About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
8 years ago or so, I was helping an client build out a new business unit. Their first step – add a checkbox to their ecommerce checkout process. Their question to me: “Where do we put the checkbox?” The entirety of this new business and the aspirations of the entire team – rolled up into …
Continue reading “Minimum Viable Product as 5-Words or Fewer”
Dan Grigsby from MobileOrchard, discusses how he’s building a comfortable life for himself with a combination of projects, what’s lacking in the Minnesota tech startup community, and why that isn’t a problem. [55 minutes]
This past summer, I entertained the idea of purchasing a couple tables at the community garage sale and loading them up with my basement full of stuff-in-need-of-a-better-home. And price everything at $0. Primarily, because I can’t imagine spending the time determining a price for each and every thing, labeling it, handling money, and risk justifying …
Continue reading “Mental Exercise: Price Free Retail Stores”
Like a lot of families, we’ve scaled down this Christmas. Happy (small)idays from the Van Burens.
I’ve been saving Dave Slusher’s Punk and NaNoWriMo [mp3] talk until I could give it a proper listen. After a week of working through some very hard problems – and only still only seeing just a glimpse of a solution, this morning seemed like a good time. Around the 27 minute mark, Dave mentions the …
Ben Moore from WorkSimple, discusses how, after almost 3 years into his funded startup, his company changed direction, branding, and almost everything else. [41 minutes]
I’ve been fighting with a bug that doesn’t properly sign a person out from a subdomain (using a combination of Authlogic and Subdomain_fu) The sign out link looks like this: < %= link_to_remote "Sign Out", :url => {:controller => ‘person_sessions’, :action => ‘destroy’, :subdomain => false}, :method => :delete -%> While the session was destroyed, …
Continue reading “Subdomain_fu and Destroying Authlogic Sessions with link_to_remote”
“…the design of typefaces had existed for centuries as an exclusive discipline reserved for specialists, who had access to proprietary tools. Today the personal computer provides the opportunity to create custom type designs with an increased potential for personalization and expression…Our design of custom fonts for Emigre magazine grew out of our need for unique …
In continuing my short sell of social media, I’ve been imagining Twitter and Facebook as holdings in a hedge fund manager’s portfolio. In my amateur understanding of hedge funds: the goal is to reduce risk and maximize returns by investing in assets that move in the opposite direction. The magic is in finding the complimentary …
Continue reading “Mental Exercise: Who Wins When Twitter Stumbles?”
Ben Weiner‘s been doing great work on giving greater visibility for open fonts – and has written a book proposal for web fonts. I called him up to discuss this work and my notion that web fonts are a brant new species of fonts. Links and topics we mention: Open Font Library EEULAA.org SIL Open …
Continue reading “First Crack #124. Open Web Fonts with Ben Weiner”