Cartalk Podcast

NPR now offers a podcast of the full episodes for CarTalk which is great news because I usually miss about 50% of every episode (even with the repeats). Other great NPR shows available as a podcast:

• Wait wait... Don't tell me!
• This American Life

It's great to see NPR acknowledge the changing role of radio and adapt. I hope PBS is thinking along the same lines.

Startup Camp 2 Report

As I mentioned, I attended Startup Camp 2 this past monday. The event was fairly well attended, mostly by people attending Java One that week - Sun made an effort to provide a forum for a bunch of free one-day events called Community One. One downside to this was that there were several events that I would have liked to attend going on at same time and I spent most of the breaks doing work...

For the second iteration of Startup Camp the event was compressed to a single day in San Francisco (presumably to live within the constraints of Community One). The event seemed to have a somewhat different vibe from the first one - not better or worse, just different - maybe it was a different crowd or the layout of the conference rooms at the hotel. Some of the discussions tended to turn into lectures and it took a concerted effort to not turn things into a monologue. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz spoke at the start about why startups are important to Sun as customers and to him personally (he called Startups 'the Swamp from which I spawned').

Some of the sessions I attended:

• Should Startups "think scale first"?: Jinesh Varia from Amazon Web Services ran a discussion to trade off the costs and benefits of designing for scalability up front versus dealing with problems as they arise. My own take is "it depends" on lots of different factors about your startup - some level of planning is appropriate but a lot of thinking tends to ignore survivor bias - for every Twitter.com there are many many failures and priority #1 should be proving out your idea. Jinesh gave some information at the end about the tools that AWS has for startups which allow you to pay for what you need, not what you think you might need. His presentation reminded me about Amazon Simple Queue Service which I had tried out several years ago but which makes a lot more sense in the context of EC2 and S3.
• OpenID: What can it do for my Startup?: Luke Sontag and Kaliya Hamlin answered people's questions about Open ID and how to use it in your webapp. There were a lot of concerns about phishing and trust in general which apparently are not currently addressed. My take away was that Open ID aims to solve a limited problem and because it's recently gained a lot of support from various groups, it now needs to increase the scope of the problem it solves to be web single-sign on.

At Startup Camp 2

I'll be at Startup Camp 2 tomorrow morning. The last one was quite informative and this time it's in San Francisco so the crowd may be a little different. It also looks like it will be even better attended at least as far as I can tell from the registration page with more than 400 people. Unlike Startup Camp 1, it's only a single day long which it about all the time I can spare right now but I'll report back tomorrow. Startup Camp is sponsored by Sun and is part of a bunch of Community events around Java One including RedMonkOne by the guys at Redmonk who I met at the previous Startup Camp.