Grumplestiltskin » Tech

Silicon Valley Street Cred Badge

EDubya — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 01:24:37 +0000

I earned some Silicon Valley street cred this week. Bizzy, the startup I had been working on for the last year and a half was shuttered. I found out on Monday and our last day as a team was on Wednesday. So bummed.

I could spend a lot of energy worrying about what went wrong, but I’m choosing to concentrate on what went right, because a lot went right.

We were in a hot and competitive space, bringing the power of mobile, community, and simplicity to local reviews. It was a great app. As much as I’m going to miss my team, I’m going to REALLY miss using the app. I think we had something, and I fully ~~believed~~ believe in what we were building. We were iterating, honing, and perfecting, as there is always room for improvement. After all, a work of art is never “finished”, merely abandoned.

I am proud of the work I did. I got to own the voice of our app, and that was awesome. I (officially) became a cartoon character, talking to our users every time they opened our app. We built a community of passionate, engaged users from all over the country out of nothing. They were interested and interesting, and we gave them a platform to call home, at least for a while. The outpouring of love from those users when our announcement reached them meant so much to all of us.

Our community will miss each other and will miss us, and that tells me that I did a ~~good~~ damn good job.

In the end, we didn’t show large enough user adoption in a short enough period of time to make us viable in the long term, and our parent company pulled the plug.

The LBS world is a super crowded space right now. There will absolutely be casualties, however, I do stand by my previous assertion. Apps are not like Highlanders. There can and should be more than one.

I’m still game.

I’m also pretty sure joining a new startup right after closing down another one is worthy of some additional street cred, so I’m on it.

I’m ready to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I’m all out of bubble gum.

Here Fishy Fishy

EDubya — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:46:05 +0000

I’m starting to think I might have an addictive personality.

And I *KNOW* I have a tank full of fish.

Innovators Stand Up and Be Counted

EDubya — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:09:22 +0000

Remember when the Tech Museum of Innovation opened in downtown San Jose, and it was SO VERY COOL and a huge destination when you had friends in town? That was a little over ten years ago. Sadly, we all know that ten years might as well be 100 years in software. Sometime in the last ten years The Tech has become crazy dated, and nowhere near as “innovative” as it’s moniker would have you believe.

Some of the exhibits are still pretty cool. The earthquake simulator is a good example of that. The robot deal that spells your name out of wooden blocks…very cool. In fact, many of the more mechanical exhibits are definitely worth seeing and playing with.

But…

What the hell has happened as far as keeping current with the software exhibits? Nevermind the seemingly high percentage of these things that just. don’t. work. (hardware failures, crashes and reboots on WINDOWS 98, I might add) The things that *do* work are often hopelessly out of date. Particularly glaring is one exhibit where visitors can make their own personalized web page, with a few customizations in the colors and backgrounds, sort of like a rudimentary blog. They can even put their photo on it, snapped by an attached webcam. They can use a bar code scanner to load in the exhibits they have already visited, and then give a little summary of their experience about each of them. That sounds pretty good, right?

EXCEPT THE WEB PAGE YOU PRODUCE IS STRAIGHT OUT OF GEOCITIES CIRCA 1998.

It’s bad, friends. Really bad. Is this really representative of innovation? HERE?? We are smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a web developer and *THAT* is the personalized web page we are showing off at the Tech Museum of Innovation? WHAT KIND OF MIXED UP WORLD ARE WE LIVING IN???? I’m sure it was great when they launched it, but come on…there are a bazillion free websites where kids can set up a personalized page about a million times snappier than these with about four mouse clicks…maybe using only their FEET.

How about the spam whack-a-mole machine? Did we pick that one up at a Chuck-E-Cheese that went out of business? Why not an exhibit where kids have to design their own filter and then have hundreds and then thousands of pretend words hammer at it, complete with L33T spelling variations to demonstrate the vigilance required, and how easily a system can be totally swamped with spam? Let kids try to keep up adding new variations to their filter. It would be so much more interactive, so much more realistic, and most importantly, NOT OF THE STONE AGE. Kids are not stupid. Remember that the kids playing with this stuff probably have email addresses of their own. They’ve likely been on computers or online since they were toddlers in one way or another. Give them more value.

Let’s talk about the roller coaster build simulator. It’s pretty simplistic, but the kids dig it because after they build their own roller coaster, they can take their little barcode over and sit down in what is essentially a hard bench in front of a large tv and “ride” their roller coaster. Great! Except for the part where IT DOESN’T WORK. Two of the kids spent fifteen minutes building their coaster, and tweaking their designs only to walk over, stick their barcode in the reader and be told there was no file found. Total. Letdown.

You know what *is* neat though? The big software driven marble labyrinth where you tilt a large flat computer screen from four sides to move the marble through the maze. Oh wait…that didn’t work either. The marble was stuck in one corner.

These place needs a total reboot. Apple? Google? Ebay? Everyone? All you folks here in the valley that pave the way for the rest of the world, how can you guys let this place represent the valley in which we all live and WORK?? This is totally embarrassing. I am calling on you to get your marketing people down to The Tech and see what you can sponsor. If we want to let the museum continue to morph into a glorified lobby for the IMAX theater, great, but it’s ridiculous and sad that with all the real innovation in the valley, THIS is what we are presenting to the rest of the world.

We can do better. To quote @aaronh , “There isn’t a single thing here more impressive than the free apps on my iPhone.” He couldn’t be more right.

I don’t want to abandon this place, but I can’t abide membership renewal if this is the way it stays.

Email Rules to Live By – Kid Edition

EDubya — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 03:47:56 +0000

Judging by an entirely unscientific polling of my parenting cohorts, I fall just about in the middle as far as what age I will allow the kids to have their own email address. They want it so badly, so very badly. Large, being the household guinea pig for all privlidges that come with age, was anxious, doomed to eternal nerdity among his peers (or so he thought) if he didn’t have an one, and despite the fact that we are of the last generation that can tell their kids, “When I was your age, I didn’t have email, and I didn’t die of deprivation in a lonely pool of my own frustration and burgeoning tween angst, so put that in your pipe and smoke it.”, he got one. He was 9.

We didn’t use an email platform designed for kids. We used Gmail. The spam filter is actually pretty darn good, which was concern number one. I didn’t want V14GR4 ads showing up in his email inbox. Having been around the internet block a few thousand times, we set up some conditions under which this account could exist. I think they are pretty good guidelines, so I’m sharing them here. Some are about safety online and some are just meant to keep a kid from being THAT KNUCKLEHEAD that you never want to obtain your email address for correspondence.

1. I will have your password and access to your email account 24/7, whenever and wherever they want. You will have zero privacy. None. Zilch.

2. I will have your email sent directly to my phone, so I will see not only every message you send, but every single piece of mail you receive. I can and will block particular senders (read as your friends) from being able to send you mail when they send things I don’t think are appropriate.

3. Your email address will not be your actual name, nor will your last name appear anywhere on your account. This is non-negotiable.

4. YOU WILL NOT FORWARD CHAIN MAILS OR STUPID JOKES.

5. If you break rule no.4, you will NEVER forward anything anywhere while including anyone else’s email address as a cc. Doing so is akin to providing a perfect stranger all your friends’ names and cell phone numbers, and it is a violation of their privacy and EXTREMELY LAME NETIQUETTE. Know how a bcc works if you MUST forward something.

6. If you persist in breaking rule no.4, do not ever forward any email sent to you from another person without their permission. That is another violation of their privacy and just plain rude.

7. You will not talk about any of your classmates in anything but extremely polite terms via email. EVER. You NEVER KNOW where your emails will end up. Don’t be that kind of tool.

8. Do not ever share your password, and do not ever click “remember me” when logging into your email from someone else’s computer. In fact, just don’t log into your email on anyone else’s system.

9. Do not sign up or register at any websites with your email address without my EXPRESS PERMISSION and SUPERVISION or your ASS IS GRASS.

10. Danger, there be dragons. Do not enter the realm of the SPAM folder. This one is actually managed better now, with the advent of the latest GMail tools release which allows you to hide entire folders from view. Monkey no see. Monkey no do.

Plenty of the kids’ friends and classmates have had email from a very early age, while some friends of Large *still* don’t have it. There is really no reason they need it, other than they will likely use it to communicate with other human beings for most of their life and their classmates is a good a place as any to practice. I’d rather they learn the ins and outs while I still have them under my thumb. Come to think of it, I think we probably all have some adults in our address book that would have been well served by having these sort of rules beaten into habits for them. You know what I’m talking about. Don’t play dumb.

ahem.

I know I’ve forgotten some of our rules. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Stupid Farmville

EDubya — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 04:00:24 +0000

Remember when I lost an entire weekend to Animal Crossing? I do. Welcome to my Sunday. I might as well have hay in my teeth. I set about clearing all my requests from Facebook today. There were something like 150 of them languishing in my procrastination pile. Among them were a least a few dozen Farmville requests, thus my toiling in overalls all day.

If you don’t play this game, stick your fingers in your ears and do the whole “LA LA LA LA LA LA” thing for a second.

Okay, I raked in a ton of money today which I spent, naturally developing my little home away from Animal Crossing. Because I had so many requests pending, I ended up with a fair number of neighbors, so I scared raccoons, gophers and whatnot off their farms to earn more points. Now, I’m stuck waiting for crops to harvest with not nearly enough money to build the house, barn and haunted mansion that I MUST HAVE. Bah. I’m also all about the ribbons. I’ve got the blue ribbon on the spoiled dealio just from you folks sending me goodies, so THANKS.

Also, can I mention for a moment the unabashed thrill of discovering all you closet farmers? Some of the people you would least expect had the most elaborate homesteads going. Stitches, I tell you.

Googly Bits

EDubya — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:38:16 +0000

Two things…

1. The powerful and magnificent Google gods reinstated my email account that they hosed. That was right nice of them. There was no explanation of why they toasted it in the first place, but it is still good to have it back. The inbox contents were even there. Nice!

2. As of this afternoon, I’ve joined the Google Wave wave, so that’s what I’m doing right now. THANK YOU to my most giving-est of giving friends that hooked me up. I’m trying to figure out the ins and outs and learn what’s what. It’s a bit trial and error and we’re dorking out in tandem on our couch. Sidenote: I keep vanishing from @aaronh ‘s contact list, so if anyone knows what the deal is with that, holler at me. Also…removing contacts…that’d be a good thing to know how to do.

Between this supernerd bliss and a BIG TV NIGHT tonight (I know. I’m so exciting, right?) there will likely not be another non-housekeeping post tonight.

You May Hear a Muffled Scream

EDubya — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:32:24 +0000

::KNOCK KNOCK::

Housekeeping…

So, it was pointed out to me yesterday by a benevolent commenter that the email account I had hooked up in my sidebar over yonder was bouncing. When I tried emailing it myself, I found that it had been disabled by the great Google gods. DISABLED. That’s what they do to n’er do wells that whine about the internet, I guess. I’ve no idea why since the email account was all of…like…three weeks old and had been used like twice. I’ve got a message in to the Googly folks around the corner, but I suspect I may not hear back. I am curious to say the least. Anyway, I’ve hooked y’all up with a different email address on this domain instead, so if you have the need to write and tell me I’m a really strong swimmer or have parsley in my teeth, you should be good to go.

I’ll let you know if I hear anything interesting, of course.

Location Based Death Match

EDubya — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:02:39 +0000

Before I get into this, let me first say that there is room enough (and users enough) on the magical interwebs for both of these apps. Web apps are not like Highlanders. There can and should be more than one. Like I said yesterday, conclusions had been reached after our great donut / bakery caper. Using both Foursquare and Gowalla side by side for about a week, I feel I’ve got a pretty comprehensive understanding of how they stack up against each other.

Checking In

Checking In: There is no competition here. Gowalla takes it hands down, for one simple reason. Their GPS works. I’m certainly no expert on the backend of how you would implement GPS, but Gowalla just uses it smarter in interaction. When I open the Gowalla app, it was never less than 100% accurate in determining where I was, and if my location was not in the database, it presented the nearby locations in the database in order of closeness. Sounds like a no-brainer? I think so too. Guess what else… it won’t LET you check into a venue that you are not within a reasonable distance from. GOOD WORK, GUYS. Adding venues could not be easier, just a name and a category and confirmation via map (smart…again) and you’re done. One small issue, once you create a venue, you must check in to it separately. I can think that there may be rare occasions where you might not want to check in to a venue you just added, but it’s got to be far and away the exception. I’d either check someone in automatically or offer an opt out.

By contrast, when I open up Foursquare, the list of venues is presented in two sections, “nearby favorites” and “nearby”. I don’t believe there was a single occasion where Foursquare accurately presented my location in either of those options. Routinely, I would have to use the search function to find my current location. This could be made SO MUCH BETTER by showing venues in order of distance OR at minimum including the closest places where I have checked in at the top of the “nearby” list. If I am standing smack dab in the middle of a venue that I have checked in at multiple times, or am even the mayor of, there is NO EXCUSE for why that venue doesn’t show up before other “nearby” locations that I have never even visited. Bad interaction design. This also lends itself to users creating duplicate venues, after not being able to find their current location because they have to go looking too hard for it. At the movies today, I found three different entries for the theater, each named slightly differently. This sort of dovetails into another problematic issue discussed previously where when you click “not in the list” for your current location and then enter the name of the location, if it happens to match something else in the database, EVEN AN HOUR AWAY, that is where you are checked in. It happened to me again this weekend. Again…should not be possible to check into a venue that you are not reasonably close to. Also, just as an added gripe, having to change the city if you are not in one of the small number of “official” cities when you add venues is a pain in the ass. In a social network where a vast database of venues is integral to gameplay, less is not more. More is more. Make it as easy as possible to add venues. You know where I am via GPS, you should pre-populate the city field with that city or don’t pre-populate it at all.

Gameplay: Other than a commonality with unlocking achievements and badges/pins, the two apps have a very different approach, so it really comes down to personal preference.

Stinkin' Badges

Foursquare has a couple different things going on. There is a points-based gameplay where each city has a weekly leaderboard. I actually have no idea what, if anything, special happens if you finish the week on top, but I can tell you that our marathon adventure yesterday had something like 26 check-ins and it was pretty easy to rack up a RIDONKULOUS number of points in doing so. That’s not a complaint. For multiple checkins on the same day, you end up with a “trip bonus”, so for the second check-in I got 2 bonus points, third had 3 bonus points, up to the last check-in with 26 bonus points in addition to any other points I received for adding venues, making my first visit, etc. It was pretty amazing. At the end of the day, I was far and away the leader in SF, but fell behind by the end of Sunday when the boards are reset. Separate from this there are “mayorships” up for grabs at each venue. Depending on who you ask, this is either rip-roaring fun or fury inducing. Part of the problem may be the check-in issues above making it pretty easy to “cheat” and check-in wherever you want from the comfort of your couch. Either way, it’s either something you get into or not. I definitely get into it, but the lack of check-in safeguards kinda hinder full enjoyment. I may be hyper competitive, but I play fair and I like it when you *have to* play fair.

Gowalla doesn’t have a user vs. user gameplay, other than bragging rights over pins and stamps. However, every user is out to collect virtual items that they find along their travels. The lower numbered your item is, the more sought after it is. Neat. You can either collect and “vault” the items or you can drop them when you add or are an early visitor to new locations for “founder” status. To this point, I’ve never had enough items to vault any vs. drop them for founder status at new venues, but I’ve found this element to be nothing short of delightful. Add in that you can track the ownership of the items that you pick up (like travel bugs for you geocachers out there) and it’s just awesome. I’m just a little bitter that I left my little beatnik at the pet store in exchange for founder status. He was pretty cute. If I have any complaint, it is that I would like to have more items in my pack, particularly if I’ve been adding and founding a bunch of new venues all over town. Seems like that user behavior should be rewarded a bit more routinely.

Friends: This may be the one category where Foursquare takes it for me. Foursquare can scour your gmail, twitter and facebook friends lists for people you know already on the service. Alerts from those that you choose to add default to on, meaning you will get pings to your phone from any of their checkins, EXCEPT when they are in different cities, which can actually be kind of frustrating. If you have a friend that is in another city, you can’t get updates about where they are or what they are doing, and you just might want that. You can also see who your friends are connected to, which will often lead you to more folks that you might know.

Gowalla can check your twitter and facebook friends, BUT will only show you other users that have signed up AND connected Gowalla to those respective accounts. Also, no gmail check. womp wah. Also…you can’t see who your friends are connected to. This is problematic when you receive a friend request and don’t have the context of their network. If someone is using an unfamiliar name, you may just bounce their request because you can’t see that they are connected to other folks you know, which may tip you off to who *they* are. This could use some definite work.

Conclusion: The overall winner by knockout is gowalla. Since the fundamental functionality of the site hinges on the usability of the check-in process, ya gotta go with gowalla. The gameplay is a bonus. The little things, like automatically capitalizing every word while adding a location name (LOVE YOU GUYS) really set it apart. There is not a pixel on the web or iPhone app that does not look like it had meaningful design. I like my apps like I like my steak, well done.

One Dozen The Hard Way

EDubya — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:16:29 +0000

If you follow me on foursquare or gowalla (I’M SO SORRY), you already know all this, but anyway…

As a little background, I’ve been using foursquare and gowalla in tandem for the last week or so as an experiment. I consider putting websites and apps through the paces part of my job, but it is also no secret that I just like to do it. That’s how it ended up being my job in the first place. This being the first Saturday with no plans in a really long time, we were drunk with possibilities. Up early, despite our best intentions to sleep in, we formulated a plan based on a throw-away idea from @aaronh. Because we are both huge nerds and hyper competitive, we set out on two missions this morning.

1. “One Dozen the Hard Way” – Visit 12 donut shops, procuring a treat from each one to compile a one dozen set of assorted donuts.

2. “Baker’s Dozen of Bakeries” – Visit 13 bakeries, buying a delectable tidbit from each one.

The key to ridiculous challenges like this is careful planning. We made lists of our destinations and created a route using Google maps, to lessen any unnecessary zig-zagging. How awesome is it to be able to add multiple destinations on your directions map and drag and drop them in the order you want? Completely awesome.

Adventure Haul

Originally uploaded by ahurley

We only had one real guideline. We decided that actually patronizing the establishments was key to our challenge. First, not doing so felt like cheating. Second, we would get to experience places in and around our neighborhood that we might never otherwise visit. Third, since we would be entering all these places on gowalla and foursquare, we felt there should be some benefit to the actual business owners. Hopefully, since many of them would be new to the system, it would result in new business for the shops, as more people would have an opportunity to be exposed to them on the sites. You know there are folks that HAVE TO visit every venue in the database. Don’t play dumb. You know who you are.

We left the house a little after ten and finished up around four o’clock. It took much longer than expected, though we did have a break for turkey burgers in the middle of it. Lunch?? How could we have LUNCH? Well, truth be told, though we had a backseat FULL of donuts and bake shop goodies, we each ate exactly one donut. ONE. Yet, we both felt grossly stuffed as though we had eaten every last one of them. It had to be the smell in the car. I seriously think that if you just dabbed a little donut scented oil under your nose, you would feel sated all day. We only had a few speed bumps along the way with shops that had closed or changed hands, rendering them a duplicate. However, because we were prepared (woohoo), we had back-ups for any such issue.

We finished EXHAUSTED. Plenty of UX comparison. Conclusions have been reached. More on that tomorrow.

Fu Are You?

EDubya — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 05:17:05 +0000

Like any good geek household, we have a collection of domain names that we, at some point, HAD TO HAVE, for whatever GREAT IDEA. Most of the time it ends at the domain name, but not always. While it is true that my favorite domain is sitting idle (for now) not all of them are. Mind you, I don’t build anything, I just am lucky enough to be married to a RoR developer, so if I play my cards right he’ll spend a half of a day whipping something up for me. Right now, I’m plotting a way to get him to build a dashboard for managing a remote team with a predictable, consistent workflow (hint hint), but enough about me…

He’s built a bunch of things in his vast amounts (read as “no”) spare time, including zeaLOG. I guess you know that you chose the right career when you still do it for fun outside of your job. He also doesn’t sleep. I should mention that. I think we lived together more than a ear before I ever saw him asleep. That leaves him with a few more hours in the day than most mortals. He and his buddy @SimianLogic are big movie buffs, and they decided they wanted a better way to find movie times, so they built one, of course. They came up with ShowtimeFu. So…funny thing happened last Saturday. ShowtimeFu ended up on TechCrunch quite unexpectedly, really complimentary piece too. Domain secured on 8/17, TechCrunch on 9/26. That’s pretty nutty.

If you haven’t given it a whirl, check it out. Quite proud of the boy(s).