Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

It’s no secret that home-grown fruits and vegetables are usually really good, handily beating what you’ll find lining the aisles at your local supermarket. But If you’re like me,  gardening has always seemed like something of a dark art — you put seeds in the ground, add water, do some other stuff, and a few weeks (or months?) later you have some tasty fruits and vegetables. Perhaps I’m in the minority here, but I’m guessing that there are a lot of people who aspire to start growing some of their own food, but just have no idea where to start.

Fortunately, there’s a new startup called SproutRobot that’s looking to clear things up for the masses: you tell it what you want to grow, and it sends you high quality seeds, automatic email updates instructing you when to plant them, and a guide to handling everything else.

To get started, you tell SproutRobot your zip code. From there you’re given two options: you can elect to either sign up for a free email version of the service, which tells you when to plant your seeds but doesn’t actually send you any (in other words you have to go to the store and buy seeds yourself). Or you can sign up for the premium option, which runs from $20/year for three varieties of seeds to $70/year for ten types of seeds.

Eventually you’re asked to choose what you want to grow. Again, this is pretty straightforward. If you want carrots, you click the box next to carrots — there aren’t a dozen kinds of each vegetable to confuse you. There are around thirty types of  fruit and vegetable seeds available, covering everything from beets to winter squash. All seeds are from Seeds of Change and are certified organic.

Once you’ve signed up, SproutRobot will send you bags of seeds at the appropriate time, and will tell you exactly when to plant them based on your local weather patterns. Erik Pukinskis, who heads the one-man company, says that this is based on the last five years of weather data, and that he hopes to include current weather conditions as a factor too. This would allow SproutRobot to shift planting dates if there was, say, an unusually dry month or cold snap.

The site still has a ways to go. It does tell you when to do things like plant your seeds or transplant your broccoli (whatever that means). But when you click on the online directions, the site sometimes kicks you to a different website, like eHow. Sure, these pages appear to have the proper directions, but this information should probably be included on SproutRobot itself. Pukinskis says that printed instructions are included with the seeds themselves in comic-form, and he’d like to eventually have SproutRobot cover every single step of the growing process.

One thing to note: Pukinskis says that the site is still in beta, and it may have a few quirks and slowdowns. He also says that SproutRobot is still perfecting the planting calendar (he noted that some users growing tomatoes were told to plant them a bit too late), though all paid users have their calendars checked by hand to ensure accuracy.

The iPad offers a great web browsing experience — maybe the best on any device (assuming you don’t want to go to a site that uses Flash). But it could still be better. For example, it would be nice to have actual tabs, rather than the bogus window system the iPad uses. That system makes sense on the iPhone where there isn’t much screen real estate, but there’s plenty on the iPad. Undoubtedly it’s a memory issue just as much as anything else, but it’s one of the things designer Markus Schmeiduch was thinking about when he decided to do some mock-ups of how Google Chrome might run on an iPad.

Schmeiduch acknowledges that due to the restrictions on JavaScript engines, Chrome for the iPad is not likely to be a reality anytime soon (not to mention the relationship between Apple and Google at the moment), but that hasn’t stopped him from dreaming. On top of real tabs, his Chrome for iPad gives us Google cloud-synced bookmarks, gestures, and even some Chrome OS features.

Obviously, Apple let the Opera browser on the iPhone recently, so they’re some indication they’re not opposed to competition on the platform for Safari. But you almost have to wonder if they let Opera on the iPhone simply because it’s not very good (and yet would still appease people). Chrome, especially with any Chrome OS features, would likely be a different story. Still, Schmeiduch’s mock-ups are interesting.

Check some of them out below. You should also go here for full-sized renders and look at them on the iPad to see exactly how it would look.

Yahoo is clearly positioning itself to become a stronger player in the online content game, as evidenced by its recent acquisition of Associated Content. But we are hearing that the real prize they want is the Huffington Post. The two companies are currently in negotiations over a deep content partnership, according to sources close to the situation. There are also rumblings that Yahoo wants to buy the Huffington Post outright, but it may be too expensive. In any case, the Huffington Post seems to be more interested in doing a content deal than selling.

Yahoo needs high quality articles and videos, and the Huffington Post needs more traffic and pageviews. A content deal could conceivably include articles, videos, and advertising integrated across Yahoo News and other Yahoo properties. Who knows, maybe that deal could lead to something else. There are many ties between the two companies. Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau sits on Yahoo’s board, and president Greg Coleman used to be head of sales at Yahoo.

The Huffington Post is killing it right now. It is the biggest blog on the planet, with 26 million unique visitors worldwide in April, according to comScore. It is already bigger than NYTimes.com. The HuffPo has expanded well beyond politics to cover more than 20 different news categories, and it is embracing social networks as a way to drive pageviews through sharing. It is even experimenting with badges and other game mechanics to reward loyal readers and sharers.

If content is once again becoming king, online media companies need a lot of it and they need it to be good. An acquisition by Yahoo would accelerate the HuffPo’s growth, while at the same time give Yahoo a strong anchor for its content business. Sources with knowledge of the HuffPo’s thinking insist it is not for sale. But everything is for sale at the right price.

Buying the Huffington Post would not be cheap. When it last raised $25 million in December, 2008, that round gave the company a $125 million valuation. It would want multiples of that now. The company is on track to generate $60 million in revenues next year and $100 million in 2012. It still has cash in the bank, and could turn profitable by early next year. If you figure an acquisition multiple of 6X or 7X next year’s revenues, Yahoo would have to pay at least $360 million for HuffPo today, or much more a year from now. If Yahoo wants to focus on being a media company, there are worse things it could do than buy HuffPo. But is it really worth that much? A content deal lets Yahoo dip its toes in the water and find out.

Photo credit: Flickr/NeoGaboX

Gaming giant Zynga has just filed with the SEC indicating a sale of $20.5 million in stock. Based on its recent acquisition of Austin-based social gaming company Challenge Games, we believe the transaction to be related to this deal. We reached out to Zynga and they would not comment on this.

It’s a safe assumption that the filing indicates that Zynga paid at least $20.5 million for Challenge Games. But there could have been additional cash involved, which would not be disclosed in this filing. Challenge Games, which is now Zynga Austin, launched in 2007 to focus on immersive Web game development built on a virtual goods business model. Backed by Sequoia Capital and Globespan Capital Partners, Challenge Games develops a number of social games including Warstorm, a collectible card game set in a fantasy universe, and Ponzi, a tycoon game. The company previously raised $14.5 million in funding.

Zynga is steadily building up its gaming empire through acquisitions and deals with major networks and web giants. Last week, Zynga signed a deal with Yahoo to feature its games throughout Yahoo’s network, which puts Zynga’s games in front of Yahoo’s 600 million users. The previous week, Zynga acquired Chines gaming company XPD Media and struck a branding deal with 7-Eleven. And the social gaming giant struck a five-year partnership with Facebook.

Zynga has a large war chest. The company just raised $180 million in funding from Digital Sky Technologies, Tiger Global, Institutional Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz in December. And Zynga is a profit machine, with yearly revenue estimated to be around $600 million. One estimate shows that Zynga is pulling in $15 million in profit per month. With that sort of cash on hand, $20 million-plus is chump change.

As a Push Notification addict, Boxcar for the iPhone is one of my must-have apps. Apple simply doesn’t have a good way to corral notifications in the iPhone OS, so this third-party management system is needed. Obviously, the same is true with the iPad. And now it’s here with version 3.0.

Boxcar for the iPad brings all the previous iPhone goodness, and then some. First of all, rather than charging to add support for various services (through in-app purchasing), developer Jonathan George has decided to make the entire experience free. This means that you can add Twitter notifications, Facebook notifications, email notifications — everything, for free. It’s now simply ad-supported. If you want to turn off the ads, it’s $4.99 (a one-time purchase).

Also new is the revamped look and feel of the app. George has made the app itself feel more like the Messages app you find on the iPhone. Notifications are broken up into types, and when you click on any of those, you’re taken to a list of the notifications that appear in colorful chat bubbles. Just as with the iPhone version, you can be notified of the notifications through sounds, badging of the Boxcar icon, and pop up messages (or a combination of all three).

The new Boxcar 3.0 is universal (it will work on both the iPad and iPhone). Find it here.

We wrote about the impending launch of Cupidtino, a dating site for Apple fanboys and fangirls to connect and, well, find love. A name play on Cupid and the city of Cupertino (where Apple’s headquarters are located), Cupidtino launched to the public today, allowing all you single Apple fans out there to find your true soul mate. Or at least someone who won’t roll their eyes when you start polishing your shiny new iPad.

The site is essentially like any dating site, except with a few Apple-flavored features. It allows you to attach photos and list the basics about yourself, including “when you became a Mac” and a list of the gadgets you own. To express interest in someone you can “Mac him” (or her), which is like a poke; message the person; or meet the individual at the nearest Apple store.

All joking aside, Cupidtino is a bit of a letdown in some ways. Yes, it’s craftily formatted to look like and feel like the Apple site, complete with Apple icons and the background, which has a hint of light pink to it. But the UI is a little clunky. The profile pictures are too large and you have to scroll down the page to get any substantial information about the person who you are checking out. But I guess Apple lovers won’t care really because they really just want to check out the photos of others fan boys and girls.

While in private beta, the site was able to get a little traction amongst users. Currently, there are nearly 600 men listed on the site. Unfortunately, the site has not been able to attract many fangirls, and only lists 100 profiles of women. And something tells me this ratio of men to women on the site won’t change too much.

Apple’s WWDC event kicks off on Monday with a keynote by CEO Steve Jobs (we’ll be there). There, he’s widely expected to unveil the next generation iPhone, and well as show off more of the new iPhone OS 4.0 software. But this keynote will be a bit odd because the leaked iPhone prototype has already revealed the next generation iPhone, so Jobs may have to do a bit more to wow the crowd. Speculation about what else could be coming is already well underway: iTunes in the cloud? Free MobileMe? A new Apple TV? And then there’s the OS X 10.7 question.

As MacRumors points out today, use of OS X 10.7 within Apple has clearly been on the rise the past few months. I decided to check the TechCrunch logs, and sure enough, we’re seeing the same thing. Hits from the “Intel 10.7″ identifier in Google Analytics started coming in October of last year and they’ve been growing ever since. In the past 30 days, we’ve seen a roughly 25% increase (from the previous 30 days) in visits. That said, the jump from March to April was much greater (nearly 100%). Apple is clearly expanding the work on the new OS, but is it ready to be unveiled?

Back in December of last year, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber suggested that OS X 10.7 was on pace to be unveiled at WWDC this year. But he revised that stance in April of this year, saying that work on iPhone OS 4 has taken the front seat and that we may not see OS X 10.7 until WWDC in 2011. With the iPad outselling the Mac, the new iPhone coming out, and the full-on assault from Google Android, it’s undoubtedly true that the emphasis is on iPhone OS. Still, it has been a full two years since OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was stealthily unveiled at WWDC (but less than a year since it was actually released).

The schedule for WWDC this year shows a major emphasis for iPhone OS as well, and a relatively lighter OS X emphasis. This again seems to suggest no OS X 10.7 at WWDC, unless Apple is purposefully making it seem like there will be no OS X news this year.

We also don’t yet know what big cat nickname OS X 10.7 will get. Lion? Lynx? Cougar?

[photo: flickr/Harlequeen]