As I wrote last week, I created Preditter as a project to use some of the technologies that we have invested in. I blogged on Monday about how amazingly easy it is to use the Twilio API. Up today: MongoDB (which has been created by the team at 10gen). Here too, I was blown away by the ease of getting going. You can literally be up and running with MongoDB in minutes (on my Mac laptop I just downloaded and on my Slice running CentOS I used yum). But the thing that I was most pleased about is h...

As I wrote last week, I created Preditter as a project to use some of the technologies that we have invested in. I blogged on Monday about how amazingly easy it is to use the Twilio API. Up today: MongoDB (which has been created by the team at 10gen). Here too, I was blown away by the ease of getting going. You can literally be up and running with MongoDB in minutes (on my Mac laptop I just downloaded and on my Slice running CentOS I used yum). But the thing that I was most pleased about is h...

One of the great things about being focused on investing in web services is that the technical challenges faced by almost all of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio tend to be the same. The solutions on the other hand vary widely. Some companies rack their own servers, others are at traditional hosting companies and some are entirely in the cloud. Some use Java, others PHP, many mix languages. You get the idea. And: there is no obvious correlation between the tools companies ...

One of the great things about being focused on investing in web services is that the technical challenges faced by almost all of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio tend to be the same. The solutions on the other hand vary widely. Some companies rack their own servers, others are at traditional hosting companies and some are entirely in the cloud. Some use Java, others PHP, many mix languages. You get the idea. And: there is no obvious correlation between the tools companies ...

I still have quite a few great topics suggested by readers to work off for my Tech Tuesday series on technology in startups. But today I want to take on a different issue because it has been on my mind. I have now been programming computers in one way or another for over thirty years (yikes) and have seen a lot of technologies come and go during that period. So when something new comes along I tend to think of the great French saying: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more thing...

I still have quite a few great topics suggested by readers to work off for my Tech Tuesday series on technology in startups. But today I want to take on a different issue because it has been on my mind. I have now been programming computers in one way or another for over thirty years (yikes) and have seen a lot of technologies come and go during that period. So when something new comes along I tend to think of the great French saying: “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more thing...