Weblog of Daniel Brusilovsky

Moving Forward

Daniel Brusilovsky — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:00:55 +0000

I’ve had a lot of amazing opportunities in my life so far, and I thank many people for where I’ve come today — my family, my friends, and especially Robert Scoble — but there are some opportunities too good to say no to.

Starting Monday (tomorrow), I’ll be joining TechCrunch working on events, conferences and business development with Asad Akbar (Events Director) and Heather Harde (CEO). I’ve been friends with TechCrunch for some time now, and have been working from their new Palo Alto office time to time on my projects (Qik and Teens in Tech), and have been looking into other routes to follow in my life.

I’m excited to be joining TechCrunch considering first and foremost, I was a blogger, and that environment is what I love. I’ll be joining an amazing group of individuals whose writing is all over the internet. I’m sure a lot of you are probably thinking – what’s going to happen with Qik? Don’t worry, I’m not leaving Qik. Both Qik and TechCrunch are part time jobs, and I’ll be able to work both.

I just want to thank Michael Arrington and Heather Harde for this amazing opportunity at TechCrunch, and for all the people involved. Look out TechCrunch — here comes Daniel!

Day 2 with the G2

Daniel Brusilovsky — Sun, 31 May 2009 05:31:54 +0000

I recently attended the Google I/O developer conference where Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering at Google, had his own “Oprah moment.” Google gave every attendee (estimated around 4,000) a G2 phone with the latest version of Google’s Android mobile operating system.

I went down after school to Moscone West in San Francisco, where Google I/O was held, to attend some sessions and pick up my G2 phone. After picking up my phone and activating it, etc, I spent the rest of the day playing with the phone. Here are my initial comments/feedback for Google if they care to listen. All of this is subject to change, since I’ve spent less then 48 hours with the G2 and my opinion will change in the future.

The Good

Google really worked hard with HTC, the makers of the G2, on branding the phone for Google I/O. First of all, the phone is engraved on the back with the Google I/O logo, and the first thing you see when you boot up the phone is a I/O logo as well before it boots up into Android. Google did very well on branding the phone, besides the OS, considering the phone is free for attendees of I/O.

Another feature I really like is the integration of Google products, like GMail, Google Chat, Maps, YouTube and others. Being that I’m a Twitter addict, I had to download Twidroid, the essential Twitter application for Android.

Android has it’s own ‘App Store’ by the name of “Android Market.” In no way is it comparable to Apple’s iTunes App Store; the Market doesn’t have a community involved like the App Store and what Apple has built. However, there are some pretty cool applications like Beetaun, and more.

The Bad

I said that Google integrated their own applications like GMail, so when you boot the phone for the first time, you put in GMail details, and it grabs your email, and contacts on Google Contacts. With GMail, the mail client automatically fetches messages with the POP3 protocol (I much prefer IMAP), so messages I’ve already elsewhere still appear as unread on the phone. It would be nice to have a setting in the phone to have the email as IMAP, and not just POP3.

Another small beef I have with Android as an operating system is security. It’s very easy for someone to guess your “password” just by looking at your finger smudges on the screen. Android needs much better security then just connecting dots.

Conclusion

At first look, the G2 model seems to be an improvement to G1. I’ve only played with friends G1s, and it’s definitely nice to have an Android phone. I’ll be playing more with the phone in the next month while I have my free service, so I’ll report back after I’ve spent some more quality time with it.

Technorati Profile

Summer Plans: 2009

Daniel Brusilovsky — Wed, 20 May 2009 08:00:13 +0000

With my junior year in high school coming to a close in 10 days, it’s time to (somewhat unofficially) announce some of my summer plans. First off, one of my main focuses this summer is Teens in Tech, for which we are working on version 2.0 of the site. We’re on schedule for testing in early July, and are really working hard on delivering new features and revising the site, so expect a lot of changes. I can tell you now that Teens in Tech will not be the same at 2.0.

My other focus this summer will most likely be Qik. I’ve been with Qik since February 2008, and I have a great position (Product Marketing Manager/Evangelist) and work with a great team. I get to travel to conferences across the Silicon Valley and spread the joy that is Qik. If you don’t have an account, go sign up now.

Speaking of conferences, I’ll be taking many more speaking engagements this summer, starting with Ypulse Mashup in the first week after school ends, and in the end of June, the Social Networking Conference in Beverly Hills, Calif. I’m willing to take up all sorts of speaking engagements, so if you want me to speak at your event, please get in touch.

I will continue to blog here, and produce podcasts on my show, Apple Universe Podcast (I know things have been slow there, but lots of great shows coming soon!).

I’m also continuing to consult though my firm T-Cast Media. We are still working on a site, and we are almost done. I’ll also be working with my business partner, Sam Levin (@samlevin) on projects like Western Digital, and others.

In the end, summer is time for me to relax from school, and not stress about essays, and homework and all that stuff, time for me to enjoy my time as a teenager, and that’s my biggest priority. I’ll be spending more time with my friends, and just enjoying my childhood, which I haven’t done too much in the recent times. Lots of people tell me that I should be a kid first, and entrepreneur second, and hopefully I’ll fulfill that goal this summer.

WWDC 2009

Daniel Brusilovsky — Sun, 17 May 2009 04:00:54 +0000

With WWDC, Apple’s developer conference less then one month away, it’s time to get prepared. You’re probably wondering: admission costs more than $1,000, and you have to sign an NDA just to attend the conference sessions. Most developers who go say it’s worthwhile, but all the Apple fanboys/girls look forward to one key event during the whole show: the keynote.

Sam Levin (@samlevin), and I will be reporting live from the first couple of rows at the WWDC keynote this year. Apple said, and I quote “if you have a camera, we’d need you to be in the pit with the rest of b-cast (so I suggest leaving the camera in your bag and just blogging). Speaking of, live blogging is fine but we ask that there is no live video or audio of the keynote.” So that ruins my plans of Qikking the entire keynote, but we’ll still be live blogging and live tweeting the entire event.

What I’ll probably do is just run a blog post and send updates and add pictures as we go. Engadget’s got the live blogging down, as well as TechCrunch, so we’ll give it a go here!

More updates to come…

From TextMate to WordPress

Daniel Brusilovsky — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 00:37:25 +0000

(Editors note: The following post is a guest post written by Joseph McLaughlin, a junior attending Brigham Young University – Idaho. Joseph is a 17 year old (turning 18 next month), code monkey and geek. Subscribe to his blog and follow him on Twitter.)

Have you ever wished that you could write new blog posts for your WordPress blog without having to log in and mess with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor? Well, you can, using MacroMate’s popular text editor TextMate. The purpose of this post is to get you up and running, so you can write your articles from TextMate, and publish them to your blog with a couple clicks.

To get started, you need to ensure that you have the “Remote Publishing” option turned on in the Settings → Writing section of your blog. You need to check the box to the right of XML-RPC, as shown in the following screenshot.

Before we can start blogging from TextMate, we have to set up a config file with the necessary information for TextMate to connect to WordPress. To access the config file, navigate to Bundles → Blogging → Setup Blogs as shown in the following screenshot.

You need to enter your blog information in this format:
This is my blog title http://myusername@myblogurl.com/xmlrpc.php

For example, here’s what mine looks like:

josephmclaughlin.info http://josephmclaughlin@josephmclaughlin.info/blog/xmlrpc.php

If you’d like to be able to post to multiple blogs, you can set up each one on a different line, and you’ll be able to type in which blog will be posted to each time.

At this point, make sure you save the configuration file, or you won’t be able to connect.

The next step we’ll take is to take a look at the formatting required by TextMate to assign all the meta-data required by WordPress (i.e. Title, Categories, Tags). The best way to do this, is to download one of your current posts and take a look at where everything goes. To download a post, you need to navigate to Bundles → Blogging → Fetch Post. TextMate will connect to your server and assuming everything goes well, you’ll get a dialog box showing the posts that are currently on your blog similar to the following:

Pick any one of your posts to take a look at, one that has a lot of content is good, so that you can get a good feel of how TextMate will handle it. I’ll go with my jQuery Tutorials post, to illustrate what some of the tags do.

The tags at the top of the article, as I mentioned, will be used for the meta-data of the post, and won’t appear in the post itself. Let’s go through them one by one, and talk about what they do.

Type: For our purposes, since this tutorial is geared towards WordPress, will always be the same – “Blog Post (HTML)”. You can copy and paste this value when you create a new post, or type it in just like it appears (”Type: Blog Post (HTML)”)
Blog: This is which blog you’d like to publish the article to, and it should be the same thing you called your blog when you edited the config file. If you are posting to multiple blogs, make sure you fill this in. Otherwise, you can skip it and TextMate will automatically add it when you post it.
Link: You can, and should omit this tag when you write a new post (you can leave it there if you’re updating a post). If you fill something in, you’re running the risk it will conflict with the link structure you’ve set up for your blog.
Post: You should omit this tag when writing a new post. It’s the number of the post that you’re writing/editing (including comments). If you change it, you could mess up your WordPress database.
Title: Pretty self explanatory, this is the title of your post. If you omit this, your post won’t have a title, which can cause severe problems depending on how your theme was written. Besides, you want your posts to have a title, right?
Slug: If you want to specify a special “URL-safe” name for your post, you can use this tag, otherwise, omit it and WordPress will automatically generate it based off of your title.
Keywords: These are what WordPress calls “tags”, you can put as many as you want (up to 255 I believe). This isn’t a required tag, but they’re good for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
Status: This can be set to either “publish” or “draft”, but can be omitted if you’d like (It will default to “publish”)
Date: Unless you want to specify a date other then the one you publish it, you can use this tag, otherwise, it’ll default to the current date/time.
Pings: This is an optional tag and defaults to “On”, if for some reason you want to disable Pingbacks and Tracebacks, you’re welcome to include this tag and give it the “Off” option.
Comments: This is also an optional tag and it defaults to “On” as well. If you don’t want to allow comments on the post for whatever reason, you can include this tag with the “Off” parameter.
Category: This is the same as WordPress Categories, you can include multiple (or no) categories separated by commas.

That about sums it up. TextMate is an incredibly powerful way to blog, because you have complete control of the HTML of your post, without having to use the WordPress web editor. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by email: josephmc…@me.com or on Twitter: @mclaughj and I’ll be happy to help you as best I can.

What I Launched in a Weekend: My Startup Weekend

Daniel Brusilovsky — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:00:35 +0000

With Startup Weekend San Francisco now over, I wanted to talk about what I did this weekend, and where I’m going from now on with my latest project. Initially, I came into Startup Weekend thinking I was just going to help oversee the event along with the lead organizer, Tyler Willis. On Friday night I was helping take pictures, and doing other small things.

After the pitches were done, which most were amazing, I went off and hung out with my friend Dylan Field. We were talking about technology, the web, and social networks, when Naveen Koorakula came up to us, and asked what we were (developers, designers, etc). I quickly explained that I was an organizer, and probably wouldn’t partake in the event. Dylan, also an organizer, told Naveen he was a developer with strong PHP experience (I agree – he’s an excellent developer). Once Naveen started talking, I tried to remember what his pitch was. His pitch actually turned out to be on the top 10 pitches according to angel investor Dave McClure.

Naveen’s pitch was a ponzi scheme website, which we named BigPonzi.com. Not an actual ponzi scheme, but a tutorial of sorts with training on how not to get into a ponzi scheme. I think every single person in the room at Microsoft (who we thank very much for hosting the event) started laughing. It was a brilliant idea. Once we started talking more about Naveen’s idea, we started thinking on how to develop, etc. From there on, we decided that Naveen, Dylan and I were a team and we started brainstorming. Later on, Naveen’s wife, Sakina (who’s also awesome), joined our team. Sakina is Head of International at YouTube. She basically runs anything outside of the US having to do with YouTube. Sakina had a background in PR, marketing, business development, online, and more. This was all Friday.

Come Saturday, I came to Microsoft in the morning ready to work on our startup. I quickly found my team, and found out they had already started on wireframes. We were on a great start. Everyone was pitching in ideas, and we were heading in the right direction. After the wireframes were done, Dylan and Naveen decided on what development framework to in. They decided Ruby on Rails. I don’t have a lot of Ruby experience, so I couldn’t help much in that area. Sakina and I branched off into our mini team working on content, and what would actually go on the site. Naveen and Dylan started coding. We spent the rest of Saturday working on both content and back/front end. Time flew really fast, and before we knew it, it was 10 PM! We went home, and continued to code at Naveen and Sakina’s home. We were up until 3 AM working on the site.

We woke up the next day at around 9 AM, and Dylan and Naveen already started work on the site. Once we all got dressed, took care of morning duty, ate breakfast, etc., we quickly realized that there was a good chance that we wouldn’t make it to our demo time at 7 PM that day. We had no graphics, and our wireframes were drawn on a whiteboard. We decided not to give up, but continue, and see how far we could get that day. We got our stuff, and drove back to Microsoft. We were debating whether to go back or not, due to WiFi issues at Microsoft, but Tyler DM’ed us, and said WiFi was working fine. When we got to Microsoft, indeed WiFi was working… for Dylan. For some reason, Dylan always had working WiFi. Even I didn’t have working WiFi at the Teens in Tech Conference, yet Dylan did! Anyways, Naveen and Sakina had working WiFi, and I was internet sharing with Dylan over ethernet, and it worked great.

We setup timeframes on what we needed done. Dylan and Naveen worked on development, while Sakina continued to work on content, and I worked on our front end design, coding the front end, and working on our blog. Dylan and Naveen worked really hard on development, and tried to get the site up and running. By 3 PM, they had a lot of the sign up and login process done, but we were far from done. We then realized that we won’t be able to give a working demo tonight. Dylan suggested mocking up the design from the wireframes on Illustrator, which Naveen went ahead and started with. Dylan and I worked on server side matters in the mean time.

From this point on, we worked on mock ups, and what to present during the demo hour. Dylan had a brilliant idea on give attendees a history of ponzi schemes, and how on our startup, BigPonzi.com, will help. About 20 minutes before we were sscheduled to demo, Dylan, Naveen, Sakina and I were working on the presentation. Dylan has uploaded the presentation to SlideShare, and it’s below:

BigPonzi.com

View more presentations from Dylan Field.

And with that, I spent 54 hours working on BigPonzi.com. We haven’t launched yet, but will be launching sometime this week. Go ahead and follow us on Twitter, and subscribe to the blog for email alerts when we launch!

(Disclosure: I was one of the organizers, and was responsible for a lot of the event, like other organizers. All my opinions are those of an attendee.)

Speaking at Ypulse Mashup

Daniel Brusilovsky — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 05:56:15 +0000

After speaking at eComm 2009 in early March, I’m very happy to announce that I’ll be speaking at the Ypulse Mashup this June in San Francisco. I’ll be speaking on a panel called ‘Totally Wired Youth Entrepreneurs’ moderated by technology pioneer, Guy Kawasaki. I look up to Guy a lot, and it will be honor being on a panel with him.

On my panel are Jun Loayza, Co-Founder, Future Delivery, Carly Wertheim, Co-President, Teens Turning Green and my good friend and Teens in Tech Conference keynoter, Jessica Mah of internshipIN. My panel is at 4:45 PM on Tuesday June 2, 2009 at Hotel Nikko San Francisco (map).

I highly recommend that any teenage focused startup or company attend the Ypulse Mashup. If you want to buy tickets, use the code ‘SPKR09‘ and you’ll get a 10% on your ticket! I’ll try to attend both days of the conference, so come and say hi!

MacHeist 3 begins

Daniel Brusilovsky — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 03:02:03 +0000

On March 24, the MacHeist 3 bundle was revealed in a geek-star studded live show featuring Chris Pirillo, Veronica Belmont, and Lisa Bettany.

This is the line-up for this bundle:

And of course, it wouldn’t be a bundle without unlock incentives, and this year, MacHeist goes all out with amazing software:

Of course, all good software comes at a good price. This year: $39 USD. And if you have participated in any of the missions, you probably earned discount coupons to take the price down even lower.

If you missed our live reveal show with Chris Pirillo, Veronica Belmont, and Lisa Bettany, you can check-out the recording of it here.

So what are you waiting for? Go ahead and get the MacHeist 3 bundle!

Build a Company in a Weekend!

Daniel Brusilovsky — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:06:59 +0000

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with an extremely smart group of individuals on organizing an event called Startup Weekend. Many of you know of Startup Weekend because of fellow entrepreneur Paul Stamatiou’s startup, Skribit, which launched at Startup Weekend Atlanta.

I’m happy to announce that Startup Weekend is coming to the San Francisco Bay Area on April 3-5 at Microsoft’s lovely office on Market Street in San Francisco. Basically at Startup Weekend, you come up with an idea, build it, and launch in one weekend. Most of the team members don’t get any sleep while working to achieve their goal of launching a startup. This is the second Startup Weekend that will be hosted in San Francisco. The first Startup Weekend launched ‘Help Hookup,’ which isn’t in service any longer.

If your interested in attending, go ahead and register online using Eventbrite and get ready to launch a startup in a weekend! Also, using the code ‘danielbru‘ will give you 20% off your order! Got some startup ideas? Leave a comment below and let us know!

Going to Seattle [UPDATE]

Daniel Brusilovsky — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 01:07:17 +0000

I’m really happy to announce that I’ll be going to Seattle April 8-9 for spring break. I’ll be flying in to Seattle on Wednesday morning, and will be flying out Thursday at night. I’ll be visiting my friends over at Tatango.com in Bellingham (about 80 miles away from Seattle). My goal of this trip is to profile startups outside the Valley that are making differences in technology. It will be my first time in Seattle or in Washington. I’m trying to decide if I will spend any time in Seattle, so if you would like to meet with me, feel free to get in touch, and we’ll try to work something out!

UPDATE: I’ve decided that I’ll spend the first day in Seattle, and drive to Bellingham at night, and stay overnight in Bellingham, spend the day with Tatango, and then drive back to Seattle to head home! I’m booking meetings now, so email me if you want to meet!

UPDATE 2: I’ll be flying Virgin America with in flight WiFi, so I’m pretty sure I’ll try out that service and see how good it is! Maybe I’ll video chat with the rest of my family back home! We’ll see…