Mark Fletcher is the CEO of Bloglines, and that makes him someone worth listening to. He gave a presentation, titled “From the Garage: Lessons Learned Birthing and Building Web Start-Ups”, at the recent ETech conference. Some bloggers have posted highlights from his presentation.

I found this story via ITNorthWest Voice via Andrej Gregov’s Weblog. Read Andrej’s post for the highlights.

Of course, Mark also has his own blog, wingedpig.com, where he has noted some of the coverage of his presentation. He has also put a copy of the presentation online (PPT), due to popular request.

Why I blog this? Andrej’s highlights from Mark’s presenation are solid, and while most of it was not new information to me, one particular item did catch my eye: Outsourcing small projects to eLance.com — where contractors bid for your work.

I had never heard of eLance, and had not given much consideration to using contractors during the startup phase. But during startup, I really want to keep all my dedicated employees working on the real gold of the company. I could see value in outsourcing some of the small projects that are not make-or-break, but still need to be completed.

Laurence Fried and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California decided to see if they could get water to go superionic. To do so, they recreated the conditions inside the giant planets of our Solar System. Such planets are extremely hot (more than 1,000 ºC) and have extremely high pressure (some 100,000 times the pressure on earth). The team used a device that smashed water between two diamonds. Then they heated the water with an infrared laser. The calculations and experiments appear to show water shifting to a superionic phase. It has been predicted for years that water in this weird state is structured such that the oxygen atoms are essentially frozen, but the hydrogen atoms can whiz around at high speed.

“By looking at [the frequency with which the water molecules vibrated] we are able to determine phase boundaries, but we don’t really know what is on the other side of the boundary.”

The researchers also studied computer models of the atoms’ behaviour, which suggested that the water had indeed entered a superionic phase, a strange state between solid and liquid. Tracking a group of some 60 simulated atoms took weeks, and required computing power equivalent to 1,000 laptops.

Why I blog this? It is cool science and I like to keep track of projects which require decent amounts of computing power. The amount of processing power in the world will continue expanding rapidly, and the price to compute will continue to drop. Thus, any problem which requires a lot of work to solve and is considered hard now could possibly be within reach a few years from now. My computer science background and entrepreneurial mindset scream “Opportunities abound!”

via news@nature.com

Mitch Ratcliffe is the founder of a small company named Persuadio. Persuadio was recently featured in Esther Dyson’s PC Forum - one of hottest annual events in the technology and venture capital worlds. Why? Because Mitch is an entrepreneur with an innovative piece of software. His company has created a free blog social relationship exploration tool called MyDensity. MyDensity maps the first two degrees of the social network around any URL. People can use it to figure out where they are and how people find them. The basic idea is to increase understanding of how people’s sites are rising and falling in popularity and where those changes start in the market.

What we hope to let you do with our tool is let you see where [on the Web] you are compared to all of these other kinds of interests and then measure how much value is somewhere and who you need to influence in order to get people to start paying attention to you.

I found out about MyDensity thru stories Mitch is posting about his ongoing entrepreneurial experiences. See his Red Herring posts entitled We’re talking real money now (Mar. 9/05), Crunch Time (Mar. 17/05), and The extraordinary lightness of entrepreneuring (Mar. 23/05).

Also check out RatcliffeBlog, his personal blog, where he announces Persuadio LLC.

Why I blog this? Because I think he is on to something.

We need more ways to visualize the heaps of metadata the Blogosphere produces. The picture below (created about 24 hours ago) shows the results of a search for this blog. This is a young blog so I did not expect any results, but I had a few.

Searching with MyDensity returns a graph that you can dig into. Needless to say I am impressed with the application. The visual interface and navigation need work but can be upgraded later - innovative functionality comes first. When the resources are available a better visual interface can be built and MyDensity could be set to kick ass. But hey… maybe I am biased?

Why I really blog this? As you may have guessed, the primary reason for this post is to attract Mitch’s attention. I would hazard a small bet that he notices. Maybe this post will help increase Echo Generations popularity. I guess I will just have to check in from time to time using MyDensity to see if it does.

If he notices this post I wager mucho dinero that the next time I use his search engine the results for this blog will be worth posting about… again. :)

via ZDNet - Startup Persuadio visualizes opportunity in the Internet’s long tail. ZDNet also hosts an audio interview with Ratcliffe (mp3).