Man this was a smart idea. When wireframing I tend to remake this stuff over and over. Just go download your scrollbars and mouse hover states from here. Pretty smart idea.
Archive for the 'technology' Category
I’ve been traveling a lot lately. I spend a lot of time in airports waiting for flights and in coffee shops meeting various people. One thing I always pay attention to is what kind of computer that people around me are working on. A bit geeky I suppose. Anyway, I don’t know if it is the kinds of places I frequent or if Apple is just having a very good year but I’m seeing A LOT of Mac laptops. Of the 13 people working around me in the San Francisco terminal the other day waiting for our Seattle flight, 9 of them were on Macs. Frankly, I was astounded. At the coffee shop the next morning there were exactly 8 people working on laptops. 5 of them were on Macs. As I sit here working in the new Top Pot Doughnuts on Queen Anne this morning, there are 4 people working on laptops. Two of them are Macs.
According to preliminary data from NPD, Apple reportedly achieved 14 percent of the U.S. retail PC market share in February 2008, up from 9% just a year ago. This represents 60 percent unit growth and 67 percent revenue growth year-over-year.
This data is probably accurate but my day to day observations suggest that many in tech circles are switching. Low and behold, Apple’s stock isn’t in that bad of shape given what’s happening to the economy. I’m buying a little bit more stock today and will continue adding to the position over time and as I see how the economy unfolds this year. All I know is that I can’t recall other MP3 players, mobile phones or computing equipment where people were as religious as they are about these products. With Apple pushing business features into the iPhone, releasing a 3G version soon and positioning itself strongly for the utopia that is video-on-demand then it seems a reasonable bet to assume that this stock will keep pushing higher.
http://www.ironmyers.com/
This CSS Development Collection Project is put together by Jake Myers and looks to be one of the more extensive CSS resource directories I’ve yet seen. Definitely worth a bookmark. You’ll use some of this stuff.
Thanks to TechnoSailor for doing this review of the new WordPress platform. Besides the obvious interface updates, you’ll notice a new and dramatically improved visual editor for making posts. The TinyMCE team has worked closely with WordPress on this release and it looks much better. You’ll also notice a new batch image uploader for those of us who like to add a lot of images to our posts.
This is not yet a public release but it looks to be a serious update of the best blogging platform on the planet.
You designers have long known about the Airtight Interactive photo viewer. It’s free. It’s flash. It’s easy to use. For those of you who haven’t used this code, go check it out!
Dropbox is super cool. Seriously. Need an easy way to share a file with someone? Just drag the file into your dropbox and get your URL. What if you make a change to the file later? No worries. The latest version of the file stays in synch. What if you need to recover a previously deleted file? No problem. What if you want to easily drag a whole folder of files or images at once? No problem.
Of all the filesharing systems I’ve seen, this is the best so far. And, over 10,000 others must have liked it too because that’s how many Diggs this thing has so far. Sure, you could always FTP files up to a webserver if you know how to do that. But, even that method doesn’t keep version changes of the same file up to date.
Mac power users no doubt already know about Skitch but I was turned onto it yesterday by my good friend Max Ciccotosto over at Wishpot. My usual process for pointing out bugs graphically or otherwise notating something I like about another site is to screenshot it, bring it into Photoshop and write all over the image. Skitch lets you do this SO much faster. You can scribble, jot, annotate and do anything else to an image in seconds. Much fewer steps to point out what you want others to see. Ideas can even be directly uploaded via FTP right from the tool. Talk about conveying ideas from one person to others in the most fluid way possible. Makes me wonder what other Mac apps I shouldn’t be living without!
Sure we’re involved with SEOmoz but that doesn’t mean this FREE seo guide isn’t worth your time. I assure you it is. If you want the single best starting point from which to understand SEO, read this entire guide front to back. Because so many pieces of a site AND your editorial behavior factor into the final results, and because search engines can be notoriously slow to reflect what impact your actions are having, there are two things SEOmoz would like to remind us:
- Patience is not the only virtue that should be used for successful SEO.
- The strategy itself must have a strong foundation in order to succeed.
Crossing the line from an original idea over to real world performance struggles should be easier than it is. But, time and time again my observations suggest that 25-40% of available development bandwidth goes to maintaining and optimizing what you built and NOT to ongoing new feature development. Pages get slow. Users complain. Errors become more prevalent. Traffic spikes impact sales. It’s all a big struggle. For everyone.
I’ve been wondering how I would plan in advance for these challenges and that’s led me to reconsider how I would plow forward on a new idea. More details in this regard later because it impacts everything from design decisions to PR plans. Anyway, it goes without saying that your ability to conduct some manner of testing wherein each user is simulated by a separate thread with his own session information shall be important to understand how efficiently your app and hardware platform is.
I’ve been evaluating various tools for this purpose and am trying to collect information from others in this regard. The tests that I think are meaningful would include:
- Maximum number of users the webserver can accommodate before producing error messages.
- “Entire website performance at the normal (expected) load.
- Single URL tests of a webserver or web application to identify and discover elements that may be responsible for slower than expected performance.
- Testing for specific web pages which can be requested simultaneously without problems like database deadlocks.
Which tools do you use for NON Microsoft platforms? What other tests do you deem important? Let me know. I’m curious. Being curious is what we do here.
Ever wondered that? What’s all this talk about ping servers? How do search engines crawl your new post? My blog is getting scraped? Republished? Huh?
This is simply a fantastic diagram that shows how your blog content can propagate across the webernet.
Just tripped over this over at http://weblogtoolscollection.com/. Might be a worthy read for anyone interested to learn the basics of SEO for Wordpress.
Carrie Hill and Mary Bowling of Blizzard Internet Marketing has released a WordPess SEO Whitepaper that is available for free in PDF form. The white paper goes over the usual suspects such as the use of pretty permalinks, SEO Plugins and socializing your blog. The whitepaper also gives quite a few tips and tricks to help configure your WordPress powered blog so that it is SEO friendly from the get-go. This is an excellent read for those that are brand new to WordPress or for those curious to know what they could do to improve the SEO on their own blogs.
Not everyone reads comments on a blog but I felt the two comments to my last post “What’s wrong with the Seattle start-up scene anyway?” were insightful and I didn’t want them to get lost in the comment basement. I think the theories here seem as good as any others I’ve heard. For a “business guy” I believe I’m more technical than most at least insofar as I can actually DO some things myself and I don’t rely on devs to handle every tiny request for me. I generally understand what devs are telling me in status meetings and I’m able to have a reasonable two way dialog with them to arrive at decent solutions. So, I love technology. That said, I still need to think about whether or not founders themselves need to be technical. I think we as entrepreneurs need ready access to world class development resources. But, I don’t think the world needs more technical founders. Most projects simply will not require, or benefit from, a CEO who is a developer. Just my two cents. But the comments here are good and the links from Glenn’s response are worth following.
From Glenn Kelman of Redfin:
Kelly, in my opinion, the most important change Seattle could make is to invest more in the University of Washington’s computer science department so that it competes with Champagne-Urbana and Irvine if not Stanford, MIT and Berkeley. Most entrepreneurs here have been imported from elsewhere by Microsoft and Amazon, and many are not technical founders. The entire investment thesis of, say, a Sequoia Capital (fund computer scientists under 35 attacking large markets), is more difficult to implement here as a result.
See:
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/06/how_to_kick_sil.htmlAnd of course! http://blog.redfin.com/blog/2008/02/the_next_silicon_valley.html
And, thanks to Todd Dean of Keiretsu Forum NW
I have many comments on the topic “what’s wrong with the Seattle start-up scene.” First I would like to address that the Northwest is one of the most active areas if not the most active area in the country for entrepreneurship and companies being funded currently. We (Keiretsu Forum) have a very clear view on what is going on locally, nationally, and internationally regarding start up companies. So let me address a couple of the questions above. 1) Entrepreneurs lack the resources and capital they need. 2) Entrepreneurs have more access to capital and resources due to the climate of the communities in for example Silicon Valley. 3) As for the comparison of Facebook and YouTubes we do have Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks to name a few. 4) We do have many education resources but in my opinion we still have a ways to go in the area. I’m happy to elaborate further if you should have a meeting, forum, or get together to collaborate and share our points of view??
Over the last few weeks I’ve been working with a small team of like minded software veterans, investors and entrepreneurs to brainstorm how the Seattle start-up scene could be improved. We’ve now got a private mailing list and several interesting (and not so interesting) ideas flowing around. My ideas probably dilute the quality of the others’ good ideas 
In any case, on some level I think all of us keep coming back to the same set of questions.
1) What are we trying to solve?
2) Is it true that Seattle entrepreneurs don’t have the same opportunities that are available in the Silicon Valley?
3) Can we draw some meaningful conclusions if we ask ourselves how many Facebooks or YouTubes there AREN’T in Seattle?
4) Is there a sufficient network and associated infrastructure already in place such that there are no obvious broken components?
I don’t even really know the answer to #1 if I were to be honest. I think there are two notions that seem to be more prevalent than the rest. First, entrepreneurs seem to feel that it takes too long to close funding rounds in Seattle. Second, is this idea that Seattle doesn’t have the same energy or “support infrastructure” as the Silicon Valley which would otherwise encourage a sufficient number of game changing start-ups on par with eBay, PayPal, Facebook, YouTube, Slide etc.
Is something broken? Do we need a revised mentality? Or are we simply witnessing logical factors of scale from one locale to the next wherein the Valley simply has more tech workers, more venture capital firms and larger universities with more aggressive technology focus. I don’t know the answer. It is obviously true that there are more financing options available to an entrepreneur in the Bay Area. You could spend 3 days in meetings, driving from one end of the corridor to the other and not hit a fraction of the active firms. Thus, there is probably some justification for the frustration that start-up hopefuls feel when making the rounds in Seattle. When there are fewer firms investing on any reasonable scale then each firm is bound to take more time evaluating each deal and scrutinizing each entrepreneur. Fear of loss and competition move needles when push comes to shove. And, when there are fewer serious firms making waves then the overall pace simply slows because it can. I am not sure I would characterize this situation that is inherently associated with something being “broken”. I think it is just a phenomenon of our market here. Ever tried dating in a big city like London, New York or Los Angeles? I admit it’s been a while for me but I do know that when you see that someone special you assume that if you delay in your approach then someone else with a bit more bravado is quite happy to step in and reap the rewards.
In terms of networks, events etc I know we have Alliance of Angels, Seraph, NWEN and so many others. Is it enough? That’s really the question. It was asked; “what is our DEMO?” “Where is our SXSW?” Reasonable questions if you ask me.
One thing I’ve noticed about Seattle. Everyone assumes that everyone knows everyone else. It simply isn’t the case. And that’s why I’m a big fan of more events. I’m lucky in that I think I have a fairly extensive network in Seattle. If I needed a team then I have every reasonable opportunity to find the right people by relying on that network. But, in reality, not every entrepreneur is so lucky. Yet more reality: VC’s don’t see every interesting thing going on in Seattle. Admittedly, Imagekind doesn’t stand out as the next big online social network. I admit that. But, it is as reasonable an investment as so many others that have been made in Seattle nonetheless. I closed a small $2.65 million round in just a few weeks and never pitched a Seattle venture firm. Actually thats not true. I did pitch Mike Slade and Nick Hanauer at Second Avenue although theirs isn’t a fund exactly. The point remains. Anything that can be done to help developers find their CEO the better. Anything that can be done to help CEO’s build out their teams the better. Anything that can be done to insure good projects with good teams get sufficiently funded and within a reasonable time the better. Anything that builds camaraderie within the ranks of the Seattle start-up community the better.
As the ideas swirl continue to swirl about amongst the group I find myself thinking that any idea that is even incremental to what may already be working is just fine. It’s perhaps not about what’s broken. It’s about what can be made better by those who have the initiative, energy and wherewithal to contribute to these kinds of thankless projects. Small steps forward are often harder than they seem.
I got quite a few requests for the slide deck from my presentation at the Northwest Entrepreneur’s Network last week titled “The First Six Months: Psychological Challenges of a Startup and How to Manage Them.”
Getty Images (NYSE: GYI), the world’s biggest supplier of stock pictures and video (and increasingly a digital player) which put itself up for sale and acknowledged it last month, has not yet found a buyer and the auction process is in jeopardy, reports NYT. The company, which hired Goldman Sachs to hawk itself, has received no offers significantly above its current market value of $1.6 billion, the story says.
Private equity firms like Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Bain Capital and Providence Equity partners had expressed interest last month. The story attributes the frozen process to the tough credit markets, as well as the low-cost competitors to Getty, which are eroding the stock photo business in a big way.
