AeroFS is a file syncing application, similar to Dropbox, but instead of syncing your files with their servers it runs within your own network and syncs data among your devices internally. It’s a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) filesystem that doesn’t require a ‘middleman’ server. They offer an optional encrypted sync to their servers (cloud) if you want offsite backup as well. See their Features page for more info.
The idea is a really good one: if you already have file storage capacity in your home or business you can use it to set up automatic syncing and sharing of directories and files without going through a third party service. Many companies have security policies that don’t allow file sharing through services like Dropbox, so something like AeroFS could meet that need really well.
As of this writing they are in beta so you can sign up for an invitation and be notified when it’s ready.
Yesterday’s post on Webmonkey about Google and Mozilla (makers of the Firefox web browser) teaming up on a new set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) for connecting applications and websites. It’s called Web Intents and provides a way for sites to pass data between each other.
So just what are Web Intents? Well, the easiest way to understand them is by example. Take the sometimes overwhelming proliferation of buttons on web pages that allow you to do something with the current page, whether it’s Like, Tweet, +1, Read Later, Add to Instapaper and so on. Rather than adding a dozen little badges to your site, Web Intents creates a bridge that connects your site to any website your visitor wants to use. Web Intents define an API for your site to use and another API for the receiving site to use. Plug them together and transferring data becomes a quick and easy process, both for users and developers.
From Tantek Çelik, creator of microformats, who refers to Web Intents as Web Actions:
“[W]eb actions have the potential to change our very notions of what a web application is from a single site to loosely coupled interactions across multiple, distributed sites…. In that regard, web actions have the potential to become a building block for distributed web applications.”
Shortly before 2pm today Apple surpassed ExxonMobil in market capitalization to become the most valuable company in the United States.
Apple Inc.’s stock gained 3.4 percent to $365.10 Tuesday afternoon, bringing the iPhone and iPad maker’s market capitalization to about $338 billion.
Exxon Mobil Corp. shares, meanwhile, were trading at $69.23, down 1.4 percent. That gives the oil company a market cap of $337 billion.
Other big-name corporations, such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and General Electric Co., don’t even come close.
[...]
In its latest quarterly report, Apple said stronger iPhone and iPad sales helped more than double its net income to $7.31 billion and grow revenue by 82 percent to $28.6 billion.
This is a phenomenal level of performance in a little over a decade. In 1997 Apple was nearly bankrupt when Steve Jobs returned to the company as ‘interim’ CEO as part of the NeXT acquisition. Ten years later Apple revolutionized the mobile industry with the iPhone, and followed that up three years later with the creation of a totally new product category with the iPad. Not to mention the first widely-adopted online digital media store—the iTunes Store—that surpassed 10 billion downloads in 2010.
Since OS X 10.7 Lion is delivered exclusively via download from the Mac App Store—no boxed disk or installation media of any kind is being sold—Guillaume Gest has created the free Lion DiskMaker Applescript application to provide a way to create an installation DVD or USB stick (USB should run faster than a disk). This would be useful if you ever need to reinstall Lion without having to download it again, or if you want a quick and easy way to install it on your other Macs.
Gest’s web site claims that a 4 GB USB stick will handle it, or a single-layer writable 4.7 GB DVD.
The chart below shows impressive growth numbers for Google+ — although I don’t know what it really means at this point, if anything. Could be a lot of people are just looking for an alternative to Facebook, but 10 million is a pretty big user base in just a couple of weeks time.
I joined G+ this week and have been poking around a little, mostly out of curiosity to see what they’ve built and how the technology works. I never used Facebook and I don’t know if G+ will be any different, but they are doing some interesting things there with the ‘Circles’ model of security and permissions. You can see the Circles concept demonstrated in a YouTube video here.
Watching the developments with Facebook and Google+ I wonder if a single platform needs to “win” this game or if several different ones will find their own audience and grow independently of one another—if so, what if some of your friends or family are on one network but not the other? Maybe some form of integration among the networks will evolve. I don’t imagine the principal players will want to go along with that but it might be an opportunity for a third party middleware service to do something.
The premise of a feedback loop is simple: Provide people with information about their actions in real time (or something close to it), then give them a chance to change those actions, pushing them toward better behaviors.
A feedback loop involves four distinct stages.
First comes the data: A behavior must be measured, captured, and stored. This is the evidence stage.
Second, the information must be relayed to the individual, not in the raw-data form in which it was captured but in a context that makes it emotionally resonant. This is the relevance stage. But even compelling information is useless if we don’t know what to make of it, so we need a …
Third stage: consequence. The information must illuminate one or more paths ahead.
And finally, the fourth stage: action. Then that action is measured, and the feedback loop can run once more, every action stimulating new behaviors that inch us closer to our goals.
The ideal feedback loop gives us an emotional connection to a rational goal. And today, their promise couldn’t be greater. The intransigence of human behavior has emerged as the root of most of the world’s biggest challenges. Witness the rise in obesity, the persistence of smoking, the soaring number of people who have one or more chronic diseases. [...] Feedback loops can improve how companies motivate and empower their employees, allowing workers to monitor their own productivity and set their own schedules. They could lead to lower consumption of precious resources and more productive use of what we do consume. They could allow people to set and achieve better-defined, more ambitious goals and curb destructive behaviors, replacing them with positive actions. Used in organizations or communities, they can help groups work together to take on more daunting challenges. In short, the feedback loop is an age-old strategy revitalized by state-of-the-art technology. As such, it is perhaps the most promising tool for behavioral change to have come along in decades.
Card.io is another new mobile credit card processing solution, similar to Square except that it doesn’t need additional hardware to swipe the card—instead, it uses a mobile app to scan the front of the card. There’s a little more info on the How it works page but apparently it’s targeted to software developers to integrate credit card processing into their mobile apps.
They are currently accepting early access requests on their web site: www.card.io. SDK (Software Development Kit) available now for iOS, coming soon for Android.
With the popularity of Twitter and the need to keep ‘tweets’ within the 140-character limit, someone came up with the clever idea of a link-shortening service. The idea is that sometimes you want to include a link in your tweet, but some URLs are really long, like the following link to a Wikipedia article which has 67 characters in the URL:
If you wanted to include this URL in your tweet it would take up almost half of the available characters, so you might have to shrink your message to accommodate the link. Link shortening services like bit.ly and goo.gl and others provide you with a unique short URL that will redirect to the longer one, so you drop the short link into your tweet—or in your email or web page: you can use them anywhere you would use a link—and when someone clicks the short link it directs them to the longer URL. This leaves more room in your tweet for your message, and minimizes the number of characters used for links.
For example, I shortened the Wikipedia article URL above using my own shortening service I set up yesterday, which uses only 17 characters: http://stacy.cc/4
I used a free PHP script-based tool called YOURLS (Your Own URL Shortener) found at yourls.org. You can register a short domain name of your own, install and configure the YOURLS software on the domain, and you’re up and running with your own service. Domain registrations are pretty cheap as well, so this is a very low-cost solution if you need it. I registered the stacy.cc domain through my hosting provider, Dreamhost, for $25. I had the whole thing up and running in less than two hours.
Why create your own rather than use one of the freely-available services already out there? The best reason I can think of is control. If you use someone else’s service to handle link redirecting for you, then you run the risk of losing this function if the service shuts down, and your shortened URLs will no longer work. For most people I don’t think it’s a big deal if they’re just using it for Twitter, but if you like the idea of running and controlling your own service, and you’d like to use a custom/branded domain for your redirects, setting up a service like this is a quick and inexpensive option.
Here’s an interesting bit of mobile innovation: EasySign.
It’s an iPhone app that lets you set up digital signatures and then apply them to documents (PDF, Word, Excel, JPG, etc) right on your phone, then send the signed doc wherever it needs to go. It eliminates the need to print the doc, sign a paper copy, scan the signed doc and then send. You can also insert dates and other custom text.
I like the EasySign concept a lot, but what I don’t like about the current model is that it requires server-side technology for inserting the signature into the document, which means it goes to their servers for processing and is then sent back to the user. Their FAQ states that they are looking into other ways of handling this. Ideally it would all be done locally within iOS and never leave your device until you send the finished product.
Today Google introduced Google Wallet—an ‘app that will make your phone your wallet.’
A blurb from the Google blog post describing the service:
You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC) [...] Because Google Wallet is a mobile app, it will do more than a regular wallet ever could. You’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, but without the bulk. When you tap to pay, your phone will also automatically redeem offers and earn loyalty points for you. Someday, even things like boarding passes, tickets, ID and keys could be stored in Google Wallet.
Initially it will only work with one phone (Nexus S) on one network (Sprint) with one credit card (Citi MasterCard) so it’s a very limited rollout.
I’ve recently read that Apple is working on something similar for the iPhone, and I wonder if Apple’s approach will be compatible with Google’s. Adoption of this technology will take much longer if we begin with competing technical standards and protocols.
I also wonder how much more of my life I want to put in a device that’s capable of tracking my location pretty much 24/7 already—now it’s going to track my spending, too. Not only will Google have a near-monopoly on our search data, but now our financial data to analyze and sell to advertisers as well?
AeroFS is a file syncing application, similar to Dropbox, but instead of syncing your files with their servers it runs within your own network and syncs data among your devices internally. It’s a distributed P2P (peer-to-peer) filesystem that doesn’t require a ‘middleman’ server. They offer an optional encrypted sync to their servers (cloud) if you want offsite backup as well. See their Features page for more info.
I used a free 
