A couple Fridays ago, Carlos Segura, Jason Fried, Jim Coudal, and Edward Lifson (from left to right below) put on the second SEED Conference in frigid Chicago.

Sandy Weisz took some great photos of the event.

A bunch of folks blogged reviews: What I Learned at the SEED Conference | DK Design Studio SEED review | Visual Rinse SEED review | Fishsuit review (with 7-page PDF) | Giant Robots SEED review.

We’re looking forward to SEED III. When we have a date we’ll let everyone know. Thanks again to everyone who attended. We hope you found the conference valuable.

P.S. Special thanks to Sarah for handing registration and administrative details. She made it look easy all while handling a full load of 37signals customer support on a particularly heavy day.

Carlos at Cartype is putting together a gallery of car cut-away diagrams. I’m ever fascinated by how many parts go into making a car. Every little tiny piece has to be designed by someone and manufactured by someone. The precision required to make everything fit and function together reliably blows my mind.

Since the early/middle of 2007 we’ve been hard at work on a new product. It’s something thousands of our customers will use every day, but not a single one of them will sign up for it or log into it. It’s a silent partner. It’s called Queen Bee.

What is Queen Bee?

Queen Bee is the name of our internal unified billing, admin, and stats platform. Prior to Queen Bee, each one of our pay products had a different sign-up process, a different billing engine, a different coupon engine, a different affiliate engine, and a different back-end admin. That was fine for a while, but last year we decided it was time to take advantage of economies of scale and unify.

How about an example?

Many of our customers have multiple Basecamp accounts. Some may also have a Highrise account or a Campfire account.

So, let’s say you have two Basecamp accounts and a Highrise account and you want to update your credit card because it’s about to expire. Before Queen Bee you’d have to log into each account separately, click the Account tab, click the “change card” tab, and update your card. But now all you have to do is pick any account to update and you’ll see a screen that look like this:

You’ll see that if you have multiple accounts with us on the same credit card you’ll be asked if you want to update all the accounts or just one (or two) of the accounts. This makes our customer’s administrative tasks (updating cards, for example) a lot easier. Hassle be gone.

What else can Queen Bee do?

Queen Bee can do a lot of good stuff, but we’re not completely finished porting all our products over to it yet. We just wanted to give you a quick peek at what we’ve been working on. Stay tuned for another taste of royal jelly as Queen Bee development rolls on.

P.S. Big ups to Jamis for his incredible work on Queen Bee so far. From many different angles it’s been our most complex undertaking to date. So many moving parts, so many criticalities, so many hooks and loops and connections. All things considered, it’s been incredibly smooth sailing. Well done Jamis!

EveryBlock, the hyperlocal news/data site from Adrian Holovaty and crew, has launched for Chicago, New York, and San Francisco.

What’s it for? Well, for example, you can see the results of all the restaurant inspections, crimes, business licenses, graffiti cleanup, building violations, etc. in your zip code, your neighborhood, or your street.

If you don’t want to go hyperlocal, you can zoom out. For example, here are all the recent filmings going on in Chicago right now. EveryBlock even lets you know which streets will be closed for block parties, parades, or athletic events.

For more background on this useful new service, check out the about EveryBlock page. I especially like how they’ve designed their own maps — real nice touch.

Adrian first told me about this idea over lunch about a year ago so it’s a real thrill to finally see it launch. Adrian, a fellow Chicagoan, is wonderfully talented and an especially nice guy. He’s a great guitarist too. The team he’s assembled for EveryBlock is top notch. I wish them all the best success with EveryBlock.

Yesterday I got an email from a biz dev guy at a company that syncs data between different applications from different companies.

This was the first line of the email:

I work for an enterprise level integration company that is looking to attack the long tail of the market for point to point integration solutions.

Delete.

Over lunch we were discussing how embarrassing it must be for people to document their college years in such detail in on Youtube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, etc. What looks fun today likely won’t be tomorrow — especially when looking for work.

So we wondered… Wouldn’t it be cool if you could attach expiration dates to images, blog entries, or anything you put on the web? You could say “in 18 months this picture should be deleted” or “3 years from now delete this blog post.”

I know the Wayback Machine keeps archives of just about everything online, but what if expiration dates were a universal truth? So Wayback, or anything else that records the net, would also obey the expiration date rules. It’s your content—why do we assume it has to live forever?

Anyway, just an idea. We liked it at lunch so I figured we’d put it out there on the blog.

American Express Publishing is looking for a Web Developer in New York, NY.

Facebook is looking for a Web/Graphic Designer and a User Experience Researcher in Palo Alto, CA.

Netflix is looking for a Senior Interactive Designer in Los Gatos, CA.

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

Alpinist Magazine is looking for an Art Director in Chicago, IL.

Fyreball is looking for an Interaction designer in Seattle, WA.

Hargray Communication is looking for a Web Designer in Hilton Head, SC.

PixelMEDIA is looking for a Senior Front-End Ninja in Portsmouth, NH.

LECTRIC Internetoplossingen is looking for a Front-end Developer in Zaltbommel, The Netherlands.

Threespot Media is looking for a Senior Software Engineer in Washington DC.

You’ll find more jobs at the 37signals Job Board. And don’t forget the Gig Board for projects or temp gigs.

Chicago-area based TicketsNow was just picked up by Ticketmaster for $265 million.

I’ve been fortunate to meet Mike a few times and have always been impressed by his humble, genuine nature.

He started TicketsNow out of his one-bedroom apartment with no VC in 1999. Last year they sold about $200 million worth of tickets. TicketsNow is an inspirational success story built on a solid vision, hard work, real value, and good decisions.

Congrats to Mike and his entire team.

Mike asks:

I’m at a crossroads with a new project where I have a concept that can be executed in two ways. One execution is significantly more complex to build (and would take much longer) than the other, but could be the deciding factor of how successful the application is. The other execution gets the concept out there faster, but I fear it may lack the profoundness of the full execution and may fall short of its potential.

Assuming you have a vision for what a product should be before you begin development, where do you draw the line between your full realized vision and a core release that gets the concept out there. How do you make the choices about which features define the “soul” of the product versus the features that are not critical for a first release but which you plan to implement later?

My advice is always to err on the side of simple. The more complex something is the greater the chances that something will go wrong. And things will go wrong. You’re better off with less things going wrong early on. Wrong can be overwhelming.

Further, your initial assumptions about how critical a specific feature is often wrong. You don’t want to spend all the extra time up front on something that may or may not be the deciding factor. You’re better off executing the basics at a very high level and then adding on from there. What you thought was essential may surprise you.

Lastly, the longer a product takes to develop, the less likely it will launch. Long projects zap morale. Things get in the way. Life changes. Your time demands shift. Opportunity costs mount. We believe you’re better off launching something small quickly and then building from there. You’ll know more about what the product should really do once it’s actually alive.

As far as knowing exactly where the cutoff point is, that’s more art and gut than science and stats. The way we usually do it is to ask ourselves: “Does what we have now solve most of our problems now?” There’s always more to add and plenty of things to refine, but does what we have now get the job done reasonably well most of the time? If you’re using your product as you build it, and as long as you’re careful not to confuse your needs with “wouldn’t it be cool if…” then you’ll naturally get to the “yup, it’s good to go” point soon enough. That’s when you launch.

Whatever you choose to do, good luck. We hope you succeed.

Got a question for us?

Got a question about design, business, marketing, etc? We’re happy to try to provide some insight into how we’d tackle the problem. Just email svn [at] 37signals dot com with the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks.

Investor’s Business Daily has always been one of my favorite business papers, but I stopped getting it years ago. I just didn’t want to deal with the leftovers—the stacks of paper full of yesterday’s news.

However, when I got the Kindle I was excited to see that Investor’s Business Daily was one of the available newspaper subscriptions. $5.99 a month for the electronic version was a done deal.

This morning I read an article that made me smile. I love stories about people who’ve achieved huge things against all odds. I’m a sucker for that sort of thing.

The piece was on Sidney Weinberg, the former Chairman of Goldman Sachs. He was Chairman for four decades in the early to mid 1900s.

Sidney wasn’t formally educated. He didn’t have an MBA. He didn’t go to college. He didn’t even graduate from high school. He was just a determined, ambitious mail room clerk who wanted to do big things.

Read the rest of his story — it’s pretty incredible.