HOW’s 2006 Business Annual (subscribers and the newsstands should be getting it soon) features an 8-page spread on 37signals.

The piece talks about our beginnings as a design consultancy, then on to Basecamp, Rails, Backpack, Campfire, etc. We also talk about Less, our culture, Getting Real, working remotely, why we believe in the power of small, etc.

We’re really happy how the article turned out. Big thanks to Lisa Baggerman Hazen, the Chicago-based writer and web designer who penned the piece. Lisa was great to work with. Check out her extensive design and writing portfolio.

So, thanks again to HOW and Lisa for the piece! We really do appreciate it.

This is a fascinating look at how one man has demonstrated that he can lift a 22,000 lbs concrete pillar upright and move a barn over 300 ft on his own just using a few basic elements (and no modern technology at all). [via jk]

Stuff like this is so inspirational. It encourages you to look at what you’ve got, where you want to go, and give it a try. Chances are you can do it if you embrace the constraints and force yourself into a creative solution. It reminds me of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous quote: “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”

Lexus is well known for pushing the technological envelope in their cars. Radar cruise control, automated parallel parking (you control the speed and it does the steering), the industry’s first eight-speed automatic transmission, and so on.

But now the Lexus LS 460 can monitor your own body temperature and adjust the cabin temperature accordingly. A little too clever maybe?

Can a computer really know better than you how comfortable you are? Lexus is betting on it.

For a limited time, when you upgrade your Basecamp, Campfire, or Backpack account from either free to pay, or from pay to pay, you’ll save $10 on your first month if you enter code 37SVN into the coupon code box on the upgrade screen.

To upgrade, log into your account, click the account tab/link, and click the upgrade button under the plan you want to upgrade to.

Note: We can not apply this coupon to past upgrades or upgrades today before this was announced at 4:30pm CST. And we can not apply the coupon if you forget to enter it or if you enter it incorrectly. So if you want $10 off your first month be sure to enter it correctly.

We hope you enjoy the savings and our products! Thanks for your business.

Some recent gigs from the Gig Board. Gigs postings are $100 for 30 days.

Lead Developer for SMS-based application in Washington DC. Budget is $10,000 and the time frame is 4 weeks.

Experienced ExpressionEngine developer needed. Telecommute OK. Site needs to be live by Christmas 2006.

Freelance Interactive Producer/Project Manager needed for creating a CRM package for a high-end/luxury brand in NYC. Time frame is about 8 – 11 weeks.

Build a web/mobile app. Telecommute OK. Preference for rapid development environ like Rails and for open source solutions.

Graphic designer for series of Logos. Telecommute OK, budget is negotiable.

Kickass WordPress Theme Developers wanted for ongoing blog development projects (sometimes video blogs for entertainers, sometimes corporate blogs—it varies), we need designers who can take our wireframe sketches from concept to implemented WordPress theme. Telecommute OK.

Need help with a project? Looking for a freelancer or contractor to give you a hand? Need some temporary work? Post an ad on the Gig Board and find the right match. It’s only $100 for 30 days. And if you are looking to fill a full time position, the Job Board may be right for you.

On the 5th anniversary of the iPod, Steve Jobs talks with Newsweek about the iPod’s cultural impact.

Steve nails the money shot with this answer:

QUESTION: Microsoft has announced its new iPod competitor, Zune. It says that this device is all about building communities. Are you worried?

ANSWER: In a word, no. I’ve seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

What an answer. With a subtle style all his own he’s saying Microsoft = Cold tech and Apple = Humanity. MS scares her away, Apple gets the girl. That’s a sharp, clear, and powerful distinction. Whether it’s true is up to the customer, but Jobs understands how to bait the hook like few others.

Our friends and fellow Chicagoans at Threadless finally got their Chicago media due in this long piece in the Chicago Tribune Magazine [registration may be required]. It’s about time the Chicago press noticed a few dropouts in their 20s selling nearly $20,000,000 worth of T-shirts on Ravenswood Avenue.

“It certainly doesn’t hurt our PR when we go to speak and stuff like that to say, ‘Yeah, we turned down Target. We turned down Urban,’ ” Kalmikoff says. “But honestly, a little bit of it was laziness. We were like, ‘Well, who’s gonna fill out all this paperwork? I’m not doing it. Are you gonna do it?’ It just sat for like two weeks. Then we’re like, ‘Just tell ‘em no.’ We couldn’t take the time away from our client work for our side project to be filling out the paperwork to get into Target.”

I love it. That pretty much sums up Threadless to me. They do it their way, they have fun doing it, and they do it better than anyone.

It’s not the technology, it’s the experience. It’s simple sharing. It’s easy embedding. It’s reliable viewing. It’s “when I share a YouTube video with someone I know they’re going to be able to see it no matter which browser, computer, or OS they have.” That’s what makes YouTube YouTube.

But you won’t hear that from AOL or Microsoft — two companies that were considered YouTube suitors before Google swept in and closed the deal.

What you’ll hear from them are lines like this:

“The AOL guys would’ve loved to have got YouTube. We looked but decided AOL has not only better technology but it’s also in-house,” said Dick Parsons, CEO of Time Warner, which owns AOL.” (source)

“Microsoft evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago, and decided to build our own offering, focused on driving better customer and advertiser experiences through integration with Microsoft assets and services that reach an estimated global audience of 465 million consumers,” said spokeswoman Whitney Burk in a statement. “We are excited about the potential we are seeing in the beta of Soapbox on MSN and believe building our own solution is a more cost-effective way to compete in this new space.” (source)

Both AOL and Microsoft take the “we have better tech in-house” stand. That’s why YouTube wasn’t attractive.

It wasn’t that YouTube was overvalued or YouTube has significant legal battles ahead that AOL and Microsoft didn’t want to absorb. It was that YouTube’s technology wasn’t up to snuff.

Never mind that YouTube was streaming millions of videos a day and never seemed to be down. Never mind that YouTube is the leading video viewing/sharing site by a wide margin. Never mind that the public likes YouTube. Never mind that YouTube movies are embedded with Flash which everyone already has. Never mind that nearly every email I’ve gotten from anyone in the past year saying “hey, check out this video” lead to a YouTube video. Never mind that my parents actually know what YouTube is but have never heard of AOLs “technology” or Microsoft’s Soapbox. Never mind any of that. Just mind the technology.

Can AOL and Microsoft beat YouTube down the road? Anything is possible, but they’re making it awful hard on themselves if they think technology is what’s going to win this race. Technology rarely wins the race — experience and execution does. YouTube nailed that. Time will tell if they nailed a few coffins at the same time.

Here are a few of the most recent job postings on the Job Board.

Kansas State University is looking for an Web Developer for Special Projects in Manhattan, KS.

Mentel Inc. is looking for a Senior LAMP developer in Montreal, Canada.

Wesabe is looking for a Web Developer (Programming) in Berkeley, CA.

StyleFeeder is looking for an Marketing/Business Development Executive in Cambridge, MA

Avenue A|Razorfish is looking for a Associate Creative Director in Chicago, IL.

Behavior Design is looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer in NYC.

The Robot Co-op is looking for a System Administrator in Seattle, WA.

Today we launch the new(ish) Signal vs. Noise. Well, it’s not all that new on your end, but it’s all new on our end.

We’ve been using Movable Type since the early days. But thousands of posts and tens of thousands of comments later, it’s just gotten a little too slow for us. If you’ve tried to post a comment anytime in the past year you’ve noticed it may take up to a minute or more for that comment to be saved. That really took the fun out of commenting.

So we went off and built our own little blog engine that could. It’s not a product we’re going to sell or share, it’s just something we put together for our own use. Now SvN is blazing fast again. Eventually it will allow us to do a few more things around here we’ve been thinking about doing but didn’t have the software to do it. And in the spirit of our camping product names, internally we call this software Blog Cabin.

We decided not to copy over all the old posts to the new system. It was messy and there were weird formatting issues that just weren’t worth dealing with. You can still get to the old posts, and you can of course search for them in the sidebar as well. They’re all still there in static HTML.

So here we go. We hope you enjoy the speed of the new system. And as time goes on we hope you like some of the new things you’ll see around here.