Monthly Archives: August 2007

Magic Pixie Dust

This is why people love Flickr …

From their recent blog post about recent improvements:

“Some of what’s new:

  • A snazzy new interface! Designed to show you clearer progress for your uploads.
  • More files at once. Only six photos per upload? Ha! Now you can select a bunch of files all at once (using shift-click) and upload them all together.
  • New batch operations. Once your photos have arrived safely, add tags to the batch, or add them all to one of your sets.
  • Magic pixie dust. Helps your photos upload faster!”

Gotta love that magic pixie dust. :-)

A little personality goes a long way!

TechEd 2006 Keynote

Next week is Microsoft TechEd in Auckland.

I would link to the registration page, but it sold out a long time ago.

This time last year I was preparing for the keynote. It was originally supposed to be a double team with me and Sam, but he had to pull out at the last minute, so I ended up doing it by myself.

Here are the slides and audio from my presentation on SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/rowan/teched-nz-2006-keynote-rowan-simpson

The start may require some explanation: I was introduced by Jaquie Brown from TV3 who was the MC. She was boasting about her feedback on Trade Me, so I decided to look her up and see what people had actually said about her. :-)

Unfortunately I won’t be at TechEd this year, but if you’re heading along look out for the presentation by Alastair and Craig from Xero as part of the “voice of the customer” track.

UPDATE: I just got an email from SlideShare to say that this presentation is featured in their Spotlight section. That’s cool!

Train the trainer

Here is a nice technique if you think you’ve got a killer idea.

Get someone who knows your idea try to pitch it to a third person. Or ask them to complete the elevator test for you, and see how they describe your product or service.

You’ll learn a lot about your idea [1].

And it will force the person making the pitch to consider your idea in a different light [2].

Remember, if you’re going to rely on word-of-mouth marketing this is exactly how your idea will spead.

Notes:

[1] This is just one of the many great pieces of advice covered by Marc Hedlund in his Etech tutorial

[2] Watching with intent to repeat ignites key learning area of brain, from ScienceDaily

My Football Club Update

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about My Football Club.

On Wednesday this week they announced that they have reached their target of 50,000 members and are now in negotiations with three four clubs. The have a budget of GBP 1.5 million, so should be able to find something interesting to spend that on.

You might wonder what the clubs who are likely to be bought (not to mention their existing fans) think of the scheme. I guess time will tell once a purchase is announced. Meantime they don’t seem to be too stressed about it. I suppose that it doesn’t compare too unfavourably with being taken over by an odd foreign billionaire.

Here is a local news item from Anglia TV whose local team, Cambridge United, is #3 on the hit list:

I’m in. If you want to join the fun you can register online (cost: 35 quid).

:-)

Google Reader

To those of us who use an RSS reader it’s hard to imagine life without it.

But, we have to keep in mind that these are far from mainstream tools today. Think about your extended family: how many of them would be able to subscribe to an RSS feed without your help?

In the last couple of weeks I’ve introduced a few different people to Google Reader. Hopefully it will make it much easier for them to keep up with the various sites they are interested in.

I found this nice “Getting Started” guide on lifehack.org:

How to get started with Google Reader

Sometimes it’s the technology we geeks take for granted that really has the potential to make a difference.

Extra for experts:

Firefox users will be familiar with the page which asked you to choose between Google Homepage and Google Reader when you use the built-in feed detection to subscribe to a new feed. I don’t use Google Homepage so this is a redundant step. With a simple about:config change you can skip this altogether.

It’s a tough job …

StarNow is a Wellington-based company started in 2004 by three guys who all worked at Trade Me: Cameron, Nigel (who also started FindSomeone) and Jamie.

They had a good idea: to build a website where people who want to be famous can advertise themselves, and where reality television producers can go to find the next sucker star.

And, they’ve done a great job of executing and have grown the site into an excellent business, which they now call a “global talent casting service” covering actors, models, musicians, dancers, entertainers and photographers.

This is how Matt Cooney described their business in Idealog:

“For New Zealand, this might be the perfect business. Almost every cent is earned offshore. Start-up and infrastructure costs are low, there are almost no transport costs, no expensive offshore offices to maintain, no worries about import duties, foreign exchange hedging or oddball tax regimes. No factories, no shelves to stock, no resource consents. Marketing is largely through word-of-mouth and the business scales beautifully. It’s proof that three guys with some brains, a great idea and a couple of hundred bucks for marketing can literally invent a business in a few weeks.”

Disclaimer: that’s a bit of a vanity link, as Matt also interviewed me for the same article.

I got their latest newsletter and had to smile when I read that Cameron, who is now CEO of StarNow, was asked to be a judge in this year’s Miss England pageant.

It’s a tough job … but somebody has to do it, I suppose. :-)

The laws of software development

Phil Haack has a great post listing 19 different laws of software development. Everything from Postels Law, to The Pareto Principle (a.k.a. the 80/20 rule), to Wirth’s Law (software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster), to Sturgeon’s Revelation, even Murphy’s Law gets a mention.

My favourite?

One I hadn’t heard of before, but which definitely marries with my experience:

“Conway’s Law: Any piece of software reflects the organisational structure that produced it.”

What’s the shape of your org chart? And how is that manifesting itself in your code?

UPDATE: Wikipedia has a much longer list, if you’re into this sort of thing. :-)