Ray Ozzie has shown a preview of some a new open technology Live Clipboard his team at Microsoft has developed for cutting and pasting structured data between web (and desktop) applications.

It is really cool in both it’s simplicity and also that Microsoft are going to be releasing it on a creative commons like license.

So what I would like to know is who will be the first to have a Rails plugin or gem available? Unfortunately I have no time to start playing with it until Saturday and I guess that some bright spark will have released one by then.

For more on the technical background including source code see the Live Clipboard Technical Introduction .

Imagine Copying a contact from Outlook into the invitation screen in WideBlog or a Basecamp milestone into Outlook.

I completely forgot to announce this over the weekend when it was released. I have released version 0.3 of EzCrypto the easy to use crypto library written to look and feel like a Ruby library and not a 1987 C library.

The changes to this version have mostly been submitted by Dirk ([email protected]) who has implemented a bunch of support for encrypting and decrypting files.

These are the same libraries I use in WideWord and WideBlog.

Over the past few days I have been listening to the podcast version of The Future of Web Apps conference, which was held in February. All the talks so far have been very interesting, but the most interesting by far for a bootstrapper like me was Ryan Carson’s talk about how he built DropSend .

It is a very practical hands on talk about all the costs (with his own real figures) of founding a web based startup. He covers everything from dealing with designers, lawyers, accountants, programmers, hosting etc.

One thing he mentioned was the $1000 he spent on the user agreement. I have saved that for all of my apps including WideWord and WideBlog, by writing my own and writing one that I personally would like to see.

His comment on why the hell did they fork out money on printing letterheads made me laugh as that is one of those silly old school ideas that you most likely wont need as a web startup. It’s a really easy trap to fall into though (as I myself know from personal experience). It’s one of those things that I covered in Bootstrapping a business vs. Playing a business .

Brillant work Ryan and thank you very much for being open about all of this.

Update Ryan has released the slides to the presentation.

I dutifully installed the new security update this morning and now Safari has been crashing like crazy. I have of course submitted reports to Apple, so I hope it gets fixed soon. I the meantime maybe I will switch to Camino as my main web browser.

Sorry to bore you with more VC related writing. Shel Israel has a chat with Jeff Clavier about Web 2.0 disrupting VC’s .

It is a pretty interesting read even if you haven’t got any plans of going the VC route.

Jeff’s views on what will happen with the current Web 2.0 start-ups is interesting:

A small number of companies will be acquired early before they reach scale or revenues (as opposed to the current fantasy that GEMAYANI will acquire them by the dozen). Another small number will reach profitability and will have their options open, and the majority will either hit the wall or operate small enough that their founders will be able to keep them running alongside their regular day job.

I personally think that there will be a power law kind of situation. Where the A list gets bought up, the B list manage quite fine on their own thank you very much and the C list keep running as a side job.