I really wish you could forward mobile phone voicemails like you could forward emails. Sometimes I get a call, someone leaves a message, and it’s more relevant to David or Sarah or someone else.

Visual Voicemail on the iPhone is a huge step forward for voicemail, but it still feels a bit last generation. It’s still about the static message that sits in your box. You can’t forward it along, you can’t email it to yourself, you can’t even play it to someone else who’s on the phone with you.

I’m looking forward to the day when voicemail is as easy and flexible and portable as email.

The Superest
The Superest has a great yet simple design/style. Note the balance between the thick heavy lines, the heavy arrows, and the super thin grey lines that hold the page design together.

Design Museum in London
The website for Design Museum in London has nice variety from page to page.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a legend in the making.

Gary is best known for his wonderfully passionate video reviews on his self-styled Wine Library TV. But he’s much deeper than that. Gary is an incredibly shrewd businessman with and innovative and intuitive business mind. Gary understand the next generation of promotion as well as anyone I’ve ever seen.

He’s a master of the things that really matter now.

1. A master of the product he sells. He understands everything there is to understand about his product. He knows the business, the process, the flavors, the appeal inside and out. He’s immune to dogma — he has his own opinions about his product and his industry.

2. A master of PR. Without a PR firm he’s been on Conan, Ellen, and Nightline. His video reviews are watched by over 60,000 people a day. A good portion of those people don’t give a damn about wine either. They’re there to see Gary go. He’s talked about at wine conferences, tech conferences, print media, new media, everywhere. This is not an accident.

3. He’s a master of community. His wine reviews routinely get well over 100 comments. Some topping 300. His obsessed fans, affectionately branded the Vayniacs, are as passionate as he is. Through link ups, Facebook friending, and relentless Twittering, he gives them the fuel, attention, and love they need to keep the fire burning. And he reminds them that he appreciates every moment of it.

4. He’s a master of his own brand. He endlessly promotes Wine Library, his family’s wine shop, and his own brand on camera, off camera, and through merchandising. He genuinely believes you can help people by being true to yourself. When you think of Gary you think of authentic passion. Is there a better quality for any brand? Here’s some more great advice from Gary at Strategic Profits Live.

5. He’s a sharer. Gary shares all day long. He understand that when you share you get back more in return. But fundamentally he’s not really sharing to get back, he’s sharing because he loves to give. He loves giving his opinion on wine, business, life, etc. He wants other people to be successful.

On top of all this, Gary is just one hell of a nice guy. I’ve recently gotten to know him and the one thing that really stands out — besides his ridiculous energy — is his generosity and overall desire to see others do well. Tara Hunt’s interview is a great example of this. I look forward to learning a lot from Gary. I hope you do too.

A few George Patton quotes:

“A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

“If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you’ll be amazed at the results.”

“Battle is an orgy of disorder.”

“Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.”

“I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

“Nobody ever defended anything successfully, there is only attack and attack and attack some more.”

“Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable.”

“Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.”

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine! When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead!”

“Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.”

Here’s George C. Scott playing him in the movie Patton:

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New features
Highrise tasks revamp and improvements
We launched a major revamp and set of improvements to the Highrise tasks feature. What’s new: 1) Setting tasks with dates/times is significantly faster, 2) iCalendar feed for dated/timed tasks, and 3) New tasks calendar layout.

New Basecamp Features: Reply to a message via email and more
You can now post comments to a message via email. Prior to this update, you had to log in to Basecamp to post a comment on a message…Also new: a revamped message/comment screen and Clarified email notifications block.

New Highrise Feature: Advanced search
Now you can search contacts by city, state, zip/postal, and phone…Now, next time you head to San Diego on business, you can find all your contacts who live in San Diego. Or, if you want to find all the contacts you have in the near-north Chicago suburbs you can search by area code 847.

Case studies
[Case Study] Swimming pool company uses Backpack to track equipment, send reminders, and more
“I use Backpack to inventory all their equipment, model numbers, serial numbers and any odd parts that facility has. Now when a client calls us all we need is what that piece of equipment operates. I then can log into Backpack via my Blackberry and get all the information I need to pick up parts on the way to the job site. The minimal amount of money we pay for Backpack has returned itself many times over in productivity.”

Backpack is “an invaluable tool” in fighting ADD
“I used to write this stuff down on post its, and carry a PDA or a binder with a calendar that I’d color code by hand with highlighters, as well as any important documents that I’d need to complete a project. Backpack has become a central repository for this information and has literally taken a load off of my back. My to-do lists, memos, projects files, address book, even things like the meals I’m planning on cooking for the week and my household budget are all in one place.”

“I love that Backpack’s calendar is color-codeable.”

Pre-release “blogger-bashers” are terrible predictors of a product’s success

David Pogue: “Every now and then, a couple of messages come in that really irk me. These messages tell me how wrong I am about something I reviewed, which is fine — but they come from people who have never even tried the product. It was that way with the iPhone, in the time after it was announced but before it was available. “This will be the biggest flop since the Cube,” went the critics. “No removable battery? Nobody will touch this thing.” Etc. The blogs were full of this stuff. As it turns out, they were massively, humiliatingly wrong. Four million iPhones were sold in the first 200 days. Its sales surpassed Treos, Windows Mobile phones — everybody but BlackBerry. So what’s the lesson here? Simple enough: those vocal pre-release blogger-bashers are terrible predictors of a product’s success or failure.”

Cordell Ratzlaff discusses ux management at Cisco

“One of my pet peeves is with the specialized labels that have evolved within our profession. We have user interface designers, usability engineers, user experience specialists, visual designers, interaction designers, etc. The distinction between these many roles is fuzzy and confusing to those both inside and outside the design profession…I encourage designers to get as broad a range of experience as possible. Design products for as many markets, demographics, product types, and technology platforms as you can. Don’t be afraid to take on tasks outside your traditional role. The best designers I know are good at many facets of design. It certainly doesn’t hurt to know about branding, marketing, business models, and technology as well.”

How to disagree

“If we’re all going to be disagreeing more, we should be careful to do it well. What does it mean to disagree well? Most readers can tell the difference between mere name-calling and a carefully reasoned refutation, but I think it would help to put names on the intermediate stages. So here’s an attempt at a disagreement hierarchy…”

Sign up forms must die

“When planning a customer’s initial experience for your web service, think about how you can avoid sign-up forms in favor of gradual engagement.”

JetBlue on Twitter

“I learned that Morgan is behind JetBlue’s tweets, and not a bot, and that Morgan is very well informed on social media ethics and aware that corporate use of Twitter can be tricky. I am impressed that Morgan was watching Twitter closely enough to sense an issue, responded quickly, apologized, and removed the two of us from @JetBlue’s list. This served as a demonstration of the company’s active participation in the Twitter conversation, its willingness to course-correct, and of the new speed of social media with which corporations have to contend.”

In “Maverick: The Success Behind the World’s Most Unusual Workplace” (Amazon link), Ricardo Semler tells the story of how he converted a traditionally structured business into one without walls and rules. The way he challenges assumptions and rethinks how a business can be run is inspirational. (It’s probably the business book that’s been read by more members of 37signals than any other.) Below are some excerpts…

A modern company must accept change as its basic premise:

To survive in modern times, a company must have an organizational structure that accepts change as its basic premise, lets tribal customs thrive, and fosters a power that is derived from respect, not rules. In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest – quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all – will follow. At Semco we did away with strictures that dictate the “hows” and created fertile soil for differences. We gave people an opportunity to test, question, and disagree. We let them determine their own futures. We let them come and go as they wanted, work at home if they wished, set their own salaries, choose their own bosses. We let them change their minds and ours, prove us wrong when we are wrong, make us humbler. Such a system relishes change, which is the only antidote to the corporate brainwashing that has consigned giant businesses with brilliant pasts to uncertain futures.

Growth is often just about greed:

A few years ago, I struggled with an opportunity to acquire a company with five plants and 2,000 employees. “Why do we want to grow more?” I asked myself. Are we going to be better for it?”...

It’s all about persistence, isn’t it? But where does persistence end and obsession begin? How high is too high? How big is too big? Of course, some growth is necessary for any business to keep up with competitors and provide new opportunities for its people. But so often it is power and greed and plain stubbornness that make bigger automatically seem better…

Semco has learned that to want to grow big just to be big is a catch…Much about growth is really about ego and greed, not business strategy.

Architecture fans will enjoy these two Charlie Rose interviews.

Philip Johnson at 90:

Philip Johnson at 95:

And for those who haven’t seen it, you must watch the two 1957 Mike Wallace interviews with the 88 year old Frank Lloyd Wright. They just don’t make people like FLW anymore. A paragon of confidence, a wellspring of opinion. What a treasure.

What a beauty. Nature wins every design competition.

Using the Basecamp API, we automatically post product releases to the Deployments project in our Basecamp account.

When we push an update a message is automatically posted to the project. Here’s an example of two recent deploys:

Each deploy lists the changes that were logged into subversion, who logged the change, and a description of the change. We also add a one-line description that sums up the main reason for the deploy.