Success is what defines Benchmark Capital, who turned $6m into $5b between 1997 and 1999 with their investment in eBay, and have now completed two transactions, the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, and of SpringSource to VMWare for $400m. A big round to you guys, well done! TechCrunch has more details on the deals.

It appears than an input validation vulnerability is present in wp_login.php, used by WordPress 2.8.x to validate logins and reset passwords. An attacker can bypass the emailed password change link validation by submitting a crafted input to the password reset function in wp_login.php, as described here. The fix is at the bottom of the article, it involves changing one line of wp_login.php.

I say all this as I just had my password reset through an anonymous proxy, so it appears there is an automated attack taking place – fix your WordPress today, I just fixed mine!

Check out this post:

https://forums.garmin.com/showthread.php?t=274

If you are running the latest release, downgrade to the previous one otherwise uploads from a Forerunner 405CX will invariably fail.

After Whisher was acquired by wifi.com in mid-January, I was to continue working as CTO for the new venture as part of the deal. Since I had worked on the technology since the very first day, it made sense that I continued to oversee the development of the new phase of the project. In April, news came out that Rob Monster, who headed the venture fund Monster Venture Partners, had shut down the fund and needed to cut costs on all the startups he was funding as a result. This lead to an awkward situation which left me in a limbo, with no income, and no significant equity. I’m waiting for the issues to be worked out, but things are not particularly promising right now.

Spiritus – the divine breath – inspiration^[1]

What I need most after this transition was inspiration, so after I saw Martin’s post about TechTalk ’09 in Menorca, I sent an email asking if I could join the event. Reply quickly came that while the full event was…well…full, I was welcome to come on the Friday for the talk itself, scheduled for the afternoon. The TechTalk is a loose-scheme round table, where people can stand and share their views, problems or ask questions, and then interact with others during the rest of the event, in a very relaxed and beautiful setting.

As a kid, I had visited Menorca every summer with my parents. We would rent a small house for a month, in places such as Cala en Porter, Cala Galdana, or the beautiful Cala Morell. Menorca is also ripe with archeological features (one of my other interests), with many neolithic constructions such as the Naveta d’es Tudons, and the many taulas and talaiots from around 2.000 a.C. The archeological museum in Mahón, with its necropolis, is also of great interest. Going back after many years would be very interesting, even if I didn’t have the time to tour around the island.

The arrival

Call it fate, but Jordi Vallejo (Fon’s CTO) and I had been trying to meet so that he could give me one of the new Fonera 2.0 routers to try out. Even though we live very close, plans were always thwarted one way or another. Turns out he was sitting two rows in front of me on the flight from Barcelona to Menorca. We took a taxi to Torrenova, Martin’s villa, which left us at the gate after a difficult ride through narrow dirt tracks.

A lesson in optical physics and muon detection

Behind our taxi was a small rented Mercedes, and in it was Isaac Shpantzer, who offered us a ride to cover the rest of the dirt track up to the villa. And what a ride! It turns out that Isaac was a NextNet founder, invented OFDM, and was currently working at CeLight, a company that develops high-tech for communication and military applications. One example is a high-bandwidth optical communication system that points a blue laser towards the sky (and it is blue for a reason, but I’m not telling – it’s really really clever), and uses coherent detectors to grab scattered photons which have been modulated to convey data. We are talking terabits per second throughput – truly amazing. He was preparing a demo on Friday or Saturday night, but sadly I was leaving earlier, it was sad to miss it!

Another interesting development he explained during the trip was a nuclear device detector – picture a small nuclear bomb inside a steel crate shipped to the US by a terrorist group. Current detection methods are essentially x-ray arches and physical inspections. CeLight’s method relies on cosmic radiation detection. This radiation is composed in part of a negatively-charged particle called the muon. Powerful x-rays work at 120 keV, whereas a muon has an energy just over 105 MeV – thus, it has a huge penetration power, much higher than electrons. Every square meter of the Earth is hit by about 10,000 muons per minute. Since nuclear weapon cores consist of very dense, positively charged material, placing two detector plates above and below a steel container should show a straight path of muons hitting both plates, unless they pass through the nuclear core, in which the polarity difference deflects their trajectory. It’s a very neat idea, and they have a working prototype already.

Settling in

We moved into Binisegarra for a couple of hours before lunch, and had the chance to talk with a few people. Many were chilling inside the pool, trying not to get stung by the approximately 4,921 wasps that were flying around it (my most accurate count, they were moving so it was hard to keep track). Saw many known faces such as Loic, Anil, Michael Jackson (no, not that one), Rodrigo, and Ola.

Time for lunch

We had a very nice buffet lunch, and talked to Dina Kaplan of Blip.tv, who also runs the NY Founders Club, which is an interesting idea which could be taken to Barcelona. There are some events already happening here to promote interaction between startups, but nothing like Founders Club (if there is, let me know!).

The talk

Since there were so many people this year, instead of having everyone stand up and say their bit, volunteers spoke about their startups, problems or questions for the audience. It was interesting to hear Isaac’s presentation (which was way less technical than in the car but still left some puzzled faces), and Deborah’s project involving the location of firefighters in 3D space through time-reversal techniques – it’s a shame we didn’t get to talk more on the subject. Ola (the other half of Sweden!) related his most embarrassing story ever, involving clothes (or the lack thereof), a hotel in Chueca, and room locks – all in exchange for solutions to his fix-the-world problem.

Catching the last flight home

It was sad to have to leave as many activities went on during the weekend, and those are the real opportunity to talk to people about their projects and learn from them, but it was time to go. Alejandro Santana was kind enough to drive me to the airport, even though he had a later flight to Madrid.

In all, it was a very good experience after many months of stress due to a number of situations, the worst just having come to light as I was typing this post – more on it later. All I can say is that I found the inspiration to get going again, and look for new exciting projects (either join or start them). Thanks Martin for hosting such an event in such a beautiful setting!

[1] Quote taken from the movie Always, when Hop tells Pete that his task will be to inspire a young pilot as he gets started in firefighting attack planes.

In essence – search engines. A search engine will mix results of searches for “iPhone 3G” and “iPhone 3G S”, but maybe not so much for “iPhone 3GS”. Google seems a bit immune to this effect, other engines not so much.

I read with interest the list of the top 50 startups to watch by BusinessWeek after a post by Martin Varsavsky on Facebook. I think there are considerations not taken in the list, such as how much money every point earned cost, which would measure how good the brand image, PR and relationship with its users are, among other things.

I tried to weigh the ratio of funding to points ($M/point), the funding versus how long the company is running ($M/year), and the number of points gained for every year the company is running. After scoring each company on these three factors plus the original score, this is the result:

Some curious results show up, such as Ning and Tudou dropping many places (due to their huge amount of funding).

It’s been some time since my last post. Many things have happened – started working on wifi.com, some developments at Whisher, and have also started to look into HDR photography. HDR stands for high dynamic range, and it is best explained while following the tutorial by Trey Ratcliff, who creates frames like this one:

My first attempt at HDR is below – first, the normal exposure photo, and then the HDR result from composing three RAW images with Photomatix Pro (the crap on the top left is some fluff that made its way onto the camera sensor somehow – easily taken out with Photoshop):

Yes, I know the sky is grey and has halos, and Trey states that this will lead me to end up with no friends (who will curl up into a ball and cry, apparently), but I have to get good at masking on Photoshop first. You will find my HDR stream here. For these I’m using a Nikon D70 with a 16-80 VR lens. Here is another attempt:

Case example: the Sony SPK-HCE waterproof case for video cameras. I tried to find a good, in-depth review, or even just a blog post by someone who had used one and could shed some light into wether dumping over 200€ on this thing is worth it. However, searching for “SPK-HCE review” on Google returned 1660 results, of which the third goes to ZDNet, in fact, the Google summary says “Get the full unbiased review of SPK-HCESPK-HCE at ZDNet Reviews. Each review comes complete with video or image galleries, Camcorder Waterhousing …”. Bullshit! Click on the link, and land here (click for full-size version):

So…you are showing me ZERO ratings, and ZERO reviews, but at least a dozen links to online stores where I can’t even buy this accessory, but a whole different camera!! Google: you suck, you cannot tell SEO-laden pages apart from good review sites, and ZDNet: you suck too, for polluting the Internet with shitty useless content designed to fool users and drive revenue.

Went to the Madrid colo on Wednesday to shut down Whisher’s servers. As some of you may know, Wifi.com, backed by Rob Monster, acquired Whisher in mid January. I have joined Wifi.com as CTO, and continue to improve upon Whisher’s offerings – the main aim now is to make social interaction possible through the wifi.com website.

It was a sad moment – they had been churning for almost three years, and have been the most reliable I have ever worked with. Four Dell boxes, one for the Whisher authentication server, another for Oracle (by -far- the most stable database server I have worked with, almost zero downtime during three years), and two for RADIUS and our Apache web server. The Whisher website and blog will continue to live on a shared hosting for the time being. Wifi.com is hosted on new servers in Seattle.

When I have some time I’ll write the Whisher story, but for now, it’s time to move on. The rest of the Whisher team will go on to pursue new exciting opportunities, as it’s usually said – in this case, with reason, they are all in other exciting startups – wish you the best!

It looks like tricks will no longer fool the Spotify client – it was until recently possible to create an account over a tunnel to a UK IP address and set your country to UK, in order to access a lot of the blocked content that people in certain countries are not allowed to listen to, based on the whims of the copyright holders.

I guess I’ll have to cancel my paid subscription – it was a tit-for-tat as far as I was concerned, willing to pay but only if they allowed a loophole. Bye Spotify, we hardly knew ya!