Every day I read a new article about some company whining about how hard it is to hire technical staff. Invariably it turns out that they’re only looking for people within a commuters distance of their office. I refuse to feel sorry for such companies.

If we were only trying to hire in Chicago, we’d never have the world-class team we have today. 37signals has people from such distinct tech hubs as Fenwick (Canada), Phoenix, Caldwell (Idaho), Romiley (UK), Jefferson Hills (Pensylvania), Ann Arbor (Michigan), Boulder (Colorado), Tampa (Florida).

The technology to successfully run and manage remote teams has never been better. We use Basecamp to keep track of our projects, Campfire as the virtual water cooler, Skype for calls and screensharing, and iChat and email to top it off.

None of it is fancy, expensive, or hard to use. Everything we do to manage a business consisting mainly of remote employees is something anyone else could do too. There’s so much untapped tech talent that does not live near your office, but would work for you if you allowed them to.

So stop whining, spend a day to get up to speed on remote working practices, and hire outside of your commuter zone.

Cheap distribution model
Apple with iTunes has ushered in an era where CDs and DVDs are fast becoming extinct. CDs and DVDs require packaging to be produced, space in warehouses to store, and discs to be fabricated. Presumably offering the music and movies on iTunes is cheaper because all the costs to manufacture have been cut. The savings get passed on to the customer.

The Lazy Tax
Video games are different though, and I can’t really figure out why that is. You can get the game L.A. Noire from Amazon for under $19. It ships free (if you’re a Prime customer) too. The only problem is it comes on disc. You have to load it into your console when you want to play. You have to find someplace to store the game when you’re not playing it.

You can download the exact same game for $40 on Xbox Live. It gets saved to your console. You don’t need to insert the disc to play. You don’t need to store a case. You don’t have a box laying around.

My friend calls this the “Lazy Tax” because you pay extra for the convenience of not having a disc to insert into your console when you want to play. This doesn’t make sense to me though. App stores seem to be the future, so why are game manufacturers still encouraging gamers to buy physical media?

I’m always on the lookout for great products, services, companies, ideas. Here are a few I’ve run into lately:

Uber

iPhone app to request a towncar. More expensive than a taxi, and not something I’d use every day, but for the occasional transportation when a taxi is a hassle, Uber is spot on perfect. The iPhone app is fantastic, you can follow the driver via GPS as he heads to your location, and since Uber has your credit card on file you just get in, go, and get out without having to deal with payment hassles or tipping. It’s all inclusive and effortless. Very well done.

TurboScan

iPhone app to scan documents with your iPhone camera. I was skeptical at first, but this thing delivers. It just works and it works well. Accurate, fast, convenient, and $2. No brainer.

Sanuk

I recently picked up a pair of Kyotos from Zappos and I couldn’t be more pleased. Very comfortable, casual, slip-on, kickaround shoes. Exactly what I was looking for.

Breville Tea Maker

This is definitely a luxury buy, but it’s a really well made product for the tea lover. Yes, it makes you feel lazy (“I never had a problem making tea myself before”), but it also makes you appreciate a product that is so well conceived for one specific purpose: Brewing tea at the proper temperature for just the right amount of time. I’m a fan.

Nokia Lumia 800 + Windows Phone 7.5

I’ve been hugely impressed with the Nokia Lumia 800 running Windows Phone 7.5. I’ve had an iPhone since day one, and every model since, but I really like the new path Microsoft is cutting with WP7 so I decided to give it an extended try. It’s been a bit over a week, and so far I don’t miss my iPhone at all. In fact, going back to the iPhone feels like going back in time. It’s rough around the edges in a few spots, but I think Microsoft is up to something good here. More on this in a future post after I’ve spent some more quality time with the phone/platform.

T-Mobile

In order to get the Nokia dialing I had to get a Micro SIM. I didn’t want to sign a long-term contract because I was just testing the phone, so I went over to T-Mobile to check out their pay-as-you-go plans. Wow, they’ve done a great job in that area. No contracts, dead simple pricing, quick-in-and-out of the store. I opted for the simple $2/day unlimited talk/text plan. If I don’t use the phone on a give day, there’s no charge. I loaded up the account with about $60 in credit and I was off and running. Really simple to understand and very well executed. Well done.

When we needed a creative shop to help us with this year’s holiday gift, we turned to Scott Thomas and his crew at Simple.Honest.Work in Chicago. They did a fantastic job putting together the concept and building, printing, and assembling the final packages.

Shaun shot a behind-the-scenes film of the final stage of the project. Here’s how they put it all together:

We’re looking forward to getting some postcards.

A safe holiday season to everyone. Take care.

All features must ship! There’s been some improvements to your 2011 Campfire lately, and it’s time you came on down and tried them out.

Per-Room Permissions

First up, we’ve added per-room permissions settings. Previously, permissions could only be changed on a specific person, and it was tedious to click around to each person once you added a room. Now, right after a room is added, you can immediately change who has access to it in one place.

Tons of Emoji

We’ve got some hot new imports: More emoji. “More” is an understatement. How about, 495 emoji? There’s an an entire cheat-sheet so you can educate yourself on proper Emoji usage as well.

New Sounds

There’s also been a few new sounds added lately. Try out ”/play secret”, ”/play tada”, ”/play nyan” at some point!

Animated GIF Thumbnails

One of my favorite parts of Campfire is how it plays GIFs. Perhaps this isn’t the most productive way to communicate, but it sure is awesome. If you upload a GIF to Campfire now, it will resize and animate the thumbnail as well. Pretend the above image is animated, I’m only good at finding GIFs, not making them.

We’re in Campfire every day at 37signals, and we love making little improvements to make your experience better. Hopefully these brighten up your Friday!

Today we’re bringing autosave to Basecamp (for messages and comments), Highrise (for notes), Backpack (for messages, comments, and notes), and Writeboard (for documents and comments), as well as right here on SvN.

Autosave keeps a local copy of your work in your browser’s storage as you write, so you’re always protected against accidental refreshes, closing the wrong tab, a browser crash, or clicking a link that opens in the same window. The local copy will be kept in your browser’s local storage until you submit that message or comment.

If you accidentally close your browser or refresh the page, everything you’ve typed will be restored automatically when you return. You don’t have to do anything, it just works.

Autosave works with modern browsers: Internet Explorer 9+, Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 4.0+, and Safari 4.0+. If you’re not already using one of these versions, now’s a great time to upgrade!

We hope this gives you even more confidence in working with our products. Losing something while you’re writing it stinks – hopefully this helps cut those incidents down dramatically.

If you want to reach peak performance, you have to find the limit. Finding the limit means stepping over the limit. Going too far, going too fast. It means taking a good idea to the extreme to learn just how far it’ll bend before it snaps.

In racing, the driver who can most consistently drive just beyond the limit — running the optimal seven degrees of slip — is most likely to win. The same applies in business.

When you continously seek out the limit, you’ll realize that it’s often much higher than you expected. Yes, you can make that screen even simpler than the bare-boned version you’re looking at. Yes, you can trust your employees much more than you imagined. Yes, you can launch without a billing system.

Once you train yourself to seek out the limit in all endeavors, you’ll get better and faster at correcting the inevitable oversteps, and hit that peak performance.

But if you never dare venture close to the limit, you’ll find that it’s shrinking all the time. There will be even more people you could possibly offend, even more bells that need whistling, ever more realities of the real world you cannot change.

Records are set by the people who said fuck your limits and found their own.

Remember when you accidentally deleted that master to-do list in your Basecamp project? Or when Bob thought he was looking at the old Sales project and deleted the new one by mistake?

These things happen, and they definitely used to ruin your day. We felt your pain as well, since these things quickly found their way into our support queue. But Basecamp now sports a spiffy new way to recover things that you (or anyone else on your account) deleted recently.

Recovering a deleted project

If it is a project that was deleted, any of your admins will see a new link on the sidebar of the dashboard:

Clicking that link will take them to a page showing all recently deleted projects, including when they were deleted, and who deleted them:

To recover any of those projects, simply click the corresponding “restore” link, and you’ll be back in business!

Recovering a deleted data within a project

Similarly, within any project, there is a link at the bottom of each page visible to any admin:

Following that link will take you to a page listing all data recently deleted from that project, again with when it was deleted and who deleted it:

Clicking the restore link there will let you recover any of that data as well.

The deleted data is only retained for a short time (no more than 30 days). Hopefully this will reduce heartburn when someone accidentally deletes that crucial message or mock up!