Gnip

My first company, Feld Technologies, didn’t have contracts. Instead, we had a one page PSA (professional services agreement) that spelled out in English that we charged $X per hour, would do our best, and our invoices were due upon receipt. We never had a single legal issue with a client, although we had a number of tense moments which we almost always solved successful by “doing our best.” There were a few cases where this wasn’t enough and our clients effectively fired us, but we always made it easy for them to walk away if they weren’t happy. ...

Gnip has completed the latest version of their schema and is now about to embark on a campaign to integrate at least 100 services by mid year. They’ve decided that rather than simply choosing them by themselves, they’d crowd source the process. There are currently over 350 web services in consideration with more being added every day. You can vote on which ones you’d like to see integrated by going to https://gnip.uservoice.com.&#160 ; This will be a dynamic process with Gnip tagging the web services that are either in process or completed. ...

Kevin Kelleher’s article on GigaOm this morning titled 2009: Year of the Hacker made me think back to the rise of open source after the Internet crash of 2001. In the aftermath of the crash, many experienced software developers were out of work for a period of time ranging from weeks to years. Some of them threw themselves into open source projects and, in some cases, created their next job with the expertise they developed around a particular open source project. ...