TechZing

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Justin and Jason discuss possible referral models for Pluggio, Sebastien’s progress on the Swarm AI, using WebWorkers (the HTML5 spec for multi-threading) vs setTimeout or setInterval, Jason’s ideas for his machine learning library and business intelligence platform QuantFire, the benefits of collaborating on projects with friends, the status of AppIgnite, developing locally vs using a development server, ambient thinking, growing your willpower and managing your time, how not to lose your enthusiasm for a project, what can’t be stolen from you and why clones seem to almost always fail, the new iPad news app Flipbook, launching an app per week using AppIgnite, AppInventor as the VB for Android and a comparison between the Android and iPhone developer ecosystems.

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Justin and Jason speak with UFO historian, Richard Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941-1973, The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991 and a third and final volume which has not yet been released, but which will cover the history from 1991 up to the present day. Some of the topics discussed include the top twelve government documents on UFOs and how they were obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, The Black Vault as a source of released government documents, a provocative UFO encounter at an Air Force missile base, why an alien race might find us interesting and whether there could possibly be more than a single species, the rapid advancement of human technology and the Singularity, some interesting statements made by Ben Rich, former director of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, the possible transfer of recovered alien technology from the hands of the military to aerospace contractors, the black budget and special access programs, how the National Reconnaissance Organization, the NSA, Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project all remained secret from the public for many years, possible reasons for the government’s desire for secrecy on the subject of UFOs, Nick Cook, the editor of Jane’s Defense Weekly, and his book on the Nazi effort to develop Zero-point energy, Katherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of HUD and her amazing revelations about the Arlington Institute’s work on the topic of aliens, investigative journalist Leslie Kean and her upcoming book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, the possibility that aliens may have been here for thousands of years, NASA Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s revelation that there exist deep black programs within the US government to study alien technology, the history and controversy surrounding the Majestic 12 documents, the intelligence community’s use of disinformation and it’s corrosive effect on democracy, NICAP – the leading civilian UFO organization of it’s time and how it was infiltrated by the CIA, how Richard was able to make a career for himself as a UFO historian and some advice on being a writer and publishing your own work.

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Justin and Jason discuss the show’s new schedule, the Teddy principle, using setTimeout as a way to circumvent the long running script warning, Jason’s Javascript machine learning library, the use of AI in medical diagnostics, Jason’s idea for a web-based business intelligence platform, how Appcelerator compiles Javascript to Objective-C, the relative speeds of the various Javascript engines, Swarm’s sales statistics, the importance of targeting your niche, Justin’s strange question of the week and Jason’s quote of the week, Guyon’s suggestions for Swarm, the iPhone 4 controversy, the dramatic fall in IPOs, the benefits of a lifestyle business and the the importance of the existence proof.

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Justin and Jason speak with Chris McCann, co-founder of StartupDigest, about how he’s turning a weekly email of local tech events into a fast growing and profitable business.

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Justin and Jason speak with Sebastian Arnaud about how to build an AI for Justin’s iPad game, Swarm SG.

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Justin and Jason speak with John C. Dvorak about his life as a writer and podcaster and how he got started as a tech pundit, how he arranges his work day and why he likes having a lot to do, the advantages of the listener supported business model and how to do it right, the importance of contention in a podcast and how much of his grouch persona is natural versus cultivated, the benefits of being Internet famous, how his various podcasts came into being and how they’ve evolved, how long it takes him to prepare for a show and who produces them, his learning curve in broadcasting, how to promote a podcast and how it seems to take at least eighteen months for a podcast or blog to gain traction.

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Justin and Jason speak with the co-founders of PubNub about how they’ve built a real-time data service that works across all major browsers and mobile devices and is capable of scaling to 300K connections per server with latencies measured in mere milliseconds.

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Justin and Jason discuss multitenant databases, the possibility of using MongoDB as the underlying data store for AppIgnite applications, options for exporting and installing AppIgnite applications, the fundraising strategy for the iPhone app Jason’s been working on, the process of raising money from VCs, whether raising money forces a death date on a project, how nine copies of Swarm were sold on it’s first day of release, how Justin has accepted a full-time position as VP of IT for MyVBO and will have exactly one guy reporting to him (sweet!), how Taylor Norrish is good at both design and UX, PubNub and Comet, the importance of having a collaborator on a project, an idea for a hackathon website, a new show segment called Letters from Guyon, how iPhone and iPad owners have been conditioned to pay for software, building a version of Swarm for the iPhone, how it takes approximately two weeks (or maybe thirty days) to establish a habit (we actually don’t know), automatically processing incoming emails via PHP, Jason’s idea for building an email application wizard and Justin’s idea for generalizing the concept for an email support system, targeting designers with AppIgnite, why it’s important to try to build real applications with AppIgnite, what Justin needs to do to increase the growth rate of Pluggio and what could be done to increase the growth rate of the podcast.

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Justin and Jason discuss how the TechLunch crew watched the US/England World Cup game at Justin’s house, the inner workings of AppIgnite, how Jason came up with the idea for AppIgnite and why he doesn’t want to raise money for it, building one large revenue stream vs a number of smaller revenue streams, the investor in Jason’s previous company, Apple’s convoluted App Store certificate process, potential pricing models for Swarm, the trade-offs of relying on third-party platforms, the productivity boost provided by Titanium, debugging in Titanium using trace statements, whether Twitter’s API limitations are due to malice or incompetence, the Google nuclear winter, why Justin likes to pay for products, how to keep your creative voice from being infected by external influences, why Jason talks to strangers, why he took his son to a Parkor gym and how he tried the stand-up desk thing and failed.

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Justin and Jason discuss the current status and growth of Pluggio, the failure of the human brain to comprehend the exponential function, word of mouth growth and super spreaders, Jason’s experience using Subversion, TortoiseSVN and Assembla, Justin’s warning about Subversion, performing a full-text seach on a subversion repository using SVNQuery, accidental excellence and it’s relationship to evolutionary theory, Jason’s serendipitous discovery of Titanium, the Mexican designer who was discovered on Hacker News, how Taylor is now doing the design work for Jason’s iPhone project, the possibility of inviting either John C. Dvorak or Richard Dolan to be a guest on the upcoming 50th show, Jason’s dream about how he interrogated some aliens that landed in his back yard, Justin’s theory about how our universe might be able to suck the energy from a parallel universe, Nick Cook – the editor for Jane’s Defense Weekly and his book The Hunt for Zero Point, Craig Venter’s creation of synthetic life, the feasibillity of developing an unbeatable AI algorithm for Swarm, Clark’s three laws, crowdsourcing the development of an AI for Swarm, how Netflix crowd-sourced their recommedation engine, financial vs social incentives in the book Freakonomics, Your World of Text, Cells – a massively multi-agent agorithm game and Jason’s previous description of a similar concept, the authoritarian SimCity experiment, Scott Adams’ blog post about how ideas are worthless and execution is everything, the HTML5 Showcase and the current status of HTML5 support, how Jason’s brother was recommended for the Distiguished Flying Cross, the movie Kickass, Jason’s ideas for some new show segments, Stanton’s law about how the future is not an extrapolation of the past, ways of capturing and tracking ideas, Justin’s use of iNotes, FreeMind and iThoughts HD, mind mapping and how Justin uses it, breadth-first vs depth-first development and how to keep from getting stuck in the weeds on a project.