clip commemorating the first 30 days for the 2008 TechStars companies in Boulder. The ten companies have come a long way in a short time. In fact, so has TechStars itself: Check out David's post detailing the inception of TechStars. Here's my summary of how well he had it figured out:

"Hey d00d [David Brown], let's lure entrepreneurs to Boulder with couches and shit."

Just kidding, sort of. We love you David.

Here's Andrew's masterpiece, but check out more on the community site:

When you devote almost all waking energy to our startup, it's not uncommon to find yourself eating and working simultaneously.  Today the dynamic duo is a fish burrito and nonlinear least squares regression (NLLS).

While the burrito is still hot, let's dive into a little compare/contrast.

Many of you may not be familiar with one of these items, so I'll give that item a quick introduction:  A fish burrito is a mexican entree fashioned most typically out of fish, lettuce, a tortilla, and an interstitial sauce of some kind.

Now that we've covered that, you are probably thinking, man, that's almost identical to NLLS.

And you're right.

• Both the burrito and the mathematical technique are customizable.

• Both are subject to local maxima -- if you start looking for a fish burrito in the wrong town, you will end up with the best of the worst.  NLLS will end up with with a solution near the initial guess, but not necessarily the best overall.  Overcoming this problem, in both cases, can be done by randomly jumping around periodically (with an airplane and random number generator, respectively).

• When someone says "fish burrito," there's obviously a lot of ambiguity.  It could mean an authentic, south-of-the-border creation -- a homemade fish burrito fashioned from leftovers -- or, as in today's case, a fish burrito from Illegal Pete's.  Saying "Nonlinear least squares" is equally unspecific.  Everyone's left wondering, do you mean a gradient-descent NLLS?  Do you mean MATLAB's lsqnonlin function?  Or, as in today's case, do you mean the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm?

Despite these similarities, we can't end without pointing out the key difference:

• Fish burritos do not require an estimate of the Jacobian.

Because the walk to Sydney's coffee was just too far away (and closed on weekends).