About Asides

My "asides" are short reblogged entries that are currently powered by Posterous. You can also view them at asides.bmannconsulting.com.

My feed of asides is the same as my old link blog address. It only contains items that have not been promoted to the front page.

Asides by Boris Mann

Google Apps for (United States) Government

And we’re not stopping with FISMA certification. Google Apps for Government will continue to evolve to meet unique government requirements. Google Apps for Government stores Gmail and Calendar data in a segregated system located in the continental United States, exclusively for our government customers. Other applications will follow in the near future.

PEI: Visitors from Silicon Valley

Had a great breakfast at the Great George Hotel. You sit in armchairs and sofas in the lobby and have little tray tables in front of them. Standard "continental" breakfast - toast, yogurt, and some hot quiches.

As I sat down, I walked into the middle of a discussion by two women about different types of careers that you can "go to school for", and pick directly (vs. ending up in a job/career through circumstance). They talked about engineering and becoming a lawyer and mentioned computer science, but then also talked about how artists and musicians often end up in computer science.

Turns out they were visiting as part of a group getaway from Silicon Valley. Mainly for golfing, but they were part of the "non golfing" spouses. I told them about some of the speaking I would be doing while I was here, and quizzed them a bit about Yelp and so on.

Arrived in PEI, visited Casa Mia Cafe

I'm going to try and keep a few short notes in my asides section on this trip to PEI.

This was my first "red eye" traveling in North America. That is, I intentionally chose an overnight flight as opposed to Europe, where you're usually losing a day in some way because of the time change.

Google acquires Metaweb / @fbase

Bandcamp has a business model

Bandcamp only makes money when you make money. We considered building the business around advertising, but…well, OK, we never really considered that. We did consider building it around subscriptions, but under that model, given the option of either developing a feature to increase your sales by 20%, or dinking around with service tiers to try to boost our subscriptions by 20%, we’d have to choose the latter. By building the business on a revenue share, our interests are perfectly aligned with yours: we only succeed when you succeed.

from bandcamp.com via @cbrumelle

This is the post announcing Bandcamp's business model (15% of sales). Bandcamp is the go to solution for putting a band's music / discography online, and their statement above just makes so much sense: their needs / means of success as a business are 100% aligned with their customers.

The Facebook Economy

On Apps:

"There are 550,000+ apps that are used on Facebook. Seventy percent of users engage with apps each month. There are one million app developers. Zynga, the top app developer, made $250 million in 2009. Of that amount, $80-$150 million is estimated to be profit, more net profit than Facebook itself made."

On Pages:

"There are 1,500,000 active Facebook pages. The average value per fan is $136.38. Extrapolating on that, many celebrity pages would be worth enormous sums:

Michael Jackson, with 13.3 million fans, would have a page worth $1.8 billion. Family Guy has 9.5 million fans for a worth of $1.3 billion. Lady Gaga and Barack Obama each have 9.1 million fans, worth $1.2 billion each. Vin Diesel has nine million fans, worth $1.1 billion. Starbucks has 8.2 million fans, worth $1.1 billion. South Park has 6.2 million fans for a worth of $845 million."

Via VisualEconomics.com

I would love to see something similar for the Android and Apple app store economies.

How to setup Gravity to post to your Flickr account

Gravity is still the best Twitter client for Nokia / Symbian S60 phones. A recent update (it gets a ton of alpha / beta updates all the time, and they're super simple to upgrade to directly from within the app) added direct posting to Flickr.

Evernote + #Drupal = Posterous clone

So just to be clear, here's the workflow:

City of Vancouver looking for #opendata feedback /cc @daeaves

The City of Vancouver is continually looking for ways to improve the
accessibility and usability of its open data catalogue. One option
that has been considered is to provide access to the catalogue through
APIs based on open standards such as REST and web services.


The city currently provides data via bulk downloads of datasets
whereby developers download an entire dataset and create custom API’s
in order to interact with the data and display it in meaningful ways.

Bluetooth + Last.FM = making a café react to its customers /via @ruk /cc @rtanglao @termie

Which got me thinking: how could we make the café react automatically to the customers inside it at any point in time, and adjust the music playlist accordingly.

This week I’ve been working on an answer to this question. Here’s the working theory: