Open Web

AngelList is turning Silicon Valley upside down. It's basically Match.com for startups and business angels, and startups are raising millions from angels on the site almost every day, leaving VCs to scramble for dealflow and paying higher valuations. Not everyone likes it: last week O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures partner and Foursquare investor Bryce Roberts publicly left the site, saying it encourages a herd mentality. Meanwhile prolific startup investor Dave McClure says it's the most innovative thing to happen to startup funding since Y Combinator in 2005.

James Gleick. In his formidable new book, The Information, Gleick explains how we've progressed from seeing information as the expression of human thought and emotion to looking at it as a commodity that can be processed, like wheat or plutonium. It's a long, complicated, and important story, beginning with tribal drummers and ending with quantum physics, and in Gleick's hands it's also a mesmerizing one. Wisely, he avoids getting bogged down in the arcane formulas and equations of information theory-though (fair warning) there are quite a few of those-but rather situates his tale in the remarkable lives and discoveries of a series of brilliant mathematicians, logicians, and engineers

another excellent tutorial from InfoWorld.

Excellent guidelines for developing crossplatform smartphone apps in HTML5-CSS-JavaScript.  Covers Appcellerator, Sencha, jQuery, and Drupal.  Great resource!

Another DropBox integrated into Google Docs.  The list keeps growing.  Box.net just got $48 M fifth round funding.  Google Cloud Connect has been released.  BusyDocs isn't worried though.  They have spent quite a bit of time identifying the many shortcomings of Google Docs.   Good job.

Another DropBox integrated into Google Docs.

If this doesn't make Florian weep, nothing can! Google Cloud Connect for Microsoft Office is now available worldwide. This plugin for Microsoft Office is available to anyone with a Google Account, and brings multi-person collaboration to the Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications that you may still need from time to time. The plugin syncs your work through Google's cloud, so everyone can contribute to the same version of a file at the same time. Learning the benefits of web-powered collaboration will help more people make a faster transition to 100% web collaboration tools.

In taking this next step Box are closing some acquisition doors in electing to attempt to become a core piece of enterprise infrastructure rather than be swallowed up into someone else's larger offering. It's a brave and interesting move that will see them attempting to penetrate on-premise document and project management opportunities that are currently dominated by entrenched vendors, notably Sharepoint. Box's collaboration and work flow tools are currently adequate but unremarkable, and while the user interfaces are well done and unintimidating, they are now attempting to enter the areas of business steeped in document versioning and email inefficiencies that have been so lucrative to Microsoft, who can't be blamed for not cannibalizing their licensing golden geese of Office, Sharepoint and Exchange yet, and probably made 48 million as you read this sentence. Addressing the inefficiencies of these old ways of working are at the core of the modern collaborative enterprise, and it is primarily focusing on business purpose and performance from participants that ultimately unlocks the greater efficiencies possible with 2.0 technologies. The challenge for Box will be to avoid becoming a larger document and content graveyard while providing greater business agility, and this requires some cultural shifts in their offerings to target customers.

The HTML5 Bible

Tech Support Alert has some of the best software reviews i've seen.  Very consistent, informative and insightful.  This page covers their free software recommendations, starting with utilities.  Excellent stuff.

After eliminating those PDF Writers suggested by readers that were not free, were limited time trials, and basically adware (the product was free but forced the user to endure various ads as a punishment for using it), there were only six candidates left.  These were (alphabetically) Bullzip PDF Writer, CutePDF, doPDF, PDFCreator, PrimoPDF, and TinyPDF.  Which one of these is best?  That really depends on the options you need.

Broadcast of Demo Spring 2011, where new companies demonstrate their stuff to Silicon Valley VC

good stuff.  Google Docs uses Foxit PDF Software to do conversions.

Great stuff.

Great article!  First order of the day?  Go to DD-WRT and TomatoUSB to see if your router is compatible.  If it is, download and install the new firmware.  Pretty funny stuff.

Collection of reviews for Cloud based project management systems

the online document service Crocodoc, which Thursday wrote about last year, is rolling out some new features that should make it easier to collaborate on and mark up highly-formatted documents, including PDFs, Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents, and PNG and JPEG images.  Crocodoc is out to replace Adobe Acrobat as the preferred way to display, view and mark up highly-formatted documents.

Good numbers!  Amazon reproting $25 Billion, yet IT is only spending an estimated 10% on Cloud-computing.  2013 Cloud-computing market expected to be $2.5 Trillion. (451 Group)  Amazon currently has 59% of the cloud-services market.