Posts Tagged shopping
How I Built a Free Grid Computer, In Less Than a Week
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 11th, 2008
By now you’ve all heard about BuyLater, my happy little firefox extension that (thanks to an unexpected LifeHacker.com article) is rapidly climbing towards 1000 users and world domination. Without getting TOO technical, I thought I would share with you how I saved BuyLater from becoming an infrastructure nightmare – one that would have either killed the value of the application (real-time updates), or sucked tons of money and hardware into a technology backwash.
This will be a little controversial, I think – simply because the technique I used, (grid computing), is most often used for less… legitimate… purposes. So much so, that it is almost synonymous with “Bot Nets”.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
BuyLater 0.7 Released, Support for Canada and UK Users
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on April 3rd, 2008
After the deluge of new users from last week’s Lifehacker.com article, followed by a full day on the front page of delicious, I ended up with an inbox full of bug reports. While there were a few pernicious actual “bugs” in there (sorry to everyone who ended up with the ‘can’t delete items’ bug, that’s fixed too), most of them fell into two buckets:
I Wrote A MashUp, Just for You
Posted by admin in entrepreneurs on March 22nd, 2008
If you’re one of those people who stood in “The Line”, then this isn’t for you.
If you get a strange, visceral pleasure in wasting hours, even days, of your life, waiting for your local WalMart to get more Beanie Babies in stock – then you should stop reading right now.
If you like to revisit your local grocery store every night, just to see if they’ve dropped the price on those great donuts in aisle 4… then hit the Back Button, and read something else.
But – if you have a life, and you still want to try and buy something online – I might have something that can help.
It’s called BuyLater, and that’s exactly what it’s for – buying Amazon products, later on.
Later can be: When it’s back “In Stock” (can someone say Wii?), or simply when it’s a little cheaper (or even on sale).
Unlike many of my ideas (which are unique, innovative, and incomprehensible), this one actually isn’t mine. My buddy Jesse Andrews did it first, with a Wii-only bot called WiiMe. I just took the idea, and strreeettched it a little.
