Blog
Writing helps me think more clearly. This archive is longer posts; quick updates now live in notes.
Topics: AI, blogging, photography, programming, projects, Signboard
Dave Winer in Solving problems sometimes requires work: I sent my ten steps to first post list to a VC friend. But clearly after the first step (which was go to fargo.io) he ditched the list, and made it up himself, and never got to first post. Now that would be fine if VCs weren't the gatekeepers, but…
Marco Arment finishes Lockdown, his piece on the war Facebook started and its latest casualty Google Reader, this way: We need to keep pushing forward without them, and do what we’ve always done before: route around the obstructions and maintain what’s great about the web. Keep building and supporting new tools, technologies, and platforms to empower independence, interoperability,…
Late last week we started looking to fill two positions at Plain and wrote a blog post explaining what we were looking for, who would be eligible, and how to apply. We've gotten some great responses so far from people all over the world; Europe, South America, and the rural US. It's great. Exactly what we were hoping for….
(I couldn't decide on the title. Sorry.) Jeremy Keith wrote a really great piece about how companies like Twitter and Facebook feel threatened by data interoperability and how this is setting a trend on the web: Once Facebook had proven that it was possible to be the one-stop-shop for your user’s every need, that became the model to…
Marco Arment paints a picture full of opportunity in what Apple has done with iOS 7. I appreciate that he kept his opinion of whether or not he liked the design of iOS 7 to himself and rather decided to focus on the opportunity this big of a change creates. This big of an opportunity doesn’t come often…
Jason Santa Maria, on a great piece on his not-updated-often-enough blog, on innovation: What people sometimes mean when they say innovation is actually iteration—continually building on good thinking and assumptions, then, most importantly, believing in the equity of those decisions enough to keep revising upon them. That is Barley. The next logical step. Not an innovation or something brand-new…
This past week Kyle Ruane and I drove to Greenville, South Carolina for the Greenville Grok – a half-week long string of events and activities put together by the great folks at The Iron Yard. Grok is unlike most conferences in a number of great ways. Most conferences focus on providing headline speakers to bring in a crowd. The crowd is…
I remember the first time I ran WordPress on my local computer. It was amazing. Within a few moments I was up and running with just a bit of PHP that could power hundreds of blog posts. Before I was using b2 (the name WordPress sort of had before that project became WordPress) I was copying and pasting HTML blocks to simulate…
On March 14th I turned off Push Notifications on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I no longer get interrupted by text messages, calendar notifications, tweets, email messages, or software updates. If I want to see if I have any new messages I have to check myself. At first this may seem like a recipe for missing very important notifications the moment they…
Starting a new business requires you to do many things that you may not enjoy doing. You may end up spending a lot of time focusing on tasks that you feel are mundane, unneeded, and downright archaic. I'm sorry to be the one to tell you but you'll have to do these things. You'll have to pay the…
Tonight I had the privilege of presenting Barley during the Lehigh Valley Tech Meetup. I thought I'd take a photo of the audience. Are you in the photo? Tweet about it!
Last year I linked to Inc.'s article about Dublin's apparent growth in successful start-ups, investments, and the general tech scene. In contrast to that post is Patrick Collison's post from October of last year showing the challenges that start-ups face in Ireland. The interesting question is probably “how hard is to start a successful start-up in Ireland compared to doing so in…
Matthew Smith in his interview with the always excellent The Great Discontent: Then people started asking me to build more things, like customer databases. I would nod in agreement as if to say, “Of course I can do that,” and then I’d get off the phone, crap my pants, and go do research on Google, ask questions on forums, and…
Jason Schuller on Promising Solutions for Simple Websites and Blogs about our just-launched first product Barley: Barley is already beautifully branded and is dubbing itself as a “this-generation content editor” which I have actually bought into just from the teaser. From what I’ve read, it will be a hosted solution geared toward non-technical people (in other words, an actual human-usable website…
I try to get to the Keystone Observatory at least twice a year in the spring. It is only a few miles from our home and a great way to think about all things extraterrestrial. Last night I took my nephew Ethan. We saw Jupiter with four of its moons (one of which was transiting Jupiter), Saturn and two of its moons, Castor and Pollux (binary stars part of the Gemini constellation),…
Bijan Sibet: For as long as I can recall, both as an entrepreneur and a vc, startups have been asked to pay their investors legal expenses related to their investment. Whether the company raises $500k or $5MM it has become “standard” that the company foots the investors legal bill. I didn't understand it then and I still don't…
Fred Beste, on Ben Franklin TechVentures in Bethlehem, puts it best: I am not aware of any facility that matches this place. I’ve stated it this way: This is the building that every mayor wishes were in his city. It doesn’t get any better from an economic development standpoint. This is where you get the intellectual property, high-growth, high…
Jake Lodwick, co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo, writes about how poorly the acquisition process can go and how it seems to happen over and over and over in our industry in An acquisition is always a failure: The party ended in 2006, when we sold our company to IAC, a conglomerate owned by media mogul Barry Diller. Bit…
Jim Ray reviews Twitter #music: Tellingly, you can’t get to a musician’s tweets from within the app to decide whether you want to follow them based on the content of their stream, you’re just supposed to follow all of your favorite musicians and be in awe of their celebrity, I guess. Yesterday I tweeted that while Twitter #music looked nice it was…
From Dark Sky Company, the guys behind the relatively new web app Forecast, comes a great post about how web applications can perform as well as native applications: Granted, some apps must be native: OpenGL-based games, for example, or apps that access hardware capabilities that are not yet exposed to the browser (a shrinking list); but I don’t buy the argument…
Alex Hillman is one lucky guy: I’ve been to Australia twice in the last 12 months. Three different cities. All for coworking related activities. Sounds like great fun but he also has brought back what he's learned from his experiences down under for all of our benefit. Which goes along great with my How to tear break down the…
I just spent a few minutes playing around with Medium, a new "system for reading and writing", created by the makers behind great services like Blogger and Twitter. It was extremely validating to see that some of the decisions that were made by the amazingly smart and talented Medium team ended up being some of the same decisions we…
My good friend Gary Vaynerchuk chose your's truly as #4 of 19 people he thinks should be followed on Twitter. He says of me: his new project is something that I think has the real chance of blowing up in 2014. Keep an eye on him. I think he’s a great follow and someone who’s always been quite…
Me, in December of last year: Now they need to take a queue from Instagram (and many other modern mobile apps) and start uploading the photo immediately, rather than waiting for the user to click “done”, so that it seemingly uploads instantly. Flickr blog, yesterday: Uploads from the Flickr app are much faster. We did some magic to…