Producteer

DNA Ancestry is live!

Our team at ProductCore helped build Ancestry.com's new DNA Ancestry service.  It is now live as a Beta at dna.ancestry.com.  Try it out.  They've also got a DNA Ancestry product blog online at http://dnaancestry.typepad.com/blog/.

The service will let you buy a relatively inexpensive genetic genealogy test that will tell you...

• Your DNA results for genealogical purposes.  This is a set of "allele values" that uniquely represent you.
• Your ancient ancestry ("haplogroup").  Where did your ancestors migrate after they left Africa tens of thousands of years ago?
• Who your living genetic cousins are.  Ancestry.com will search its database of other DNA tests and identify close matches to your values.  You can then anonomymously communicate with these folks to figure out whether you are in fact related.  This is very valuable to family historians who want to break through dead-ends in their research.

Andreesen on Facebook

Excellent review of the new (application-friendly) Facebook by Netscape founder Marc Andreesen.

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html

Forgetting is Good

A handy new rationalization.  It turns out that forgetting useless stuff helps one remember other things more efficiently.  From the NY Times article:

"In all, this research suggests that memories are more often crowded out than lost. An ideal memory improvement program, Dr. Anderson said, “would include a course on how to impair your memory. Your head is full of a surprising number of things that you don’t need to know.”"

 

The original Nature article is here.

Busted

Too funny.  A CEO busted by his own technology.  From TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/03/plazes-ceo-busted-by-his-own-product/

The Neighborhood

I expect there will be many more applications that connect family, friends, and even neighbors in the near future.  Now that everyone is online (with broadband), it's time to take advantage of this connection.

A small example, but I was able to use a hosted service called "Nexo" to build a private neighborhood discussion board at www.wbcna.com. (sorry, but visitors will not be able to go beyond the 2 public pages).

71miles.com

Since I'm always looking for fun things to do with the family each weekend -- at the last minute -- I expect I'll make use of this site: http://71miles.com/.  71miles helps you plan fun day trips around major cities.

Amazon EC2

Dunno why I didn't hear about this earlier, but Amazon will be hosting virtual PCs (or Linux boxes) via its new "Elastic Compute Cloud" service.  Combined with S3, this makes a hardware-free startup possible.

See Overview and Tutorial presentation.

Getting to $50 MM in Revenue

Great blog posting (and discussion) on the economics of B2C, ad-driven websites.

Lightspeed VC blog

WhosAmung.Us

Super-geek URL, and the simplest website I've ever seen.  Yet another example of the transparency juggernaut: http://whos.amung.us/

Here's how many people are at Producteer right this minute (other than you):

... so I'm not that popular yet.  Gotta fire up my SEO.

Moo.com

Best new product I've seen in over 5 years: Moo MiniCards. 

I was able to make beautiful, high-quality, almost "arty" business cards out of my own photos.  You can use photos from Flickr or MySpace or your desktop.  The cards are matte-finished and very high quality.  I'm going to make them my business cards for now.