MADE IN DETROIT

Market Cap Per Employee

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:00:15 -0500

AAPL is now worth >$200B, along with only (I think) XOM, MSFT, BRK, and WMT. So those are the biggest companies, but how do they stack up on a per employee basis?

AAPL: $202b / 34,300 = $5.9M/e

WMT: $207b / 2,100,000 = $98,600/e

MSFT: $252b / 93,000 = $2.7M/e

XOM: $315b / 80,700 = $3.9M/e

AMZN: $57b / 24,300 = $2.3M/e

BRK.A: $203b / 222,000 = $914,000/e

Facebook (reported): $10b / 1,200 = $8.3M/e

Interesting.

No question, mobile apps will be huge. What I’m curious to...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:55:00 -0500

No question, mobile apps will be huge. What I’m curious to watch play-out is which platforms win. My bet is on HTML5 and mobile web.

ericmortensen: bexjoblogspot: Directed by James Frost, OK Go...

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 11:47:46 -0500

ericmortensen:

bexjoblogspot:

Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of “This Too Shall Pass” off of the album “Of the Blue Colour of the Sky”. The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The “machine” was designed and built by the band, along with members of Synn Labs (http://syynlabs.com/) over the course of several months.

Source

Freaking sweet I tell you. What do you think?

Well done!

Underwritten by State Farm Insurance. Embeddable, too. Interesting.

The President(?) of SyynLabs gave a talk at IgniteLA last night about this video. OKGO had all sorts of requirements for it, the most difficult of which was obviously “One Take.” You’ll notice that most of the “small” stuff happens in the first half of the video, making it easier to reset if/when something failed (small stuff was much more likely to fail). The “tire” part was the big moment — if they could get to the tire, they pretty much coasted the rest of the way.

Apple and "1-Click Sex"

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:51:52 -0500

rafer:

iseffcom:

continuations:

Over the last few days, Apple has removed a number of apps from the app store that have, as the New York Times’s Jenna Wortham put it “sexually suggestive” material. There is plenty of speculation on the motives, such as VentureBeat’s idea that this is about winning over educators to the iPad. I think the actual explanation is likely to be simpler.

Browsing and discovery are broken in the app store. If these were working well, then there would be no need to remove apps like this (for any reason). Instead, they would be visible only to those specifically searching for them. Imagine coming to the Google home page and finding a list of the most popular web pages in various categories. Unfiltered I am pretty sure that would include a bunch of porn. This could be one source of complaints but I suspect that access by children is more important.

Theoretically parental controls are supposed to help keep this content away from children, but that of course requires some non-trivial configuration, as this tutorial shows. I believe that most people buy iPod Touches or even iPhones for their kids and simply hand them over without ever going through these steps (we didn’t — but that’s because we don’t believe in filtering for kids — more on that in a separate blog post). Without these controls “questionable” apps are just 1-click away for kids.

Phil Schiller cites “customer complaints from women” in his NYT interview as the reason for the app removal. Based on the above, I suspect many if not most of them are mothers who discover that their children have actually purchased “inappropriate” apps (as opposed to just browsed the web). There were a huge number of iPod Touches given as Christmas presents this year and the timing of this removal could be the result of that.

I am surprised that Apple did not solve this problem by defaulting to a “safe mode” (and fixing app store browsing/discovery), but instead resorted to removing the apps. This suggests that there are technology issues behind the scenes that prevent them from making sufficiently rapid changes to the App Store.

This dovetails very nicely with my post from yesterday about brainstorming a sane app review process. Like I said there, now that AppStoreHQ is in the app submission and review business, the two biggest things we have to deal with will be: (a) coming up with appropriate guidelines for developers, and (b) providing mechanisms for sectioning off the site to only the apps you find appropriate (for yourself, your children, others, etc).

Rafer sez:
@iseff There can never be a sane app review process. There can only be a sane developer reputation and trust system.

@rafer True. We’re all about using market-based approaches like this (and we want to allow any app and any type of app into our service), but we’re not there yet. I think it’s necessary to have the technology in place to allow users to control what they’re seeing first. In the meantime, we need to provide developers a way to understand what to expect from us (we really don’t want to screw them (like Apple repeatedly has)).

Apple and "1-Click Sex"

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:54:10 -0500

continuations:

Over the last few days, Apple has removed a number of apps from the app store that have, as the New York Times’s Jenna Wortham put it “sexually suggestive” material. There is plenty of speculation on the motives, such as VentureBeat’s idea that this is about winning over educators to the iPad. I think the actual explanation is likely to be simpler.

Browsing and discovery are broken in the app store. If these were working well, then there would be no need to remove apps like this (for any reason). Instead, they would be visible only to those specifically searching for them. Imagine coming to the Google home page and finding a list of the most popular web pages in various categories. Unfiltered I am pretty sure that would include a bunch of porn. This could be one source of complaints but I suspect that access by children is more important.

Theoretically parental controls are supposed to help keep this content away from children, but that of course requires some non-trivial configuration, as this tutorial shows. I believe that most people buy iPod Touches or even iPhones for their kids and simply hand them over without ever going through these steps (we didn’t — but that’s because we don’t believe in filtering for kids — more on that in a separate blog post). Without these controls “questionable” apps are just 1-click away for kids.

Phil Schiller cites “customer complaints from women” in his NYT interview as the reason for the app removal. Based on the above, I suspect many if not most of them are mothers who discover that their children have actually purchased “inappropriate” apps (as opposed to just browsed the web). There were a huge number of iPod Touches given as Christmas presents this year and the timing of this removal could be the result of that.

I am surprised that Apple did not solve this problem by defaulting to a “safe mode” (and fixing app store browsing/discovery), but instead resorted to removing the apps. This suggests that there are technology issues behind the scenes that prevent them from making sufficiently rapid changes to the App Store.

This dovetails very nicely with my post from yesterday about brainstorming a sane app review process. Like I said there, now that AppStoreHQ is in the app submission and review business, the two biggest things we have to deal with will be: (a) coming up with appropriate guidelines for developers, and (b) providing mechanisms for sectioning off the site to only the apps you find appropriate (for yourself, your children, others, etc).

Brainstorming a sane app review process

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 14:00:33 -0500

When AppStoreHQ launched the ability to submit new Mobile Web Apps a couple weeks ago we thrust ourselves into the app submission and review business. Because we’re still formulating how the Web App App Store should look and work, we haven’t put much effort into formalizing rules for app submissions.

However, Apple’s review process has always been problematic and the latest news about removing 5,000 previously approved apps for “adult-ness” (even just a silhouette of a woman’s body) reminded me that we absolutely need to think about guidelines sooner rather than later.

Before we can create actual guidelines, I think there are three things we need to think about: (1) Why censor apps at all? What are the benefits and drawbacks to users and developers? (2) What are my general beliefs about censorship and how does that affect our guidelines? and (3) How can we productively include all the stakeholders to create a consensus on guidelines (us, users, and developers should all have some say, I think)?

WHY REVIEW APPS AT ALL?

There are some clear benefits to reviewing apps:

Allowing only family-oriented apps means that parents and families don’t have to worry about kids using the store.
A key to the success of an app store is discovery. Limiting the number of apps — even through censorship — does help to make discovery easier.
Censoring apps certainly helps keep spam out of the store. Developers of non-spam apps then don’t have to compete with spam apps trying to invade their turf.

MY GENERAL THOUGHTS ON CENSORSHIP

In an ideal world, I’d censor virtually nothing. The more, the better, in my opinion. But, I also realize that keeping certain apps out of our store increases the overall value of the store and helps users find the best apps — the ultimate goal for us, users, and developers. Still, in general, I don’t think things like simple nudity or aesthetics are reasons for censorship.

I do think there are opportunities to slice our store into multiple mini-stores, keeping adult or otherwise more questionable apps sectioned off without “contaminating” the rest of the store. For that matter, you probably didn’t know Amazon sells porn, vibrators, and adult handcuffs. Amazon does a good job of providing these products, but keeping them in their own section where they wouldn’t normally be found.

A STARTING POINT FOR OUR APP REVIEW GUIDELINES

Given my beliefs and why I think app censorship makes sense, here’s a rough draft for app guidelines. This list means nothing, isn’t official or ratified, and can be changed at any time. In fact, I’d encourage you to leave a comment and let me know your thoughts (include whether you’re a user or developer). I also think less is more when thinking about these rules; we’re not trying to write the US tax code, just some guidelines about what sorts of apps should be accepted.

Until we can build an “adult store” hardcore porn should probably be off limits. As for what constitutes hardcore, “you know it when you see it.” I do think we should allow these at some point, but only when we can effectively separate adult apps from non-adult apps. I would also like to first institute some age guidelines (like movies or video games) and allow sane parental control.
Spam apps shouldn’t be allowed. I’ll define spam as “shallow” apps built specifically for trying to get more results in search and browse, or apps that simply don’t provide any value to users.
(Mostly) Innocent until proven guilty (part A). This one has a double meaning. First, I think there should be a max approval time (say, 2 days). If we can’t get it done in that time, we shouldn’t stop the vast majority of good developers from publishing, marketing, and making money. So, assume the best, publish, and then review as soon as our resources allow.
(Mostly) Innocent until proven guilty (part B). Second, since we’re a web app store, we can’t (and frankly don’t want to) control each and every update to an app. Shady developers, therefore, have the ability to pull a bait-and-switch on us, submitting one app, getting published, and then changing the app for the worse. We can’t do much about that, but we can allow our users to flag apps and then re-review those apps at that point.

FEEDBACK

So, what do you think? This is an important, unsolved topic for us and mobile apps in general. We know we won’t get this right immediately, but we want to include as many people as possible to make a good first attempt. Comment here, or if you’d rather comment privately, email me.

Tremendously Tremendous : The Greatest Hockey Game You Never Saw

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:15:57 -0500

soupsoup:

While NBC was airing “Ice Dancing,” their sister network MSNBC was airing one of the most exciting hockey games in recent history. It didn’t take a genius to figure the matching of the home host Canadian team taking on a surging USA team would be a compelling matchup. NBC realized the error of their ways in the final moments of the match, cutting off the two-man bobsled, but they already missed a golden opportunity.

Throughout the game, twitter was flooded with viewers buzzing about the match, so much so that “NBC” and MSNBC were trending topics, mainly based around people calling out the network for not airing the event on their main network, along with “Ryan Miller,” the USA goalie and “Team USA.”

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the network who decked Conan O’Brien in favor of putting a well past his prime Jay Leno back in his old time slot would make such a colossal programming blunder. The network has enjoyed record ratings thus far, but the lack of live events have frustrated viewers. In the age of the internet, you would virtually need to shut off your digital life in order to prevent yourself from finding out the results of what NBC decides to air hours later, in prime time. Twitter becomes a spoiler landmine and many found out too late to turn off their New York Times breaking news email alerts.

Here NBC had an a chance to capture an audience that would follow this USA hockey team to the medal rounds, and all in real-time. Instead, it they committed a crime of poor programming, enough to throw them in same MSNBC Lockup that normally airs weekend evenings and preempted in favor of men’s hockey.

NBC’s coverage of the Olympics has been absolutely abysmal, but tonight’s programming of the game took the cake. As someone without cable, I was stranded thinking I’d be able to stream it online easily.

Turns out you needed to have service with a cable/satellite operator in order to watch live events. In a scramble, knowing my Dad has DirecTV, I called him, asked for his account number, created an online account on DirecTV.com for him, and logged in using that account to get access to the stream.

Annoying, backwards, and dumb.

Oh, and let’s not even talk about the fact that the online stream went to commercial DURING THE GAME on multiple occasions. WTF is up with that?

(P.S. The Michigan connections made me very proud tonight, especially my Red Wing Brian Rafalski.)

AppStoreHQ: The Web App App Store

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 17:37:00 -0500

It’s no secret that I think mobile web apps will be huge. They might never supplant native apps (games are one place I see native apps winning for quite some time), but they’ll be a valuable part of the mobile app ecosystem. I’ve been linking to articles and writing about this trend for a couple weeks now on MobileHTML5.com. I also wrote about how iPad caused a surge of interest in HTML5 and then about how the killer feature of Apple’s iPhone/mobile platform is the App Store’s ability to pay developers.

The fact that I believe mobile web apps will be huge — but that the actual platform isn’t the biggest reason iPhone succeeds (it’s the developer’s ability to easily monetize via the App Store) — led me to think of ways to help developers promote their mobile web apps. This is why last week we launched the ability to Add a Web App to AppStoreHQ. As of today, we already have over 4,000 mobile web apps listed, including some truly great apps like Google Voice, Google Buzz, Reader, and more.

This ability to help users discover (and developers promote) the best mobile apps, regardless of platform, is unbelievably valuable. Not to mention the fact that all our standard blog and Twitter tracking and recommendations also work.

As Apple’s App Store showed, it’s also about removing the muck. That’s why we’ll be helping developers make money by allowing users to pay for mobile web apps through our site. To that end, I’ve already created a very rough outline of what this would look like with a test app I created. Check out the pipeline and let me know what you think (but be warned, the app is absolutely not worth 1 cent, let alone the 99 cents I’m selling it for so I wouldn’t actually spend the money unless you understand you’re not getting ANYTHING of real value and are willing to waste 99 cents). If you’re interested in learning about this feature (it’s a dead-simple API), how to monetize your mobile web app, or even test drive this feature, shoot me an email. We want to help you and need your input to do so.

I’m very excited to have a mobile web app app store on AppStoreHQ and I think it’ll be a great addition for users looking for mobile apps and for developers looking to promote their apps.

Helping out a fellow FC company with an experiment here: Cardone 30-2895

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 13:39:35 -0500

Helping out a fellow FC company with an experiment here: Cardone 30-2895

What makes Apple's App Store tick?

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 13:40:00 -0500

A couple months ago I had an idea. One of those, “I wonder if this would work” ideas. I talked it over with Chris and we both decided it was probably a good idea, but we weren’t quite sure (we needed feedback from potential users and customers), and we didn’t want to invest much time into it if it wasn’t what developers wanted. At the same time, we didn’t want to reveal too many hints about the idea.

I ended up creating a simple poll about Apple’s App Store and posting it to Hacker News. I wanted to learn what makes Apple’s App Store tick. Why do developers really love it? The results (I received 75 submissions) weren’t earth shattering, but they were interesting. Here’s a rough overview followed by a synopsis:

A majority of developers would rather write native apps over web apps in an ideal world. This actually surprised me, and I believe this sentiment is quickly changing.
Of those who would rather write native apps, a majority do so because of the App Store over any other reason (including available APIs, performance, language). This is super interesting to me as it means that the platform itself isn’t the killer feature of the iPhone for developers, it’s the App Store.
When we first started AppStoreHQ, discoverability was the killer idea of the App Store, but now only 25% of the developers said that discoverability was what made the App Store tick. In fact, discoverability might be hurting the App Store at this point. (Note: This is where we, AppStoreHQ, come in.)
Over 70% of the developers say the killer idea of the App Store is payments. Developers want to get paid for their work as easily as possible. This is huge, fascinating, and (to me) surprising.
For the developers who chose web apps over native apps, over 50% said it was because of cross-platform (write-once, run-anywhere) issues, but a full 25% said it was due to not having to deal with Apple.

Synopsis:

The thing that popped out the most to me is that the App Store is the killer feature of the Apple platform, rather than anything dealing with the device itself. When you start to boil it down, it sounds a lot like Jeff Bezos’ reasoning for Amazon Web Services. Jeff likes to talk about how when you’re starting a brick and mortar store, for instance, you don’t have to worry about setting up your own electricity; you simply call the electric company. In the same way, with AWS you no longer have to set up a data center, buy servers, etc; you just call up AWS. Jeff calls this “the muck.”

I think this is exactly what developers see in the App Store. The App Store removes a ton of muck. Most importantly (from this survey at least), dealing with credit cards and payments is one of the biggest pains for developers, and the App Store completely shields developers from it.

The iPhone platform succeeds because the App Store “removes the muck.”

Why did the iPad create such an interest in HTML5?

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 19:31:03 -0500

The most interesting thing to me about the iPad announcement a couple weeks ago has nothing to do with the device itself (at least, not directly). In my opinion, it’s that in the two or so weeks since the announcement, the amount of interest surrounding Mobile HTML5 apps has increased tremendously. Going into it, I would’ve expected the opposite to happen: people would’ve been jumping further into the native app bandwagon. But that just wasn’t the case.

Looking back on it, here’s why I think it happened. One reason is obvious, but I think it might be more subtle than just the obvious answer:

The obvious answer: Lack of Flash. The lack of Flash on iPhone and iPad has caused quite a lot of anger from developers and users alike. The fact that Steve Jobs brought up a web page with a big non-working Flash object during his demo didn’t help things. HTML5 bridges this gap with its video support. But I don’t think this fully explains it.
Less obvious answer #1: I think a lot of developers are still feeling pretty burned by some of the less than gracious tactics by Apple and their approval process and heavy-handedness. For a while it looked like things are getting better and then they went and did things like lock down geolocation for ads. I think developers are looking for an excuse to head towards HTML5 and the web.
Less obvious answer #2: The new form factor of iPad means that every developer has a brand new resolution and screen size for which we need to develop. This might not be a huge deal for many developers, but it’s a big time-sink for the best developers. Add in the fact that Android seems to be gaining steam and you’ll see that it’s not even close to a “write-once, run-anywhere” environment. You may not be able to control everything about a mobile web app, but for the most part you won’t have the same overhead as writing native apps specifically for iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.

I’m a big believer in the web, and I think the web will win just as it did on the desktop (and I think Google is showing how great the web can be with Google Voice for iPhone and Google Buzz web apps). It might take a few years, but I think it’ll happen.

The Relative Effects of Links

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 02:33:00 -0500

Sometimes Chris, Brett, and I feel like we get no press love for AppStoreHQ. We’re the biggest app discovery service, yet others are being covered way more frequently by the “elite” tech blogs. Truth be told, however, in less than a year we’ve received some great coverage, so we’re not complaining one bit; we just think we have such a great service with awesome features that solve real problems for users and developers (we’re passionate like that).

I thought it’d be somewhat interesting to see the relative effects of some of the bigger, more respected journalists and sites who have linked to us over the last 6-8 months. Below is that graph. I’ve labeled the source, the date, and whether the link was “primary” (that is, the article was about AppStoreHQ or app discovery and included us) or “secondary” (the link is probably just to an app detail page or something similar). I summed the amount of traffic we received in the 7 days after each link was published.

There’s a lot of interesting data in there, in my opinion. First, TechCrunch is obviously big, but Boing Boing blows it out of the water in terms of traffic sent. NYTimes Gadgetwise is large, but I would’ve expected larger. I imagine a link from their newspaper articles would be tremendous. Then there are some surprises, like how much traffic Pocketgamer sent, or how little Hacker News sent (we’ve been on the front page a few times; I chose the time with the most traffic sent). Granted, we were never #1 on Hacker News, so I bet that contributes to it.

Interesting stuff. I’d love to hear how this compares to your experiences, and which sites sent the most/least traffic for you.

Tutorial: Your First Mobile HTML5 App - The Basics, Forms, and Geolocation (Part 1)

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:33:14 -0500

Tutorial: Your First Mobile HTML5 App - The Basics, Forms, and Geolocation (Part 1):

I’m writing a tutorial about developing a very simple mobile HTML5 web app (while I’m learning a lot of the features myself). This is part 1, where I discuss the basics, new form elements, and geolocation.

Mobile HTML5 is so exciting to me. I’m crazy interested to see what innovative apps people will begin developing.

Tips for running a startup virtually

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 02:04:30 -0500

AppStoreHQ isn’t really a virtual company, but it’s close (especially for me): My co-founder and our first employee both work from our office in Seattle, while I work from my apartment in Los Angeles. It’s definitely an adjustment, but I we’re doing well with this set up.

Here are some tips that have helped us over the past year or so:

Begin by working together. Chris and I spent a few months together in the office in Seattle before I moved to LA. Before that, we spent upwards of a year chatting off and on about business, startups, etc. This time together helped us get used to our styles and understand the primary objectives of the business in a way I’m not sure we could’ve done purely virtually.
Know when to use various tools. Email is great for things you don’t need a response to immediately. IM is good for getting quick answers to simple questions. Voice is the best for hashing out more elaborate issues or arguments. In-person is the best for long-term strategy and planning. Learn when to use each of these tools and you’ll have a successful virtual startup with great communication.
Skype video chat is your friend. You’re running a startup, so you probably have a new laptop. It probably has a web cam. Use it. Seriously, Skype video chat is fantastic: being able to see your teammates faces and reactions is an amazing tool for virtual teams. It also has a great Screen Sharing feature to show-off half baked ideas.
Make sure you’re in-sync with daily video chats. Every morning the AppStoreHQ team logs on to Skype and does a quick video chat. We go over projects in progress, recently completed, and upcoming. We make sure everyone on the team understands what everyone else is working on and how it’s going. This 15 minute video chat is, in my mind, probably the single biggest key to our success working virtually. Getting on the same page every day is so important.
Make your progress transparent. We use a Google Spreadsheet to keep track of all our projects and where we are in each of our tasks. Keeping that up to date gives everyone, regardless of location, insight into how everyone else is performing and how close each project is to launch.
Get together in person every once in a while. Once every month or month and a half, I head up to Seattle for a few days and meet face to face with the team. We spend a few hours going over higher level strategy, thinking ahead a few steps. We go out to team lunches. Things we couldn’t otherwise do effectively over email, IM, or Skype.

These tips are simple, but they’ve helped us a ton. You have to be committed to running a startup virtually, but if you are, you can be successful.

On Mobile HTML5 vs Native Apps: An Overview

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 01:28:50 -0500

The future of mobile apps is definitely an area in which I have a lot to say. Specifically, my views around HTML5-based mobile web apps and native apps. Here’s my personal overview of the world as it is right now.

Overview

Chris and I often talk about how there’s a strong correlation between what’s happening right now in mobile apps and what was happening to the web around ‘96-‘99 or so. That is, it’s exploding, discoverability is hard, people want to be on board but aren’t sure why/how yet, etc. Many, many similarities.

But there are also correlations to even earlier than that, such as the OS wars of Windows and Mac. Right now there are many platforms (Apple, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, etc) all gunning for the apps, while developers are trying to increase distribution. To do so, developers have to rewrite their app — mostly from scratch — for each new platform. Back when the web came around, people hopped on thanks in part to its much nicer write-once-run-anywhere feature (disregard browser incompatibilities here). We’ll see the a similar transition with mobile apps (though not necessarily to the same extent).

There’s plenty of reasons for apps to be native, especially over the short term: access to the camera, better/faster/easier graphics (read: games!), multi-touch. But there’s also plenty of reasons for apps to be web-based: ease of maintenance, write-once-run-anywhere, freedom from approval restrictions.

HTML5 and open source libraries like PhoneGap really start to blur the lines between what is necessary to be done natively and what can be done from the web. As developers begin to learn these new tools, we’ll see some really impressive new apps come to the web (Google Voice), but there will remain the need for native apps, too.

MobileHTML5.com

On that note, because mobile web apps are ready for prime time, I’ve decided to start a new tumblog, MobileHTML5.com. The goal is to provide links, videos, quotes, and hopefully some articles on how to get started and keep up on writing great mobile web apps. Check it out, subscribe, follow, etc. And let me know what you think.

AppStoreHQ

Similarly, if mobile web apps are going to explode, discoverability will be a problem. Luckily, I know of just the site to help with that sort of thing. ;) Today we announced that we now include mobile web apps in AppStoreHQ’s database. We’re starting with just one example, the recently launched Google Voice for iPhone. You can now search for web apps, browse web apps, learn about each web app, and get connected immediately to the app with a click of the mouse (touch of the finger, as it were).

If you have an app you’d like us to include, we’re starting with a manual inclusion process, so just email me and we’ll try to get you set up as soon as possible. In the near future we’ll make this much easier for developers. :)

Tools We Use At AppStoreHQ

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 01:51:00 -0500

I said last week that February would be blogging month, but today came and I felt as though I had nothing to write. Still, I couldn’t start the month off on the wrong foot, so I’m beginning with a softball…

Every day we use at least a few tools to help run AppStoreHQ:

Google Spreadsheet: We have a “master” spreadsheet that helps us manage all the ideas, features, and products we’re building, have built, or want to build. There are 3 tabs: Backlog, Roadmap, and Completed. Backlog is where we keep any and all ideas about what we want to do. Nothing is too big or too small to go here, all the way from bugs to “personalized recommendations.” Roadmap is where we keep track of the projects currently in progress or just about to begin. While the Backlog is tracked at a “feature” level, the Roadmap is at “task” level (where many tasks equal a feature). Each task has a time estimate (no less than one hour and no more than one day) and a “time left” estimate. This simple system works surprisingly well to keep us on track, informed, and cranking out the features, especially considering the various levels of project management I’ve used in the past (ranging from sticky notes to trac to FogBugz and on and on).
GitHub for source code management. We host our code, a few docs, as well as do code reviews, etc.
AWS: Our live site runs on AWS: EC2, EBS, S3, and SQS.
Rails.
Solr for all searching and browsing.
Capistrano for all deployments.
Google Analytics: At a price tag of free, this is an amazing tool for tracking your visitors. It’s quite simple to pick up the beginner features, but provides tremendous amounts of power user features as well.
Vanity: A tremendous Rails based A/B testing framework, Vanity has helped us optimize various parts of the site.

Like I said, starting with a softball of a blog post. I’ve started to think of some better post ideas, but I’d really love some more, so please, ask me anything.

"I picked up an interesting factoid this week from AppStoreHQ - a Founder’s Co-op portfolio company..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:52:13 -0500

“

I picked up an interesting factoid this week from AppStoreHQ - a Founder’s Co-op portfolio company that offers iPhone app search, discovery and social recommendations. In addition to their consumer-facing site, the company also owns and operates iPhoneDevSDK, the leading independent community site for iPhone developers. iPhoneDevSDK has over 20,000 registered members, but also picks up a ton of iPhone developer search traffic thanks to a very active and content-rich member forum.

I was curious to see how strongly the iPad announcement would register in the inbound search terms to the site, so I pulled the Google Analytics keyword analysis for Wednesday (the day of the announcement) and there it was at the top of the list: ‘iPad human interface guidelines’ was the top term for the day. I polled the whole keyword set for phrases that included ‘iPad’ and found almost 100 more, accounting for a little over 1% of site traffic that day (see image for the top 10 terms by volume).

So for what it’s worth, my take is that iPhone developers *are* excited about the iPad as a new vector for innovation, and are already getting busy figuring out how to take advantage of its capabilities.

”

- Chris DeVore: Do iPhone developers care about the iPad? Here’s a data point… (via iseffcom)

Nice, Ian! I didn’t know you were a Founder’s Co-op company. Congrats on the traction!

(via caterpillarcowboy)

Thanks! Yep, we were actually “spawned” from Founder’s Co-op, as opposed to being started, then taking the investment at a later point. I believe that Founder’s Co-op is going to be a big/the biggest player in the Seattle startup scene — they’re funding great people, are thinking about how to fix the VC model, and they have an active, experienced group of LPs who engage with the portfolio companies and give advice whenever asked. The fact that Andy, Chris, and Founder’s Co-op will run TechStars Seattle will help the scene tremendously, too.

"I picked up an interesting factoid this week from AppStoreHQ - a Founder’s Co-op portfolio..."

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:50:01 -0500

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- Chris DeVore: Do iPhone developers care about the iPad? Here’s a data point…

Resolved: February will be blogging month

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:32:53 -0500

Last night on a flight from Seattle to Los Angeles, I decided to make February a month of blogging. Everyday I’ll write at least one post here. The posts might be long or might be short, perhaps an essay or perhaps just a bulleted list of links or a quote I found interesting. Whatever the case, I want to create content at least once per day.

I have some ideas of things I want to write about: I’ve been keeping a (short) list of things I’ve learned over the last 9 or so months of running a startup so I’ll definitely include some of those, then there are probably some posts about software, sports, Los Angeles, the mobile web, etc that I’ll add in the mix to keep some variety. I’m sure I’ll still be hunting for ideas, so please ask me anything.

"All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite..."

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 03:42:43 -0500

“All I ask of you is one thing: please don’t be cynical. I hate cynicism — it’s my least favorite quality and it doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. As proof, let’s make an amazing thing happen right now.”

- Conan O’Brien