Jenna Wortham, The New York Times  reports how the Nightowls group gathers during late hours to work uninterruptedly and create the most productive result
After college, most people do their best to avoid having to pull any more all-nighters. But for some, even after graduation, the wee hours of the morning are the most productive.
That is what led Amber Lambke and Allan Grinshtein to start a group called the New York Nightowls, a sort of study hall for entrepreneurs, freelancers and software developers who gather at 10 every Tuesday night and stay as late as 4 am.

“The goal is to come, get inspired, meet new people and get work done,” said Lambke, a creative consultant. “It’s six hours of uninterrupted, productive time where you’re surrounded by other creative people doing awesome things.”

Although the New York group has been meeting only since April, the concept is catching on. Others have organised similar weekly gatherings in nearly a dozen cities, including San Francisco, Boston, Stockholm and Melbourne, Australia.

In New York, roughly two dozen people armed with laptops and caffeinated beverages assemble each week on the top floor of an office building in Chinatown and hunker down for a night of work.Some, like Grinshtein, head of product design at the video site Blip.tv, are there to work on pet projects and side ventures that go ignored during the regular workday.
Most who show up for a session spend their time hunched deep in thought over a glowing screen. But this is no library. It is not uncommon to hear soft music playing, and some participants choose bottles of beer over coffee.

Participants say a spirit of collaboration and camaraderie percolates through the night, one that can be hard to come by during normal working hours. “I don’t code very well, and a developer working here might be able to solve a problem in 30 seconds that might take me three hours,” said Jonathan Wegener, who creates mobile applications.”

How it started

The group got its start one evening in April when Grinshtein fired off a message to Twitter, asking if anyone wanted to form a casual work group. Lambke, who did not know Grinshtein, was immediately interested. “I saw the tweet and thought, this is exactly what I need,” she said. A week and several e-mail exchanges later, the New York Nightowls was formed.

The meetings are free, and Lambke and Grinshtein try to cap the group’s size at around 30 people. They ask attendees to schedule a visit through Meetup, a service that allows people to organise events.

Tony Bacigalupo, who runs a shared working space called New Work City that caters to freelancers and other independent types, offered to let the Nightowls use the space at no cost.

One big advantage of the late-night hours is that they are blissfully free of the distractions that clutter the daytime. Even the Web goes quiet. People feel less compelled to check Twitter and Facebook and chat with friends and colleagues via instant message. “When you don’t have your co-workers constantly interrupting you, fewer friends bored at work and on IM, it’s easier to get things done,” said Montana Low, the chief scientist at RescueTime, which makes productivity software. But preferring to work at night might go beyond a need to escape distractions. Some people are hard-wired to perform better as it gets later, said Michael Thorpy, director of the Sleep-Wake Disorder Center at the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.

The popularity of the Nightowls idea suggests that there are plenty of people in this camp. Johan Hedberg, a 33-year-old public relations consultant in Stockholm, became interested in coordinating a local version after he saw an online posting about the group. “I have a lot of friends and colleagues writing books and working on Web projects who sit by themselves at home,” he said. “There is so much more to gain by working with other people.”

Hedberg, who holds the gatherings at his offices on Tuesdays and serves platters of cinnamon buns and hot coffee, said that nearly 30 people turned out for the first event in mid-June and more than 100 had signed up to be notified of the meetings. He hopes the Nightowl group will help him start his own personal project, a book of recipes for baked goods.

In New York, the Nightowl sessions last as long as there are people working. “We’re open until I get tired,” Grinshtein said.

Lambke, who concedes that most weeks she does not last beyond 1 or 2 a.m., said that anyone who needs a quick power nap can retire to a cushy beanbag chair.

“Maybe we’re a little bit insane,” she said with a laugh. “But it’s fun.” “We’re New Yorkers,” added Grinshtein. “It’s not like we sleep anyway.”

 

Prey

Prey can help track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It provides timed reports with a bunch of information of its whereabouts including a screenshot of the running desktop and — if your laptop has an integrated webcam — a picture of the thief too!  Prey uses a remote activation system which the thief wouldn’t know about. Prey checks out if there’s an active internet connection to send the information. If not, it attempts to connect to the nearest open wifi access point available, automatically. The other features include: Modular architecture, powerful report system, messaging/alert system, and full auto updater. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free. The Windows version can be downloaded at http://preyproject.com/releases/0.3.73/prey-0.3.73-win.exe. Prey for other OS at http://preyproject.com/download. FAQ at http://preyproject.com/#faq, and how it works at How it works  http://preyproject.com/#howitworks

BBox

Desktop Manager BBox is a flexible desktop management utility.  BBox provides an extra layer of organisation that is independent of the location of files and folders on your hard drive. It can quickly and easily organise desktop icons, files, Web links and others, either automatically or manually. Its features include: Drag and drop desktop shortcuts to the management area, choose to keep the icon on the desktop, and  also use a grouping function for quick access, and customise the groups. BBox automatically hides the files in Windows explorer to enable the desktop appear “clean” even though the files are on the desktop. The 4.90 MB BBox v1.1.3.0 (24th July, 2010), compatible with Windows 2000/ XP/ 2003/ Vista/ Win7 can be downloaded at http://www.bainsoft.com/downloads/bbox.zip. Uninstall: Supported

RocketDock

RocketDock is a animated alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts onto it for easy access and to organize them. With each item completely customisable there is literally no end to what you can add and launch from the RocketDock. With the taskbar support the minimized windows appear as icons on the dock.The features include: Minimise windows to the dock, real-time window previews in Vista, running application indicators, simple drag-n-drop interface, multi-monitor support, supports alpha-blended PNG and ICO icons, icons zoom and transition smoothly, auto-hide and popup on mouse over, positioning and layering options, runs fine on slower computers, and more.  
Rocket Dock for Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7, can be downloaded at http://files.punklabs.com/RocketDock/RocketDock-v1.3.5.exe

 

DH reader T R Ganesh wrote:

Please suggest a freeware for Mac to convert YouTube videos to iPod.

DH suggested:

Try Tooble,  at www.tooble.tv/ Tooble.dmg. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 and above. Windows version (XP+) at http://tooble.tv/installer.exe

 

The network is the hottest start-up created with the aim of building an enduring internet icon synonymous with fun, writes Miguel Helft, The New York Times

 Orientation for new employees of Zynga, the fast-growing maker of Facebook games like FarmVille and Mafia Wars, can be a heady affair given the company’s outsize ambitions — all of which are embodied in Mark Pincus, Zynga’s 44-year-old founder. In a pep talk this month, Pincus told his company’s newcomers that he had set out to build an enduring Internet icon, one that was synonymous with fun.

“I thought, it’s 2007, and this can’t be all that the Internet is meant to be,” he said. There has to be more than “a garage sale, a bookstore, a search engine and a portal,” he added in a good-natured putdown of the Web giants eBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo.

And lest there be any doubt which of those giants Zynga aims to match, Pincus said the opportunity to build an online entertainment empire was “like search before Google came along.”

So far, he seems on track. The Zynga Game Network, as the company is officially called, is the hottest start-up to emerge from Silicon Valley since Twitter and, before that, Facebook. Unlike Twitter, which has meager revenue, Zynga is on a path to pocket as much as $500 million in revenue this year, according to the Inside Network, which tracks Facebook apps. While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years.

Its empire

Zynga’s empire is made up of cartoonish online games that even Pincus acknowledges are goofy. And most striking, given its financial success, is the fact that the games are free to everyone. Zynga makes money, by and large, only when a small fraction of its users pay real money for make-believe “virtual” goods that let them move up in the games or to give their friends gifts.

For instance, in FarmVille, its most popular game, players tend to virtual farms, planting and harvesting crops, and turning little plots of land into ever more sophisticated or idyllic cyberfarms. Good farmers — those who don’t let crops wither — earn virtual currency they can use for things like more seed or farm animals and equipment.

But players can also buy those goods with credit cards, PayPal accounts or Facebook’s new payment system, called Credits. A pink tractor, a FarmVille favourite, costs about $3.50, and fuel to power it is 60 cents. A Breton horse can be had for $4.40, and four chickens for $5.60. The sums are small, but add up quickly when multiplied by millions of users: Zynga says it has been profitable since shortly after its founding.

The company has ballooned to nearly 1,000 employees, up from 375 a year ago, and now has some 400 job openings. And investors, including Google and the Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, have put about $520 million into the company. Though some of the money was used to buy out early investors and employees, it’s still a huge sum in Silicon Valley.

Zynga has been valued at more than $4.5 billion, putting Pincus, who has retained voting control over the company, on a path to become Silicon Valley’s next billionaire. And, not surprisingly, Zynga has caught the attention of people beyond Silicon Valley. There have been some bumps on Zynga’s road to success. The games are programmed to send updates to players’ Facebook friends when certain actions are completed, like planting or harvesting crops. Six million Facebook users, who grew tired of constant updates about their friends’ games, joined a group called “I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia!!!” Pincus says he expects growth to resume with new games like FrontierVille, which a month after its release on June 9 had 20 million players. And Zynga investors say the drop in traffic had little effect on revenue because many players who dropped out didn’t buy virtual goods.

Its games have 211 million players every month, according to AppData.com. Though that figure counts a user for each type of game he plays, it makes Zynga about four times larger than its nearest rival, Electronic Arts. Playdom is third, with 41 million users.  While some traditional developers grumble about the social-game phenomenon, which they see as a step backward in sophistication, the popularity of Zynga and some of its rivals has made the multibillion-dollar video game industry take notice.

In November, Electronic Arts bought the Zynga rival Playfish for as much as $400 million. But some analysts say that most other traditional gaming companies are falling behind the trend that is taking the industry by storm. By the standards of Silicon Valley, where people like Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergey Brin built Internet empires while still in their 20s, Pincus is something of an aging whiz kid.

The journey

Clad in jeans and a T-shirt, Pincus could easily blend in with Zynga’s new recruits, a group of hoodie-wearing, 20-something engineers and product managers. A serial entrepreneur, he sold his first company, Freeloader, an early Internet broadcast service, for $38 million, and took public his second, a business software maker called Support.com. He owns several homes and an airplane. Yet five years ago, around the time his third company, a social network called Tribe.net, was headed for failure, he groused in an interview that he had not yet made Silicon Valley’s “A-list.” With Zynga, Pincus believes he will finally get his due. He talks of building a “digital skyscraper,” a company whose services are so indispensable that someday we will look back and wonder how we managed to do without it. As he has carved his path in Silicon Valley, he has earned a reputation as a visionary leader. Yet he is also known for his sharp elbows and irreverent style, an image he does little to dispel.

He often brags about being fired from a consulting firm job for having little patience with his bosses. “I didn’t believe in paying dues,” he said in a public talk. Now that Zynga has shone a spotlight on Pincus as never before, his bravado has come back to haunt him.

While speaking to entrepreneurs in Berkeley last year, he said: “ I knew that I wanted to control my destiny. So I funded the company myself, but I did every horrible thing in the book to just get revenues right away.”

Questionable ethics

Bloggers seized on those comments as an example of questionable ethics at Zynga after critics said the company was allowing deceptive advertisers into its games. Without being clear, some ads, for instance, signed up players for subscriptions to costly text-messaging services. TechCrunch, the technology blog, called the practice “ScamVille,” and some users filed a class-action lawsuit against Zynga. The company has since filed a motion to dismiss the suit, and a hearing is expected in September.

Zynga has since pulled the ads, and Pincus now says he was misunderstood. He says he was trying to convey to would-be entrepreneurs that they needed to earn revenue quickly to gain independence from investors. “I never meant to imply you should do anything unethical,” he says. And he says he recognised that with Zynga’s success, he needed to temper his attitude.

As Zynga has emerged as the most successful maker of Facebook applications, its relationship with the giant social network has become more complicated. First, there was the brouhaha over the notification system and the drop in traffic. Then Facebook said it would push all applications to use a virtual currency, Credits, on the site, and take 30 percent of proceeds. Tensions mounted, but the two companies eventually settled their differences.

Ethan Beard, who heads Facebook’s platform team, acknowledged the strains. But he said that the relationship between the two companies now was “very, very strong.”
Still, some analysts predict more friction ahead, as the balance of power between the two companies shifts. Zynga, which is said to be contemplating a public offering, clearly does not want to have all its eggs in the Facebook basket. It recently signed a sweeping agreement to bring its games to millions of users on Yahoo.

In addition, Zynga’s $520 million in financing includes a recent infusion of $300 million through two, roughly equal investments from Softbank and Google, according to people briefed on the investments who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss Zynga’s finances publicly. Google and Zynga are also in the early stages of exploring a collaboration, these people said. Zynga and Google declined to comment or confirm a Google investment. When Pincus first envisioned Zynga, most investors and peers doubted that a gaming start-up could become the next big thing. But the success of games like FarmVille has silenced the critics.

“Zynga has the most revenue, growth and happy customers of any three-year-old venture we’ve ever backed,” says John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the venture capital firm that has backed Amazon, Google and Netscape. Asked how big Zynga can become, Pincus has a difficult time hiding his ambition. “I am drinking the Kool-Aid more than anyone,” he says.

 

 

RAMRush
RAMRush is a a free intelligent memory management and optimisation tool to optimise memory, free-up RAM, prevent system rashes, and remove Memory Leaks. RAMRush main features: enhances system performance, enhances the amount of memory available, defragments system physical memory, recovers memory from Windows applications, removes memory leaks, prevents system crashes caused by memory problems, displays the real-time usages data of CPU and RAM,  carries out optimization with a just a click -  move the mouse cursor to the  RAMRush window in the tray icon area, click ‘Start Optimize’, or double-click RAMRush tray icon, or press the hot key ‘Ctrl-Alt-O’ to commence the optimization immediately. The 534 KB RAMRush v1.0.6.917 can be downloaded at http://www.fcleaner.com/ downloads/ramrush.exe.  It is 100% clean, no spyware or adware either. aver the developers.

 

TeamLab
Developed by Ascensio System SIA, TeamLab, a platform for business collaboration, has a dual purpose: making social networking and project management efficient.  It lets you to use social networking tools such as blogs and forums, organise business tasks and milestones, as well as communicate with your team members via corporate IM.  TeamLab can help create new and manage existing projects; maintain company blogs and share ideas with teammates; use forums to discuss important issues; Schedule and check out task milestones, conduct polls to collect and process employee opinions; chat with colleagues in real-time via TM Talk; create corporate knowledge base to ensure effecctive information flow;  backup your data - provides the source code to deploy it on your own server; and more. TeamLab, provided free of charge, is available in two deployment solutions. To know more about TeamLab browse the How-to guides at http://teamlab.com/HowTo.aspx

 

Sculptris
Sculptris allows you to create your own 3D model faces, as though you were sculpting them  from lumps of clay.  With Sculptris you can create a 3d object from a sphere, color it and change the back ground and so many things more. Anyone can start sculpting models by playing around with the basic features of Sculptris.  However, it would take a bit of exploration to learn how to use Sculptris effectively to create great-looking 3D models. The documentation file has details on the interface, buttons, and shortcut keys. You could also visit the Sculptris forums to post your questions over there or just to showcase your works. The 3.2 MB Sculptris v1.0  (Updated to v1.02 on June 28th 2010) truly rivals expensive programs. It can be downloaded at http://www.sculptris.com/sculptris.zip. A trailer on Sculptris can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DNRg6pdNeE

 

DH reader Balasundaram wrote:

Please suggest a utility to boot XP faster.

DH suggested:

You could try BootVis, v1.3.37.0. The tool is no longer available from Microsoft, however, you can download it at http://snipurl.com/microsoftbootvis

 

By Brad Stone, The New York Times

Ricky Bess spends eight hours a day in front of a computer near Orlando, Fla., viewing some of the worst depravities harboured on the Internet. He has seen photographs of graphic gang killings, animal abuse and twisted forms of pornography. One recent sighting was a photo of two teenage boys gleefully pointing guns at another boy, who is crying.

An Internet content reviewer, Bess sifts through photographs that people upload to a big social networking site and keeps the illicit material — and there is plenty of it — from being posted. His is an obscure job that is repeated thousands of times over, from office parks in suburban Florida to outsourcing hubs like the Philippines.

With the rise of websites built around material submitted by users, screeners have never been in greater demand. Some Internet firms have tried to get by with software that scans photos for, say, a large area of flesh tones, but nothing is a substitute for a discerning human eye.

The surge in Internet screening services has brought a growing awareness that the jobs can have mental health consequences for the reviewers, some of whom are drawn to the low-paying work by the simple prospect of making money while looking at pornography.
Last month, an industry group established by Congress recommended that the federal government provide financial incentives for companies to “address the psychological impact on employees of exposure to these disturbing images.” Nigam, co-chairman of the group, the Online Safety and Technology Working Group, said global outsourcing firms that moderate content for many large Internet companies do not offer therapeutic care to their workers. A common strategy at websites is to have users flag questionable content, then hand off material that needs further human review to outsourcing companies that can do so at low cost.

Global outsourcing firms like Infosys Technologies, based in Bangalore, India, and Sykes Enterprises, based in Tampa, Fla., have leapt to offer such services. Internet companies are reluctant to discuss the particulars of content moderation, since they would rather not draw attention to the unpleasantness that their sites can attract.
But people in the outsourcing industry say tech giants like Microsoft, Yahoo and MySpace, a division of the News Corporation, all outsource some amount of content review.

YouTube, a division of Google, is an exception. If a user indicates a video is inappropriate, software scans the image looking for warning signs of clips that are breaking the site’s rules or the law. Flagged videos are then sent for manual review by YouTube-employed content moderators who, because of the nature of the work, are given only yearlong contracts and access to counseling services. For its part, Facebook has relied on its users to flag things like pornography or harassing messages. That material is reviewed by Facebook employees in Palo Alto, Calif., and in Dublin.

 

By Steve Lohr , The New York Times

Bynamite, a small website company, aims at a business that offers economic opportunities to users as well, reports Steve Lohr . Life, as they say, imitates art. And the way things work commercially today across much of the Web recalls that chapter in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” where Tom cajoles his guileless friends into whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. They supply the labor, but he gets the reward.

On the Internet, users supply the raw material that helps generate billions of dollars a year in online advertising revenue. Search requests, individual profiles on social networks, Web browsing habits, posted pictures and many Internet messages are all mined to serve up targeted online ads. All of this personal information turns out to be extremely valuable, collectively. So why should Google, Yahoo, Facebook and other ad businesses get all the rewards?
That is the question that animates Bynamite, a start-up company based in San Francisco. “There should be an economic opportunity on the consumer side,” said Ginsu Yoon, a co-founder of the company. “Nearly all the investment and technology is on the advertising side.”

Bynamite, to be sure, is another entry in the emerging market for online privacy products. The business interest in such products, of course, is being fed by worries about how much personal information marketers collect.Bynamite brings a somewhat different perspective to the privacy market. “Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Yoon said.

Although Bynamite is a tiny start-up, it points toward larger issues about privacy transactions and pricing of personal data. “In reality, we constantly make transactions involving our personal information,” said Alessandro Acquisti, an associate professor of information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Bynamite is by no means anti-advertising. It does not block ads. Its website recommends free tools, like AdBlock and NoScript, for people who want ads blocked.

In essence, the company has a libertarian, free-market ethos. If consumers have more power and control, it says, personal information should flow more efficiently to the benefit of both consumers and advertisers, who will be able to more accurately aim their ads.

Like most start-ups, Bynamite faces long odds. To succeed, it must be easy to use, and users must trust it as a reliable middleman handling their data. It has no business model yet, though it could offer product recommendations, based on interests, and collect fees on resulting sales from merchants. It hasn’t ruled out accepting ads itself. To start, its free plug-in software works only on Mozilla and Chrome browsers. If Bynamite gains momentum, Yoon predicts that individuals will be able to use their portfolios of interests as virtual currency. He calls the idea a “consumer’s preference wallet.” Yoon and his co-founder, Ian Wilkes, are former business and engineering managers at Second Life, the online community where trading virtual currency for digital goods is common.

In a few years, Yoon says, a person’s profile of interests could be the basis for micropayments or discounts. The discount, in theory, would be justified because advertisers would pay more to market to people whose interests they knew precisely and thus were more likely to buy.
“I may be wrong about the product and our company,” Yoon said. “But I’m absolutely convinced that the direction is right, giving people a way to identify and use this store of value that is their personal information.”