Marc Hedlund
Marc Hedlund is an entrepreneur working on a personal finance startup, Wesabe where he is Chief Product Officer. (He also blogs at Wheaties for Your Wallet.) Before starting Wesabe, Marc was an entrepreneur-in-residence at O'Reilly Media. Prior to that, he was VP of Engineering at Sana Security, co-founder and was CEO of Popular Power, a distributed computing startup, and founder and general manager of Lucas Online, the internet subsidiary of Lucasfilm, Ltd. During his early career, Marc was Director of Engineering at Organic Online, and was CTO at Webstorm, where he wrote one of the Internet's first shopping cart applications in 1994. He is a graduate of Reed College.
Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight
[A note to start. My company, Wesabe, is funded in part by a venture firm, Union Square Ventures, which is one of the funders of Boxee, a character in the drama described below. That said, I've never met or spoken with anyone from Boxee, and have only ever talked to Union Square about them to ask for an invite. I…
The Kindle Hardware Tax
There's a lot of news about Amazon's new Kindle 2 today, and it does look like a nice upgrade. I still don't want one, though. What I want is Kindle software. I'm hoping the early suggestions that Amazon is thinking that way prove true. I use my iPhone for ebooks all the time now. I buy through Stanza, a very…
Seeing political links in color
Andy Baio and Joshua Schachter teamed up to create a totally interesting project for the political season: a way to immediately visualize the links from political blogs on Memeorandum based on how they tend to link — to more conservative (shown with red tint) or more liberal (shown with blue tint) blogs. They write: …we used a recommendation algorithm to…
Daylife's API for the News
Several years ago, my friend Upendra Shardanand tried to get me to join him in starting a company that would remake the way news is created and understood — overturning the worst, ambulance-chasing tendencies of modern journalism, and building tools to help people track and understand the topics and people that shape their lives. I begged off in order to…
Startup Camp Companies Selected
Mark Jacobsen from O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures asked me to post this announcement about Startup Camp: We received an overwhelming response to our call for participants in the first annual OATV Startup Camp which will be held prior to this year's Foo Camp. There were so many great submissions that cutting the list to seven startups was extremely difficult. The companies…
Waxy on "Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's" (playable samples included!)
Andy Baio strikes again: From an anonymous source close to the company, I've found myself in possession of the "Infocom Drive" — a complete backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I've ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the…
Waxy: "Google App Engine ported to Amazon's EC2"
Andy Baio posts what might be a response to Tim's concerns about Google App Engine. Interesting! I loved Daring Fireball's one-line description: "So much for the lock-in argument." There's definitely still a concern if/when people find themselves addicted to the services Google provides beyond simple app hosting — as Andy writes: The App Engine SDK doesn't use BigTable for its…
Review Board is good software
After having tried and failed to have useful code reviews at several different companies, and after feeling deep envy for Mondrian, Google's web-based code review tool, I'd been looking for some tool that would help make code reviews more painless. I think I've found what I was looking for in Review Board. Code reviews usually amount to infrequent lunchtime sessions…
Everybody gets the iPhone interface
I noticed two new web applications doing something interesting: serving their iPhone interface to everyone. Muxtape uses an iPhone-style interface for its playlists, which works great on an iPhone but for the fact that the MP3s don't play (at least, for me — doesn't the iPod app load MP3s from MobileSafari? I guess not). Instapaper takes this further, and makes…
Multiuser Backpack
Congrats to my friends at 37signals for their launch of multiuser Backpack, a great upgrade to a product I love. Their new features, which let you share calendars, notes, to-do lists, and reminders with other people in a group, look perfect for the "household schedule" I've been wanting. I continue to be very impressed with how the 37s do product…