TechZing

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Justin and Jason discuss why GIT (the distributed version control system) is cool, the progress of Swarm and the Swarm AI – Cerebro, ideas for the TechZing newsletter, creating wildcard accounts in gmail, an impromptu La Critique of coder.io, the death of Google Wave, an overview of the audio technology used for the production of the podcast, Rob Walling’s book on bootstrapping, why Jason refuses to use blogging software for the new AppIgnite blog, how Rails was under development for a year before it was released, reasons to seek funding or not, when F*** U money can be less valuable than F*** U influence, how to increase your luck surface area, the quote of the week, how your personality defines your path, exploration vs exploitation, the use of Flex and Ajax in myVBO, how regular exercise is good for your brain and why Justin is going caveman, how new ideas can kill a startup, playing small and going big, Jason’s Javascript grid and his Javascript library – j(ason)Query, some responses to listener comments and the guiding principles behind AppIgnite.

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Justin and Jason discuss the status of the Swarm SG AI, ideas for increasing the TechZing listener base and why they’re launching a mailing list, whether or not Jason should buy a Mac, the need to improve the design of the TechZing website, potential names for Jason’s new blog, whether advice offered by 37 Signals is relevant, Jason’s thoughts on applying to TechCrunch Disrupt, coder.io as an alternative to Hacker News, Justin’s desire for telepresence, balancing pragmatism with thinking big, the physical consequences of sitting all day and not getting enough sunlight and whether Justin is replacing fat with muscle or vice versa.

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Justin and Jason speak with Rob Walling, founder of the Micropreneur Academy, author of Start Small, Stay Small and co-host of the podcast Startups for the Rest of Us, about how to dramatically increase your odds of success when bootstrapping a microISV. Some of the topics discussed include the love of making things and the drive to create, how to pick a product niche and why not to create a horizontal offering, why the freemium model doesn’t work for bootstrapping startups and whether Justin should discontinue free accounts for Pluggio, the difficulty of competing against venture backed startups, how to create a landing page and build an email list, possible marketing and pricing strategies for AppIgnite, Google’s SEO guidelines, why software as a service is a better business than software as a product, how to buy websites and build a portfolio of web investments, outliers and why it’s better not to try to emulate them, the time, effort and talent required to create a personal platform (ala 37 signals and Joel Spolsky) and why email lists are so valuable.

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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 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 Justin’s new podcasting setup, the current status of Pluggio and Justin’s overhaul of the Pluggio session management system, the need to scratch your creative itches, going on an intellectual sabbatical, why claiming to give more than a 100% effort is stupid, using mock objects for Ajax calls, eliminating coding mistakes via code generation, the importance of maintaining momentum on side projects, wrestling with SQLLite in Titanium, Justin’s frustration with TextMate, how Jason talked Guyon into working on AppIgnite, the basic concept of MashAPI, whether you can get vertigo by staring too long at a monitor, how Guyon is getting a sit/stand desk at work, BackMate – a mobile app for automatically adjusting a sit/stand desk, Jason’s vector-based Javascript graphics library, Jason’s cross-platform messaging library, web workers in HTML5, the net worth of past presidents, Inverted Totalitarianism, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, AntiWar.com, Scott Horton’s interview of Max Keiser, how iPads are selling at 200K per week, Jason’s methodology (or lack thereof) for naming podcast episodes, the power of exponential growth and why you want your numbers to get big earlier, why the No Agenda podcast is like a religion, hosting hackathons as a means of finding top-notch developers, why Justin codes better when he’s drunk, some stories about the Koz, Prolog to the rescue, Google’s new Prediction API, Jason’s idea for web-based business intelligence startup, how the government’s black budget programs are the equivalent to dark matter in the universe, the sudden disappearance of _Why the Lucky Stiff and why visual logic builders have never caught on.

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Justin and Jason discuss Apple’s cloud strategy, RDBHost, the power law, whether it’s better to compete in an existing market or create a new one, why entrepreneurs need to be resilient but not obstinate, the current status of AppIgnite, the efficiency of short coding sessions, solving problems in your sleep, why Stephen Hawking thinks it’s unwise to attempt to contact alien civilizations, keeping your tests up to date, and how working on something interesting makes it easier to overcome the difficult parts.

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Justin and Jason discuss the cancellation of Justin’s trip to Europe, Justin’s satirical post about Microsoft banning iTunes from Windows, Jason’s idea for a crowdsourced book, the technical challenge of processing the new Twitter search stream, TechZing as a mastermind group, the effect of releasing AppIgnite early, the risk/reward of building a platform, Justin’s transition from Windows to the Mac, the possibillity of organizing a TechZing meetup, the technical underpinnings of dragging and dropping attachements in Gmail, the scientific limits to multitasking, Justin’s about face on frameworks and Jason’s idea for summarizing web articles.

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Justin and Jason discuss the re-branding of Tweetminer as Pluggio, how Justin learns from the show’s guests, the effectiveness of communicating with your users via email, whether or not Justin should raise funding for Pluggio, Jason’s secret project – AppIgnite, the mother of all demos, how Hacker News almost blew a gasket over the iPhone SDK 4.0 TOS, Strategy Letter V – commoditizing your complements, Justin’s new game – Swarm, and Jason’s idea for a massively multi-player, browser-based AI strategy game.