Welcome to the professional site for Marc Colando, serial entrepreneur in Seattle, WA
Friday the 13th is as good an occasion as any to talk about servers, storage and backup. I’ve been running a solution that’s worked fantastically in the home office for more than a year and (fingers crossed!) should survive any bad luck today with flying colors.
International and other special characters can be a real hassle in Rails and MySQL because of different methods for encoding/decoding UTF-8. Two lines of code in your Rails database.yml file will get Rails and MySQL on the same page for easier development.
A former freelance designer to my first startuphad the seeds of an idea. What if a bit torrent TV download/streaming site got mashed-up with social networking? Find shows you like, share them with friends and discover new stuff from people like you.
Good idea. You can see the intro video on YouTube.
I took the idea through to reality with legal and content partners and the core technical team. The site launched to rave reviews and attracted more than one million unique users in the first 30-days after launch. TIOTI was acquired in late-2008.
I’ve always been a huge music fan. I mean, it has to count for something that my library has LCD Soundsystem, Too $hort, Arvo Part and Katy Perry (among others.) Reverb® is a framework that attempts to keep downloadable content free to users, profitable for content owners and powerful for brands. The Reverb architecture inject real-time suppressible advertising into content streams to enable what we called a “freemium” business model back in 2001/2.
Glue™ and ChannelCart™ were the first products to go all the through to issuance by the US Patent Office.
The patent covers “Systems and Methods for Extracting and Adapting Data” from disparate Websites. For curious fellow entrepreneurs, the time from filing to issuance was about 4 years, mid-2005 to mid-2009.
Online banking + payroll services + services that vary depending on your industry, all in one Web application. Landscapers,for example, get a calendar and weather widget that lets them plan crew deployments. Restaurants get an alert widget that shows them when someone reviews them, or a competitor, online.
Heady stuff for 2001 … 9+ years ago now!