Producteer

SuperSecret.com is live!

My company's new online virtual world for kids is now live at www.supersecret.com.

Finders Keepers

Amy and Bonnie are experimenting with "Facebook-meets-shopping" and came up with this: Finders Keepers.

They're trying to find a way to enable social shopping.  This is the first of several incarnations they're planning.

... How would you shop if your friends could help you?

Marie Antoinette, Is That You?

Wonderful article by Michelle Slatalla in the NY Times about the new DNA genealogy service from Ancestry.com.  My team at ProductCore designed and built the service for Ancestry.  It was a design challenge to provide enough depth in the service to satisfy the hobbyists while keeping it simple enough for regular folks.

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.

Violet.com Product Widget

I found a great little development house based in Hanoi, Vietnam who put together the Flash widget below for my wife's site Violet.com.  This widget lets Violet syndicate (in a lightweight way) their product content to other sites.  Clicking a specific product will launch that page on Violet.com.  The widget also lets us display prices by making changes to an XML file.  I posted a copy on my own home page at www.tedbarnett.com. 

My first experience with outsourcing was a good one.

My iTunes Widget

Finally, Apple woke up to the need for a music-sharing widget for iTunes.  Here are my all-time favorites (4 and 5-star songs):

Microsoft’s Dead Naming Strategy

Nice piece by my old When.com colleague James Joaquin (now a partner at VC firm Bridgescale Partners) on Microsoft's kooky naming strategy...

• "We’ve forgotten Microsoft Bob, we’ve forgiven Microsoft .NET, but how on earth can we decipher Microsoft Windows Live?"

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

Violet

Violet
Originally uploaded by shanbrite2

More good blog-press for Amy's gift site, Violet.com.

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.