I guess Ted couldn't make Orb work either. He was shown the door because he couldn't make a ridiculous idea go anywhere. Or rather, perhaps its the ridiculous business model that was all ass-backwards. I don't blame him really unless of course he truely believed this was great stuff!!

Om had this to say:

Orb has been applauded for its technology and has won many awards, despite not being able to figure out its exact game plan. Orb has already changed its business model once - it was a monthly paid service, but then later went to a free-ad-supported model. All this must be costing them money - serious money. Silicon Valley sources say that the company is looking to raise about $10 million.

You'll be interested to read the exchange on a previous Orb post I made here. Check the comments for a response from Ted and my response.

The end of one of the most innovative design and game making companies on the planet apparently laid everyone off on Friday. Its a shame but I'm still looking forward to Myst V that is yet to be released. Not to mention I haven't touched Myst IV yet.

From Zoomba:

Myst was THE example to show whenever you wanted to talk about games as an emerging art form. More effort went into the visual design and artistry than the game mechanic coding I bet. Cyan didn’t make games so much as they made beautiful worlds to explore, and a wonderfully complex story to discover.

Myst was the Killer App that made CD-ROM drives a must-have device in computers.

Myst was the first game that crossed the boundaries of gamer and non-gamer. Until The Sims came along years later, this was pretty much the only game that anyone could pick up and play, even if they weren’t a gamer. It held the most-units-sold title until The Sims (and it’s umpteenbajillion expansion packs).

Myst, for a time, even managed to revive the Adventure Game genre.

Here is a post from one of the Cyan employees.

Update. Found another article. My guess is that Ubisoft just couldn't clue into the vision that Rand has for the future of his games. Likely he'll go on to do something just as big as Myst when it first came out:

Rand Miller, creator of the huge selling Myst games, couldn't raise any money to fund new game development so has been forced to close down the studio. It's sad news - when I interviewed Rand not long ago, he spoke of ideas he hoped would redefine what it meant to play narrative based games. It seems no-one was quite as enthusiastic about his dreams as he was. Let's hope he finds a new home to express his ideas.

...

While the production unit has been disbanded, Cyan will continue as a company, pursuing new endeavours for the future. In the next few weeks, Cyan is expecting to provide more information about their plans. Other than this, Ubisoft has no additional information about Cyan or their future plans.

 

Starting to see some real-time google maps creations popping up:

Plotting Dublin's Aircouch coaches on Google Maps in real-time. Didn't seem to be working the last time I checked it out.

Location of all running DARTS in Dublin plotted here in real-time.

Of course there was my prototype just for proof of concept well before there was a nice API to do this all very easily!!

Excellent observations by Om about Google posted today:

Over the years, I’ve noticed that Google’s success has largely been based on their ability to be highly counterintuitive. For instance, they started a search engine when everyone thought that game was over. They started to place ads in search results when everyone thought it was highly controversial. They introduced simple text ads when everyone was developing rich media ads. They designed an ad engine to rank the placement of ads by their effectiveness (click-through-rate) when everyone else was placing ads based on the CPM rates they were able to sell. Their performance-based ad model enabled them to initially build their business on “mom-n-pop” small business advertisers (generating billions of dollars in revenues from the long tail) when everyone else was chasing after Fortune 1000 brand advertisers.

A bit of news with a recent Times mention of MaxDelivery:

Even in the reckless days of dot-com overindulgence, Kozmo.com, the Internet-to-door delivery service, seemed excessive. The celebrated dot-com promised to deliver groceries, movies, take-out, or anything else within an hour after you pressed “Enter” on your computer. Not surprisingly, Kozmo imploded four years ago, but the concept is back. Chris Siragusa, 33, who lost his job and his stock options when Kozmo went out of business, is reconstituting the concept in MaxDelivery, according to the New York Post. MaxDelivery will deliver everything from diapers to DVDs to busy Manhattanites. The difference, said Mr. Siragusa, is that where Kozmo expanded rapidly in pursuit of an IPO, MaxDelivery is staying small and focusing on turning a profit. Another difference is that MaxDelivery started on a $1-million shoestring, culled from Mr. Siragusa’s savings and money he raised from family and friends. “I have a fear of venture capitalists,” he said. Some important changes have taken place since the rise and subsequent flameout of Kozmo and rival Urban Fetch. When those companies were struggling in 2000, only 4.7 percent of web surfers shopped online. Today, that number stands near 55 percent, according to the Yankee Group. Still Mr. Siragusa is setting a number of limits that his predecessors didn’t. For instance, he is setting a $10 minimum, plus a $4.95 fee for orders under $50, to help cover costs (from Red Herring).

KoZmo (not this KoSmo) made the 3rd spot on CNet's top 10 dot-com flops:

The shining example of a good idea gone bad, online store and delivery service Kozmo.com made it on our list of the top 10 tech we miss. For urbanites, Kozmo.com was cool and convenient. You could order a wide variety of products, from movies to snack food, and get them delivered to your door for free within an hour. It was the perfect antidote to a rainy night, but Kozmo learned too late that its primary attraction of free delivery was also its undoing. After expanding to seven cities, it was clear that it cost too much to deliver a DVD and a pack of gum. Kozmo eventually initiated a $10 minimum charge, but that didn't stop it from closing in March 2001 and laying off 1,100 employees. Though it never had an IPO (one was planned), Kozmo raised about $280 million and even secured a $150 million promotion deal with Starbucks.

They also made 2nd on CNet's top 10 tech we miss:

At the height of the dot-com bubble, you could get a candy bar delivered to your door for the price of...a candy bar. Kozmo, an online store and delivery service, promised fast, friendly delivery of almost anything: a DVD rental, a bag of groceries, or just a single pack of gum. It was incredibly convenient and a heck of a bargain. It was also too good to be true. The cost of the small-time deliveries contributed to the demise of this great idea.

Interesting post by Peter Bromberg:

I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). ...

Looks to me like SipPhone is a dead end company. Its really too bad. My experience trying to purchase XTen pro as described here was a joke.

Here is a thread that followed when I opened a ticket on the issue. How do companies like this stay in business more than a day when they seem to rather NOT have you as a customer.

Ticket

Last Update: 04 Aug 2005 12:22 PM Last Replier: Tim Status: Open Department: Purchasing / Credit Card Created On: 12 Jul 2005 07:50 AM	Trying to purchase XTen Pro

Author  Contents Tim Posted on 12 Jul 2005 07:50 AM I'm trying to purchase XTen Pro. After jumping through many hoops I finally get to the point where I can click on the link to purchase and am presented with some message about not testing my softphone. Please fix this so that I can purchase this software. Tim Posted on 13 Jul 2005 09:02 AM I'm still waiting for a reply to this. I would think this would take all but 5 minutes to resolve. Chris Lawrence Posted on 02 Aug 2005 10:12 AM That filter has been cleared on your account. However, you may have noticed that we no longer sell Xten-Pro... I would recommend trying out our new (free) software www.gizmoproject.com. I think you'll find that it works far better. :) Chris Lawrence Sipphone Support http://support.sipphone.com Tim Posted on 02 Aug 2005 11:00 AM I hope it doesn't take another 2 weeks to answer this ticket. In any event, I tried Gizmo and as far as I can tell it will not come close to meeting my needs. I didn't see any way to have it connect to my OWN VoIP provider which is exactly what I'm trying to do with XTen. Will you folks be making XTen available for free then if you are not selling it anymore? It is a shame that you're trying to lock people into using SipPhone by not providing the software or means to connect to any VoIP provider. Sip Phone Posted on 04 Aug 2005 11:47 AM Tim, Before you come to such hasty conclusions you should probably do more research on NAT / SIP / UDP traffic. First of all we aren't trying to lock anyone in we are guaranteeing experience. There is no telling what will happen when the gizmo software connects to another sip service.. You won't get gizmo alerts, call balance, presence, all of these functionalities are tightly integrated with our sip / back end services.. this is what makes our service work not that we are tying our users in to an open sip proxy. Anyway please use another solution. -Digi SIPphone Support http://support.sipphone.com Tim Posted on 04 Aug 2005 12:22 PM You haven't provided me with any useful response here as to why you have discontinued use of SipPhone. The only conclusion I can come up with AGAIN is that you are trying to LOCK me into using Gizmo which doesn't solve my needs. SipPhone solves my needs. The free SipPhone Lite solved my needs and I liked the product enough to BUY the Pro version with the slightly advanced features. Gizmo does nothing for me just like Skype does nothing for me for this specific purpose. It is amazing that I'm struggling to become a customer and you folks seem to be going to a lot of trouble to keep me from becoming a customer. It just baffles the mind. I'll certainly go elsewhere and if/when I do need a solution like Gizmo I'll use Skype instead or a number of more popular ones. You should indicate to your smart business folks that the business model you seem to be following died about 4-5 years ago.

As per usual with an incident like this there are many conflicting reports. Eye witness accounts of the plane hitting the ground very hard on the first touch down to eye witnesses saying that the initial landing was very normal and people were actually clapping until a few seconds later when the plane was shaking violently while going down the runway.

My initial thought yesterday which I haven't seen reported until today was that weather was likely the main culprit here. At about the time of the crash I was working on some Google Earth stuff and I just happened to be pulling in radar images. I was thinking at the time that these were some of the most severe radar images I've seen in a few years. I look at radar images for this area on almost a daily basis as I have a customized weather page I use for myself. I actually have an image of that radar image although since it also includes confidential information I'm not going to post it here. And of course around the same time there were severe thunderstorms in our immediate area and likely all around Toronto. Another report about the weather before we even knew about the plane crash came in from a tech support guy who came into the office for around 4pm. He said the hail was so bad that cars pulled over on the highway (likely near the airport) because it was just too dangerous to drive.

I finally hear about this today in this article:

Toronto's airport was under ``red alert'' because of the threat of lightning when an Air France jetliner landed in a fierce rainstorm despite having enough fuel to reach another airport - a decision that was made by the pilot, airport authorities said Wednesday.

I'm sure when they put two and two together they'll determine this was caused by weather and a bad decision by the pilot. I wonder if that pilot should have listened to warnings that the ground controllers likely gave him.

Then again, it reminds me of a time a few years back when I went up with my flight instructor. He explained that there was weather to the north of the airport but it was likely not moving towards the airport and even if it did we could slip around it. I remember very distinctly advice from the tower suggesting we probably shouldn't go up. Then the last words from the tower were "good luck". The pilot tells me they must be really concerned because they never say anything like that. We took off anyway. In a manner of minutes we found ourselves in practically white out conditions from a snow storm that engulfed us. The pilot was pretty calm and after some serious flying got us back down on the runway safely. It was till afterwards that I realized how serious the situation was. He seemed really relived while I was thinking at the time it was a pretty cool experience. After some thought and seeing the pilots reaction on the ground did it hit me the seriousness of the situation. Good thing he was mostly calm while flying that is for sure.

And as per usual these days a great place for news information is Wikipedia and can be found here.

Update: Found audio from the control tower during the time of the crash. You can hear them diverting planes around weather and such.

Yet another BlogChat type thing. We were actually in discussions years ago with a few Drupal type services to integrate BlogChat. I guess it took a few years for people to realize how useful a tool like this could be.

I have just made a checkin into the contributions repo of an ajax enabled chat module. This module depends on the buddylist module to allow users to chat in real time with their online buddies on a Drupal powered website. The module includes the drupal.js created by thox for enabling Ajax in Drupal. We started off on this module to explore how we can utilize rich internet technologies like AJAX to create something useful within Drupal. The module is shaping up nicely but it can do with more robustness. This is definitely alpha quality code. Download the module from http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/chat/ (source: http://drupal.org/node/27689)