Northwest Technology News and Development

Seed investments, incubator, software development consulting

Soople: exposing some of Google’s hidden powers

Soople is basically another (ugly) but effective user interface to Google. It gives you a series of search entry forms so you can access the more advanced, but hidden, search features of Google. For instance, one can specify a search by one particuliar site or filetype( word, excel, powerpoint and pdf) or an imagesearch by size and type.

Soople

July 27, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

How big is Digg?

Ever wonder how big is big? How big is Digg? How much net participation happens before you become a Digg phenomenon? Well, there must be a thousand ways to answer that question. However, some interesting numbers show the following:

Google Links: 69,400
Yahoo Links: 1,251,860
MSN Links: 1,089,510
Blogrolling Links: 191
Technorati Links: 2,826,630
Google indexed pages: 5650000 Google indexed pages for www.digg.com
Compete Monthly Visitors: 22,541,770
Quantcast Monthly Visitors: 7,200,000
Alexa Rank: 95
Google Page Rank: 8

Digg is big

July 27, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

What does Brad Feld read?

Holy crap. I’ve never met Brad Feld but we are nonetheless co-invested in Shelfari with Amazon. So, I read his blog. Ever notice how long his blog roll is? If he can really keep up with this much material call me very impressed! Great link list actually…

July 27, 2007 | Filed Under Venture capital | 1 Comment 

SEO Tips for blogs and Wordpress

As a tech guy living and working in Seattle I can’t tell you how many MAJOR consumer internet sites I’ve come to know (here) that are not SEO optimized. They have raised tens of millions of dollars. They are household names. They have been on national television. But they have failed SEO 101. I will not mention any names. I cannot mention any names. Fortunately, I can say that our own start up at Imagekind.com gets a significant amount of daily traffic. Nonetheless, I’ve finally realized I need to turn my attention to my own sites. Kellysmith.com and this very site (Curious Office) need SEO help. Both sites run on the fantastic WordPress blogging platform. But now I need to really optimize the heck out of them. As such, I started doing some research. Got a WordPress blog? Then check out these links and optimize your own blog too!

July 27, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | 1 Comment 

SEO in Seattle

Recently I discovered a great Seattle based company called SEOMoz. If you care about site rankings and how to best position your company for success on the web this should be added to your SEO bookmarks. Besides a great blog they have fantastic tools to include:

  • Rank Checker Check and monitor your search engine rankings
  • Term Target Find out what keywords your page is targeting
  • Page Strength Quickly assess the value of a website
  • Crawl Test Diagnose potential search engine crawling issues on your site
  • Keyword Difficulty Determine how difficult it is to rank for a term

SEOmoz

July 26, 2007 | Filed Under Start-ups | Leave a Comment 

12 basic types of advertisements

I posted this link over on my personal site and thought I’d share it with Curious readers too. This is a must read for any marketers. Sorry for the occasional redundancy.

12 ads

July 24, 2007 | Filed Under Inspiration | Leave a Comment 

Got an iPhone? Use the iPhone Google interface

Ajax to the max. Check it.

Google and iPhone

July 24, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Forget Firefox tabs. Make the switch to Netvibes.

My morning reading ritual had unfortunately consisted of about 30 of my favorite sites launching in 30 separate tabs in Firefox. That made it slow to fire up my browser and it was just not an elegant solution. FINALLY I made the switch to my own custom home page. Any site, every site I ever wanted to follow populates my own custom NetVibes page. I don’t know why I didn’t use these kinds of Ajax home page services sooner. If your day doesn’t start with one of these…go take time out and custom make one for yourself. It is truly the dashboard to everything I now do on the net. That includes logging into my social networks, checking my stocks, checking my bookmark feeds etc. I haven’t used Pageflakes but the new Coriander release of Netvibes rocks. Really, really hard.

Netvibes

July 24, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

Facebook vs. MySpace

So at least several times over the last week I’ve gotten into these conversations about Facebook and what it might mean for MySpace. So many adults I know who had never previously gotten involved with any other social network (like MySpace) are sending me Facebook requests out of the blue. So many people are saying Facebook is here to last and MySpace has “jumped the shark“. I must admit, it does feel like MySpace is sucking the air out of the room these days. Even I jokingly refer to it as the other Internet. Is it true? Some suggest its actually a “class war”. If anyone would know what’s really going on it would be Danah Boyd…a PhD student in the School of Information at Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She’s mostly known for churning out a lot of research docs on social networks. My stance? Facebook is the new MySpace.

Facebook vs. MySpace

Read the Forbes article.

July 24, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

A rather interesting site for entreprenuers

This is a bit like a high end social network. Some pretty interesting and accomplished folks inside Cofoundr so far. Doesn’t seem to have TONS of traffic but I’ve found a few new interesting facebook friends so far.

Cofoundr

July 19, 2007 | Filed Under Start-ups | Leave a Comment 

Where I hang out online…

Was just updating my personal contact page over on kellysmith.com and figured I’d share all my coordinates here too.

Facebook

aSmallWorld

Linkedin


Skype Me™!

July 17, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Silverlight Resources

Microsoft’s Silverlight seems to be gaining momentum. I must admit, some of the demos have been pretty incredible.

Silverlight

July 17, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

If you work in tech you need to probably watch this

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates do not do very many in person interviews together. If you haven’t watched this yet you should do it now.

July 17, 2007 | Filed Under Inspiration | Leave a Comment 

Get direct Imagekind access from flickr

Flickr moved Imagekind printing and framing direct to the Order Prints tab above every image. Thanks Stewart and team! We appreciate it.

imagekind

July 17, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

RANT #2: Flash (splash) pages

The second in my 10 part series of rants. Flash intros. Nothing is more annoying than navigating to a page only to have to endure some goofy flash animation before you can get to real content. Luxury brands are the most guilty of doing this. They think we want to sit back and watch their trailer before we get to the goods. Below is Fendi’s front page. Thank you very much. That commercial was very entertaining. And I’m sure Google’s spiders would have enjoyed it too were they actually able to make sense of the stupid page.

Fendi

July 12, 2007 | Filed Under Technology | Leave a Comment 

Next Page »

  • Curious Office Companies

    The companies below represent current Curious equity holdings.

    Inkd

    Inkd Marketplace for Print Design

    Inkd is our latest internally developed concept. We raised our $1.7 million seed round on September 22 and are backed by Second Avenue Partners and a variety of tremendous angel investors. We are developing the World's First Market for Original Print Design.

    Read the TechCrunch article.

    Visit the Inkd website!

  • CafePress

    CafePress Funny and Custom Tee-Shirts Cafepress acquired Imagekind in July 2008. CafePress.com is an online marketplace that offers sellers complete e-commerce services to independently create and sell a wide variety of products, and offers buyers unique merchandise across virtually every topic.

  • Imagekind

    Imagekind The First Market to Buy and Sell Artwork Curious Office started Imagekind in 2006 and it is the world's fastest-growing art site offering over 750,000 high-quality fine art images for sale. Imagekind gives consumers limitless options to purchase museum-quality framed and poster art from over 50,000 domestic and international emerging and established artists.

  • SEOmoz.org

    SEOmoz is unparalleled seo link performance. Curious Office invested in SEOmoz along with Ignition Partners in 2007. SEOmoz serves as one of the largest online hubs for search marketers worldwide by providing education, tools, resources and paid services to help make every SEO the best they can be.

    Seattle PI: SEOmoz raising funds from Ignition, Curious Office

  • Shelfari

    Shelfari: The World's Leading Online Book Community. Amazon.com acquired Shelfari in September 2008. Based in Seattle, Shelfari introduces readers to our global community of book lovers and encourages them to share their literary inclinations and passions with peers, friends, and total strangers

  • Fanzter

    CoolSpotters is Celebrity Brands, Fashion, Styles and more Fanzter is headquartered in Collinsville, Connecticut and are the creators of the wildly popular celebrity style and entertainment platform Coolspotters.com, which launched in May 2008. Fanzter secured $2 Million In Series B Funding Led By Steamboat Ventures in March 2009.

  • Wishpot

    Wishpot is your online wedding, baby and shower wishlist registry.

    Wishpot is a free social shopping service that makes it easy to save and share interesting things you find in stores and online. Items are easily collected online or from stores and organized using simple online lists. Lists and items can be kept private or shared with others. You can collect and discover products you like, recommend your favorite stuff, share and explore gift suggestions or ask for opinions and advice.

  • netConcepts

    netConcepts develops the gravitystream seo platform for retailers and enterprise.

    netConceps removes Internal technical constraints, resource issues and knowledge barriers are removed with their gravitystream product. gravitystream works seamlessly with any current e-commerce or website technology platform to provide the ultimate SEO test platform and continuous updating for the most competitive SEO environments.

  • Rouxbe

    Rouxbe is the first online video cooking school.

    Rouxbe is the first online cooking school- the next generation food and cooking site focused on teaching home cooks the skill and technique behind great recipes. Rouxbe is currently teaching home cooks in 180 countries around the world.

  • RocketVox

    thePlatform is the leading online video management solution.

    Curious Office co-founder Kelly Smith launched RocketVox in 2000 as one of the earlier video content aggregation platforms. In May 2001, RocketVox was acquired by thePlatform. Today, thePlatform is the leading online video management and publishing company for broadband, mobile and TV. Media companies use thePlatform's media publishing system (mps) as the open, central hub for managing, monetizing, and syndicating billions of professionally produced video views annually. Comcast acquired thePlatform in June 2006.

  • FeedDigest

    FeedDigest turns RSS into dynamic content for your website.

    FeedDigest is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds originally built by Peter Cooper. In August 2007, Feed Digest was sold to its new owners, Informer Technologies, Inc., and in 2008 rebranded to Feed Informer.