Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Using Campfire as a note-taking solution and for Getting Things Done
“I feel that Campfire’s excellent real-time record keeping ability, multiple chat room (or page) features, access options, and file management tools are ideal for not only the GTD system but point-of-contact record keeping.”

PluggedOut to “groupware” app customers: “Basecamp provides everything you might need”
“If you’re working in a ‘wide area network’ on a project, it’s essential to have somewhere central that all news, updates, milestones, tasks and such like can be pooled. Basecamp provides everything you might need.”

Get visual alerts every time a new message is posted in Campfire
If you’d like to get a visual alert every time a new message is posted in Campfire (one that’s visible even if your browser window is not), then check out this bit of code Snailbyte cooked up.

Sleepers. They’re customers who have free accounts but haven’t used them in a while. They got far enough to sign up and start using your product. They just never made it over the hump.

We’ve been thinking about how to wake these sleepers. After all, it’s a lot easier to wake a sleeping customer than win a new one.

A one-time reminder email seems like a good nudge. Something that reminds these people they signed up, shows them what they’re missing, and offers a path for getting back in the saddle. And a discount or coupon never hurts.

For example, Jamis tried StumbleUpon once a while back. They recently sent him this email:

There’s also the option of offering sleepers a treat to wake up. David, who stopped using NetFlix, recently got a letter from the company saying “we miss you” and offering a 20% discount on the first few months.

The goal is to find a nice, positive way to poke inactive account holders. You could even frame it like this: “Hey, you have data with us you haven’t used. Would you like to delete your account? If not, here’s a deal…”

Of course, it’s best to keep pokes like this to a minimum (sometimes sleeping dogs just want to lie).

Also a good idea: Allow the recipient to cancel/unsubscribe. A lot of these sleepers are sleepers because they simply don’t want to use the service. It’s only fair to give them an easy to way get back to sleep.

We get lots of email from people who want to get our take on this or that or why we do things one way instead of another way.

We thought instead of answering these emails on a one-on-one basis we’d answer them right here so more people can participate in the discussion.

So, we’re looking for interesting questions to answer here at Signal vs. Noise. Got one? Then send it to us at svn@37signals.com (make sure the subject line reads “Ask 37signals”). We’ll cherry pick the most interesting ones and answer them here. Fire away!

This is a bit of a “if a tree falls in the woods…” question, but I think it’s interesting nonetheless.

Innovation is defined by creation, but I wonder if it’s possible to be innovative by standing still.

If everyone else is doing something new, and you are sticking with what you’ve got, are you being innovative? Can you be innovative by not changing a thing?

For example, Kottke has a piece on the return of the housecall. The doctor even says “I’m a new kind of physician.” Is that innovative? Housecalls used to be the norm, and now here’s a doctor that’s doing it again. Sounds innovative to me in today’s context, but is it actually innovative? Or is it just a return to something that works?

Now, this doctor is bringing some innovation in the form of video and instant messaging, but if a doctor has been doing housecalls for 30 years, and everyone else was requiring an office visit, and then housecalls are back in vogue, is that 30-year-housecall doctor innovative?

I know this doctor example isn’t a perfect example, but hopefully it’s a good baseline for discussion.

So what do you think?

Erling Ellingsen made a $2 multi-touch pad with a plastic bag, some dye, and a camera. Eat your heart out, MacGyver

- The main idea is that you threshold the image into three areas: background (light blue), fingers (dark blue; these are shown as an overlay on-screen) and pressure points (not blue).

- I used a bag of dye for now, since that was easy to make. It might be feasible to tape LEDs to the edges of the table, and use FTIR-like scattering; I’d like to try that later. Actually, if you have one of those cheesy engraved-perspex-plate-with-blue-LEDs-in-the-base things lying around, you might be able to use that.

- Large areas of non-blue are interpreted as fingers. There is a mouse mode, where every touch immediately moves the mouse to that point, and a multi-touch mode which sends an NSNotification with a list of points for each frame. These will of course only be understood by programs that understand this protocol—of which there currently exist only one (the rotozoomer at the end)

- The on-screen display is just a regular transparent OSX window. The background pixels are 100% transparent (alpha=0), and the hands show up as black with alpha 0.1 or so.

So cool to see this sort of innovative thinking and embrace of constraints.

I’ve been listening to Bloomberg Radio a lot lately (it’s 130 on Sirius if you’ve got it). I’m really impressed.

I’ve always been a bit of a stock market/finance junky. An inordinate number of my dreams contained scrolling tickers (and I swear they were in color). That stopped a few years ago, thankfully.

I’ve seen my share of CNBC, I’ve read my share of the WSJ, and I’ve picked up financial news in a lot of other places too.

But I’ve never been as impressed with the depth, approachability, accuracy, clarity, and overall presentation of the financial news as I have been with Bloomberg Radio. They explain things clearly, they make sense of detailed and confusing topics, and the voices have a careful, pleasent calm that belies the chaos of the markets themselves.

This is good radio. If you can pull in Bloomberg Radio you should give it a listen. Even if you’re not a finance junky, you stand to learn a lot and experience real quality programming.

Some recent postings at the 37signals Job Board:

ROOV is looking for a RoR Developer (creative) in the US.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is looking for a Web Designer in Washington, DC.

RealTravel.com is looking for a Ruby on Rails Application Developer in Mountain View, CA.

Apple Inc. is looking for a Business Development individual in Cupertino, CA.

Kaboose Inc. is looking for a Web Software Developer in Toronto, Ontario.

Cisco/IronPort is looking for a Sr. UI Architect in San Bruno, CA.

RD2, Inc. is looking for a Web Developer in Dallas, TX.

Yodle, Inc. is looking for a Web Designer in New York.

Outreach, Inc is looking for a Website & Newsletter Coordinator in Vista, CA.

UpGuppy is looking for a Director of Site Development in any location.

Mint Digital is looking for an HTML/CSS/JS developer who wants to learn rails in New York, NY.

Ardent Media is looking for a Director of Engineering in San Francisco, CA.

More jobs…

These are just some of the recent jobs posted on the Job Board. The Job Board is linked up on over 1,000,000 page views a month on some of the industries most highly regarded sites. If you’re looking for a design, programming, copywriting, or IT executive job, take a look.

On Monday, October 29, 2007 in Chicago, Jim Coudal, Jason Fried, and Carlos Segura will lead a presentation and discussion on design, entrepreneurship, and inspiration. We’re calling this one day event the SEED Conference. Attendance is limited to 135 people and the price is $399.

What you’ll learn

You’ll learn about taking control of your own work, seeking out methods to inspire new ideas, and adopting unconventional ideas about collaboration and business.

Who should attend

You should attend if you’re a designer (print, web, video) or a business-minded soul who’s looking to take your creative ideas and turn them into something satisfying and bankable. Anyone creative with an open mind will take away something useful.

The format

The format will be comfortable and open. Some lectures, some networking, and ample time for questions, discussion and interaction. This is a day of active learning, not just idle listening.

A wonderful venue

The venue will inform the discussion too. The auditorium at the Rem Koolhaas designed McCormick Tribune Campus Center was built with new ideas and is set amid the historic Mies-designed campus of IIT.

Bonus “Working-lunch”

A catered “Working-Lunch” will feature a talk about the IIT Campus and Mies van der Rohe by Public Radio host, architecture critic, and Loeb Fellow at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Edward Lifson.

Sign up quick

With only 135 seats available, and three in-high-demand speakers, seats are sure to go quickly. Get more info and sign up today.

The internet is full of conditional phantom buys: “I’ll buy if they’d make one for less than $300”, “I’m getting it when it hits version 2”, “Until they add this feature, I can’t get it”. At the surface, all these conditions sound very reasonable. Or well, often they’re not all that reasonable, even arbitrary, but at least they represent a personal statement of value. Until this condition is met, I won’t part with my money.

The problem for anyone driving their decisions off conditional phantom buys is of course that these statements are as fickle as they are cheap. It costs nothing to claim to have ready cash if you can get a company to follow your pet goat. It doesn’t actually mean you’ll have to get money out of pocket when it happens.

The deceiving part of these birds in the bush is that the proposition is proposed as a one-to-one barter. You give me this one thing and you’ll be rewarded with all the gold you can carry from everyone who’s just like me!

Except that most such propositions are just window shopping that gloss over all the other implicit barriers to purchase that’ll surface when the pet goat has been fed.

So take the ultimatum-based shopper’s mirage with a grain of salt. It can undoubtedly contain pointers of interest, but don’t go projecting revenue growth off them.

Oversimplification can be confusing

“When saving a file, you have an option to ‘maximize compatibility’. The thing is, they never tell you what the alternative is. Why would you ever choose to not maximize compatibility? Even worse, the dialog explicitly warns you that turning the option off is a bad idea. Seems like a stupid question then, doesn’t it?”

Change your to-do list into a could-do list

“When I draw up my daily lists of tasks I refuse to see it as stuff I have to get done. When I did that in the past, I’d feel a sense of dissatisfaction at the end of the day when I didn’t have everything ticked off, despite the fact that I knew when I wrote it, it was highly unlikely I’d get to everything. It’s a tiny shift, but by viewing it as a list of things I could do today, I’m relieving the pressure to get them all done. It feels like there’s more of an element of choice around how I spend my time – I don’t have to do x today, I could leave it till tomorrow and focus more attention on y today instead.” [tx SM]

"Atlas Shrugged" influences business execs

“One of the most influential business books ever written…The book attracted a coterie of fans, some of them top corporate executives, who dared not speak of its impact except in private. When they read the book, often as college students, they now say, it gave form and substance to their inchoate thoughts, showing there is no conflict between private ambition and public benefit.”

Can China control the weather?

“Every year, China launches thousands of rockets and artillery shells into the sky. They’re not part of a set of war games or preparation for a battle with Taiwan, but rather a battle with the weather. Through its Weather Modification Program, the Chinese government hopes to control the fickle forces behind rain. Run by the Weather Modification Department, a division of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Science, the program employs and trains 32,000 to 35,000 people across China, some of them farmers, who are paid $100 a month to handle anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers.”

Mike Birbiglia cuts a deal with "Glamazon"

Mike Birbiglia’s new comedy album “My Secret Public Journal Live” features this track which discusses how he cut a deal with “Glamazon” to take back a busted tv.