— Devrim's Tech Stuff

There are so many things that can be said about this, but let me start with how excited we were to be selected to this event. Being in top5 felt awesome. According to Tyler, there were more than 100 applicants. Kodingen team worked really hard to deserve this. Since rest of our team is not here in US, I turned on the webcam for a minute for them to see the venue in midtown Manhattan.

Jason Calacanis, can’t be thanked enough for an exclusive event like this. Because he put his own time and efforts to pick handful angel investors that are ‘real’ investors that we know and follow on TechCrunch, and he selected the best companies to pitch to them.

Event was great, everyone was genuine and honest, it wasn’t a crowd of people who weren’t interested in each other, on the contrary, I think everyone was able to talk to and meet with everyone, if they wanted to. Angels and entrepreneurs weren’t charged a cent. If you were ever approached by Keiretsu people, asked $6,000 just to pitch to investors that are not even known, you know why we love Jason and Tyler for doing this.

I strongly advise and encourage all entrepreneurs to apply to Open Angel Forum and try to make it there. I have never been to an event that was better than this one. It is simply the best thing that can happen to your company after TechCrunch50.

Why? Because to get to www.whatever.com, your computer asks your ISP, your ISP asks some other DNS servers, some other DNS Servers ask around and they get you to whatever.com’s IP so that you can see whatever.com.

Instead -Google says-, you can set your DNS Servers from your Control Panel/Network Settings (Windows) or Network Pane (Mac) to Google’s DNS Servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 and Google gets you to wherever.com faster.

Here is the official bit from Google:

“As web pages become more complex and include more resources from multiple origin domains, clients need to perform multiple DNS lookups to render a single page. The average Internet user performs hundreds of DNS lookups each day, slowing down his or her browsing experience. As the web continues to grow, greater load is placed on existing DNS infrastructure.

Since Google’s search engine already crawls the web on a daily basis and in the process resolves and caches DNS information, we wanted to leverage our technology to experiment with new ways of addressing some of the existing DNS challenges around performance and security. We are offering the service to the public in the hope of achieving the following aims:

• Provide end users with an alternative to their current DNS service. Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance.
• Help reduce the load on ISPs’ DNS servers. By taking advantage of our global data-center and caching infrastructure, we can directly serve large numbers of user requests without having to query other DNS resolvers.
• Help make the web faster and more secure. We are launching this experimental service to test some new ways to approach DNS-related challenges. We hope to share what we learn with developers of DNS resolvers and the broader web community and get their feedback.”

Somebody had to do this, I’m happy that Google did.

Performance benefits: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/performance.html

Security benefits: http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/security.html

Announcement : http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/12/introducing-google-public-dns-new-dns.html

Searching for a new home in Manhattan is a real pain. I wanted to make it easier for all of us.

Here is my few hours turned into an application: http://dyasar.brinkster.net/findit

And yes, it is open source: http://code.google.com/p/craigslist-home-search/

Currently works in Manhattan (where I live). Let me know if you want to extend it to where you live…

Enjoy..

This is the first code snippet that I’d like to share with you.

<?php $object = json_decode(json_encode(simplexml_load_string($xml))); ?>

This will give you a wonderful stdClass object, which you can then turn into an array… Neat isn’t it?

It’s just that I see people writing hundreds lines of code for this…

“Let’s say you have an idea for a startup. How do you begin the process of finding cofounders and employees, creating a corporation, handing investors, growing the company, etc.? There are lots of details about building a startyp that are usually a mystery to the newly initiated founder. Usually you have to learn this stuff on the job, making mistakes along the way.”

To be honest, I didn’t like him seeing a CEO video on his site a year ago. I cancelled my Mint account when they made their password screens in a way that it seemed like you are logging into your bank account OpenID style whereas they were simply saving your passwords, in their database.

However, watching this video I see an honest person (‘$170M it’s not a cash deal’), modest and genuine. This video is really worth your time if you are up to make your dream come true.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups from Techcrunch on Vimeo.