icecrums

Max on how the Koombea team built a 24 hour app. Great team building experience!

(Link Max Sez.)

Nintendo hasn’t always rocked(Wii). Elioncho describes one of their biggest failures:

Nintendo simply got it all wrong. Just one year later came the Nintendo 64 along with Super Mario 64, full of brilliant colors and 3d gameplay which made the Virtual Boy look totally outdated, obsolete and the worthy owner of a place at the nearest closet.

(Read the Full Article Elioncho.)

Colombia knows how to leverage social networks:

Oscar Morales, an engineer deom Columbia who set up a Facebook group called One Million Voices Against the FARC that organized in mass demonstrations on the street in that country.

(Link TechCrunch.)

Stanza iPhone application can download books from a store:

Fictionwise will operate the “Stanza by Fictionwise” eBook store, which is accessible directly through the Stanza app, and gives Stanza users access to over 40,000 titles from all major trade publishers.

Surprised how this doesn’t break part 3.3.3 of the iPhone SDK license agreement:

Without Apple’s prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the App Store.

I guess, you need to be in a special “club” in order to get written approval from Apple.

(Link JkOnTheRun.)

Francine Hardaway writes a good reality check on for Silicon Valley startups(or would be entrepreneurs). This time is as good as any other to start a company. Starting now is great, since you have very little overhead. As she puts it:

This panel agrees that a good entrepreneur WILL get funded in this market. Early stage companies are actually doing better, because they are less expensive to invest in. Larger, bridge rounds are harder to come by.

So if you have an eye on a particular market, go for it. You might as well do it now!

Read the full article at Francine Hardaway’s blog.

VMWaware is offering 50% discounts on licenses and an extra $30 rebate for Parallel owners(Final price of Fusion ends up at $10, from the original $79). Price cuts these high only damage the perception of value.

I paid full retail for VMWare Fusion, and now feel like an idiot. Next time around, I will wait for another crazy promotion like today’s and not pay full retail, since it is apparently “worth” much less than I paid for.

(Link AppleInisder.)

They should have sold Facebook, because until now no one on either company knows how to make money like Google does! The offer was crap, but maybe combining all those people with one same problem($) could have resulted in an amazing monetization strategy(or not).

(Link TechCrunch.)

Shit! There goes the cool factor for our skumo.com site name! Cool thing is that I now get another reason to hate Microsoft!

Thanks, guys for making my hatred so easy!

(Link TechCrunch.)

Motorola’s new WebUI widget platform is powered by Apple’s open source HTML renderer WebKit and is now holding a contest to lure developers to it’s platform:

This contest is for building “WebUI” widgets — a platform based on Apple’s WebKit Web browser guts — which Motorola’s Web site says is for “Motorola’s open mobile Linux platform.”

Nokia, Google(Chrome and Android), iPhone, and now Motorola all on WebKit, I wonder why…

(VIa Alley Insider.)

Here’s what I don’t get:

Because of trade preferences granted as part of the war on drugs, most Colombian exports already are exempt from United States tariffs. The new agreement would benefit American companies that now have to pay high tariffs on exports to Colombia.

The Democratic majority congress is still playing politics against Bush, even after the Obama win. US companies would benefit more than the Colombian ones with this pact, and still they don’t want to approve it. US companies need to increase exports as the the economy tanks. Colombia is the third largest country in Latin America(after Brazil and Mexico), thus it’s a big partially untapped market. The war on drugs and terror is at is almost won thanks to the President Alvaro Uribe’s security and economic policies. By saying NO to Colombia, they are saying no to a President with 84% popularity, thus saying no to 84% of the colombian population. President elect Barack Obama wants to change the face of the US in the eyes of the world. Why not start by endorsing a President with 84% approval? This will be easy peasy compared to the gargantuan tasks that awaits in the Middle East!

Colombia is the last South American ally the US has, and still they choose to ignore them because of supposed human rights violations(shit happens when you have rebells inside hurting the civilian population).

The time is now, to build strong alliances and keep Colombia from going left like Venezuela, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Brazil in the upcoming 2010 Colombian elections.

(Link NYTimes.)