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TechNation reviews Gleemy

Published on June 15, 2008 in Gleemy. 0 Comments

TechNation have written a concise story on Gleemy which you can read here. Thanks!

Although only a month old, TechNation is a regular source of my daily startup news intake. Their Australian focus is especially refreshing; the start up and innovation community is lively in Australia, and this site covers it.

If you’re looking for a few good articles to read, I recommend starting with these:

Jason Calacanis’ Tips For Aussie Startup Success Summary of Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Talk at OpenCoffee This Morning Disappointment Imminent for Aussie 3G iPhone Users?

Back in business

Published on June 12, 2008 in Gleemy. 0 Comments

After taking a short hiatus to focus on our day jobs and other projects, we’re super jazzed to be returning to Gleemy.

We’ve started working on a number of features and improvements to the site, including more Slide Show customizations and better file upload.

We’re also excitedly working on the next customizable app scheduled for Gleemy. It’s a step up from Slide Shows. With it you’ll be able to make more personal, rich, and interactive mobile applications - all from our web based authoring tools.

…back to the code!

Does Bill have Windows problems too?

Published on March 5, 2008 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

I don’t know what Bill Gates’ Windows experience is like, but it appears MS executives have had frustrations of their own.

My favourite quotes from this SMH article:

Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft executive in charge of Windows, struggled to even get his home printer working with Vista.

“I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is such a shortage of drivers,” [Jon] Shirley wrote to Ballmer.

Other emails from various Microsoft executives show that even they struggled to work out what “Vista Capable” and “Vista Ready” meant when buying a new PC.

OpenCoffee with an Amazon Web Services Evangelist

Published on March 1, 2008 in Development and Gleemy. 2 Comments

I met Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist Mike Culver at this week’s OpenCofee meetup. Mike visited as part of his tour of Australia and New Zealand.

Mike talked to us about Amazon Web Services and took questions from the group.

I gave Mike feedback on my experience with EC2. In the early days we used EC2 for hosting Gleemy, and it was great. We could start and stop a few Linux boxes as needed and we only paid for the time we used. For a small startup, that’s good news. When Flexiscale launched however, we couldn’t help but switch to it. I explained why to Mike:

The biggest point of pain with EC2 is the risk of losing data. When an EC2 instance terminates or crashes, the disk is erased and any data you haven’t stored elsewhere is lost. Typically, you’d need to use a redundant server or periodically backup your data to S3. On Flexiscale, your virtual hard disk is stored on a SAN. This means your data persists after your instance goes down. Moreover, if a disk on the SAN goes down, it can be swapped for a new one without the need to power down your instance (and without you even knowing about it.) Mike told us this is a common complaint, and to expect EC2 to change accordingly sometime soon. Each time you start an EC2 instance, you are given a different public IP address. You need to use a system like dyndns for maintaining a domain name. Flexiscale gives you a static IP address which you don’t have to worry about changing. On Flexiscale, you can vary the parameters of your virtual host (memory configuration, hard disk size, OS) and pay accordingly. With EC2, you choose from one of 3 pre-configured instances.

Keep in mind, EC2 absolutely excels with distributed computing applications. Read their blog for some pretty amazing stories.

3 new Gleemy features

Published on February 14, 2008 in Gleemy. 0 Comments

Eugene and I have been slogging away shipping new features and bug fixes almost every week this year. The plan is to progress from private BETA to a public BETA release pretty soon.

In this post, I want to show off 3 new features.

1. New mobile Slide Show app

The J2ME Slide Show application is built in to each Slide Show made by our users.

Here’s what’s new:

When you view a picture that doesn’t match the orientation of your phone, an arrow appears to indicate which way you should turn your handset to see it the right way up. Previously, the picture would display the right way up always, but the sides of the picture would be cut off - not good when there’s text involved.
Landscape image with arrow indicator Landscape image with arrow indicator
Good Not good
The ‘Share’ feature works better. You can now send a link to your Slide Show to multiple contacts on a single screen. Sending the SMS no longer blocks the UI, but shows a funky progress animation instead.

2. New Application Profile Page

There are two parts to Gleemy - making and finding Slide Shows (and soon, other types of apps) on your PC; and downloading apps to your phone.

The Application Profile page has been improved. Here’s a screenshot:

App Profile Page

On the left is an emulator which you can fully interact with, to preview the application before downloading. On the right is a QR code which will take you to the mobile download page for the app. I’m delighted to see QR codes finally present in Gleemy, given how much I’ve been raving on about them lately!

3. New mobile portal (http://m.gleemy.com)

Screenshot of mobile portal m.gleemy.com Even though Gleemy is in private BETA, you don’t need to sign up to visit the mobile portal and download Slide Shows made by the community. The site has been improved behind the scenes with more compliant XHTML. We’ve tried to make the ads (served by AdMob) as unobtrusive as possible. Device detection is currently provided by the DetectRight web services API.

…and tons more minor improvements like higher quality thumbnails and images, faster download times, and more! Not interesting enough to describe, but still good features to have implemented.

If you haven’t signed up already, why not try using Gleemy? We now have capacity for more accounts. Simply head to gleemy.com and request an invite.

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