I just posted a recap of the PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog, walking through a couple highlights of the event. PayPal’s new APIs offer more means of handling transactions within an Application. It will be interesting to see what types of products begin to emerge using these new tools.

Nearly 5 years ago, I joined Yahoo! to work on its “Front Doors” effort: a re-imagining of its starting points (i.e. Yahoo.com, Yahoo! Search, My Yahoo!, and Yahoo! Toolbar). My work inside since has woven through several products and teams, but there is a consistent theme: working on products and platforms that expand the capabilities […]

At a recent Yahoo! Internal Hack Day, Mac developer powerhouse Karl Adam demonstrated an App he dubbed “Campus.” For any Yahoo! employee that installs it, one can locate a conference room by name or location in the campus’ multi-storied halls. The App’s visual representation of the buildings are handled by beautifully-rendered illustrations (by Kalani Kordus) […]

This past week (just in time to beat WWDC), my team released code to integrate Yahoo!’s Social Platform APIs into your Mac OS X and iPhone applications. Announced on the YDN blog and pushed to our GitHub account, the code gives any developer access to the following: Read the profile of your user (photo, nickname, […]

Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of presenting “Designing Your Product as a Platform” for BayCHI’s monthly program at Xerox PARC alongside Dan Brodnitz (who presented “20 Conversations About Creativity”). In the talk, I spoke about what it meant to be “Open.” The word “Open” is pretty packed with meaning, and I rarely find […]

In Kanye West’s “Diamonds From Sierra Leone (Remix),” featured artist Jay-Z drops a couple of lines that have bothered me for the past 4 years: Bleek could be one hit away his whole career As long as I’m alive, he’s a millionaire And even if I die, he’s in my will somewhere So he can […]

I rarely bring up family issues here as I often assume they’d rather not be sullied by association. However, my parents recently received an award which I believe is worth mentioning. For those that don’t know, my dad is a Lutheran minister in Omaha, Nebraska (“Hometown of Heroes,” as I’m known to call it). As […]

Somehow, I managed to open a debate recently with esteemed colleague and Flash/Flex wünderkind Zach Graves about which was the better flash memory card for digital cameras: the Eye-fi Explore 2GB card (mine) or the Kingston one-trick-pony 8GB card (Zach’s). I argued (very convincingly) that uploading photos and geotagging them were for suckers. They are […]

Chances are, when you’re out and about surfing the Web, you’re bumping into semantically-enhanced content.* In some cases, you see the benefits; in others, your experience doesn’t change. This fact is one of the great side effects of the Semantic Web movement: if you participate in enhancing your content, none of your users suffer, and […]

Folks who know me know I’m a fan of Google Reader; to date, I haven’t found a better consumption experience for reading and responding to all types of content that I’m interested in. Not only does it have a lightweight interface, it provides a social lens to see what my friends and colleagues find interesting […]

My former colleague, Mike Speiser (who’s now over at Sutter Hill Ventures), recently suggested his vision of where Apple TV should be heading. With the rumored Apple TV-minus-the-box-plus-the-TV unit days from being announced, I wanted to add one more set of thoughts to his before any such unveiling. Mike was one of the folks behind […]

The Apple TV and the iPhone will (at some point) converge as a single development platform to complement the Mac computer platform. Or so my theory goes. Why is that? Apple dropped the Apple TV on consumers in January 2007 as a “hobby.” Since then, it has released several software updates, including a major on-demand […]

Last year, I posted a list of my favorite Mac software I used and recommended to others. 18 months have passed, and its time to provide an update for folks. Inquisitor Download Inquisitor | Previous recommendation that must be recommended again Aside from far-faster page-loading performance, Inquisitor makes Safari the one-and-only browser choice on the […]

Amazon apparently rolled out a quiet, but important, feature in the past couple of weeks: the Universal Wish List. By “universal,” Amazon’s simply referring to its ability to snag non-Amazon products and track them alongside its own inventory in its existing Wish List system. I’ve been trying to get my extended family to use Amazon’s […]

The Wednesday morning before last, I was excited to see that WordPress released an official iPhone application to the world. I instantly downloaded it, and added several of my WordPress blogs to the app. Aside from the annoying Twitter Tools glitch (which sent an empty tweet on blog setup), I was surprised to see some […]