I’ve been switching the site over to a new design, consolidating two Wordpress installations into one, moving the blog into a different directory and hacking a theme to make it do what I want. The site has been a bit of a mess over the last two days. Hopefully I’ll have it all finished in between the real work I have to do. Lets see how it goes.
Archive for January, 2008
Tripped over this on de.licio.us today. Anybody creating web apps knows how annoying it is to discover that one browser (usually IE) renders your work differently than another. “Resetting” CSS, as many of you know, is essentially a practice that is intended to tackle the built in browser style sheet conventions that each browser developer interprets so that YOU can “force interpret” what you really mean for all browsers to show in the first place. It removes and neutralizes the inconsistent default styling of HTML elements, creating a level playing field across A-grade browsers and providing a sound foundation upon which you can explicitly declare your intentions. Yes. Browser vendors have, in the past, picked arbitrary values for things like line height or margins and padding. Dumb. Messes you up.
The most thorough reset convention out there, in my view, is this one by Eric Meyer. Using it as a starting point for most projects is a good idea.
The team sent me some great pictures from our Imagekind customer fulfillment center down in Portland Oregon. The entire organization has done an incredible job building this business. Check out the rest of the pics!
Curious Office is sure to develop another of our own companies. Sitting in a board meeting today reminded us that we have made good progress with Imagekind - the first company we developed internally. Rewinding a bit, it would probably be a reasonable question to ask why we incubate our own companies in the first place. The answer, in short, is that we believe we can better evaluate opportunities if we’re in the trenches ourselves. Driving traffic, recruiting developers and identifying solid concepts is really about being close to the game. More importantly, we simply drive more economic leverage by funding and starting our own projects.
The market continues to give Imagekind good reviews. One of the better ones I’ve read recently comes from Empty Easel.
Our traffic is considerably higher than what is shown here but its great to see that we’re leading our sector in any case. Speaking of traffic, Marcelo Calbucci of Sampa does a great job maintaining traffic lists for Internet start-ups in Seattle. Our traffic continues to go up since this list was compiled but it shows Imagekind is in the top 10-15 highest trafficked web start-ups in Seattle.
Our partners, like Snapfish, drive an immense amount of traffic and sales for us and it reminds us that more partnerships like this would surely be a hit. We’re going to be announcing other partnerships to include some prominent stock photo sites and may possibly even consider a commercial unit catering to hotels and retail chains (such as Starbucks for example.)
Gross revenue continues to climb. Exact revenues are not shared but it would be safe to say that the company is now at about 20 employees and we’re not in a position that absolutely requires us to do fund raising.
Overall, we’re very pleased with the progress and I’ll try to take more time today sharing our experiences and plans for Imagekind.
This is a pretty cool service. Most of my friends live on their cell phones. Many of them are constantly traveling. Ever needed to forward details contained in an email to a phone? This is a handy way to do it.
Teleflip’s Flipmail service automatically redirects email from pre-approved senders to your cellphone as text messages. Yes, you have to provide your email password so some people are going to have a problem with that but you can turn it on and off whenever you want so it works fine on a per occasion basis.
The service is supposed to work both ways, too, in that replying to a “flipped” email from your cellphone in turn generates an email that looks as though it came from your email account.
I’ve been reading with interest about a few companies such as Huddle who are developing an productivity application that tightly integrates Facebook and your desktop. I’ve long joked that Facebook is “the other Internet” and I’m finding that the lines between my social interactivity and my business networking is beginning to blur. Many business conversations are now happening on Facebook and I haven’t yet moved many of my new contacts out of Facebook and into my contact manager (e.g. Outlook). Incredibly, Moli has raised another whopping $29.6 million, bringing total money raised to $55.6 million! The company envisions you creating one profile for interacting with your friends, another for your coworkers. Why would you want to do this? Because, as I say, the lines between your social life and your work life are being made ever more transparent and you might want to better manage whether your business colleagues get to learn all about your bar hopping habit, party pics and afternoons basking in the sun when you should be working. What does all this mean? Increasingly, you’ll see more business apps on Facebook. Historically, Linkedin has been the business platform of choice for savvy professionals but I think that is about to change. Whether we’re talking about sales, marketing, networking or collaboration…there is little doubt that much of the data going into Facebook and other online networks needs to get back out. It needs to be useful. You need to get other business data in as well. Want to know how your beta is performing? Need a feedback platform to track bugs, comments and overall sentiment? Facebook is where people congregate. As a beta testing universe it is probably second to none. And, in a way, it is already an interesting collaboration system of sorts.
IT departments are increasingly accepting of software as a service and “Web 2.0″ in general. Second Life, Facebook and others will certainly remain as platforms of choice for social interactivity but they will also because paramount to businesses looking to interact with each other and with their constituents. In order for that to happen more effectively, better applications need to be developed that tightly integrate with these types of services.
Could these rumors be true? Hmm. Makes sense to me!
My wife surprised me with a brand new MacBook Pro today! Wow. Now that’s what I call a SURPRISE. So fun!!! Something about setting up a new machine is just a total geek party.
The font is oddly small but this is a great collection of quotes.
Whether it’s a grid based system of design or the ever present Helvetica font, there is a good chance you are using some Swiss design origins in your web process and you didn’t even know it. In any case, one of my latest flickr contacts has some great vintage Swiss design graphics that are worth checking out.
For those of you who love cheat sheets, you’ll find these PDF documents handy to keep on your desktop. Of particular interest is the cheat sheet to remind you what all those Wordpress files are meant to do. The HTML and CSS docs are pretty rudimentary but handy for beginners perhaps.
Wordpress Cheat Sheet
HTML Cheat Sheet
CSS Cheat Sheet
This is a problem of epic proportions and yet we in the West aren’t seeing Congo nightly on our mainstream news channels.
OK, I tripped over this link today and got a pretty good laugh. Thanks to the folks over at Woot for throwing this together. Check out some of the funny things you may have missed at CES. For example:
Most Ridiculously Unpractical Oversized Tote Bag
If you can’t find a hotel room, curl up in this carry-all – and we do mean all.
Best Handmade Sign
There wasn’t much else to do on that long flight over from Shenzhen.
Least Appealing Display Video
You’ve never seen the inside of your colon in such sparkling color before.
Worst Digital Photo Frame
At least the picture’s halfway decent…
No, I probably won’t actually produce these for sale. I was just trying to make a point.
I worked with Alex Alben and Alex Castro over at Pluggd to help out with the development of new materials as part of their evolved positioning. I finished a redesign of materials, logo, developed a new site on the Drupal content management system and did a little Flash preso. The new logo is simple yet supports the “multimedia” concept. Some days I play designer. Some days I play marketer. Some days I put my biz dev hat on. It’s anything but boring around here….
