You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
Jason co-founded Basecamp back in 1999. He also co-authored REWORK, the New York Times bestselling book on running a "right-sized" business. Co-founded, co-authored... Can he do anything on his own?
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.
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?
Here are some of the latest posts on the 37signals Job Board.
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.
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.
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.
About 3 hours into my flight it dawned on me. I had to take a leak. I wasn’t expecting a rendezvous with great design, but there it was in the most unlikely of places. The airplane lavatory (and, BTW, why don’t they call it a bathroom or restroom or toilet — who calls it a lavatory in everyday life?).
When you lock the door the lights turn on. When you unlock the door the lights go off. Perfect. It’s sorta like being in a huge refrigerator, but in reverse. In this case when you close (lock) the door the light goes on.
Anyway, I thought it was great design. Why should two things that always happen together (lock the door and turn on the light) be a two step process with different controls? Just make it one step, one control. Lock and light, one switch. Great thinking. I wonder who invented that.
Man… I just adore simple solutions like Muxtape. Here’s a sample muxtape for reference.
Dead simple, absolutely clear, quenches a common thirst (sharing a collection of songs with a friend), can’t-mess-up easy (username, email, password then upload MP3s). For a tiny touch of personality you can change the color of the strip at the top of the screen.
I imagine this could get shut down, but I love the exercise in simple execution. There are so many ways this could have been complicated. Muxtape’s elegance demonstrates the power of sticking to the point.
SvN reader Michael P. sent in an interesting link this morning to the Skyline Review. This site shows the rental rate, building shape, parking rates, and space availability by floor with an innovative graphic display:
The light grey represents available space. Black is occupied. Pretty cool way to get a quick feel for how full a building is and which floors have space available.
In this Newsweek article from 1995, Clifford Stoll suggested it would be unlikely we’d buy books over the web or read newspapers online.
But he didn’t stop there. He didn’t think internet shopping would work because the internet was missing salespeople:
We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Anyway, 1995 was definitely the early days. Plenty of predictions were wrong. Who knew what was going to happen. We can’t fault him for having an opinion.
But reading his opinion today does highlight just how far we’ve come in such a short time. Just about everything in his piece — from news to shopping to government — has been fundamentally changed by the web. What he thought wouldn’t work has actually worked so well that it’s hard to imagine our lives without it.
Further, his article shines a light on the burden of assumptions. Stoll assumed one of the reasons online shopping would fail was because it lacked salespeople. That was an assumption tied to his present day experience; a person had to sell you something.
How much of what you say can’t change is tied to your present day assumptions? “We can’t do that in our business” or “That would never work here” or “We have to have that” or “We need this in order to do that” or “That’s just how its done.”
Vision is about demolishing today’s assumptions and recognizing that new things are possible. It takes real guts to fight for the side of the non-obvious.
It also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Daniel Burnham. I usually just excerpt the first part of this quote, but in this case the end is what’s relevant:
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
As far as the internet goes, we didn’t have to wait for our sons and grandsons to surprise us. We surprised ourselves.
On the bright side, it seems Clifford has come around. He sells Klein Bottles over the web. Curiously, doesn’t it look like his site was designed in 1995?
David Pogue pens a piece on The Flip — an ultra-simple point-and-shoot camcorder that’s taken 13% of the market (according to the manufacturer).
Somebody at Pure Digital must have sat through countless meetings, steadfastly refusing to cede any ground to the forces of feature creep.
And here’s all the stuff it can’t do:
The screen is tiny (1.5 inches) and doesn’t swing out for self-portraits. You can’t snap still photos. There are no tapes or discs, so you must offload the videos to a computer when the memory is full (30 or 60 minutes of footage, depending on whether you buy the $150 or $180 model). There are no menus, no settings, no video light, no optical viewfinder, no special effects, no headphone jack, no high definition, no lens cap, no memory card. And there’s no optical zoom — only a 2X digital zoom that blows up and degrades the picture. Ouch.
And the stuff it can:
Instead, the Flip has been reduced to the purest essence of video capture. You turn it on, and it’s ready to start filming in two seconds. You press the red button once to record (press hard — it’s a little balky) and once to stop. You press Play to review the video, and the Trash button to delete a clip.
Pogue says the secret is that it just simply works. It’s always ready, it’s always trustworthy, it’s always with you. The quality isn’t the sell, the convenience and foolproofery is. You can’t make a mistake, you can’t do anything wrong. Its purpose is pure to the core: Shoot quick videos without thinking about it.
I love it. Kudos to Pure Digital for having the discipline to make a camcorder for the rest of us.
[Hat tip to Chris for the link]
Highrise turns one today. Check out the original launch post from March 20, 2007. And here’s a 36-hour follow-up post with changes based on early feedback. It’s cool to look back at the comments from both posts.
In terms of 12-month revenue growth, Highrise has been our fastest growing product ever. Monthly revenue for Highrise on its first birthday is about 3x Basecamp’s monthly revenue on its first birthday. Of course Basecamp was launched 4 years ago, and Highrise benefits from Basecamp, Backpack, and 37signals’ brand recognition, but we’re really pleased with the growth so far.
If you haven’t yet signed up for Highrise, here’s some extra incentive: Enter coupon code 1YEARHR in the coupon code box during the signup process and you’ll save $10 off your first month. If you already have a Highrise account, you can upgrade your account and use the same coupon code. Just log in, click the Account tab, select a higher plan to upgrade to, and then enter 1YEARHR in the coupon field.
Thanks again for your support. We hope you’re finding Highrise as useful as we are. Check out some recent posts about Highrise on the Product Blog.
Certainly one of the most creative concepts I’ve seen in a long time. What a kick ass idea. Here’s more pictures and information about the artist if you’re interested.
[Thanks for sharing the link, Jeff]