This year we’re considering writing/publishing the second edition of Getting Real. The second edition will be more small-business focused. Less web-app, more business strategy.

Proposed topics include who to hire, how to surround yourself with great people, how to promote/market without breaking the bank, how to get press without a PR firm, how to focus on what matters and ignore what doesn’t, how to get big things done with a small team, the beauty of the basics, embracing the unknown, throwing out your plans and just winging it, finding a distinct voice, etc.

We’d like to take Getting Real to the masses. We’re seeking a publisher partner that believes in the potential of Getting Real to be a business best seller.

We’ve sold over 40,000 copies (PDF and paperback combined) of the first edition purely through blog posts and word of mouth (reviews). We believe additional exposure and wider distribution could catapult sales deep into six figures and beyond.

If you’re interested in publishing Getting Real, please drop me a note at jason at 37signals dot com (subject line: Publish Getting Real). We look forward to hearing from you.

You can just imagine the conversation. The Sprint executive screaming to the Samsung rep: “I don’t care how shitty you have to make it, just give me an iPhone knock-off in three months!!”.

And Samsung, who otherwise makes nice stuff (I loved the P-300), caved and delivered the Instinct:

Terrible, just terrible. More pictures on Gizmodo.

Whenever I get the email from Amazon telling me that our monthly bill for web service usage is available, I take it as an excuse to spend a little while looking at our usage stats and how our storage needs have grown.

When I started working at 37signals in October of 2006, we were using less than 1.5TB of disk space for customer data for all of our applications and were starting to get to the point where redundancy and backups were becoming a headache. Shortly after I started, we decided to give S3 a trial run with Campfire and we became believers pretty quickly.

The fact that S3 is priced so reasonably (our last bill was $2,004.12) and the fact that it’s generally hassle free has enabled us to drastically increase the storage limits for all of our applications. Not having to worry about managing the file servers and backups is a pretty nice bonus as well.

Here are some stats from last month, and from October 2007 to compare how things have changed over the past 6 months.

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We’ve recently added a few more “quick hit” demo videos to the Backpack tour. These tutorials show how easy it is add users to your Backpack account and share pages with them:

Video: Add others to your Backpack account
“Backpack excels when you use it with other people. Add co-workers, colleagues, friends, or family to your account and share pages, knowledge, files, calendars, reminders, and more.”

Video: How to share Backpack pages with colleagues and friends
“Backpack makes it easy to share a page of information that you’ve created. People you share with can also add new items and change content on the page. It’s perfect for quick collaboration or sharing knowledge.”

And this video answers a question we get a lot…

Video: How to get your Basecamp Milestones into your Backpack Calendar
The answer: By adding the Milestones iCal feed into your Backpack calendar. This video shows you how. More details here.

And in case you missed the first time around, there are also the videos we posted along with the original launch announcement:

Video: Make a Backpack Page
Video: Backpack Calendar
Video: Backpack Newsroom
Video: Backpack Messages
Video: Backpack Reminders

Also, the BackpackIt.com home page has a video that offers a big picture look at how Backpack works. It’s only two minutes and is a good place to start if you just want an overview.

Join 37signals, Coudal, Segura, Threadless, Edward Lifson (Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard), and our main man Gary Vaynerchuk for SEED 3 at Crown Hall – the “Cathedral of Modernism” – in Chicago, IL on June the 6th 2008. Only 270 spots available, $499 each. We look forward to seeing you there.

Yesterday my wife and I stood in our unfinished condo deliberating paint colors. Closing day looms, and the developers require our color choices before they’ll finish their work. Our fondness for furniture aside, neither of us are interior designers or color mavens. So as we stood there in a white living room full of sawdust, we were stressing out big-time.

Fortunately one of our friends is an interior designer. We gave her a call and went back to the condo this evening. Within an hour, she took us from an intractable debate to a lovely solution. Given my line of work, I was as interested in her process as I was in the end result. How did she guide us to a beautiful color scheme when I, a supposed “designer,” couldn’t pick one color? What did she do differently?

The first thing she did is shed our preconceptions. “We can’t use a dark color in a small space” — not true. “We should have a different color in every room” — why’s that? “We don’t like [insert color]” — oh just give it a chance.

We had really boxed ourselves in with assumptions and myths, and I didn’t even realize it. She helped us forget these ideas and widen the space of possibilities. Next, instead of following abstract principles or assumptions, our designer looked closely at the colors that were already there. We looked at the colors of the cabinets, the dark wood floors, the surprising red touches in the light granite counters, and the green backsplash tiles. These were productive constraints, the kind you can juice. They reduced the possibility space in a way that was meaningful. Before long we had a palette of colors we loved, and a weight off our shoulders.

Creativity grows from constraints. But they need to be the right kind of constraints. The next time I think we “can’t” do something, I’ll try to remember my experience tonight and ask myself: Is this a meaningless preconception, or is it a productive fact I can work with? I know I’ll do better by focusing on the facts and leaving all other possibilities open.

So, a couple times a year the whole 37signals crew comes to Chicago for a pow-wow. Chicago’s been a great location since it’s central and five of us are already here.

This year we’re thinking of doing it somewhere else. Somewhere beautiful and interesting and inspiring.

We’d like to rent a house, an estate, or something like that for three days to a week. We’d need to accommodate about 10 people. We’d like to keep it in North America, and be within 4 hours of a major airport.

Any recommendations?

Quick start at TripIt
TripIt.com has a neat way to get customers started: Just forward a confirmation email to [email protected].

Randy Peterman wrote:

Attached is a screen capture (plus photoshop blurring) of an email I received from TripIt.com.  I was impressed with their email’s removing the need for me to create an account to use their service: it was already created for me!  That’s a great way to reduce trepidation by simply staying ahead of the creating an account takes time excuse.  Users can easily evangelize their friends because the cost of entry is so small.

How it works: You forward flight and hotel confirmation emails and it automatically processes them. It then offers related maps, directions from airport to hotel, weather for your travel dates in both locations, etc.

Theocacao
Theocacao has a nice combination of lush ornament and minimalism.

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Here are some of the latest posts on the 37signals Job Board.

Programming Jobs

Wesabe is looking for a Systems engineer is San Francisco, CA.

Jiva Technology is looking for a Top Notch Rails Developer in Bristol, UK.

SEOMoz.org is looking for a UI Engineer in Seattle, WA.

Western Creative is looking for a Web Developer in Redford, MI.

Daylife is looking for a Web Applications Engineer in NY (Soho).

Best Buy is looking for a Front end web developer in Minneapolis, MN.

Eseekers is looking for a Senior Javascript Developer in Beverly Hills, CA.

Flickr is looking for a Front-end Engineer in San Francisco, CA.

Market7 is looking for an Agile Engineer in San Francisco, CA.

Connamara Systems is lookin for an Entry Level Developer in Chicago, IL.

CollegeWikis.com is looking for a VP of Engineering in New York, NY.

OtherInbox is looking for a Hardcore Rails Developer in Austin, TX.

Zivity is looking for a Ruby on Rails Hacker in San Francisco, CA.

Design Jobs

Apple is looking for an iPhone Visual Designer in Cupertino, CA.

Sony is looking for an Interaction Designer in Santa Monica, CA.

FirstBank of Colorado is looking for a Web User Interface Developer in Lakewood, CO.

VML is looking for a Senior Experience Architect and a Senior Interactive Art Director in Kansas City, MO.

Mayo Clinic is looking for a Art Director in Rochester, MN.

Zillow is looking for a UX Designer in Seattle, WA.

MileMeter is looking for a User Interface Developer in Dallas, TX.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky is looking for an Interaction Designer in Boulder, CO.

Airlock is looking for a Middle/Senior Designer in London, UK.

Inflexxion, Inc. is looking for an Information Architect in Newton, MA.

Delucchi is looking for a Web/Multi-Media Designer in Washington, DC.

Amazon is looking for a Customer Experience Designer in Seattle, WA.

Lots more jobs

There are currently over 130 jobs listed on the Job Board. The Job Board is linked up on over 1,000,000 page views per month—it’s a great place to find work or look for someone to hire.

Very short stories

“We’ll be brief: Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’) and is said to have called it his best work. So we asked sci-fi, fantasy, and horror writers from the realms of books, TV, movies, and games to take a shot themselves.”

“How I Blew My Google Interview”

“Another form of web literature is emerging: stories of job applicants rejected by Google (GOOG). Google makes all applicants sign NDAs, of course — can’t have future applicants boning up! — but unlike the standard Googleplex NDAs, these apparently don’t bar tales of office furnishings, candy banquets, and interrogators who look like Chewbacca.”

Revisiting “Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering”

“Simply reciting the various facts and fallacies feels like a zen koan to software engineering. Even without any of the background discussion and explanation in the book, it’s therapeutic to ponder the brief one sentence summaries presented in the table of contents.”

Ron Paul’s grassroots graphics movement

“What is intriguing about this fervent grassroots response is how graphic styles designed to appeal to a youthful constituency have been built around Representative Paul’s grandfatherly appearance. Even some of the stylized poster portraits look more like those found on souvenir T-shirts commemorating someone’s retirement, or ‘the world’s best dad,’ than a political icon. Nonetheless the passion behind such an outpouring of good, bad and kitschy art and design cannot be ignored. So I tracked down a few of the artists and asked them to explain their work.”

Visualizing Fitts’s Law

“I thought it would be nice to go over Fitts’s Law, a staple in the HCI diet, with a few visuals to explain both the concept and why it’s ideas are a bit more complicated than most would have you believe…The challenge of software application design is so complex and filled with so many variables, that blanket solutions derived from Fitts’s Law should be used cautiously.”

Faces in Places

A photographic collection of faces found in everyday places.

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