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Sex Up Your Shopping Cart
It’s not often I get excited about shopping carts. But I just discovered Foxy Cart and it looks like the shopping cart solution I’ve been wanting for as long I can remember. At Joby we use Netsuite for our shopping cart, and one of my chief frustrations is how locked in we are to their shitty UI design. It’s truly awful. It takes at least 6 steps to get through the entire checkout process, entering discount codes is completely unintuitive, and customizing the look and feel is very limited and a pain in the ass. FoxyCart seems to solve most of these problems, and I wish I had a project…
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What’s Your Real Twitter Cred? – A Better Metric
People who propose a count of followers or followees on Twitter as a meaningful measure of a user's "authority" are completely missing the mark. Twitter is a social, interactive tool, so to measure influence properly we need a more appropriate metric. In this post I detail what those measures should look like and why they're so much better at describing influence.
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Can Tipjoy Make Micropayments Into Megabucks?
I’ve been interested in the micropayment space for a long time now. I think it’s a promising market, and one that is just waiting to be addressed well. A while back I discovered a service called Tipjoy, which started as a Y Combinator funded project. I liked it the first time I saw it, and I like it even more now. The most recent development from them is a tight integration with Twitter which lets people use a syntax similar to Twitter’s direct message function to send payments to other Twitter users. For example: p @peter $0.25 because he finds cool new websites This would create a promise of paying…
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How Web Designers Really Spend Their Time
I stumbled across this image the other day. Unfortunately, it’s all too accurate a representation of how web designers are forced to spend their time these days. In other news, death to IE!
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Timing Is Everything – Umbrellas for Sale!
Have you ever noticed how, in many cities, when it starts to rain, people magically appear with a whole lot of umbrellas for sale? They don’t seem to come from any particular place, and as soon as the rain disappears, so do they. I’ve always wondered where these people come from, and how it is they always happen to have an inventory of umbrellas for sale stashed somewhere nearby, just in case it rains. I’ve experienced this phenomenon in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and even Rome – where I was once caught in a surprise downpour and actually bought an umbrella… for a mere € 2! It continues to…
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150 Miles or Bust!
For the third consecutive year I’m going to be hopping on a bike and riding 150 miles (240 km) over two days to raise money for the fight against multiple sclerosis. The ride is called the MS 150 Waves to Wine. It starts tomorrow at the crack of dawn in San Francisco and finishes Sunday up in wine country. I’ll be riding with some good friends of mine, one of whom – Dunagan – has a father affected by MS. Dunagan and some other friends have put up a website for our team, WeFightMS.com, with a bunch of very entertaining and funny videos. Check them out! I’m massively out of…
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HDTV Comes to the Internets
I recently discovered that video site Vimeo has added the ability to upload and view high-definition videos on its HD channel. The results are pretty incredible. Not only does HD look amazing on the Internet, Vimeo’s FAQ page about their new HD feature claims that you can even play their videos on your HD TV and you’ll get the same quality. I have yet to try this, since I don’t own an HDTV myself, but I’m curious to know just how well it actually works. One thing is clear, however. High definition video blows standard definition out of the water, both on the Internet as well as on TV. I’m…
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Live from BlogHer!
This dispatch is coming directly from a ballroom at the BlogHer conference, where I’ve been staffing Joby’s table in the sponsor showcase. We’re debuting our newest product, the Zivio Bluetooth headset. We’ve been giving away advance samples to some of the lady bloggers here at the conference, and the response has been overwhelming! Early in the day we were mobbed by people, sometimes standing four-deep, to hear about the Zivio and to experience it hands on. It wasn’t long before we ran out of our large stock of headsets, but all day long people kept coming by because they’d heard about our headset and wanted to see it for themselves.…
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Qik Demos Video on the iPhone
Streaming mobile video service, Qik, has demoed a version of their service which will work on the iPhone. As Mashable reports, they will be facing competition from Flixwagon, who will also be releasing such a service. Here’s a video of their demo:
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Twitter Transparency
I’ve been working on a post talking about the challenges that Twitter has faced lately and why I think they’re on shaky ground these days, but before I get a chance to finish it and post it here I figured I’d link to a post on the Twitter blog where they answer a number of technical questions that people (notably TechCrunch) have been asking them. I give them kudos for addressing these questions publicly and for permitting transparency into their operations and technical challenges. As I see it, however, they’re still not out of the woods yet, even if I (and most of the Twittersphere) am pulling for them in…