Rojo

Google has just released a lengthy blog post to announce that it has finally put its privacy policy on its homepage. The search giant has been repeatedly questioned over the last few months over its lack of a readily available privacy policy, which until now has been buried in the “About Google” section of the site. The explanation has always been vague (and ridiculous), with Google repeatedly appealing to its desire to keep the home page as pristine as possible.

Google hasn’t said why it finally gave in, but it’s likely that it has been facing pressure from the government to make the privacy policy more available - a post by Saul Hansell points out that the lack of a visible policy may have actually been illegal under California law.

The announcement was accompanied by a lighthearted description of Google’s “homepage weight” - the number of words visible on the page at one time. Apparently the magic number is 28 words, and the company was forced to drop a word from its copyright disclaimer in order to make room for the new link.

It’s an interesting little story, but the tone of it is sort of strange. Privacy is a big deal at Google, so why the levity? We’ve had some recent concerns over where Google is getting its website usage data from, nevermind the fact that it may soon hand over all YouTube user data by court order. It would be nice if they were a little more forthcoming, even if it’s at the cost of a whimsical story.

Despite these concerns, we should give Google some credit for a hosting a pretty comprehensive privacy portal (even if it was difficult to find before). Here’s their captivating introduction to cookies:

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Here are some of the jobs listed on CrunchBoard over the last week:

• Fulltime Senior AJAX/PHP Web Developer
  DriverSide - San Francisco, CA
• QA Engineer
  Gx5 - Anywhere
• Software Support Specialist
  K&L Wine Merchants - Redwood City, CA
• GoodBarry .NET Web Development Ninja
  GoodBarry - San Francisco, CA
• Head of Web Design & Front-End Development
  Global Campus - London, UK
• Quality Assurance Cowboy
  Janus Health - San Diego, CA
• Web Developer
  Wall Street On Demand - Boulder, CO
• Operations Support Engineer
  LiveOffice - Torrance, CA
• Technical Architect
  Frog Design - Milan, IT
• Ruby Developer
  TechCrunch - Atherton, CA

International readers can check out our British and French job boards as well.

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The recent court order directing Google to hand over data to Viacom about every YouTube video ever watched strikes many people as an absurd overreach of the law into the privacy of anyone who has ever used YouTube (i.e., almost everyone on the Internet). Google should definitely keep fighting the ruling if it can.

But if it can’t, perhaps it should comply with it in a creative way. The data in question are data logs containing the records of every video watched on YouTube, by whom, and at what times. The court is also ordering that Google hand over all videos that have ever been taken down for any reason. The logs alone take up 12 terabytes. Google should print them out and deliver them on paper.

It would literally fill up the Library of Congress. That is roughly the equivalent of all the printed books in the Library of Congress (by one estimate, others put it at 20 terabytes—either way, it’s a lot of paper). The court order never states what form, the data must be delivered in.

(Photo via, appropriately enough, the Library of Congress And hat tip to reader Paul Christiansen for the original suggestion).

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We’ve seen a number of music sites like Seeqpod and Grooveshark that leverage user-uploaded music scattered across the web to offer free, on-demand jukeboxes. These services manage to skirt legal repercussions by only serving content that is hosted on other sites, which makes them harder to sue (though some have tried).

Streamzy, a media search startup that launched earlier this year, has taken this approach one step further. Instead of trying to index user-generated content, Streamzy uses Seeqpod’s database as a content source, which it further refines by weeding out broken links. The site, which used to only support audio, has just introduced video playback as well.

Streamzy offers a streamlined (and much improved) interface for Seeqpod’s content, sporting a minimalist player that neatly labels each song by title and artist name. Beyond basic media playback, Streamzy also offers an intuitive drag-and-drop playlist maker that users can save for future reference. In the future the company plans to allow for users to embed playlists on their blogs and social network profiles.

Streamzy isn’t much more than a resigned interface for Seeqpod, but it’s a redesign that was badly needed. And while it will have a hard time differentiating itself from the likes of Jogli, Songza, Soundflavor and a number of others, it’s a good place to start for music on demand.

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While at Dyson HQ, I had the pleasure, once again, of interviewing the man himself. I had to ask what his thoughts were on the iPhone, and James’ answers were both entertaining and interesting.

I have an iPhone and a BlackBerry. And I have to confess that I use the BlackBerry more. But I really wanted to like the iPhone because it’s thin—one of the clever things about it—thinner than any other phone, and fits easily in your pocket. I find that a nuisance if you’re going to a function or whatever it is. I really like that about it.

I hate the touchscreen. That’s my biggest complaint. I love the weather, really good. Maps are brilliant. The way you are supposed to use it, I really like. I’m not sure about having to slide that thing across every time you answer a phone call. As a way of locking the screen, I accept that because it’s important.

Read the rest of the interview at CrunchGear

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Even back in January when Microsoft agreed to pay $1.2 billion for enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer, it was mired in an accounting scandal and trading in its stock had been suspended. Its aggressive accounting for phantom deals that never materialized earned it the moniker the “Enron of Norway.” But more sordid details keep coming out from some tenacious reporting by the Norwegian press.

The latest account comes in the June 28 issue of the Norwegian magazine Dagens Næringsliv. In an article (in Norwegian) by Trond Sundnes, Dagens Næringsliv, Gøran Skaalmo, the magazine details how the Norwegian company booked free software trials as revenues, and how its executives set up shell corporations for allegedly self-dealing purposes. A translated version of the article (embedded below) is making the rounds among Fast’s competitors and inside Microsoft itself.

The problems at Fast were financial in nature and tied to an overly aggressive sales culture, which arguably Microsoft can fix. But it does point to a certain blindness on the part of Microsoft, or at least a willingness to look the other way, in its obsessive quest to become a player in search (see Yahoo and Powerset). It also raises questions about Fast’s underlying search technology. If Fast was having trouble closing deals for its products, how good can its technology really be?

According to the article, Fast had booked $50 million in fake revenue, $20 million in fictional contracts, and former top executives closely linked to CEO Markus Lervik siphoned off $6 million to shell companies they controlled. Lervik continues to lead the business and is currently the vice president for enterprise search at Microsoft.

Some of the details from the article include:

—The company had an aggressive practice of giving enterprise customers free trial periods and marking them down as tentative deals.

—One of these was a large $18 million deal with Australian Telecom company Telstra that the company recognized as revenues in late 2006. But the deal then failed to materialize.

—A second deal for which Fast never got paid was with Accoona, another shady search company.

—An audit uncovered unauthorized payments to a shell company in Fort Myers, Florida called Archtech that is owned by a former Fast VP, Peter Bauert and Fasts’s former CFO Ali Riaz (through yet another company he controls called Bluebird Collabo). That’s Riaz in the Audi pictured above.

Lervik never responded to repeated requests for comment, but Microsoft did. It sent adjusted annual reports for 2006 and 2007 which noted that over 30 million Norwegian Kroner ($6 million) was “irregularly” paid and “wrongly approved” to:

. . . companies owned or controlled by persons who at the time of the transactions were closely related parties.

That is an apparent reference to Archtech and other shell companies that were supposedly reselling Fast software. The problem, according to the the documents Microsoft provided, was that these related companies “purchased” $3.5 million worth of software licenses for which Fast was never actually paid.

I always wondered what the “transfer” part of Fast Search & Transfer referred to.

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In this post, guest author Ryan Carson goes through some of the lessons learned from building a Web app in four days. Carson is the co-founder of Carsonified, a web shop in Bath, UK. They’ve built four web apps, created ThinkVitamin.com and run events like Future of Web Apps. If you’re bored you can follow Ryan on Twitter.

The time it takes to design, build and deploy web applications has been steadily shrinking, especially with frameworks like Django, Rails and Symfony. With that in mind, we decided to push ourselves and attempt to launch a web app in 32 hours. Four crazy days later, Matt was born.

The app we built is a simple tool that allows you to post to multiple Twitter accounts. We learned a ton during the experience so I’d like to share some of those lessons with you.

How we did it

We have a team of nine people which were divided as follows:

• Two developers
• One designer / front-end developer
• Two bloggers
• One copywriter
• Three PR folks

I would say you only need three people if you want to strip it back to the bare minimum, which would look like this:

• One developer
• One designer / front-end developer
• One blogger / PR person

Our app was built in Python using Django and is hosted at WebFaction. It uses the Twitter API, Git and Codebase for version control.

How much did it cost?

On a basic level it cost us a week of salaries (around $10,000). There are some other small costs which I’m not including like rent, electricity, coffee and taxes. We got hosting for free because of a connection we have with the company but if you paid for that you might expect to pay not more than $400 for the first month (for a simple app).

Team building

Building a web app quickly is not only a great idea if you need to get your idea to market fast but it’s also a great way to build team morale.

You don’t need to build a brand new app in order to benefit from this idea. You can actually take time off to work on a new feature or direction for your current app.

There are some serious benefits to stepping away from your normal work and producing something totally new and creative:

1. The best boost you can give you or your team is to provide the time to be creative. Turning off your phones and email and just focusing on something new and exciting will do wonders for your energy level.
2. It could generate some amazing buzz around you and your company or products.
3. You’ll come back to your current projects with a new perspective and renewed energy.
4. It will push your team to learn new skills. For example, Will, our head of sponsor relationships, spent the whole week doing PR - something new for him.

Tips on working wisely

Here are a few tips that you should keep in mind if you’re focusing on building apps quickly:

1. Limit meetings to one 10 minute chat in the morning and one 10 minute wrap-up at the end of each day. Meetings are the best way to kill productivity and crush creativity so keep ‘em short.
2. Get people away from their machines at lunch. Go for lunch together and maybe throw the frisbee or play Wii. The excitement and creativity will quickly deteriorate if you don’t have a break during the day.
3. Simplify the site and app as much as possible. Try launching with just ‘Home’, ‘Help’ and ‘About’.
4. Make sure to build on a great framework like Rails, Symfony, Django or Objective-J. Part of our experiment was playing with Django and comparing it to Rails and Symfony (a PHP framework). We’ve found that Django lacks the rigor of Rails or Symfony, thus might not be an ideal choice for future projects.
5. Go with the first logo idea and color scheme from your designer. You shouldn’t over-analyze the look and feel of everything as this process can go on indefinitely. Design the logo and move on. This is why you need to hire good designers and trust them to be good at what they do.
6. Be technologically agnostic. If your developers are saying it should be built in a certain language and framework and they have solid reasons, trust them and move on. Again, this is about hiring smart people and getting out of their way.
7. Coordinate how your designers and developers are going to work together. Our designer creates static HTML and then passes it to the developers who use the HTML as a basis for creating templates. These templates are then committed to a Git repository and from then on, the whole team works from that one repository.
8. It’s not enough to just have a designer and a developer. You need a dedicated person who’s focus is solely spreading the word about your application and working to get media coverage. There’s no way we could get the kind of coverage for Matt that we hope to achieve without several of us working full time on it. However, do not hire a PR agency for this - there needs to be an authentic passion for the app that can only come from your team. (For instance, I asked TechCrunch to cover it, and Erick came back with the suggestion to write this post).
9. Get your ‘Creation Environment’ setup correctly.

Building your Creation Environment

If you want to build quickly and creatively, you need to set up an environment that encourages and facilitates that process. If you don’t have the following basics down, your team will be constantly battling annoying issues instead of getting on with building. You’ll need:

1. Good version control. I suggest Git.
2. An easy-to-use source and changeset browser. We use Codebase.
3. Solid server infrastructure. Why not build on Flexiscale, Grid-Service, Mosso or EC2 and let the big boys worry about uptime and server load?
4. A ‘one-click’ deployment system. This means that deploying the code from your repository should take just one click. If it’s any more complex than that, there is potential for complications and downtime. Capistrano is brilliant if you’re using Rails.
5. Printers, chalk boards and meeting space. People need the physical space to throw around ideas. We’ve painted an entire wall with blackboard paint so the team has room to sketch ideas.
6. Coffee, water, music and healthy snacks.

If you really get these right, it makes building and creating so much more enjoyable and fast.

So that’s it …

Thanks for listening to the Matt story. Please share your advice and experience by commenting below. If you want to see a whole day of development squeezed down into four minutes, watch the video below. Enjoy.

Matt Week - Day Two Time Lapse - Music by MGMT

Related reading, ideas and tools

• Contest to build an app in 48 hours: Rails Rumble
• Post about the danger of too much functionality: Features are a one-way street
• Powerful web frameworks: Django, Rails, Symfony, Objective-J
• Version Control: Git and Subversion
• Source and changeset browsers: Codebase and Beanstalk
• Cloud hosting: EC2, Flexiscale, Google App Engine
• Easy deployment: Capistrano

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Google has announced an iPhone version of Google Talk which is simply an iPhone-ized browser-formatted version of the Google’s text chat application. This means you can’t talk over the Interwebs but you can tap out halting messages to your friends on the iPhone’s screen and, thanks to Safari’s tendency to clear pages randomly, you probably won’t enjoy a sustained conversation.

When the App store finally launches expect about 500 VoIP solutions for the iPhone on the first day. Until then, sit back, think of England, and enjoy your browser-based Google Talk while it’s fresh.

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Just as The Governator tries to pursue green policies, like keeping Tesla’s electric production car local, you’ll now also be able to hand out full-sized “green” business cards with Flickr images, courtesy of the same guys who brought us those cool little mini-cards, Moo.com. They are launching full-sized business cards with a new partner, LinkedIn, which makes sense in the business space, so maybe that be-suited VC won’t snigger at your tiny Moo cards any more. Moo already has partnerships with Facebook, Flickr, Bebo and LiveJournal so that people can turn their image galleries into cards. Their technology means they can put a unique individual image on every card you order - impossible with other printers. So far they’ve sold over 10m cards to more than 180 countries - even to some people in Afghanistan. They recently released an API, and have a cards designer reward scheme in the works. The new classic business cards are sourced from sustainable forests and the ‘Green’ business cards are 100% recycled, 100% recyclable and 100% biodegradable. Here’s an interview I shot to with CEO Richard Moross.

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