Brainnovate

New iPhone interface reveals that Digg has been around for almost 40 years.

read more | digg story

If you are like me, you at least considered going out to S.F. for the Google IO conference. Maybe you even went. The well constructed marketing site certainly piqued my interest, although to be honest I was afraid it would turn out to be a CJU’esk infomercial for Google technologies.  In the end I decided not to go- and now a lot of the sessions have just appeared online.  Lucky me.

So far I have only begun watching the ones that are of interest to me.  For starters, I have been watching “Even Faster Websites.”  This is a natural fit for me, because faster websites improve conversion rates.  I had not heard of or even thought of a lot of the tweaks mentioned- many of which have to do with javascript. Since our multivariate testing software Vertster uses a lot of javascript and ajaxy stuff, this is a good fit for those reasons as well.

I also am going to take a look at the session “Painless Python for Proficient Programmers.”  I have only taken a cursory look at Python, but look forward to learning more about it and Google’s new app engine.

I already know from this blog’s stats that a large percentage of you are either 1- not using windows at all, or 2- not using IE. But nonetheless, I implore you to get in on making history when the new Firefox launches in June. The Mozilla foundation hopes to set a new world record for the “most downloads” in a 24 hour period. I sure hope they have a lot of servers and mirrors lined up. Here is the official badge:

So go ahead and pledge to download the new software the day it comes out (which incidently has yet to be announced, but it will be in June.)  And if you have a site, blog, myspace, or all of the above- by all means add the fox to your site.  This could generate some great press and further the reduction of the buggy, unsecure, piece of crap that is IE.

On Friday I attended a “LivePitch” event put on by FundingUniverse.com This was very similar to speed pitching events, but was open to the public. In case you are not familiar with the concept of speedpitching, it follows the same format as speed dating, where a number of entrepreneurs get to pitch their startup, but they only have 4 or 5 minutes to do it. In an hour, potential investors can quickly see if they want to “date” any of the entrepreneurs. Typically these are closed door affairs, meaning unless you have money to invest, you aren’t getting in.

FundingUniverse decided to change this paradigm up and created the “LivePitch” format to allow anyone to come and watch. Everyone in attendance was give $100 dollars in fake money to invest in any of the five companies who were pitching. In addition, there was a panel of “celebrity judges,” made up Steve Grizzell (Innoventures Capital), Stan Kanarowski (Park City Angels), Jeremy Hanks (DOBA), Mark Bonham (Ray Quinney and Nebeker), Kent Thomas (Olympus Angels) who judged the entries and gave feedback on each idea.

The five companies that pitched are summarized here, along with their approximate investment totals:

1. Dolphin3D: A new web browser with many new features not found in IE ($250)
2. Egghead Intensity: Social network for new college graduates ($350)
3. InciteWorld: Social network and resources for medical associations ($500)
4. iSecureMyNet: Portable security product to protect your passwords on any device ($1100)
5. ISYS Technologies: Patented computing technology that promises much smaller CPUs that run cooler and can easily be grouped together ($3000)

Congrats to each of the presenters for getting up and sharing their concept. ISYS was the clear winner among the audience “investors” and also was the top pick of the expert panel. You can learn more about their technology at their web site or Youtube channel.

Prebuilt software like Wordpress (which this blog uses), Drupal, Joomla, and other similar systems are bad for innovation. There… I said it. I love Wordpress after avoiding it for years. The past 2 weeks have been the best 2 weeks of blogging in my life. And these tools are great for 95% of use cases- most sites will benefit immensely from putting them in the engine box.

Although I haven’t used it, Drupal sounds like Wordpress on steroids, with an attached boat anchor to slow you down. My friend Jeremy over at QuitYourDayJob lost two weeks of his life trying to teach it to sit, stay, and fetch. Now it works great.

These tools are immensely powerful, don’t get me wrong. But they are really optimized for doing something that has already been done. If you want a simple blog, brochure site, forum, simple social networking features, etc, then this will get you there quickly. Not a bad strategy if you can find a corner of the market without good coverage yet. But this blog is about innovation, and doing things that haven’ t been done before.

If you really want to do something unique and revolutionary, relying on a CMS will kill you dead. Imagine if the guys who built Twitter started out with a CMS platform and went from there. You think Twitter has problems now There are a lot of people “gunning” to be the next Facebook, Myspace, etc. They are not using a CMS either.

So if you are new to all this, step back and think about other tools that are available. Personally, I recommend and use Ruby on Rails extensively. Python with Django is quite strong as well. The main difference with these things is that you can write applications that do things that haven’t been done before, or at least haven’t been done by thousands of other people.