An electric knife:

A juicer:

An iron:

More disassembled appliances in this Flickr set.

Farhad Manjoo (who wrote a cover story on 37signals for Salon.com a few years back) is now writing for Slate. This time he wonders about the Google Black Hole.

Farhad plays “Where Are They Now?” with some of Google’s recent higher-profile tech acquisitions. He focuses on mojo-heavy companies and products like Jaiku, Jotspot (Sites), Dodgeball, Measure Map, and Grand Central. Some of these died, some of these slowed down, some of them were still not open for new customers a year after the acquisition. Some people are wondering if Feedburner (Google), Upcoming (Yahoo), and Delicious (Yahoo) might belong on this list.

The astute Dare Obasanjo wrote about this phenomenon in detail a few days ago. His Application Rewrites after Acquisitions: How Large Software Companies Destroy Startup Value article is well worth a read.

Of course there have been success stories. Innovation at big companies often comes from the small companies and teams they swallow whole.

But with the odds of a big-co buyout nearing lottery proportions, a good chance of neglect awaiting your product on the other side, and a “I can’t wait until my employment contract is up,” feeling lingering your every work day, I hope entrepreneurs think twice about building to flip.

Related: David’s The secret to making money online talk at Y Combinator’s Startup School 2008.

We had a blast last week answering Q&A for about an hour during the first 37signals Live session. We hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. Thanks to all 1000+ people who stopped by to watch or participate.

Next Show: Wednesday, August 13 at 11:00am central time

We’re ready for the second show. Down the road we’re going to do more focused Q&As around specific topics, but we want to do another round of general Q&A this time. So please join us at http://www.37signals.com/live at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th. We’re going for the morning so more of Europe can join us. We’re excited to see you there!

37signals Live: New and improved

We got a lot of feedback during and after the last show. We’ve taken some of this feedback and made some improvements.

There were a few issues with the first show:

1. Spammers cluttered the chat window.
2. The chat flew by so fast that we missed a lot of questions.
3. The chat itself was distracting.

We thought a lot about how to resolve these issues. We liked the spontaneity of real-time question asking via chat, but the spamming and general noise hurt that experience.

A lot of people suggested an option to pre-submit questions. We could even have digg-style voting to move questions up or down on the list. This sounded like a good solution on the surface, but if we just had a list of questions ahead of time it would kill the “live” part of 37signals Live. Questions in advance kill spontaneity. It kills the magic. We might as well just record the answers on video ahead of time and play the video later.

What you’ll see: Video & question submission

Here’s what the new on-air screen looks like:

Live video on the left. No more chat, but question submission on the right. Enter your name, location, and your question. A few of the questions we recently answered will be listed below.

What we’ll see: Review, approve (or reject), and answer

Behind the scenes we’ll see:

On the left we have the approved queue. On the right we have the incoming queue. As questions come in, someone else from 37signals (generally Matt) can approve, reject, or edit (fix misspellings, edit so it’s easier to read, etc.) the question. We can also ban the questioner if they’re just spamming. We’ll approve just about anything as long as it’s above the waist.

Once a question is approved it shoots over to the left side in big type so we can see it on a second screen positioned at the other side of the desk. After we answer a question on the left we just click it and it turns dark grey and moves to the bottom of the screen so it’s out of the way.

Excited to give it a go

We’re pumped to give the new system a go. We hope you’ll join us at 11am central on Wednesday, August 13th at http://www.37signals.com/live.

As much as I respect Apple, Unslow, one of their new iPhone 3G television ads, has me wondering how they kept a straight face when they put this on the air. Try to follow along with your own iPhone 3G:

Web pages load immediately. GPS picks up instantly. Files download about 3x faster than I’ve ever seen a file download — even over wi-fi. I don’t think standing on top of a 3G tower antenna would even deliver such an experience.

This ad borders on bait-and-switch and it’s disappointing to see Apple go there. If the ad wasn’t about speed it might be a different story. If they were just showing off as many features as they could in a 30 second spot it would be understandable. If they exercised poetic license and cut out a few frames to make a different point we’d understand.

But Unslow is about selling speed. Speed that isn’t for sale at any price. It sets the wrong expectations. It leads to a disconnect between the iPhone in the guy’s hand on TV and the iPhone in your hand. When they don’t deliver what they demonstrate people end up disappointed.

UPDATE: Someone compared the ad to the real-world performance (full 3G reception in Boston):

Some new features are sexy. They come with shiny new interfaces, extra buttons, more power. These are obvious and easy to spot. They are fun to develop and fun to release.

However, there’s another side to improving a product that doesn’t get as much respect. It’s the optimization. Nothing new, but everything better. Small tweaks here, hardware upgrades there. Everything runs more smoothly but you don’t really notice it. You feel it, but there’s nothing pretty to point to as evidence of the hard work.

The speed initiative

We want to treat speed as a feature. It should be one of our best features. So, for the past few months Jeremy and Mark have been working hard on speeding up our apps through software optimizations, caching, and network and hardware improvements. They deserve a huge round of applause for the results. They’ve made a big difference.

Let’s talk about Basecamp

We’re rolling these optimizations out to different 37signals products at different times, but let’s start with Basecamp, our most popular product. Basecamp gets used a lot by a lot of people. It’s also the type of product that people are in and out of all day long so speed is a critical factor. We rolled out a series of optimizations this week.

Some data

Here are some charts generated by New Relic that shine a light on the results of the hard work.

These charts compare an hour of traffic this morning with the same hour last week. As you can see, the changes we’ve implemented have made a dramatic difference. Our overall response time was cut very nearly in half, meaning that pages are loading roughly twice as fast as they were for the same time period last week. At the same time, we’ve managed to cut CPU usage by about a third and database time by about half.

How we did it

These gains were achieved using a variety of techniques including:

• Analysis: We relied heavily on New Relic’s outstanding RPM performance management suite to give us insight about the parts of Basecamp that were accessed the most as well as those that were most in need of improvement.
• Caching: We’ve begun using Memcached in a variety of spots. Caching can be tricky with dynamic apps like Basecamp since different people often see different things, but we’ve implemented it carefully where it could be used to its best advantage.
• MySQL optimizations: We’ve been working with a MySQL performance consultant to help us optimize our database calls and queries. We’re still early in the process but we’ve learned a lot so far.
• Hardware upgrades: We recently made some significant upgrades to our database servers. We went from servers with 2 x Dual Core 2GHz processors, 32GB of RAM, and 6×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives to servers with 2 x Quad Core 3GHz processors, 128GB of RAM, and 8×73GB 15,000 RPM SAS drives. We’ve also upgraded our load balancers and have new switches coming soon as well.

Change you can feel

While you may not immediately notice speed increases like you’d notice a big new feature, we think that over time you’ll see your productivity increase due to these speed increases. Less time for pages to load, less waiting for results. Everything’s just smoother. It’s change you can feel. The more you use Basecamp the more you’ll feel it.

We had a pretty wicked line of thunderstorms roll through Chicago last night. I propped my Flip video camera up on the windowsill to capture the hot lightning action. It gets worse as time goes on. Close strike around 3:58.

Over the years we’ve received hundreds (thousands?) of emails asking us our opinion on this, how we’d do that, what we think of this idea or that idea. People ask about Getting Real, entrepreneurship, business models, hiring, collaboration, design decisions, tech-related stuff, questions about our products, etc.

We also really enjoy the Q&A sessions at the end of our talks whenever we present at a conference or workshop. We always try to leave ample time to answer as many questions as we can. We’ve always believed live Q&A is the best part of any talk (and unfortunately there never seems to be enough time left over at the end to get to everyone’s questions).

So we’ve been thinking: How can we make Q&A more a part of our business? We enjoy it, people seem to get a lot of value from it, so we should do it more often.

We could certainly write more “Ask 37signals” blog entries, but it’s hard to find the time to write ‘em all up. We also seem to give better answers when we talk them through rather than when we write them down.

So we’ve decided to take a page out of Gary Vaynerchuck’s book and do a 37signals Live Q&A session on the web. We don’t know how well it’s going to work, but we’re going to give it a shot.

The first session will be tomorrow (August 5th) at 3pm CDT (what’s that in my time zone?). We’ll plan for an hour but we’ll see how it goes. We’ll have a live video feed and people can ask us questions via a live text chat that’ll run alongside the video.

We’re excited to see what happens. If it works out we’d love to do them on a regular basis. If not, we’ll chalk it up to experience.

So, ask us anything tomorrow at 3! We’ll see you there!

We’re going to start using Twitter a lot more to announce news, new features, special offers, live Q&A sessions, events, and more. If you want to be one of the first ones to know, make sure to follow us on Twitter!

37signals is looking to hire a second system administrator to help manage our growing infrastructure. We are looking for someone who has solid experience running production web applications and good all around system administration skills. In particular, you should have strong experience with Apache, MySQL and the HTTP protocol. Some of the other software we rely on includes HAproxy, Mongrel, memcached, and Xen primarily running on RedHat Enterprise Linux or CentOS 5, with a handful of FreeBSD machines.

Experience with Cisco hardware and Ruby programming are a big plus, but attitude and enthusiasm are an even bigger one.

Details on how to apply at the Job Board.

An always beautiful, sometimes sad, sometimes uplifting site documenting the daily life of Philip’s 98 year-old father after his mother passed away. It’ll tug at you.

Aside from the personal story, the site’s navigation is worth exploring. Move your mouse to the bottom of a photo to partially expose the next one. Click it to move forward. Same thing goes for the top of an image, except that you move backwards. Move your mouse all the way to the left to reveal thumbnails. It’s not obvious, but when you can’t figure out what to do next you begin to explore. Then your mouse will eventually discover the system. You can also keep your mouse fixed at the bottom of an image and just click-click-click to move through.