Yesterday, the topic of competitive analysis came up. I quickly Google’d the topic and realized that there was virtually nothing out there. I am shocked that there isn’t a SaaS product that crawls the web gathering competitive analysis into one spot. The UX would be pretty straight forward. In fact, I quickly (15 minutes) whipped…
One day, I want to build the best Product/Project/Task/Bug/Community Management software ever. But for now, I have to live in the real world. At Marketo, we used TargetProcess for bugs and mild product management. We used Helpstream for community and case management. At Adchemy, we use Jira for bugs and VersionOne for product/project management. There…
Metcalf’s Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system. In English: The Internet with 10 people on it isn’t that valuable. Add a million people it’s much more valuable. Add a billion and things really kick off. Look at these…
You have to hand it to Google. They innovate. They come out with stuff that is new and different. I like that about them. It makes me want to use and buy their products. Google Wave is a great example. What is Google Wave? I imagined the conversation when they pitched the idea. In my…
This is just unbelieveable. Look at this Gateway Netbook from Verizon. First of all, $99! Are you kidding me? That is ridiculously cheap. It’s got the same power as my EeePC that I bought for $350 and I carry with me all the time. Plus it’s lighter! Second, it comes with Verizon wireless built in. …
It took me a looooong time to get Office 2010 beta 2 installed. Uninstalling 2010b1 was a disaster. I had to manually remove hundreds of registry keys to kill the thing. Finally, I got the new version installed. This is a very interesting release. Microsoft has spent quite a bit of time working on the…
About 80% of my spam falls into 4 categories. Drugs. Makes sense, they spend alot of money on marketing and are complete scumbags. Diploma. This is mostly ONLINE diplomas, which I assume are just scams. More scumbags. Russian. Sometimes I translate the email and see they are actually lawyers in Moscow. Why would I want…
I went through more of my spam folder and found more false positives. I have a suggestion that I think will help. I think the filters need an update. Specifically, I am suggesting that you allow users to make a custom filter like this: If it is called spam by GMail, AND It contains any…
Another step in my never-ending adventures against comment spammers. I have been using NoSpamNX for quite some time with very good success. Well, at least I didnt hear about someone failing to comment. However, in the past few days, someone on the spammer side, figured out what NoSpamNX is doing. Now I have a slew…
I just had an awesome experience. I had to create a prototype for something and used HTML. Because it was a prototype, and therefore throw-away code, I could use a single browser. I chose Firefox 3.5, which is fast and supports Firebug as well as CSS3. It was a dream come true. In just a…
For most of 2009, I have been using Windows 7. Suddenly, this week, I was thrust back in time to using Windows XP. It has been quite a shock. Here are some of the things I picked up on: Fonts. The ways fonts are handled in XP is alot different. Everything feels sharper and blurrier…
The decisions you make in the beginning of a product determine a large portion of the headaches you will feel for the next several years. The first month can make a huge difference. (Think butterfly effect) Here are my key tasks to do to when you look at the UX of a new product. Understand the scope…
2 years ago, there was this great moment at Ajaxian. The idea was something I called Browser Possession. Here is the business case: HTML and CSS are easy enough for non-engineers to create. However, they aren’t powerful enough. We want rounded corners, shadows and gradients using CSS and simple markup. We want simple interactivity like…
Of course, the minute I get my phone, Verizon announces that they are getting the Palm Pre , Android phones as well as Windows Mobile 6.5 versions of the HTC Touch. Just my luck! I have 30 days if I want to return this one, but I think I am going to keep it, even…