About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
Seems to me, if you name your company ‘Netflix’ and it’s not a streaming movie service – then the company is horribly misnamed. On the flip side, Netflix has taken years to build a highly efficient distribution pipeline optimized for USPS. And they’ve trained their customers to have high expectations for and quickly report any …
Continue reading “Qwikster is to Netflix as AWS is to Amazon”
Build an iterative development strategy around these four activities in this order: make it run make it right make it fast make it small
Today, Patrick Rhone and I challenged each other to imagine our respective projects as rooms in our homes. What color are the walls? Is there furniture? Are you sitting? Standing? How does the room make you feel? What do you do (an not do) in this room? I found it a quite interesting and insightful …
Continue reading “Sitting in a room different from the one you are in now”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, our region has had the 6th largest year-over-year percentage increase in GDP and yet we’ve a lower employment percentage. I know you’re all anxious to show how valuable you are, but just stop. At this point your work ethic is obnoxious. Just stop being productive.
1. Twitter adds ‘Promoted Tweets’ to everyone’s ‘stream’ “Twitter is expanding its promoted-tweets program and is now including paid tweets from companies that people don’t already follow in their timelines.” 2. Facebook introduces the ‘Subscribe’ button “Hear from people, even if you’re not friends Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends” What’s …
Continue reading “Wait, I thought there was significant business value in my “social graph”?”
“‘Foxfire’ is the name of a series of books which are anthology collections of material from The Foxfire Magazine. The students’ portrayal of the previously-dismissed culture of Southern Appalachia as a proud, self-sufficient people with simple beliefs, pure joy in living, and rock-solid faith shattered most of the world-at-large’s misconceptions about these ‘hillbillies.’” The Foxfire …
I’m subscribed to Hugh MacLeod’s “Hugh’s Daily Cartoon” email. Lately he’s been in rare form – even for him. Today’s reflected where my thinking has been as of late.
I’m no longer frustrated that I’m not comfortable in the chair – I got rid of it. A couple months back, I started a serious and deliberate re-work of my office. While the introduction of a monitor extension arm helped – I was still uncomfortable. By the end of the day, I was achey, cranky, …
In the daily churn it’s easy to miss truly remarkable projects. Remarkable in origin, in execution, and in presentation. Projects that market themselves. Projects that compel you. That haunt you. That remind you somewhere, deep inside you, there is an extraordinarily meaningful project – that must be birthed. And you’re the only one that can. …
(tl;dr – I call sputnik on Google, Apple, and Facebook) At any given point in tech culture, there are favorites. Favorite places to work, favorite companies to talk and write about. A few years ago the favorites were; Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google. Long ago, I’m sure the favorites were – IBM, Remington, and Smith-Corona. At …