Daniel Buchner (Jetpack project manager) is going to lead a Design Lunch this Thursday to talk about the rebooted Jetpack SDK (software development kit).
The Jetpack design team is specifically going to be looking for feedback on this proposed extension to the tools for Jetpack developers.
The design lunch is Thursday March 4, 12:30pm – 1:30pm PST. The details of how to watch or participate remotely are on the Design Lunch wiki page.
Hope to see you there!
Face to face meeting
Phone call
Letter in the mail
Personal email
Blog entry
Email newsletter
Physical interactions are infinitely more valuable than digital ones. If we must communicate digitally, it should be the preamble to future physical, real human interaction.
3,744 — the record number of updates to a single Lighthouse ticket. Whoa!
Alright, the big day is finally here! REWORK is now available in stores. You can order the US version online from the following booksellers:
International versions are either out already or coming soon. Check with your local retailer. There’s also an audiobook version read by Mike Chamberlain (listen to a sample).
At the book site, you’ll now find a PDF that includes five essays and illustrations from the book:
Download PDF excerpt (1.7 MB)
And here’s the copy from the inside flap of the book, also a good primer on what you’ll find:
Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.
REWORK shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition.
The truth is you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.
What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You’ll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.
With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, REWORK is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of “downsizing,” and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.
Press
Reviews are starting to pour in. Inc Magazine’s review of Rework:
Fried and Hansson are the Henry David Thoreaus of entrepreneurship. They preach doing less and embracing constraints…Written with genuine voice — a sometimes cranky and profane voice at that.
800-CEO-READ did a brief Q&A with Jason in advance of the book. Here’s what the site’s Jon Mueller had to say about the book:
This isn’t just a book about changing your business, it’s about changing how you think about business, and is, perhaps, one of the most important books you’ll read this year. Whether you’re admin or CEO, there are many things to learn, and this book offers some great insight into how we all can waste less time, offer people more value, and accomplish things we’ve not yet imagined.
The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.
—Henry Ford
Our new office, pre-construction. Lease signed today. Move in scheduled sometime in July. Full story, floor plans, and vision shortly.
The coolest thing about digital media is this: The footprints last forever. Which means that some small promotional activity and links will endure, and sometimes pull a Jesus and get a second coming. Just like we did with rentoid.com on our www.iwearyourshirt.com promo. We recently got featured in the Fox News New York spot. The story wasn’t about us, but we had a good spot in it. You can watch it below.
http://www.myfoxny.com/dpp/good_day_ny/getting-paid-to-wear-a-shirt-20100308
Three terms that came up repeatedly during our San Diego retreat:
Slack
All the stuff that doesn’t fit neatly into bigger, concept-driven iterations. We save one of our programmer/designer teams for slack work — small scope things that build up, a bug that needs to be fixed, a quick support assist, etc.
YAGNI
You ain’t gonna need it. It’s easy to get carried away discussing how you could possibly do this, that, or the other thing. It’s harder to step back and ask “Are we really gonna need this?” The answer is usually no.
Low ceremony
When it comes to workflow or policies, stay away from posturing. Just stick loosely to a few guidelines and let good judgement lead you the rest of the way.
This is the sixth of my crowd sourced blog entry ideas as suggested by Ben Rowe. Ben wanted to get my thoughts on the following:
In a word, no. But given the task is to discuss, I’d say the fact that matters here is the word emotion. Does a brand generate an emotional response from the audience. Does it generate passion and fervor? Good or bad? If the response isn’t emotional. There will be no discussion.
The product or service may be very good, have a reasonable price and even be a market leader. Yes it may suffice or dominate it’s category, like cornflakes do as breakfast cereal, but I’m hardly about to email my brother with a link to the Kelloggs website.
We need to think about things that are emotional responses: Joy, Anger, Sadness, Elation, Fury, Disappointment, Love, Hate….
The heavy emotions every human is familiar with. A brand has to engender these type of emotional responses to get on the word of mouth agenda. Case in point is banks. They are seen to take advantage of their customers, and we have a strong distrust and hate for them. And even though the response is negative, it’s emotional and generates a great deal of discussion. That is, it’s not boring. It’s often the case that brands which have factional parties in the for and against camp (love / hate) generate the most word of mouth. Some recent examples of brands with this effect include:
All of these have been worth talking about. Our brand reputations as people wouldn’t be hindered if we mentioned these.
As far as start ups are concerned we should thinking less about trying to generate a viral campaign, and more about the emotional impact our offer has on our audience. Being new and innovative isn’t enough, it’s got to have an emotional impact on people. With boring brands we are simply indifferent, and so we just get on with our lives.
Footprints - Every building footprint, and nothing else, in Montgomery County, Ohio. It's interesting how buildings can define an area.
Data, data everywhere - The Economist reports on the explosion of big data and the challenges that come with it.
Q&A With Shawn Allen of Stamen Design - Always interesting to hear from these guys [thx, tim].
The Case For An Older Woman - Another thoughtful analysis from the okcupid group on why men should be more open-minded to dating older women.
There's this article on CNN, from The Frisky, that has this little theory about who is most likely to win the Oscar for best actor:
[T]he Oscar generally goes to the dude who has the most best actor and best supporting nominations under his belt already.
That seemed like a curious statement. Didn't Forest Whitaker, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Jaimie Foxx recently win on their first nominations for the coveted award? Okay, so Hoffman was actually up against a bunch of other newbies, but what about the rest?
Only 10 out of the past 29 winners, or just over a third, had the most nominations their year. Take a look at the data since 1980. Is the theory valid? You decide.
Of course when Jeff Bridges wins tonight, the theory authors will declare victory, but oh well.
Just for fun let's take a poll:
Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:
Basecamp
New in Basecamp: Stylized email notifications
We created new email designs for milestones (and 48-hour milestone reminders), file uploads, messages, to-dos, and comments.
New in Basecamp: Post a message via email
You can now email a message directly to a project. This means you can post messages without even being logged in. Just send a message via email from your desktop, web-based email client, or mobile phone, and it’ll post right to Basecamp as a message.
“Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes” is a comprehensive guide to Basecamp
Sams Teach Yourself Basecamp in 10 Minutes by Patrice-Anne Rutledge is a new book that’s the most comprehensive guide to Basecamp we’ve ever seen. If you want to know everything there is to know about Basecamp, this is the book for you.
It was a good month for FlowingData. We passed the 30k-reader mark, and I think this past month was an all-time high for pageviews. Thanks again. everyone for reading and sharing FlowingData.
I also managed to switch servers (semi-) successfully while updating the FD homepage in the process. Make sure you check that out if you haven't already, and let me know what you think in the comments.
In case you missed them, here are the most popular posts from last month ranked by a combination of views, comments, and trackbacks. I especially enjoyed a lot of the thoughtful discussion that came out of these posts.
There was also some good stuff going on in the forums with a couple of job postings and some data goodies.
Data Visualization Guru - Energy group EnergyHub is looking for someone who can help visualize their data.
Interactive Data Visualization help needed - So is FrogDesign, but for a smaller project.
Visual Architects Contest - Do you have what it takes to win?
WinterOlympicMedals - The Olympics are over, but that doesn't mean you have to stop playing with several decades of medal data [thanks, annie]
I ran some statistics on the last few years of Basecamp activity and uncovered this strange, recurring anomaly.
A long take is a single, unbroken camera shot that lasts much longer than a typical shot. While the idea’s been around for a long time, it feels like it has extra impact in today’s world of hyper-editing and constant angle changes. Some examples below.
It feels almost cliché to be linking up an Ok Go video at this point, but ya gotta hand it to the band; They have really mastered the art of making “event” videos. Check out this amazing long take video featuring the Notre Dame marching band:
Film directors have long known the power of the long take (Daily Film Dose offers up this list of “The Greatest Long Tracking Shots in Cinema”). One of the best is this scene from “Goodfellas,” where Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco walk through the Copacabana.
More music video examples after the jump.
I call myself a statistician, because, well, I'm a statistics graduate student. However, ask me specific questions about hypothesis tests or required sampling size, and my answer probably won't be very good.
The other day I was trying to think of the last time I did an actual hypothesis test or formal analysis. I couldn't remember. I actually had to dig up old course listings to figure out when it was. It was four years ago during my first year of graduate school. I did well in those courses, and I'm confident I could do that stuff with a quick refresher, but it's a no go off the cuff. It's just not something I do regularly.
Instead, the most important things I've learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data. Here they are in no particular order.
Oftentimes it's the little things that end up being the most important. There was this one time in class when my professor put up a graph on the projector. It was a bunch of data points with a smooth fitted line. He asked what we saw. Well, there was an increase in the beginning, a leveling off in the middle, and then another increase. However, what I missed was the little blip in the curve in the first increase. That was what we were after.
The point is that trends and patterns are important, but so are outliers, missing data points, and inconsistencies.
With that said, it's important not to get too caught up with individual data points or a tiny section in a really big dataset. We saw this in the recent recovery graph. Like some pointed out, if we took a step back and looked at a larger time frame, the Obama/Bush contrast doesn't look so shocking.
This should go without saying, but approach data as objectively as possible. I'm not saying you shouldn't have a hunch about what you're looking for, but don't let your preconceived ideas influence the results. Because if you go to length looking for some specific pattern, you're probably going to find it. It'll just be at the sacrifice of accurate results.
Context, context, context. Sometimes this will come in the form of metadata. Other times it'll come from more data.
The more you know about how the data was collected, where it came from, when it happened, and what was going on at the time, the more informative your results and the more confident you can be about your findings.
Finally, and this is the most important thing I've learned, always ask why. When you see a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it's there. If you find some correlation, you should think about whether or not it makes any sense. If it does make sense, then cool, but if not, dig deeper. Numbers are great, but you have to remember that when humans are involved, errors are always a possibility.
*Photo by misterbisson
I walked into a Sprint store today to check out the Palm Pixi. AT&T has been bad enough lately that, while I’m not ready to chuck the iPhone, I’m at least growing curious. Unfortunately “walking in” is about all I could do.
Every smartphone in the Sprint store was locked under glass cabinets. The untouchable phone displays were covered in fake screenshot stickers. Two weary looking gentlemen in polo shirts manned the back counter and a queue of six customers (shoppers?) aimlessly paced the floor, waiting for something to happen.
It took about 30 seconds to realize there was nothing to gain from my store visit. After a quick round to be sure I didn’t miss a demo unit somewhere, I turned back to the street. Is this typical of Sprint stores?
Compare this experience to the Apple store. iPhones and iPods are less than six feet away from the entrance door. All you have to do is reach out and grab one. Salespeople meander around you, instead of you around them. A total Apple newbie can go from curious to salivating in about 90 seconds in that environment.
Can you imagine if Apple locked their products under glass cabinets? Or put stickers with screenshots over their displays? Who makes these decisions?
Tomorrow’s Design Lunch will be about the results from the Test Pilot study on menu item usage. Jinghua, Blake and I will present what we’ve found out so far about what menu items are most commonly used (and how this breaks down by operating system and by mouse-clicking vs. keyboard-shortcuts). We’ll have a brainstorming session about what this data might mean for future redesigns of the Firefox menu bar, and try to come up with questions for further investigation.
We’ll also present some findings about the demographics of the Test Pilot user base.
The design lunch is Thursday March 4, 12:30pm – 1:30pm PST. The details of how to watch or participate remotely are on the Design Lunch wiki page.
We often read about the value of brand names: “The ikea brand alone is worth $12 billion – Interbrand”
Not really. The value of a brand is the infrastructure and value chain which has been built behind it, resulting in the ultimate revenue streams. In truth the brand name is worth very little. Think about many of the unexpected and surprising corporate failures. Lehman Brothers, Ansett Airlines and Worldcom to name a few. What are their brand names worth today? Zilch.
If the brand name was really worth something, they would be sold and re-launched in some capacity. When any company is bought, the brand name is merely an adendum. It’s not the name that is being bought, rather the system, the structure, actually it’s the organisation. Of which the brand name is a very small part, even though it is what is spruked as the compenant of ultiamte value.
Startups who want to build a brand should think less about names and logos and more about building an infrastructure and revenue streams.
Good customer support and the ease of user feedback are critical to the success of any indie developer. Aral Balkan, founder of Naklab, is no stranger to this. Aral uses both Tender Support and Lighthouse to maintain a streamlined workflow, making things as easy as possible for for him and his application's users.
"Tender has several killer features. The most important, for me, is the rich integration options Tender has: the API, Lighthouse integration (and, in turn, Lighthouse's Github integration). Beyond that I love how customizable it is: I make it look exactly as I want. And, of course, it just works. It has all the characteristics I try to imbue my own apps with." - Aral
Aral’s iPhone applications, 'Avit and Feathers, bring customer support and user feedback to the front line by directly integrating with Tender Support.
/END Press Release Robot Voice
Seriously though...
Earlier today, Aral pinged us on Twitter:
"Dear @entp peeps, Feathers is being featured by Apple, and I'm sure it's in part due to having @tenderapp support built in" - about 3 hours ago via Feathers for iPhone
We're always stoked when we get to see our service have this kind of reach. Aral has done and awesome job and we're sure each user is equally as thankful.
As I was writing this, I got a chance to ask Aral what his favorite feature in Tender is.
"More than any one feature, it's the whole user experience that I love. As an interaction designer, that's probably the biggest praise I could give it." - Aral
Needless to say, we all blushed a little after reading that.
As an added bonus, it looks like we'll finally get to hang out with Aral at the Chirp conference in San Francisco this April!
Update: A double added bonus, Matt Newberry has an Objective-C Library for the Tender API for integration with iPhone and Mac applications, OSS and all -- http://github.com/MattNewberry/Tender. Awesome.
Via Joshua Kaufman.
As entrepreneurs we can’t be afraid of boot leather as a strategy. It’s vital, even for web startups.
But recently I’ve been out selling rentoid partnerships (clipboard under arm sales rep style) to the rental industry in order to develop strategic alliances. It’s not easy, but I’m learning more doing this than I ever do looking into this computer screen.
In addition to that – 50% of the potential customers I find aren’t on my call sheet. They aren’t on the internet at all. If I wasn’t driving, walking and looking around I wouldn’t find them. They have no digital presence at all. When I do find them, they are usually glad I have.
If you’re genuine. If you have an offer that will help people with their business, and if you make the effort to go to where they are, you miles ahead of any entrepreneur, web or otherwise staring at his computer screen. Sure, it doesn’t sound very strategic, or webby, and it wont feature in techcrunch or mashable, but it’s a winning strategy of more internet and general startups than most people would ever believe.
Frederik Seiffert provides this nifty tool, LastHistory, to visualize your Last.fm listening history. Mouse over songs and find repeated track sequences. The visualization itself isn't all that useful, but it gets interesting when you hook your calendar and photos in with music. LastHistory lets you replay songs synched with your photos, and your slideshow suddenly gains a new dimension.
I don't use Last.fm, so LastHistory isn't much use to me, but I'd be interested in hearing what others think. Give it a try for your self though (for Mac only), and leave your thoughts in the comments below. Is it a reason to start using Last.fm?
I’m excited to give a talk at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I’m going to walk through Christopher Alexander’s design theory and explain how to apply it to everyday web app UI work. Alexander’s book Notes on the Synthesis of Form had a huge influence on me early in my career at 37signals. It’s going to be a lot of fun to share key points from that book with an audience for the first time. I hope you can come out to see it.
Where:
MFA Interaction Design Department
132 W 21st Street, 6 Floor
New York City
When:
Wednesday, April 7
6:30-8:30PM
See the event page at the SVA’s MFA in Interaction Design program to RSVP.
UPDATE: The talk is now sold-out.
Startups need people able and willing of doing the actual work. They need programmers, designers, and eventually folks to do marketing, support, and more. What they don’t need, though, is someone who’s just going to be The Idea Guy.
You know the type. It’s the “this thing is going to be Facebook meets Flickr, but for dogs! If we can just get 1% of the online dog market, we’ll be rich!” spiel. All idea, usually no money, and hardly any functional skills that’ll help build or launch the damn thing.
On the face and the facts of it, it’d be easy to turn down The Idea Guy. He wants you to work for very little or free in return for a smaller-than-his slice of the pie in the end. That end very rarely happens. But the energy and the big dreams can be dangerously alluring. I know, I fell for it more than once.
The truth is that most everyone has plenty of ideas that could work out to be great businesses. The kicker is most often the right execution, that they’d be responsible for anyway, at the right time, which is almost impossible to predict. The value of The Perfect Idea is very small indeed.
That doesn’t mean it’s useless to have big ideas and plenty of enthusiasm. If you’re that guy, you’ve got a great start. Now pick up a functional skill and help build it your damn self.
Time: 41:20 | 03/02/2010 | Download MP3
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The new business book from 37signals
REWORK hits stores on March 9. This episode features an extended conversation all about the book. We discuss why we wrote it, what it was like working with our publisher, the writing process, the illustrations, the cover, and more.
Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast. Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS.
A List Apart Active Reload Dr Nic Williams Evan Weaver FlowingData Giant Robots Giles Bowkett Has Many Through Jay Fields Thoughts Joel on Software John Nunemaker Jono @ Mozilla Labs Justin French Labnotes Mark Mansour Pat Allan Pivotal Blabs Rails Spikes Random Hacks Rands in Repose Riding Rails Robot Has No Heart Ryan Tomayko Ryan's Scraps Sam Ruby Signal vs. Noise Start Up Blog Techno Weenie Vertica Very Small Array al3x buckblog raganwald
