Business advice from David Lynch?
“Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. Feeling correct is a feeling I think everyone knows.”
Steve Ballmer spends one-third of his time meeting with customers
“I get energy from seeing our customers. It reminds me of the things we’re doing well and it also reminds me of the things where we need to improve.”
You only get three seconds to make an impression
“People have forgotten that the most important thing on a website is the content. Not the gradient, not the drop shadow, not even that PhotoShop brush that you thought would be cool as a background image. If your content doesn’t say interesting stuff in a concise manner, then no amount of CSS Zen will help. Writing for the web is the toughest and most important part of developing web sites/applications. Get that wrong, and every other part of the design process from your information architecture through to your IE5.5 on OSX CSS hacks just doesn’‘t matter.”
Video: Real worldish use of multi-touch driven screens
Jeff Han and Phil Davidson demonstrate how multi-touch screens “will change the way we work and play.” Examples include usage in image editing, web browsing, creating 3D animations, etc. [tx ML]
Fotolog and Flickr neck and neck
“Perhaps this is a sign that those folks trapped in the Web 2.0 bubble are not being critical enough about what is responsible for success on the Web circa-2007…Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”
SmugMug discusses Amazon S3 problems
“I can’t think of a particular vendor or service we use that doesn’t have outages, problems, or crashes. From disk arrays to networking gear, everything has bad days. Further, I can’t think of a web site that doesn’t, either. It doesn’t matter if you’re GMail or eBay, you have outages and performance problems from time to time. I knew going into this that Amazon would have problems, and I built our software and our own internal architecture to accommodate occasional issues. This the key to building good internet infrastructures anyway. Assume every piece of your architecture, including Amazon S3, will fail at some point. What will you do? What will your software do?”
Setting small goals creates sustainable change
“When someone goes from one extreme to another, the behavioral change rarely lasts. In my experience, this is true in personal finance, fitness, studying, and a bunch of other areas. When I make a change, I almost always make the most incremental change of all and work iteratively from there. This is why I just shake my head when I see personal-finance pundits giving families advice to go from a 0% savings rate to a 25% savings rate (“you can do it!!!”). Giving that kind of advice to someone is not useful if their habits have been set for years. That’s why you find articles like 8 lottery winners who lost their millions. Habits don’t change overnight, and if they do, chances are it won’t be sustainable.”
Jeff Veen's CMS suggestions (e.g. give customers quick wins)
“Make it easy to get started. Give first-time users a series of quick wins that become increasingly complex. When I first log in, I want to create a Web page. Next, I’d like to add some styles to it. Then, I’d like to make links to some other Web pages. I’ll build a navigation system after that, and start to add other features eventually. But I want to feel successful with your system within a few minutes. I don’t want to you to present the stunning power at my fingertips until I’m comfortable with my surroundings. Please save the content ranking, on-the-fly PDF creation, community forums, and user polls for later. I may eventually want that stuff, but not the first time I log in.” [tx WH]
Released: PackRat 1.0 lets you use your Backpack data when you can't be online
“Before you hit the road for the first time with PackRat, just sync up with Backpack and your data is duplicated in PackRat’s database…When you get back on the ‘net, PackRat will automatically inform Backpack of all your changes and Backpack will be up to date.”
Tech barons trying to change energy policy
“The venture capitalists could become a powerful part of the realignment of energy politics. They are lending a new voice to the debate, one that politicians are likely to listen to given the investors’ reputation as smart backers of next-generation companies.”