What is the future of NYC Technology companies?  Are we here to service the old gatekeepers?  Or are we going to build new companies that empower people to do great things?  Scott Heiferman put that question to an audience of 700 tonight in an FIT auditorium.  A number of do-gooders (Scott's label) proceded to challenge us technologists to do more than just produce another shopping app.  It's been awhile since I attended a NY Tech Meetup and I definitely need to make myself a regular.  Majora Carter wants city planning tools that better show the value to citizens lives of green spaces.   She was particularly harsh on Sports Teams and public funding of stadiums.  It added a little perspective.…

For the last three months we have been preparing Crowd Fusion in anticipation of an announcement that will put our framework in the hands of hundreds and hopefully thousands of developers and media companies. The timing was right, so we applied for TechCrunch 50 and were honored by the opportunity to present on stage and give this announcement.  Our framework, codename sprung, and Crowd Fusion CMS are now open source licensing.  For the next 6 to 8 weeks we'll be taking beta signups and working with developers who apply in preparation for a full public release.Our core framework now uses Inversion of Control (IoC) and an event model to allow developers full access to the framework and easily…

Are you a hard core XHTML/CSS designer/developer looking to work collaboratively with a strong team of experts challenging and learning from each other daily while building the next big thing in web publishing? Ideal candidate has superb skills in XHTML and CSS, a working knowledge of JavaScript, SVN, web design experience, and is comfortable with webpage templating principles.     Crowd Fusion is an exciting virtual company, made up of people who love what they do, which relies heavily on strong communication skills and interactive tools like basecamp, campfire and email.   Contractor needs to be able to commit to 10-20 hours per week and be available at least half of these hours to collaborate with the Crowd Fusion development team.  Ideally available 2-3…

The Obsessable launch seems like it was years ago, but it's only been 3 short months.   Three short months without a single contribution to this site.  That needs to change and what better time to start posting than January, resolutions and all.   Family was here for the holidays, like most Christmases there was much sickness, hurrah, good time had by all though (more in another post -- or in pictures).   Crowd Fusion is progressing at a rapid pace and helping build exciting new ways to consume media.   The Obsessable team is showcasing the platform right now with their CES 2009…

What's so different Obsessable than the other dozen great technology sites ? The easy answer is Crowd Fusion.  The platform allows us to attract great talent and let them act superhuman.  Speaking of Superhumans, we hired Barb Dybwad. Take a look at an individual product page like the T-Mobile G1. It's not only description and specs or stories we've written, there are stories from around the web, that we are curating through an internal RSS reader.  This gives us a deep search experience, helps us find news stories and new products faster than other sites, and assign them into…

Your browser does not support JavaScript. This media can be viewed at http://www.podtech.net/home/5023/whats-inside-sxsw-interactive On the first day of SXSW Ryan and I registered early and avoided the lines.  We then found a pair of comfy chairs right under the wireless router.  It turned out to be a high traffic area for the press and we got interviewed by the Houston Chronicle and I got two quotes in an Intel Video -- the one I knew they'd like is at 1:00 in where I say that I sleep with my laptop under my pillow. I did a ton of name dropping include Crowd Fusion a couple of times - Jason I am learning.

If you haven't been following the Comcast v. BitTorrent debate that is being mediated by the FCC, get out from under that rock.  The future of the internet is being decided now and if you don't step up and tell the powers that be how you feel - you are destined to have internet programming regulated by the same clowns that bring you 20 hours of Reality TV every evening.  I signed up for Verizon EVDO on February 28th.  I noticed in the contract that if they decided I was a 'heavy user' they would restrict my bandwidth.   I wasn't thrilled at the idea, but I only needed it for travel so I didn't expect that I'd be a candidate for throttling.   I liked the service enough that I recommend it to a friend to use instead of his Cable Internet, when he got to the store on…

Refactor I is in the books and released to the production environment of Crowd Fusion.  Ryan nearly single handedly rebuilt our prototype code into a far more logical OOP framework that will allow for more hands to be working simultaneously.  The refactor took less than 5 weeks, 6 was budgeted, and retains the main principles of MVC with strong leaning on Elements as our fundamental class structure. True project management has begun and a build out of all the weapons in our arsenal is in full swing.  We are now adding developers to the core coding team.  One of the biggest changes moving from the old code to the current version was the rewriting of the stub, our old initialization routines were disjointed and complex to navigate.  The new system is truely a single…

We have started a Refatoring of the code base for Crowd Fusion.  This version of the Code is barely 6 months old but was prototypical from its birth.  Ryan is taking the lead and being sensitive to the core principles, our Element Controllers are restrictive, but allow future extensibility without conflict, and need to remain intact.   While working through some of the framework design flow were discussing a great post about 'professional PHP developers' and I thought about a missing component to this.   A professional PHP developer has undergone numerous refactors, and they'll be able to talk about the pitfalls. Great programmers are never happy with what they wrote yesterday.  So I'm trying to come…

Ryan started working with us full-time at Crowd Fusion this month and we are ecstatic to have him.  Hiring him was a triumph that is seems many other NYC Startups are having trouble with.  Nate Westhimer posted about his trouble finding php developers and Allen at Centernetworks picked up the story.  I'm drawn into this conversation because of my recent history of being an advocate of the virtual workforce and that Nate being an internet entrepreneur is caught up with old world workplace notions. We have been able to find tremendous talent available if you broaden your search scope.  Virtual working is…

Another Milestone accomplished yesterday on Crowd Fusion, the permissions system was put live in production.  The fundamentals of the permissions system are similar to many others that you'll find on the web. Members authenticate through a signin form. Members belong to Teams (a.k.a Groups). Content (pages, news, photos) can be limited to one or many teams. The tagging system and our tag widget makes the tasks of adding the groups to the content and filtering the content powerfully dynamic and simple to learn.  

The underlying structure of Crowd Fusion is definitely out of prototype, through alpha and solidly Beta.  Brian and I spent last Thursday going over the Elements of Crowd Fusion and the Inbound and Outbound linking structure connecting each element to one another.   Needless to say it answered some nagging questions about the interplay between things like media and news and allowed me to 'finalize' how galleries and project pages will be handled on this site. An example of this inter-connectivity is when you go to an individual project page like Crowd Fusion you get a synopsis and a list of what I'm writing in regards to that project.…

In December the fledgling Crowd Fusion Team met in Philadelphia for 3 days of coding, colaberation and consumption.  Below is the group enjoying the Feast of Seven Fishes with the author of EZ Street  Robert Tinnell.   Alex Hilman gracious let us live in Independents Hall conference room.  For the first time at Crowdfusion design, process, and development began to gel into a solid product offering.  We met our old buddy Mike Propst in Philadelphia, he joined us for dinner, and gave us some great design feedback. Alex is running what is quickly becoming a model co-working space that makes Philadelphia a very…

Often building a better mouse trap is the best kind of innovation.  In these days of Foolish Facebook Evaluations and VC money tripping over each other to find the next hot internet platform it makes sense to remember that Altavista was an early winner in the Search Engine space and Friendster is widely attributed as the creator of Social Networking -- where are these brands now? As Brian and I are starting to promote CrowdFusion the question comes up a lot, "What is unique about your Internet Web Publishing Platform?".   Everyone wants you to condense your product down to an elevator pitch.  I can't --  we are building a better mouse trap -- we have revolutionary concepts -- but they need to be seen within the context of the overall product.  Why…

In college I had a cloned IBM PC that my father bought me as we were leaving Hong Kong.  This AT with a Turbo button would cruise at a whopping 10Mhz.  Other than typing papers for the Football players in my dorm, about the only other thing I did the PC while in college was attempt to write the Warrior System with Brian Alvey.  I didn't stay in Texas long enough for us to get very far on the Super Hero platform to end all platforms, but through random encounters and discussion over the last 20 years (many around pool tables) we've never lost the desire to work together on a killer computer framework.