There are so many new features in Leopard that digesting each — and figuring out what’s eye candy and what’s actually useful — is going to take some time. Fortunately MacOSXHints has excellent tips for the Macintosh operating system and Leopard tips abound.

I was reading this tip about Apple’s Quick Look feature. I’d seen this capability of selecting a file in the Finder and hitting the keys "Command-Y" and a preview would instantly popup. Cool….but then I thought about it and was demonstrating a few features to a new user in the office when a light bulb went on!

This woman takes about 1,000 photos per day at markets domestically and internationally and often needs to preview dozens or hundreds of images. Using iView Multimedia, iPhoto and other tools in the past were cumbersome since many of these photos are trashed. A quick look at them would be a huge enabler using the (aptly named) Leopard Quick Look feature.  Another tip tells how to select multiple files (e.g., photos) and have them popup in a slideshow view.

Sometimes this stuff is hard to visualize so I put together this quick tip screencast (1:08 in length):

There is far too much gushing all over the ‘net about the new Mac OS X Leopard operating system. Deservedly so.

Today I had two requests by others with Leopard to try out the screen sharing in iChat. In order to show others how simple this is to perform, I thought I’d put together this 2.5 minute screencast and then thought "Hey…I could post it too" so here it is:

The answer is: Silicon Valley and why I’ve talked to three Minnesota startups this month whose principals are either heading west to California to relocate their company or are doing so in order to obtain initial funding. There are woefully few angel investors in my state willing to take risks on ideas or concepts.

Heard of Kovio? Didn’t think so since I hadn’t either. Heard of Facebook? Thought so. Both of these companies are examples of startups led west to California to get their "gold" and their respective companies moving (from this article):

The idea underlying this (Kovio) technology was not developed at nearby Stanford or Berkeley, but at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But when the professor set out to commercialize it, his venture capitalist, Vinod Khosla of Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers — whose earlier successes included Sun Microsystems, Juniper Networks and Corvis — insisted that he move the company to Silicon Valley, to tap into the deep well of chip-making talent and plug into Kleiner’s network of managers, academics and financiers.

You’re probably sick of hearing about the bazillions Mark Zuckerberg is now worth and about all the
applications that are suddenly behind the closed doors of this social
networking site platform, but what you might NOT be aware of is this:

A similar story is told of Mark Zuckerberg, the precocious Harvard student who thought he could turn an informal social networking site into a money-making business. After being turned down by East Coast venture capitalists, Zuckerberg headed west and found an angel investor in Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal. Thiel put $500,000 into Facebook for a 10 percent stake and introduced Zuckerberg to a former PayPal colleague, Steven Chen, who signed on as one of the company’s first engineers.

So it’s not just Bostonian’s wringing their hands over startups leaving but I’m hearing similar tales in my own State of Minnesota, though no bazillionaires have yet been created by the departed.

Why is this happening and how can it change?

[Read more...]

Know what disturbs me? There are a wealth of great solutions out there that I’ll bet most of you have never heard of and never used.

Next week I’ll be doing a webcam interview for PCWorld and the guy driving it asked me to download and use the free version of SightSpeed, the "World’s Best Video and Voice Calling…FREE".

I downloaded the Mac client, recorded some video, emailed myself, engaged someone else to test it with me, and I came away very, very impressed. Looking over the plan comparison list for the inexpensive pay version ($4.95 per month) I was stunned with how much is in there and how — even though I’ve stopped by their site before but never tried them out — they’re mostly invisible to the Web 2.0 community.

My favorite feature (and a real competitive differentiator for SightSpeed) is Multi-Party conferencing where up to four people (including you) can see one another and the conference can also be recorded and the video posted elsewhere or on a SightSpeed location. I haven’t tested this feature yet, but it appears promising. I also can’t find any multiparty conferences other than this one by the CTO of SightSpeed, Aron Rosenberg, who is talking with some guy about this feature (though admittedly I didn’t have time to search very hard). Notice how the lips get out of synch about 60% of the way through the video, however…this was my experience too.  UPDATE 10/26: For some reason (maybe the poor representative quality of the previous video) it was taken offline so here is another example delivered via Vimeo:

As a counterpoint to my glowing post and the SightSpeed site itself, here is a user who tells you why he likes but doesn’t always use Sightspeed.

There are other "video show" solutions out there like Mogulus (which lets you queue up and insert different webcams and videos in a true TV show-like format) as well as others like (the also pretty invisible) Hipcast, and higher visibility offerings like BlogTV and Stickam. But for ease of use, cheap monthly fees, highly competitive features, super-simple and Flash-based transport of your video inside a player, you owe it to yourself to check it out.