fluxcapacity

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.

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

Three weeks in and Andrew Hyde is starting to sneak up on TechStars companies and record them in their natural environments.  Last night he caught us at around 9pm and captured this brief podcast.  Listen in to hear about our first three weeks.

Here's an old video of the rear-projection physics whiteboard referenced in the podcast. Maybe one of these days we'll set it up in the Bunker and record the creative madness that ensues.

We are two weeks into Techstars, in the beautiful city of Boulder, Colorado, and it has been wonderful. There is so much to experience when you are surrounded by a group of cool people you haven’t met before, away from home, being a part of something fresh and new. Talking about experiences, here is a list of things I did for the first time ever, after coming to Boulder...

The First ‘Startup Experience’

How is being a part of a startup, different from working for an established behemoth of a firm? Well, frankly, I think of an established company as a 100 page book of ‘connect the dots’, and think of startup as play-dough. One is a monotonous, rarely intriguing, to be repeated over and over again, with a high success rate. Play-Dough on the other hand, well, it’s so much more fun, so much more creative, and you may not end up with what you thought you were making! (not hinting at any Techstars startups… ).

The First Ice Hockey Match

So many of our interests are programmed into us subconsciously. Sports is certainly one of them.

We may find a zillion reasons for why your favorite sport is supposed to be the best, but in the end, it’s the common passion that our people have for it, that sucks us into it. And, it can happen at any age. Vikas and Jeff, being from Michigan, are hard core Red Wing fans, and asked me and Shun to watch the Stanley cup finals with them, and it was great. (Actually, if you count the ‘Bart Vs Lisa’ episode from The Simpsons, it was my second ice hockey match). I now find Ice Hockey cool...

The First Waffle

Most of the western food that has influenced the east, is fast-food from USA, pastas and Co. from Italy and Mexican food from, well, USA (it’s more like “Mexican” food). So I can safely claim that you won’t find waffles anywhere in India. I had one with pecans the other day, and it was awesome.

The First Martini

(I am being forced to write this….)

I have been above the age limit for some time, and the other day, I decided to take the plunge by getting a vodka+wine mixture, called, The Strawberry Confusion. It contained strawberries, and well, couldn’t figure anything else out. Maybe that’s the confusion part of it. A drink, so true to it’s name. The exclusiveness of the moment called for a picture to be taken using Jeff's ever-handy camera phone.

And this concludes my First Blog at Fluxcapacity…cheers to that!

It's been a crazy busy couple of days at TechStars. First, we had three of the heavy weights of the tech world, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft come talk to us.

Monday was "Google Day", we:

• Learned about OpenSocial, and AppEngine from Kevin Marks and Dion Almaer.
• Got to hear the story of FeedBurner, which was acquired by Google in 2007, first hand from founder Dick Costello. It was interesting to hear from him how the rallying cry for the company was "get all the feeds." Dick told us how people would come in with a bunch of feeds they got and other stuff that he called "rabbits". He said he would throw the rabbits away and then ask "Do we have all the feeds yet? No? Then go get all the feeds!" It's a very simple, measurable goal and it probably helped FeedBurner stay focused. Here's Devver's take on it.

Tuesday was "Amazon Day", we:

• Got excited about Amazon Web Services after hearing from Mike Culver. Amazon is building some ridiculously cool services for developers to use. We've already built some infrastructure around S3, but we'll be looking into other services like EC2 as well.
• Heard about Shelfari (Amazon invested in them) from founder Josh Hug at Colorado University. We got to hang out with him right before he presented at the Boulder New Tech Meetup. Josh did a great job showing off Shelfari, especially because he simply showed a compelling demo rather than a bunch of slides. He also had great answers, mostly "yes we already do that", for all of the questions he got asked. The presentation I enjoyed the most was Watching Grass Grow. The creator of the site uses webcams to keep track of and display seemingly mundane things like his lawn growing and paint drying. Apparently the site gets about 500,000 unique visitors a year!

Wednesday was "Microsoft Day", we:

• Learned about what Microsoft can do for startups from Don Dodge, Dave Drach, and Anand "A.I." Iyer. We actually met Don and Anand at MIX 08 in Las Vegas back in March and it was great seeing them again.
• Got to hear the story of NewsGator from founder/CTO Greg Reinacker. Greg was the only founder, and it was interesting hearing his perspective on getting started, his interactions with Brad Feld, bringing on a CEO, and building a site to scale.

But wait, there's more! Over the past couple of days we also:

• Worked hard to get a demo ready for a meeting with David Cohen.
• Rewrote our pitch 3 times.
• Horribly messed up App-X's pitch. At one of the sessions each of the teams had to give another team's pitch. I was chosen to give App-X's pitch, and I think I said something to the effect of, "App-X uses Salesforce and builds stuff on top of it to do stuff." Instead of quitting while I was only slightly behind, I proceeded to say another sentence which also made no sense. Sorry guys! I'll try to get better at it!
• Found out that UPS lost a 148 pound server we shipped. How do you lose a box that's 4' by 3' by 3' and weights 148 pounds!!? Luckily we had insurance on it.
• Watched the Wings win the Stanley Cup! We were at Conor O' Neills here in Boulder. Interestingly, there are two Conor O' Neills, one here and one in Ann Arbor where me and Jeff went to school.

Although it's been busy, we've had a lot of fun. I'm definitely looking forward to drinking a few beers on Friday night though!