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 (along with guest host Sébastien Arnaud) interview David Fogel about his background in machine learning, his experience evolving the grandmaster level checkers playing algorithm Blondie 24, his thoughts on the applicability of various machine learning techniques, his ideas on how to develop a competitive AI for Swarm, his experience with Natural Selection, Inc., a company he co-founded with his father, and why he believes it’s important to work on things that interest you.

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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 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.

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Justin and Jason interview Tayor Norrish about his startup experiences with PrintFriendly and GovIt. Specifically, they discuss how he came up with the idea for PrintFriendly and how he found a developer, the algorithm used by PrintFriendly to parse and tag relevant content in HTML pages, how GovIt got started and why (to his regret) he declined the first two and only acquisition offers, the importance of finding a partner with complementary skills, the relative cost of various web technologies, comparing the cost of Java and Ruby developers, the importance of experience vs passion when hiring a developer, the difficulty of finding good designers and developers, Elance and ODesk, targeting a niche market vs a horizontal market, the theory of the cargo cult, using Google Optimizer for A/B and nth degree testing, starting a service based on the Farmville concept of building something and watching it grow, brainstorming a pricing strategy for Swarm and Digg’s recently announced change of strategy.

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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.