Patriotism in the Tech Venture

We were short a software engineer for most of today, but for the most fortunate of reasons:

Originally from Shanghai, our developer spent a lot of the day in front of a judge becoming a citizen! (more…)

Launch of GeoIntelis.com!

At the beginning of March 2011, the company that I run full-time, R7 Solutions, launched our new Web 2.0 mapping and workflow service: GeoIntelis.com!

Here is the announcement blog post on the GeoIntelis.com website.

Since then, we’ve announced a slew of new data packages for both oil and gas exploration and production users, and for solar and wind developers.

Dozens more data packages are in the pipeline and will be announced daily for several weeks to come.

This has been a long journey, but one about which I have been passionate – and my vision for this product has been unwavering.

I wanted to talk a little about this journey here, from a personal and entrepreneurial perspective.

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Quick Mini-Reviews: TweetDeck, Wink, CamStudio, VCOrganizer, DriveImage XML

You certainly get your money’s worth at TechVentureGeek! Here are 5 product mini-reviews in the space of a single post – and most of them are freeware!

First, we’ve switched over to TweetDeck for our tweeting.

As speculated previously, HootSuite came up with a monetization scheme, and that scheme didn’t work for this casual tweeter.

So, we jumped over to TweetDeck, and couldn’t be happier.

The prior reason for staying with HootSuite was that it has a lighter footprint. It is 100% JavaScript & AJAX.

TweetDeck, on the other hand, is an Adobe AIR RIA app. OK, so the overhead isn’t so heavy that we really care. It works great.

We’ve put all of our Twitter accounts into it as well as some Facebook pages.

Next, we’ll experiment with specialized, filtered Twitter feeds to isolate – without unfollowing – a few of the automated/media feeds.

TweetDeck is free, so long as you don’t mind using Adobe AIR, which is an installed application framework (like Silverlight, etc.)

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Exploration of the Inevitable: “Sentiment Mining”

Sitting here, listening to “Der Kommissar” and thinking about the future.

I haven’t had time to blog recently, with the birth of our second child, but I’m just going to dive back in with an “Exploration of the Inevitable”

First up, automated sentiment trading.

Precipitated by the real-time fire hose of data that is now hitting our screens, cellphones, tablets and retinal implants, AI is back in vogue.

Of course, AI doesn’t look anything like we thought it would. It looks more like a warehouse that thinks for itself, solving a tiny domain problem incredibly effectively, and making money in the process.

Or – just maybe – a Jeopardy robot.

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I’m back… and it’s a girl…

I had some difficulty keeping up with my posting schedule this summer after the birth of our second daughter, Ella, but autumn is here and it is back to school time at TechVentureGeek!

We’ve been very busy at R7 Solutions launching new services this quarter, including launching an all-inclusive GIS hosting service, re-vamping our ArcGIS consulting, launching our Open Source GIS consulting services and re-launching our GIS application development services. And we have several new products and services in the works to be launched before the end of the year.

Here at the TechVentureGeek blog, I look forward to sharing several new reviews of great tools for startups, ongoing discussion of the evolving venture capital environment, and a humorous feature on toxic executives you sometimes find attaching themselves to startups and what to do about them.

Stay tuned!