http://franticindustries.com Sat, 10 May 2008 09:34:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Remember my first article on Spotplex? And the second one? Well, unfortunately, they didn't wake up: Spotplex is offline and I doubt it's ever coming back. This is also a wake-up call for anyone that thinks that getting a wildly positive review on Techcrunch is enough to reach stardom. Spotplex, simply, ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/05/10/spotplex-is-dead-hate-to-say-i-told-you-so/ Ultraedit, Notepad, Joe, Textpad: all those editors are created for people who can't handle Vi. Give it to a normal user, and you can bet that there's absolutely no way they're going to find its functions by simply using trial and error. A diehard Vi fan, however, will rather die ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/05/08/masochism-20-online-version-of-vi-editor/ I did not expect Microsoft to withdraw the offer, but that's what they did. I'm relieved that the first season of this soap opera is at an end, as I was getting bored out of my mind with all the speculations regarding the issue. But, I'm afraid that the story ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/05/04/so-what-does-yahoo-do-now/ The answer: this. Marc Andreessen is not in it for the money; he's not trying to be a journalist, and he certainly doesn't care about posting frequency too much. But, he knows a lot about certain topics (in this case, he gives a very thorough MSFT-YHOO analysis, a must-read if ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/04/28/what-makes-a-blog-great/ The debate on whether printed newspapers and magazines are going to die out or not comes up fairly often. I'm not going to into pro or con mode right now, but I will share a thought that comes to me every time I write an article for a paper mag ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/04/12/paper-online/ Back in the day I wrote a review of online photo editors, and my biggest concern with all of them was the lack of some web-oriented options, most notably Photoshop's brilliant ability to have an image resized and scaled to a certain (exact) size while cropping. It's an extremely valuable ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/31/picnik-now-with-crop-resize-scale-at-the-same-time/ Here's a new, painfully simple way to create mixtapes - well, not real mixtapes, but lists of MP3s which can be played directly in a web browser. Which is pretty much the next best thing. The service is called Muxtape and it has literally no options, which is sometimes a ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/25/muxtape-really-simple-way-to-create-mixtapes/ I've noticed recently that I simply cannot keep up with all the e-mail I receive, both here and on Mashable where I'm the features editor. I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you who wrote to me and I didn't reply, but unfortunately my e-mail overload ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/23/a-call-to-connect/ Franticindustries.com got hacked over the weekend with the usual result of nasty keywords appearing in the posts. After a couple hours of tinkering, hopefully I've now patched most of Wordpress' many security holes; but the blame is ultimately on me for not keeping Wordpress up to date. In short: lame ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/16/got-hacked-meh/ There's a blogger fight going on this weekend, with a little lifestreaming application by the name of FriendFeed at its centre. FriendFeed lets you see your and your friends' activity across various web services in a simple feed, and it also adds the ability to comment and tag any individual ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/15/so-is-friendfeed-the-next-big-thing/ Guy Kawasaki (of Truemors fame) launched a new cheapass (10000 bucks) startup: Alltop. The only problem is: it's not a startup. It's nothing more than an extended version of Popurls (they admit it in the upper right corner where it says "Inspired by Popurls), which is in turn a nice ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/11/guy-kawasaki-alltop/ I know the iPhone has been tested, tried, cracked, and tampered with in all possible ways, but I don't often see anyone talking about a serious issue that stabbed my eyes practically from day one I've had the device: multitasking. Now, these problems are reiterated by a find from TechCrunch, ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/03/07/iphone-true-multitasking/ Tony from Deep Jive Interests notices that Mahalo has been doing great according to Compete's com figures, surpassing, for example, upcoming search engines Quintura and Hakia with ease. There's a lesson to be learned from it, and here it is: although Jason Calacanis has dived into the most competitive startup ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/02/28/mahalo-progress/ Kristen from Mashable dug up a really cool website which specializes in t-shirts for venture capitalists. The site, called VCwear, is half-joke, half-real, but the actual t-shirts are really funny and that's what counts. Check out the examples below. Now, the prices are just a little too steep for me ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/02/21/vc-t-shirts/ I often see comments, mostly coming from folks who live in the US, where EDGE is the standard and 3G - UMTS, HSDPA - is still very young, that you don't need 3G if you have Wi-Fi. This, I assure you, is very far from the truth. Even if you ... http://franticindustries.com/2008/02/12/3g-and-wi-fi-theyre-very-different/