The Droids have their sights on iPhone
In the early days of the iPhone, I can recall conversations with executives and strategists of other mobile device manufacturers (who shall remain nameless). At the time, I remember how these companies almost discounted the iPhone. We can understand why. Here they are, with many years of experience in the industry, large market shares, etc. And there’s Apple, a nobody, no experience in the market, never built a phone before etc. I’m not sure if these wireless companies were in denial at the t

Litetext for rendering text into a bitmap on Google App Engine Java
While developing Quick Bit Notes, I realized that the Google App Engine “sandbox” for Java doesn’t support AWT or other graphics Java classes, so I put together a simple “old-school” text rendering class that’s compatible with App Engine, called litetext. This small package (less than 1000 lines of Java code) was developed to provide a small and simple package for rendering text into an image (bitmap). It was developed for Google App Engine use whe

Twitmart ported OFF of Google App Engine
I discussed a few weeks ago how I had ported the Twitmart.org site to Google App Engine for Java as an experiment.  This was an excellent learning experience.  Unfortunately, the performance on App Engine was simply unacceptable, so now the site is back off of App Engine and running on one of my own servers again. You can actually compare the difference side-by-side by comparing the performance on a native Java web server (Jetty) platform vs. the exact same code running on App Engine: Java Jetty –> http://twitmart.org G

Don’t pay to pitch – no way
In response to Jason Calacanis’ recent post Why startups shouldn’t have to pay to pitch angel investors and the ensuing debate, short answer: Don’t do it. Don’t pay. Such angel outfits are scams, IMHO.

Introducing Quick Bit Notes
I’ve released Quick Bit Notes (QBN) as an experiment in an unconventional method of person-to-person asynchronous communication. One person drops off a personal note for another person. That note is stored and presented in image form to the recipient. The actual text is never stored on QBN and never transferred over the wire when the recipient views the message. QBN offers an alternative to complicated software, shared keys, and so on. All one needs to u