Unreasonable Observations

Oscar predictions (math-nerd style)

Backup Embedded Pictures

LiveJournal Mass Deletion

LiveJournal Mass Deletion

Interview with Profy

Interview with Profy

Breakfast with Tom Golisano

Breakfast with Tom Golisano

Spanish Version

Spanish Version

Army shutting down blogging?

Army shutting down blogging?

Venture Worthy?

Venture Worthy?

Losing data and other tidbits

Losing data and other tidbits

Updates

Updates

Enterprise Blogging

Enterprise Blogging

Backing up and restoring comments

Backing up and restoring comments

Progress Update

Progress Update

Up and Running

Up and Running

Going Live

Going Live

Useful Blogger backup template

Useful Blogger backup template

Older post on a lost blog

Older post on a lost blog

4 Different Blog Posts on "your data"

4 Different Blog Posts on "your data"

Predicting The Best Picture Winner

bandwagon and bloggingstocks

bandwagon and bloggingstocks

Look-no hands

Look-no hands

Hackers go Global

Hackers go Global

Whose Content is it?

Whose Content is it?

Control Your Content

Control Your Content

One Laptop Per Child

One Laptop Per Child

Mashup Camp - Day 2

Mashup Camp - Day 2

Mashup Camp Day 1

Mashup Camp Day 1

FeedBlitz added

FeedBlitz added

SaaS Disruptions

SaaS Disruptions

Mashup University, Day 2

Mashup University, Day 2

Mashup University Day 1

Mashup University Day 1

Mashup University tomorrow

Mashup University tomorrow

Gmail data lost

Gmail data lost

Update on BlogBackupOnline

Update on BlogBackupOnline

Try out Gliffy.com

Try out Gliffy.com

Techrigy comes online

Techrigy comes online

President Nixon's Resignation Speech (revised)

2008-02-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

The Oscars air tonight, and I’ve updated my regression analysis predicting the Best Picture winner. Despite a few skeptics, the model correctly predicted “The Departed” winning last year. (Lucky or smart? Who knows.)

(See last year’s post for a more in-depth explanation of the regression model. http://invisiblelawstudent.blogspot.com/2007/02/predicting-best-picture-winner.html )

I’ve gone back and updated the data to include last year’s nominees. I’ve continued to only use data from the last five years. I still think this is an excellent way to account for the changing tastes of voters. (What does the behavior of voters from the 1950s really tell us about voters today?)

The updated data again confirms that that the guild awards are still the best predictors of Oscar success. The PGA is still negatively-correlated with winning an Oscar. For movies such as “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Brokeback Mountain,” and “The Aviator,” winning the PGA was essentially the kiss of death. A PGA award can be overcome, but if a film is on the bubble, don’t expect a PGA award to help its Oscar chances. The Golden Globes and box office earnings remain insignificant predictors.

Here’s the updated prediction model for this year:

Oscar Win = SAG x .423 + DGA x .757 + PGA x -.454 + ACE x .285 + -.025

Here’s how the model would predict the winners from the last five years:



Movie	SAG	DGA	PGA	ACE	Points
The Departed	0	1	0	1	1.017
Babel	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Letters from Iwo Jima	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Little Miss Sunshine	1	0	1	0	-0.057
The Queen	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Crash	1	0	0	1	0.683
Brokeback Mountain	0	1	1	0	0.277
Good Night and Good Luck	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Capote	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Munich	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Million Dollar Baby	0	1	0	0	0.732
The Aviator	0	0	1	1	-0.195
Finding Neverland	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Ray	0	0	0	1	0.26
Sideways	1	0	0	0	0.398
Return of the King	1	1	1	1	0.985
Lost in Translation	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Master and Commander	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Mystic River	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Seabiscuit	0	0	0	0	-0.025
Chicago	1	1	1	1	0.985
Gangs of New York	0	0	0	1	0.26
The Hours	0	0	0	0	-0.025
The Two Towers	0	0	0	0	-0.025
The Pianist	0	0	0	0	-0.025

Notice the correct prediction for Crash.

Here’s how the model predicts this year’s nominees:

Movie

SAG

DGA

PGA

ACE

Points

No surprises here – “No Country” is the clear leader. However, it's PGA win shows that it may not perfectly fit Oscar voters' tastes, and its lack of an ACE win highlights its vulnerability. It's still the most likely to win, but don't discount the chances for a "Michael Clayton" or "Juno" to sneak in.

Here’s hoping this helps you take the prize for that Oscar pool. Enjoy the show!

2007-05-31T11:35:00.000-07:00

We've made a long awaited update to BlogBackupOnline. Users can now backup their embedded pictures with BlogBackupOnline. The backup engine will now automatically backup any images that you include with your blog entries. We've had this feature available for a few weeks now, but we didn't want to make any major announcement until we got all the bugs worked out of the engine.

Here's how to set BlogBackupOnline to include pictures in backups:

If you are registering a new blog:

Simply register your blog with BlogBackupOnline, and on the following screen select the "Images" checkbox. That's it - you're done.

If you already have your blog registered and you want to set it to back up images:

Select the "Manage" button in the dashboard for the blog
On the right, under "Media files," click "Manage"
Set how big you want the backup files to be (1 to 50 megabytes)
Click the images checkbox, then Submit

All of your blog images with future entries will be backed up. If you want to backup images from previous blog entries, you will need to run a Full Backup again.

We've also made a few other changes:

The restore screen has been modified. Hopefully it is less confusing now. Please leave your comments or send us an e-mail about how you like the new restore screens.

We have a Spanish version BlogBackupOnline up now.

These are all new updates and features, so there will be bugs here and there. Please send us an e-mail or leave a comment when you find one.

Thanks for stopping by the blog - we're looking forward to your comments about the new features.

2007-05-31T11:10:00.001-07:00

According to CNet News, LiveJournal suspended the accounts of 500 or so individuals that violated Six Apart's terms of service. Techrigy in no way condones any illegal activities, and we support the right of Six Apart in removing accounts that violate its terms of service. However, this is another powerful example of the need to backup your blog and other online content.

If these users who had their LJ accounts suspended had their account backed up with BlogBackupOnline, they would be able to simply transfer their blog to another service where they don't violate the terms of service, or they could create their own privately hosted blog. Unfortunately, many users did not have their blog backed up, and they have most likely lost years of blog posts.

BlogBackupOnline is free, and it is almost effortless to back up your blog. There's really no reason why you shouldn't be backing up your blog.

Thanks for stopping by, and please let us know if there is anything we can do to better your experience with BlogBackupOnline.

2007-05-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

2007-05-23T16:03:00.001-07:00

A few days ago, Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, a writer for Profy.com, a site that reviews Web 2.0 start-ups, interviewed our very own Aaron Newman to discuss Techrigy's latest and future product developments for social media. Her write-up of their conversation can be found here.

In her article, Cyndy begins by mentioning BlogBackupOnline, a product she herself uses for her own blog backups. She mentions its usefulness as many bloggers, like herself apparently, are lazy or forgetful about backing up their blogs manually themselves. She goes on to discuss how BlogBackupOnline is an important developmental step for Social Media Monitor, Techrigy's enterprise application currently in development.

Social Media Monitor is an enterprise application geared towards compliance and risk management issues arising out of the increasing presence and use of blogs in the workplace. As internal and external communication through blogging becomes more and more significant within the workplace, the potential liability risks are increasing reciprocally.

Techrigy's Social Media Monitor helps enterprises address potential liabilities and damages that could result from social media, as well as to help eliminate liabilities with social media and allow organizations to take full advantage of these media.

Social Media Monitor identifies social media existing internally within enterprises, and also interfaces with blog search engines to identify externally hosted social media operated by employees. Social Media Monitor then gathers the content from these blogs and runs searches against them with predefined rules to identify any liabilities. The blogs will be stored within a database, and checks against them can be run periodically depending on an organization's needs.

During their interview, Cyndy and Aaron discussed some interesting problems the enterprise application will highlight and address. Included among those issues, are, for example, considerations regarding the unmonitored and unrecorded dissemination of possibly highly-sensitive information and, furthermore, the potentially disastrous consequences that will ensue for enterprises if these up-and-coming issues are not anticipated and addressed.

It certainly is exciting to have been so positively reviewed and spotlighted by Profy. We definitely look forward to further conversations with Cyndy in the future. Follow my lead and check more of Cyndy's articles and reviews at Profy.com

Comment posted by Svetlana Gladkova
at 6/1/2007 1:35:00 AM
Kelly, here is Svetlana Gladkova from Profy.com. I am here to thank you for your positive opinion on Cyndy's article and on Profy in general. We will be happy to report on your progress on Profy.

P.S. I also wanted to mention that the link to Profy.com seems to be broken in the end of your post.

Thanks,
Svetlana

2007-05-23T16:03:00.000-07:00

2007-05-10T14:28:00.001-07:00

We had the privilege to share breakfast with Tom Golisano yesterday morning at an event made possible by TEN. Mr. Golisano is the founder of Paychex, one of the most successful payroll processing companies in the world. He's also the owner of the Buffalo Sabres (who just happen to be one round away from the Stanley Cup finals).

Mr. Golisano took time to answer questions from the local entrepreneurs that attended the meeting, discussing everything from employee fraud to community activism. The key theme I recognized throughout his talk was perseverance and fortitude. In Layman's terms - getting stuff done.

This theme can be found throughout any successful life. It isn't always the best idea or the smartest person that achieves the greatest success. An essential factor is the ability to make things happen. It's far too easy to have you head in the clouds, dreaming of how you'll make that billion-dollar idea happen. It isn't until the rubber hits the pavement that anything real can be achieved. Revolutionary ideas are secondary; execution is essential.

In other news, Techrigy's own Aaron Newman was quoted in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, where he discussed TEN.

"Before T.E.N. was around you were really on your own," said Aaron Newman, founder and president of Techrigy Inc., a Pittsford-based software company. "It's really a conduit to a lot of resources people didn't know about before."

TEN really is a great resource. Those in the Upstate NY area that aren't familiar with it would be well served to visit the TEN site. This being our first real press coverage, we will be proudly displaying it throughout the office. Cheers!

Comment posted by Aaron C. Newman (Techrigy, Inc.)
at 5/10/2007 7:54:00 PM
Fixed - thanks for the correction Luidi!

Comment posted by Liudvikas Bukys
at 5/10/2007 7:30:00 PM
There's a typo in your link to the TEN web site -- a pre-ended www.blogger.com/.

2007-05-10T14:28:00.000-07:00

"Before T.E.N. was around you were really on your own," said Aaron Newman, founder and president of Techrigy Inc., a Pittsford-based software company. "It's really a conduit to a lot of resources people didn't know about before."

2007-05-08T17:55:00.001-07:00

We're happy to announce that we now have a Spanish version of BlogBackupOnline available. (Click the Spanish version link on the homepage.) Please notify us if there are any errors in the translation.

If you'd like to see other language versions, please let us know. If there's enough demand, we might be able to put together another translation.

2007-05-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

2007-05-08T12:07:00.001-07:00

Interesting news on military bloggers from boingboing today.

Blogging (IMHO) is just another form of communication or expression. Shutting down bloggers seems like an impossible task. It's like saying no one in the military can use email.

I look back to how communication has changed over the past 15 years. I personally served in the Army during Operation Desert Storm back in 1991 and communication between people in the field and the family/friends back home was vastly different. Mail call was the highlight of the day when we would get a physical letter or package of brownies - there was no email. And an occasional 5 minute phone call was a special treat. It would be a shame to shutdown down such a great communication medium.

2007-05-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

2007-05-07T05:48:00.001-07:00

We had a great time this this past week at the Entrepreneur Boot Camp. Thanks to Jack and George from Derby Management for putting it on and to Deb and Mary from TEN for organizing everything.

We took home many key lessons, but one of the questions we found ourselves continuing to discuss is: how does a company know if it's capable of raising venture capital, or even if it needs to raise venture capital? There are a few variables every company considers when trying to decide if it is "venture worthy."

How big is the market?
What type of pedigree do the founders and key management have?
Are there barriers to entry?
How quickly can the company ramp up?

These are just a few considerations, but let's be realistic, the make-or-break variables are the market size and the experience of the company founders and managers.

What's the secret number for market size? I've heard $1 billion from some, $750 million from others, and a host of other amounts. In my experience, anything that has the potential to be a $500 million market wouldn't get tossed in the trash. There's another consideration at play that I think too many people forget. What's the probability that I can own enough of a market to make it worth a VC's while? And no, that 1% isn't enough. It's easy to say that you have a $1 billion dollar market, but how realistic is it that you can capture the market and destroy your competition for the next three years? This is something investors and entrepreneurs should consider.

The other variable, and probably the most important, is pedigree. If you've created two $50 million companies in the past 10 years, it's a lot easier to get that funding, if not almost automatic. If you were hire #2 at a $30 million company, you'll be fine. If you have been one of 100 marketing managers at a Fortune 1000 company for the past ten years, you'll probably need a great team and a great product.

This isn't an attempt at an end-all to any VC discussion, but it's something everyone starting a company should consider. As for the second thought - do you even need VC money? People tend to forget that there are many other funding options - Angels, grants, loans, family, friends, business plan competitions, etc. There's plenty of money out there, and it's a great time to be fundraising.

2007-05-07T05:48:00.000-07:00

2007-05-03T05:08:00.001-07:00

Whenever we pitch BlogBackupOnline to anyone, we always say that our concern is not that a hosting provider losing data as a user accidentally deleting content. A perfect recent example of this is Business 2.0 deleting its June issue from the editorial server before it went to press. The magazine lost all its layouts for the issue.

In college, when I worked at the newspaper, we religiously saved our layouts every five minutes, but things still happened that caused us to lose data and have sleepless nights. Having backups ready could have saved a lot headaches.

We've had a lot of people tell us how they lost their blog content because of a user mistake or accidental deletion. BlogBackupOnline can prevent that huge setback when your content is eventually lost - whether it happens tomorrow or a year from now.

In other news, some of us are attending the Entrepreneur Bootcamp with The Entrepreneur Network in Rochester. We're doing a lot of discussion and learning about business plans, raising capital, etc, so we'll be sure to share our experiences with you.

2007-05-03T05:08:00.000-07:00

2007-04-30T05:20:00.001-07:00

We've pushed out another updated version of BlogBackupOnline. This release fixes a number of problems users have discovered, mostly with Blogger and WordPress.

BlogBackupOnline will now back up all of your Blogger posts. In the past, we ran into issues when users had more than 500 posts. All of your posts will now be backed up, even if you have more than 500 posts.

We also made a fix with WordPress and FeedBurner. Previously, if your WordPress blog redirected to FeedBurner, BlogBackupOnline could not perform daily backups. We've fixed this, and blogs redirected to FeedBurner will be fully backed up every day.

Unicode supports is also enabled and fixed now. All languages should now be fully supported.

For those that missed it last time, the comment backup and restore features has also been corrected. Some users were not able to backup all their comments, or their comments were not showing up after a blog restore. This has been fixed by tacking the comments onto the body of each post.

In a related issue, Google has been having a lot of trouble with their Personalized Home Page. Apparently, many users' personalized home pages reverted back to an older version due to some technical glitches. While our goal in creating BlogBackupOnline was never to simply create a Blogger insurance policy, one can never be too safe with their information and data stored online. This is simply another illustration of a freak accident causing users to lose their content. Thanks to NetworkWorld for the info.

We're constantly working to improve BlogBackupOnline. If you have any issues, please contact us at support@techrigy.com. Thanks for stopping by the blog.

2007-04-30T05:20:00.000-07:00

2007-04-27T05:25:00.001-07:00

David Needle over at Internetnews.com writes an interesting article about how companies are handling the expansion of blogs and wikis. Employees throughout organizations are creating blogs and wikis without IT department or management having knowledge.

"It's become a control problem," Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, told internetnews.com. "'A lot of companies are surprised to find out how many Web 2.0 applications are being used by their employees.'"

Needle then goes on to discuss SpikeSource, a tool which helps companies implement blogs and wikis in a controlled manner.

Apparently, many companies are very hesitant to letting employees start using wikis and blogs.

"With over 135,000 employees worldwide, Schueller said P&G is largely 'a command and control' organization that isn't ready to open the floodgates to blogging and wikis. 'We're doing a lot of experiments to understand what will work best.'"

Social media are very frightening for organizations to consider, especially when thinking about just how much sensitive information employees can distribute at the click of the button.

It will be interesting to see how companies handle the proliferation of blogs and wikis. These social media present great opportunities for collaboration and information sharing in organizations, but if they are created in an unstructured manner without corporate knowledge and approval they could become major headaches.

2007-04-27T05:25:00.000-07:00

2007-04-24T18:54:00.001-07:00

We've received a few emails telling us how some users have been unable to back up and restore the comments on their blog. We know that this is a must-have feature with blog backup, so we've been hard at work solving the problem.

Steven and Jay have created a fix for comment backup and restore, and we went live with the changes last night. You should now be able to backup and restore blog comments. When restoring comments, the comments are added to the end of the body of the blog post. The essential usability of the comments after restore is the same, although technically the comments are not restored to specific comment fields. We're working on this though.

Please send us your thoughts on the new feature.

Keep tuning in - we have a lot of new information and thoughts about the company and future product developments that we'll be sharing with you in the coming weeks, and we'd like to hear what you think.

Hope you are enjoying the spring weather, and thanks for stopping by.

2007-04-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

2007-04-19T06:15:00.001-07:00

BlogBackupOnline has been live for about four days now. We'd like to thank everyone that has tried it out, and especially thank those that have sent us comments and feedback. We have been investigating and trying to solve every e-mail bug report.

We've noticed a few bugs in the backup engine, mostly with WordPress blogs. Aaron and Jay were able to create a fix for this, and WordPress should be working fine now.

Other improvements we've made:

- created better error messaging

- changed the restore screen language

- enhanced detection of WordPress blogs

- enhanced archive crawling of WordPress blogs

We're also working on adding support for more blog platforms.

Also, a big thanks to all of the bloggers out there that have posted reviews or links. We really appreciate everyone's write-ups and feedback.

Here is just a sample of some of the blog coverage:

Barry's Best Blog
Webware Killed the Harddrive
Download Squad
AppScout

One thing we want to mention is that yes, picture and video backup support is in the works. We'll have it up and running as soon as we can.

Interesting stats you might enjoy from BlogBackupOnline:

630 Users Registered
1271 Blogs Registered

Types of blogs registered:

Blogger - 585
WordPress - 231
Windows Live Spaces - 70
MoveableType - 66
LiveJournal - 28

Thanks for stopping by, and thanks for using BlogBackupOnline. As always, we welcome your comments and feedback.

2007-04-19T06:15:00.000-07:00

- created better error messaging

- changed the restore screen language

- enhanced detection of WordPress blogs

- enhanced archive crawling of WordPress blogs

We're also working on adding support for more blog platforms.

Also, a big thanks to all of the bloggers out there that have posted reviews or links. We really appreciate everyone's write-ups and feedback.

2007-04-15T15:45:00.001-07:00

The public beta of BlogBackupOnline is out! We finally released the updated beta last night - now anyone can register and back up their blog with BlogBackupOnline.

To recap, BlogBackupOnline allows you to:

- create full backups of your entire blog
- register for automatic daily backups of your blog
- restore your blog
- transfer your blog from one platform to a different platform
- export your backup files to any location

With BlogBackupOnline, your blog content is no longer locked up with your hosting provider, and your blog can be restored at any moment.

Not to mention that BlogBackupOnline is still free while we are in beta.

We've had more than 100 users register already, and we'd like to thank everyone for registering and sending us your emails and comments.

We hope that you'll try out BlogBackupOnline and find that it alleviates a lot of aches and pains with trying to back up your blog.

As with all betas, this isn't a perfect service, but we're working every day to make it better. Please contact me with any questions, bug reports or feedback - I'll be glad to help.

Thanks for stopping by, and please let us know what you think of BlogBackupOnline.

Oh, and a big thanks to StartupSquad for the great BlogBackupOnline review!

2007-04-15T15:45:00.000-07:00

2007-04-10T15:36:00.001-07:00

We’re gearing up for the public beta release of BlogBackupOnline. That’s right, after many months, BlogBackupOnline is almost ready to go live.

BlogBackupOnline brings all the control back to the blog owner. With BlogBackupOnline, it’s all back in your hands.

As advertised, BlogBackupOnline provides full and daily automatic blog backups for practically any blog out there. After registering your blog, BlogBackupOnline crawls your blog to create a full backup, and then it uses your blog’s RSS feed to maintain daily backups of your blog. The backups are performed automatically every day – you don’t have to do anything.

What’s the big deal?

Well, the flip side is that once you have your blog backed up with BlogBackupOnline, you’ll be able to restore it at any moment. No more worrying about lost content or blog posts. Restore to yesterday’s backup, or even a backup from six months ago. You can even automatically transfer and restore your blog contents from one hosting platform to another. Your blog is finally portable.

You can also export an RSS file of your backup to any location – including your own hard drive.

The best part of BlogBackupOnline is that there is no software installation or programming required. Just register your blog and let BlogBackupOnline do all the work. Stop by when you need to restore or export your blog.

We’ll be releasing the live beta very soon – so stay tuned.

If you’d like to be notified when we go live, or just want to say hi, drop me a line at adam@techrigy.com

Thanks for your patience – we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.

2007-04-10T15:36:00.000-07:00

We’re gearing up for the public beta release of BlogBackupOnline. That’s right, after many months, BlogBackupOnline is almost ready to go live.

BlogBackupOnline brings all the control back to the blog owner. With BlogBackupOnline, it’s all back in your hands.

What’s the big deal?

You can also export an RSS file of your backup to any location – including your own hard drive.

We’ll be releasing the live beta very soon – so stay tuned.

If you’d like to be notified when we go live, or just want to say hi, drop me a line at adam@techrigy.com

Thanks for your patience – we’re sure you won’t be disappointed.

2007-03-14T11:31:00.001-07:00

Here is a link that demonstrates how to use a template under Blogger to export your entire blog.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41447&useful=1&show_useful=1

2007-03-14T11:31:00.000-07:00

Here is a link that demonstrates how to use a template under Blogger to export your entire blog.

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=41447&useful=1&show_useful=1

2007-03-05T22:05:00.001-08:00

I just stumbled upon a story worth sharing.

"So … that’s all the content of this site lost. Around 700+ postings, all the comments, all the pages, all the links, all gone. Nice one. I’ve managed to recreate the wordpress database and put up this initial posting, but as for all the old content, it looks like it’s gone. As will I be, when I sort out a new hosting provider, but until then, sorry folks, all the old stuff is no more."

Mark was able to point people to the Internet Wayback Machine for some of his lost content.

Here's the link:
http://laurentschneider.blogspot.com/2006/11/backup-your-blog.html?

2007-03-05T22:05:00.000-08:00

2007-02-26T07:26:00.001-08:00

Here are some interesting stories in the news today.

http://www.bloghash.com/2007/02/smooth-upgrade-to-wordpress-211-in-8-steps/ upgrading blog version without losing old content

http://amix.dk/blog/viewEntry/19092 using gmail for some backups

http://blog.totalkiss.com/2007/02/youtube_crashes.html youTube & google "crash"

http://thecontentwrangler.com/article/web_based_content_management_is_your_data_saasafe/
saas content safety

2007-02-26T07:26:00.000-08:00

2007-02-24T12:08:00.000-08:00

With the Oscars being less than 36 hours away, it seems that practically every fan of cinema is making their predictions for the winners of each category. No longer being an undergraduate, I was experiencing a little Oscar withdrawal last night after not being able to take part in the annual Oscar debate with The Tiger.

The one thing I never understood when reading Oscarwatch, TheFilmexperience.net, and other sites, is how people place so much weight on pre-Oscar awards (I'm talking SAG, Director's Guild, Golden Globes, etc) but no one has ever taken the time to do some basic data analysis to really see which awards are the best predictors of Oscar glory.

So, I decided to take a little time and see if I might uncover anything interesting. You'll be surprised, to say the least.

Using the five past years of Oscar data, I used regression analysis to see if I might uncover a model to predict which movie might take home the Best Picture Oscar this year. (Please, please let The Departed win!)

There are a number of predictors I thought would be especially valid for predicting Oscar success.

Looking at every Oscar Best Picture nominee of the past five years, I collected data on the following categories:

The movie's pre-nomination box-office gross
Is the film's director also nominated for Best Director?
How many Oscar nominations does the film have among the best acting and screenplay categories?
Did the film win a Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Drama?
Did the film win the Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, Producers Guild or American Cinema Editor's award?

I collected this data for Oscars from 2002 to 2006. I then ran a regression analysis to see how each variable predicts Oscar success and if the variable is even a good predictor.

Linear regression Number of obs = 25
F( 9, 15) = 50.97
Prob > F = 0.0000
R-squared = 0.8259
Root MSE = .21547

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Robust
wonbestpic~e | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t|
-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------
boxoffice | .0000422 .0004562 0.09 0.927
bestdirector| -.0955407 .0630659 -1.51 0.151
otherOscar noms | .0055256 .0269864 0.20 0.841
wonGGdrama | .0379726 .0940788 0.40 0.692
wonGGcomedy | .0054738 .1385837 0.04 0.969
wonSAG | .2675211 .1854943 1.44 0.170
wonDG | .8988662 .1319837 6.81 0.000 .
wonPGA | -.5649189 .2538095 -2.23 0.042
won ACE | .4189429 .2361956 1.77 0.096
_cons | .0135011 .1108538 0.12 0.905

So what does this tell us? First off, this model predicts Best Picture winners with 83 percent accuracy. Secondly and surprisingly, many of the predictors that we all analyze so relentlessly mean very little for the outcome of the Best Picture Oscar. (P>|t| tells us how strong a predictor the variable is. Because I'm only using five years of data, I'm ruling anything greater than .2 is not a strong predictor. a P>|t| value of .1, for instance, would indicate that the variable will be inaccurate 10 percent of the time.)

Box office success, other Oscar nominations, and the Golden Globes mean practically nothing when we control for other pre-Oscar awards.

Also, you should know that Robust Coef. represents if the variable is positively or negatively correlated to winning a Best Picture Oscar, and how strong that relationship is. Larger numbers mean the variable is a better predictor. (If all the Robust Coefficients for a film add to 1.525, it essentially means a 100% chance of winning the Oscar.)

Knowing this, notice anything else unusual? Notice that negative sign next to the variable representing a PGA win? That's right, this analysis say that winning the Producer's Guild is NEGATIVELY correlated with winning the Best Picture Oscar. But how can that be right?

Just to take another look at this data, let's drop these variables and only use the SAG, DG, PGA and ACE to predict a Best Picture Oscar.

Linear regression Number of obs = 25

F( 4, 20) = 46.88

Prob > F = 0.0000

R-squared = 0.8186

Root MSE = .19048

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

| Robust

Won Best Picture | Coef. Std. Err. t P>|t|

-------------+----------------------------------------------------------------

wonSAG | .2477876 .1471156 1.68 0.108

wonDG | .8849558 .1086208 8.15 0.000

wonPGA | -.5132743 .2193453 -2.34 0.030

won ACE| .3982301 .2138609 1.86 0.077

_cons | -.0353982 .0241972 -1.46 0.159

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Even when dropping these variables, the model loses almost no predictive power. This regression also confirms the predictive power of the SAG, DG, PGA, and ACE.

That's right, the PGA continues to look like a huge kiss of death for any hopefuly Oscar winner. But wait, there's more. The DGA variable has a positive sign and a coefficient of .88 - that's practically a guarantee that the winning film of the DGA will win the Best Picture Oscar.

So, our model to predict best picture success is now:

Best Picture Winner Odds = SAG X .247 + DG X .88 + PGA X -.51 + ACE X .398 + -.035.
When a film wins the SAG, DG, PGA or ACE, substitute 1 for that value. If the film does not win that award, substitute 0.

For example, when applying this model to Crash, a film that won the SAG and ACE, it would looks like this.

Best Picture Winner Odds = 1 X .247 + 0 x .88 + 0 x -.51 + 1 x .398 + -.035. This leads to:

Best Picture Winner Odds = .61. This is the highest point total achieved by a film nominated for Best Picture that year, so the model predicted Crash as the favorite in 2006.

So how does this model stack up to results from the past five years? Let's take a look. (Again, a 1 represents a win, and a 0 represents not winning that award.)

Movie	Won SAG	Won DG	Won PGA	Ace	Points
Crash	1	0	0	1	0.61
Brokeback Mountain	0	1	1	0	0.3369
Good Night and Good Luck	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Capote	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Munich	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Million Dollar Baby	0	1	0	0	0.8499
The Aviator	0	0	1	1	-0.15
Finding Neverland	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Ray	0	0	0	1	0.363
Sideways	1	0	0	0	0.212
Return of the King	1	1	1	1	0.9819
Lost in Translation	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Master and Commander	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Mystic River	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Seabiscuit	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Chicago	1	1	1	1	0.9819
Gangs of New York	0	0	0	1	0.363
The Hours	0	0	0	0	-0.035
The Two Towers	0	0	0	0	-0.035
The Pianist	0	0	0	0	-0.035
A Beautiful Mind	0	1	0	0	0.8499
Gosford Park	1	0	0	0	0.212
In the Bedroom	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Fellowship of the Ring	0	0	0	0	-0.035
Moulin Rouge	0	0	1	1	-0.15

Looking at the predictions for each film, the model correctly predicts the winner of the Best Picture Oscar for every year, 2002-2006. It even predicted Crash over Brokeback Mountain, and it had Million Dollar Baby as the easy winner over The Aviator. This certainly provides more evidence that the PGA is a negative indicator of Oscar success, and the DG is a strong indicator.

Now, let's apply this data to Sunday's nominees.

Movie	Won SAG	Won DG	Won PGA	Ace	Points
Babel	0	0	0	1	0.363
Little Miss Sunshine	1	0	1	0	-0.301
Letters from Iwo Jima	0	0	0	0	-0.035
The Departed	0	1	0	1	1.2479
The Queen	0	0	0	0	-0.035

Little Miss Sunshine takes a huge hit from winning the PGA, and The Departed gets a huge boost from winning the DG. Babel is still in the mix, although trailing The Departed. The Queen and Letters from Iwo Jima have no chance. (The Departed's score is greater than 1 due to it's ACE tie with Babel. It's an unusual situation.)

Does Little Miss Sunshine really have the least chance of winning out of all of the nominees? There are certainly some problems with this model. There's a 12 percent chance of homoscedasticity, which can lead to problems. There's also the problem of only using data from the last five years, but I'm not terribly concerned about this as I was looking for the latest Oscar trends. But based on the past five years of Oscars, it certainly looks like it's a two horse race between The Departed and Babel.

Hope you've enjoyed this alternate analysis of the Oscar race. If others ask for it, I might perform a similar analysis for the directing and acting categories before Sunday night. Please leave your comments and suggestions.

Hope everyone enjoys the awards, and here's to The Departed taking home the gold!

Addendum: changed the terminology from "percentage" to "points." Sorry for the confusion, and thanks to Tim for the pointer.

Addendum 2: I went back to the 1998 Oscar (Titanic) and ran regressions on that data. Things became a lot more convoluted, and the model's predictive power dropped down to about 50%. Still pretty good, but not great. With the new data, the PGA award basically became useless, as it doesn't explain Oscar sucess at all when using data from 1998 to 2006. Box office revenues did become significant and with positive explanatory power, although not that significant. Every $15 million a movie makes gives it a small, small boost in its chances. Nominations in other acting and screenwriting categories did become significant and useful. For every screenwriting or acting nomination a film gets, its about 7 percent more likely to win. I can post the full results tomorrow, if anyone desires.

What I take away from these results is that in the long-run, its much more difficult to predict Oscar success. However, I still think we can spot trends in human behavior, and the original model spots the trends over the last five years pretty well, so I'm going to stick with it. We'll see what happens tomorrow night.

2007-02-21T16:36:00.001-08:00

Some interesting posts for the day:

From bloggingstocks.com, here is an article on backup. It talks about how we should perform backups, different ways to do backups, and some options to pick from. Specifically they address the issue of "essentially trusting your data to someone else".

http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2007/02/19/technology-for-the-rest-of-us-back-it-up-baby/

Here is an interesting new service - bandwagon (http://ridethebandwagon.com/) - which provides online iTunes backup. They are suppose to launch tomorrow.

2007-02-21T16:36:00.000-08:00

2007-02-16T06:23:00.001-08:00

I think it is great that people are beginning to understand the importance of backing up their content. There are new posts almost daily with the "work-arounds" users have figured out.

Here are another 2 entries in the "thanks, but do I have to?" blog back up methods category:
http://www.ashbaughonline.com/2007/02/15/blog-backup-strategy/

http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/BlogBackup/

The point is that these are work-arounds developed by people who understand how all the pieces fit together.
But-blogging has gotten simple enough for everyday users like me to join in, and I don't understand most of what is happening in the background. I don't want to. That's what this Web-as-platform, social-networking, join-the-community explosion is all about.

2007-02-16T06:23:00.000-08:00

2007-02-12T12:10:00.001-08:00

Check out this latest news story about hackers attempting to get in to computers and your stuff EVERY 39 SECONDS.

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/527132/

Hackers managed to briefly overwhelmed at least three of the 13 computers that help manage global computer traffic Tuesday February 8, 2007.

2007-02-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

2007-02-12T07:08:00.001-08:00

The number of stories about the need to back up your blogs is almost overwheming at this moment.

The link below gets into interesting territory. The issue of who controls your postings and content is really highlighted. http://battellemedia.com/archives/003355.php

The search for backup solutions is heating up. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html

2007-02-12T07:08:00.000-08:00

The number of stories about the need to back up your blogs is almost overwheming at this moment.

The link below gets into interesting territory. The issue of who controls your postings and content is really highlighted. http://battellemedia.com/archives/003355.php

The search for backup solutions is heating up. http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-backup-blogger-blog.html

2007-02-09T14:38:00.001-08:00

Hi, my name is Alison. I joined the Techrigy team this week. BlogBackupOnline.com will be in private beta by the end of next week and the caffiene is flowing. If you want to add your name to our list of testers send an email to beta@blogbackuponline.com.

Blog are not immune to the evils that come at us over the web. We download security updates, scan our emails, protect our PCs and back up our data. Our web based content is more vunerable-making stories like the one below inevitable.

Bloggers get Hacked is a catchy headline. It’s a short piece about being “under attack”, and how personal it feels. Starting up a blog is essentially joining a community, and we want to feel secure within that community. Feeling secure requires that we have control of ourselves and our “stuff” and this little piece highlights the importance of that control.

BlogBackupOnline allows you to take control of your blogs. Back up your remote data to our secure data center. Export it, restore it, receive it on DVD-it's under your control.

2007-02-09T14:38:00.000-08:00

2007-01-26T13:45:00.001-08:00

So while at Mashup Camp, we attended a presentation at the MIT Museum on the One Laptop Per Child program. We showed up a little late, but it was quite interesting. Here's the website for the program http://laptop.media.mit.edu/. The idea is to provide affordable ($100) laptops for children in developing nations and the idea was born at MIT.

The presentation was given by Walter Bender. He had a few demo machines. The device was much smaller then i expected. The design seems to be very, very sturdy and weather-proof. It's based on some form of linux with XWindows. It has wireless capabilities and no standard hard drive that can crash (this thing is designed not to fail and the hard drive is one of the computer most common point of failure). Walter talked about using wireless in places where wireless is not common. It's done by creating a mesh of wireless hubs, each laptop connecting every other laptop create a wireless network where one doesn't exist.

There was question and answer session where alot of thoughts and concerns where brought up:
1) Will a black market for the devices be created and how to prevent
2) What kind of training will there be
3) Does this kind of project hurt US workers
4) Can we create a similar project for students here in our country
5) What pressure have we seen from parties such as laptop builders to stop this

The program has created a limited number of laptops at this point. The last batch was 2500 so they have not scaled the operation yet.

It sounds like a solid program that could bring the world that much closer.

2007-01-26T13:45:00.000-08:00

2007-01-18T22:07:00.001-08:00

Today was the last day of Mashup Camp and it was the shortest day. I started with the presentation on Amazon web services. Very interesting, Amazon has so much beyond selling books going on now ;)

They discussed the S3 service which is basically virtual hard disk space. It's very cost-effective apparently, so I'm going to give it a try and upload all my digital photos there as a backup. I spent the last few hours trying out the S3 services and mapping a drive to S3 and creating a URL link to a file on S3. I'll post on that tomorrow perhaps. The company Mashery (http://www.mashery.com/) announced in the meeting they use S3 to store all their backups. The presenter continued talking about their other services such as EC2 which is virtual servers. They have Linux and MySQL available as virtual servers and he mentioned it cost 10 cents per hours which came out to roughly $72 per month.

I went next to a discussion on Mashup security which was quite interesting for me because of my security background. I am an officer in the Web Application Security Consortium (http://www.webappsec.org/). The discussion focused on a few topics. First the need for a framework for session management. A mashup today requires you to enter the credentials of any other web services with accounts you want to access. Is there a way to change how this trust works? A ticket-granting service like Kerberos? Everyone seemed to be looking to OpenID as a start to a solution. Another issue was the security of the browser. There was talk about whether the browser can and should be trusted but no real conclusions there. The session leader was an ex-security researcher from nCircle, one of the leading security assessment companies out there.

Overall Mashup Camp was a great experience and I meet a ton of people. Hopefully Techrigy will be showcasing our stuff at the next Mashup Camp!

2007-01-18T22:07:00.000-08:00

Today was the last day of Mashup Camp and it was the shortest day. I started with the presentation on Amazon web services. Very interesting, Amazon has so much beyond selling books going on now ;)

Overall Mashup Camp was a great experience and I meet a ton of people. Hopefully Techrigy will be showcasing our stuff at the next Mashup Camp!

2007-01-18T07:51:00.001-08:00

(Pictured here - David, the brains behind Mashup Camp)

My day started with a session on the Semantic web. There was much discussion on how this needed to be done in small chunks and that there wasn't much incentive for people to implement the semantic web, so it needs to be incidental to some other value derived from implementing the semantic web. There were discussions on the upper versus lower case semantic web and how we need to get there in small steps. One woman as well discussed concerns over privacy associated with the semantic web cataloging information about people such as skype numbers, cell phone numbers, etc... Her comment was that woman have to worry about being Skype Stalked if their information is too open.

My own comment was that Sematic Web needs to be dumbed down. Its way to complicated for the masses when it uses terms like ontology, semantic, etc... I struggle with the concepts and terms, until it is simpler it wont be universal, and until its universal, it wont hit critical value.

At the end of the talk, there was a side demo done of a new Semantic Web product called BigSwerve (seemed to be a MyBlogLog competitor).

My next session was on Commercialization and Licensing of Mashups. There were alot of concerns about exploding mashups that get shutdown by webservices they rely on. There was alot of concerns and questions on Terms of Services and the ambiguity built into them, for instance what is a commercial site? Google's definition is if you take money to log into a system. However, it is not defined and most people agreed that was likely on purpose. Someone there built the Amazon Light based on the Amazon API but linked to Netflix from the videos and got a cease and desist letter from Amazon. Cease and desist letters seemed more common then I expected. There was talk about using the Mashup Wiki to start a project to define terms of service that developers hope the big API providers adopt. There was some disension that this would be a waste of time.

At lunch my discussions continued with a company that build websites for government and public sector orgs. The attititude was they we know we are violating terms of service, but we really dont have an option. One lady said see wanted to pay a quarter per web service call for her 100 calls a day. She called the end vendor but they didn't offer anything less than $5000 to get anything, so instead she just continued to use the service violating the terms of service. It seems the web services business models don't care about the micropayments. They might learn a lesson from Google that makes a fortune 1 nickel at a time.

Following lunch was Speed Geeking with about 20 mashups. I got a chance to see the following Mashups:

1) GoogleBase(semistructured data) + GoogleGadgets = BaseGadgets from a Google employee.

2) GanstaMap.com

3) RoboCal - Google Calendar + a text-to-speech webservice. Can call you when things on your calendar are due. Also there was a botcastbuddy.com which calls you and reads whats in your bloglines account.

4) iGem - genetic engineering competition wiki looking for ways to break down the silo between teams.

5) StrikeIron - reseller of API data for Mashups making it more affordable. They showed an Excel widget they have to pull lots of data.

6) Proto - development environment for writing mashups are other programs.

7) Yahoo did MyBlogLog mashups combined with delicious bookmarks

8) IbisEye did a mashup for a historical data hurricance tracking system in which you could see the path of a hurricane from 70 years ago.

9) Hype machine - music tracking mashup

10) AOL demo of Boxely and WIM mashed up.

11) BookSearchTimesThree - searching the text inside any book. Takes the 3 sources, Amazon, Google, and someone else(?) and combines the results.

Next I saw a presention from Dapper which was much like Kapow. This seems like a very exciting area - creating an API from HTML where an API does not exist. Their technology seems pretty powerful and everyone in the audience was very excited about it.

The conversation also sequed into a discussion on terms of service, ownership of content, etc... For instance, Facebook data ownership. Facebook has a license to the data. The owner actually owns the data. So if you write a Dap to it, who's permission do you need? An article from AP on the New York Times - how do you get rights to Mash that up?

Comment posted by Techrigy, Inc.
at 1/18/2007 9:08:00 PM
Sorry for the misunderstanding. I wasn't trying to reference an actual article. What I meant was "who has ownership of an article I want to use in my Mashup". If the article is being taken from the NY Times but it is an AP article that NY Times is paying to syndicate? Someone during the discussion brought up this as an example of how difficult it can be to assign ownership of data you are Mashing Up.

Comment posted by searob11
at 1/18/2007 1:03:00 PM
I am looking for but unable to fing the AP/NYT article you refer to in your post.

2007-01-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

(Pictured here - David, the brains behind Mashup Camp)

At the end of the talk, there was a side demo done of a new Semantic Web product called BigSwerve (seemed to be a MyBlogLog competitor).

Following lunch was Speed Geeking with about 20 mashups. I got a chance to see the following Mashups:

1) GoogleBase(semistructured data) + GoogleGadgets = BaseGadgets from a Google employee.

2) GanstaMap.com

4) iGem - genetic engineering competition wiki looking for ways to break down the silo between teams.

5) StrikeIron - reseller of API data for Mashups making it more affordable. They showed an Excel widget they have to pull lots of data.

6) Proto - development environment for writing mashups are other programs.

7) Yahoo did MyBlogLog mashups combined with delicious bookmarks

8) IbisEye did a mashup for a historical data hurricance tracking system in which you could see the path of a hurricane from 70 years ago.

9) Hype machine - music tracking mashup

10) AOL demo of Boxely and WIM mashed up.

11) BookSearchTimesThree - searching the text inside any book. Takes the 3 sources, Amazon, Google, and someone else(?) and combines the results.

Comment posted by searob11
at 1/18/2007 1:03:00 PM
I am looking for but unable to fing the AP/NYT article you refer to in your post.

2007-01-16T16:25:00.001-08:00

I've added a FeedBlitz subscriber option to the left column of our blog so if you would like to get Email rather than use a feed reader to get the latest entries you have that option. It's a nice option and it's free, so offering it was a no-brainer.

Warning: we are not affliate with FeedBlitz so we don't control your email address when you register with FeedBlitz.

2007-01-16T16:25:00.000-08:00

2007-01-16T16:19:00.001-08:00

I came across an interesting post on Moon Watcher/Globelogger on SaaS disruptions. Read it at http://www.globelogger.com/item.php?id=889. It talks about a number of service disruptions with salesforce.com, and typepad. This is interesting because it's making it more obvious that SaaS is a great idea but does not eliminate service outages and other IT issue. Solutions like SpanningSalesForce as well as backing up SaaS content will continue to be very necessary.

The author of Moon Watch, Charlie Woods, runs the company http://www.spanningsalesforce.com/. They provide feeds for SalesForce.com so when you are on the road and you can't access the SalesForce.com website, you still have feeds of your important sales content (thats one view - I'm sure there's other takes on the features). Great idea. They look like they are very close to putting out SpanningSync. It's great to see success with SaaS and Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. Let's hope this is just the start!

2007-01-16T16:19:00.000-08:00

2007-01-16T15:53:00.001-08:00

(picture to the left - Jay Mari, Director of Software Development for Techrigy and super-nerd)

Presentation from Kapow Technologies right after lunch. They have a service that creates APIs for web sites that dont give you an APIs. So much information available out there can not be accessed programmatically. They have created a kapow robot called RoboMaker that allows you to build on a Web page to create a "virtual" API out of any HTML source. It allows you to find a specific tag in the page and create fields out of that, perform conversions on fields, etc... Then you can right a Mashup using the "virtual" API. They called it "Mashups for the Long Tail of the Web". From Openkapow.com, "a free open service platform that makes it possible to use data, functionality or GUI from the web as part of your mashup." Andreas Krohn's, the presenter, final words "HTML is the worlds most common API - start using it today!"

Also saw a presentation from Chris Radcliff, "That API Guy at Eventful". Eventful has an API you can use to incorporate events into your Mashups. Something interesting he talked about was actually people requesting events. If enough people ask for a performer in a specific area, they can possible cause a grass roots efoort to not just schedule but even create an event. Event can be GEO coded in the HTML and in the API, so that you can locate the event based on GEO location.

A presentation from Autodesk on MapGuide Open Source and MapGuide Enterprise. Autodesk is actually a large $2 billion company - this is not their core business. It seems they decided to open source this product and offer it out to the community. It has some very complex options to create maps and run operations around GIS and mapping. They have the ability to create multiple parcel layers and run complex queries on those layers. Its integrated with Google Earth.

Next presentation was from Infusion Development on mashups in the enterprise. Infusion is a 120 person tech consultancy working with some large financial institutions. There demo was based on a Virtual Earth mashups. I found it interesting and helpful when they started addressing what is needed for an enterprise mashup - Reliability, scalability, security, Interoperability and integration, documentation, and maintenance. These are the really issues Mashups and Web 2.0 have to address before it is going to become mainstream. All the cool technology in Mashups and Web 2.0 are going to remain on the fringe until they can address those concerns by Enterprise Admins. There demo was of federal emergency mashup - basically was done in 150 lines of code.

Final presentation of the day was done by Jeremy Lueck. He was part of Truveo which was bought by AOL for $40 million. He is an AOL Video Search Evangalist. The most interesting part of his presentation was that he forgot his keyboard for his MacMini so he used the overhead projector :)

Tomorrow starts Mashup Camp, although I've heard several reports of weather ruining travel plans. I look forward to report how it goes tomorrow.

2007-01-16T15:53:00.000-08:00

2007-01-15T20:10:00.001-08:00

Here's a quick overview of Day 1 of Mashup University:

It seems many people didn;t show up after signing up. Please be careful if you sign up for a free unconference that you don't inadvertantly fall into this practice of skipping it. It's a shame since it's free, so many people put so much effort into the event, alot of food goes to waste, and it prevents someone else from attending because all the slots were filled. Thankfully the extra food ended up donated to a local shelter. Nice job David!

My day started with "Speed Geeking" where we saw small presentations on the following Mashups:
- mashup helping flood victims return to New Orleans called "After Katrina"
- AOL's Microformats
- IBM's "Enterprise Mashup tool" call QED (Quick and Easy Design)
- Amazon's Mechanical Turk (http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome)
- LignUp - "a comprehensive IP communications system as well as a development platform that allows for quick and easy integration of voice and rich media into web applications and portals"

Following lunch was a presentation from AOL on "Microformats + DOM/AJAX to create mashups" by Kevin Lawver. This was interesting as I like the idea of setting more web hypertext into microformats that can make the web more structured and usable. A great example that was used was if you enter your events in microformats it becomes so much easier to cross refernce who else is going to the same event. Even the idea of microformats leading to imroved SEO made alot of sense. Kevin touched on how search engines are starting to understand these microformat. Hopeful this will truely lead to a more semantic web!

This was followed by a presentation on OpenAIM API and another presentation on Boxely. Both technologies worth looking into.

2007-01-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

2007-01-14T08:43:00.001-08:00

We are exciting to leave for Mashup Camp/Mashup University(http://blog.mashupcamp.com/) tomorrow. It's running from Monday thru Thursday at MIT in Boston. This is our first Mashup Camp and we truely appreciate David Berlind and Doug Gold for the hard work they put into it, as well as having it on the East Coast so we can attend! It's going to be 4 days of absorbing a huge amount of technical content and mixing with some fellow techies. If you are going to be in Boston for the week, drop up a line and we will buy you a beer/wine/coffee/etc... We just enjoy meeting other people excited about technology. Even if you can't go, check out the website - I believe they are haved podcasts and feeds of some of the content.

On another note, I was at the Coop in Harvard Square last week and came across a book that piqued my attention - Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (http://www.wikinomics.com/book/). I'm about a quarter of the way through it and its very exciting. If you're interested in the collaboration revolution going on, I recommend picking it up. I won't spoil it and tell you how it ends.

There was also an interesting post (http://meetings.abanet.org/ltrc/index.cfm?&data=20070109#088D4FA3-E334-F967-2FCBD59A3DDD4C3A) a few days ago from the American Bar Association discussing free services (such as Gmail), remote data storage, privacy concerns, and scrutinizing of online backup services. These are becoming pressing issues particularly in the legal field with the sensitivity of data. It's refreshing to see these topics being discussed more commonly. Expect to see Techrigy on the cutting edge of data protection and privacy.

Last note is on a neat blog I came across, or rather that came across us - http://www.startupsquad.com/. The blog seems to have the inside track on startup news, so if your interested in that area, add the feed to your reader. Following the feed for the past week, I've been impressed.

2007-01-14T08:43:00.000-08:00

2006-12-28T20:19:00.001-08:00

This week I'm going to post on a recent event demonstrating the need for remote online-content backup. Namely that users of Gmail ended up losing some emails.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/28/gmail-disaster-reports-of-mass-email-deletions/

Of course this is extremely timely, although perhaps if they would have given us another month it would have been nicer ;)

I guess this is our way of "unofficially" announcing the availability of support for backup of Gmail by the end of January and backup of other Google account data to follow shortly. Here are some features to expect.

-Backup all remote data to our secure data center
-Export all remote data to your local computer as a single export file
-Receive a monthly DVD with all data on it
-Backup entire history of emails

Until the end of January, we strongly suggest following these instructions to backup your gmail:

http://grasshopperfactory.com/cbc/back-up-your-gmail/

As well, consider backing up your other data, such as:
-Google Calendar
-Yahoo! Mail
-Corporate data such as SalesForce.com
-Online bookmarks
-Blogs

2006-12-28T20:19:00.000-08:00

2006-12-06T18:31:00.001-08:00

Things are heating up at Techrigy in December, even though Rochester, NY is getting very cold.

First off, the release of BlogBackupOnline.com is imminent although still not available. The private beta is planned for December 15th release. Please email us if you are interested (beta@blogbackuponline.com).

Second, we are looking to expand. If you are interested in an exciting position at a new start in a hot market, email us at jobs@techrigy.com. We have started some recruiting efforts in the local area, but all candidates as welcome. We are looking for engineering, business development, and marketing roles.

Changing gears, I spent some time this week playing with AllMyData.com. Peter Secor is one of the founders and is a friend of a friend back from his days at Micromuse where he was a superstar. I think the idea is really cool - when they pull it off, it will be a killer application. The idea seems to be around backing up your hard drive using file sharing in a peer-to-peer network - you could compare it to bit torrent. Anyhow the bottom line is they are talking about $2.95 per month to backup 10gb. Right now I am using Connected.com (IronMountain Digital) at $20 per month. If I were one of the big providers of remote backup, I would be all over AllMyData.com. Good luck to them.

2006-12-06T18:31:00.000-08:00

2006-11-27T16:38:00.001-08:00

I figured I would post today about Gliffy (http://www.gliffy.com) since I just finished using it and found the experience great! It's not the first time I've used it and honestly, it makes perfect sense. If you haven't checked it out, it's Visio-like but free and with no install. Considering I only use a diagramming tool every couple of months, I simply don't want to shell out for Visio and I don't want to download it, install it, etc... so Gliffy is a great solution.

Check out Gliffy's blog at http://www.gliffy.com/blog/. One of their latest posts is on a new plugin to Confluence, an Enterprise Wiki (http://www.gliffy.com/blog/?p=41), so it looks like they are very busy over there. Hats off to Chris and Clint!

Now to tie this into backup - this is another opportunity for backup of online content. I have some documents stored up on Gliffy I would not be happy with if they "went away". I really ought to have a backup but currently there's not much I can do to make that happen. I guess I could go through and save a .PNG of each document each time I make an update. Not practical.

Gliffy doesn't have an API (that I am aware of) to suck a copy of your files out. Maybe a "Save as Visio document" feature would facilitate the capability to provide a backup.

Well, needless to say we are going to look into adding support for backup of your Gliffy documents to BlogBackupOnline.com. We will let you know how that works out.

2006-11-27T16:38:00.000-08:00

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2006-11-20T17:03:00.001-08:00

Welcome to our first posting. This blog is being launched in conjunction with our website (www.techrigy.com). Techrigy's site was officially released today (a big thanks to Josh at http://www.grindcolordesign.com/). We are still waiting for the release of our first product, BlogBackupOnline.com (http://www.blogbackuponline.com), which is still due out in the beginning of December.

This blog is dedicated to product and company announcements, as well as news on the online content backup industry. While you will definitely see alot on Techrigy's products specifically, we will also be providing information on news outside of the company.

Thanks for reading!

Aaron C. Newman
Founder/President
Techrigy, Inc.
http://www.techrigy.com

Comment posted by Peter Secor
at 12/5/2006 12:31:00 AM
Have fun guys, backup is a fun space. Drop me a line at Allmydata if you want to compare notes.

2006-11-20T17:03:00.000-08:00

Comment posted by Peter Secor
at 12/5/2006 12:31:00 AM
Have fun guys, backup is a fun space. Drop me a line at Allmydata if you want to compare notes.

There Will Be Blood

No Country for Old Men

Atonment

Michael Clayton

2006-09-11T18:42:00.000-07:00

My fellow Americans,

I come to you tonight begging for your forgiveness. I have betrayed the men and women who gave their lives for our freedom. I have cracked the pillars of respect, freedom and liberty. I have betrayed my family and the citizens of this country whose prosperity I vowed to protect.

My sin against this great country is forgivable, but the temporary and permanent pain I have inflicted against the morals for which we stand will never be forgotten. While I yearn for nothing more than your complete and utter forgiveness, I am no longer fit to represent the innocence for which this country eternally strives.

The founding fathers intended the President of this United States of America to be a guardian of the Constitution and its guarantees. I am no longer a beacon of the eternal virtues of this country. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln – these men would never follow me on the path to darkness.

Effective noon tomorrow, I will no longer hold the office of President of the United States of America.

It tears my soul that my lack of clarity has taken me from the rank from which I hoped I could bring the greatest good to this country and the world. My actions are cause for eternal regret, but the greatest responsibility in the land is no place for a time of moral repair.

My errors are no cause for the abandonment of improvement. We must continue to solidify the right of life, liberty, and happiness in our home and throughout the world. We must purge this world of the maladies of murder, famine and oppression. We must ensure our children’s children may lay claim to the rights to which we are privy. We must take all effort to better our life, our neighbors’ lives, and the lives of our sons and daughters. We will decay, but our freedoms must echo until the heavens descend upon this earth.

In the wake of my moral failure, I will strive to correct the damage of my errors. This nation requires healing, and I will make amends with you. In this time of darkness, I vow to make you proud to be an American as you once were, and as you will again be. From the ashes of callousness will rise an eternal fire of prosperity.

While the lessons of the day must live forever, as your President, your brother, and your countryman, I beg for you to remember me as I once was, and as I will be.

May God forgive us, may he guide us, and may he deliver us into the light.