Last week I kicked off a Seth Godin action figure competition. I'll keep it open for a few more days and announce the winner early next week. It's not too late to enter.

The entries are so good I think I may well have to hand out several prizes. The weirdest photo category will be particularly hard fought.

So far Jim Kring, Tom Randle, Mr Flibble, embe and s3a have all submitted photos.

If you want to see Seth being attacked by a teddy bear, upside down in a glass of cider, posing as Lenin, reading his little book of marketing secrets or tied up as Darth Vader's prisoner then check out the photos on the original competion post.

Just an FYI, if you haven’t subscribed to me on Twitter please do. I still write here from time to time, but it’s hard to find the time for full blog posts these days. The low commitment level of Twitter allows me to normally post several times a day. You’ll also get more details about ongoing HelpSpot development than here as I sometimes Twit about what I’m working on right then.

I feel like it's all been said already, but since that's never stopped me from talking before... ;)

Wow, SocialDevCamp was amazing.

First, the opening were great. Ken Yeung was good enough to catch some of the opening discussion on Viddler. Look past the chaos for a minute and see how order appears and negotiations happen implicity. It's amazing how when you have a lot of smart people around and competing interests that we can work something out without anyone being *too* disappointed. We started with 25+ sessions and were able to filter it down to 16 pretty easily. We had 4 sessions going concurrently throughout.

For sessions, I attended:

• a detailed discussion on Amazon EC2 and S3. Jimmy Garnder - the creator of MyDropBin, a simple S3 front end - was in attendance in addition to numerous EC2 users doing some advanced things. The ideas, information, and usage kicked around was pretty impressive.
• I popped in and out of the second session, but luckily Ken also caught that on video: Social Media & Semantic Web from Dr. harry Chen. The bits and pieces that I caught were fascinating and touched on Taxonomies, Ontologies, and other things with names. ;)
• I hosted the third session of the day on "Building the Social Hub" where we talked about integrating with third-party platforms. This was an interesting one to follow the Semantic Web discussion because Bear of Seesmic shared all kinds of tips, tricks, and ideas to integrate things indirectly via semantic web concepts.

 

The final discussion was hosted by Jared Goralnick of AwayFind (sponsor) and discussed the idea of the DC-Baltimore-Philly tech corridor and deserves a discussion of its own. We talked details about what makes us different than Silicon Valley, how we can benefit and utilize those differences, how we can close the gap on others and generally spark things moving faster. One of the single biggest differences that strikes me - and I noted it during the discussion - is the DC Tech Scene's view of competition. Yes, we compete, but we're all connected too. We don't tend to compete against each other... we're working together and fighting the same fights, so we cooperate and coordinate. I don't see that in Silicon Valley or from my friend there. It's a different idea. After the main discussion, Clarence Wooten of CollectiveX shared his term for it: cooper-tition. Mario Armstong of NPR/XM shared some experiences working with O'Malley when he was still Mayor of Baltimore.

Afterwards the festivities at Brewers' Art were fantastic. We ended up with just a little more funds than we expected, so towards the end, the food ended up being on the same tab. I also shared some tips with Mario on some ideas for using Social Networks for competitive research. I've shared some of those ideas in this space... some are staying off the record. ;)

And finally, Dave & Jennifer Troy, Ann Bernard, and myself acted as the organizers/cat herders of the operation. While I've received dozens of emails, calls, im's, and dm's thanking me/us for everything, but I think a good portion of that is misplaced. Yes, Dave found the venue. Yes, we all contacted sponsors. Yes, we all got the word out and pushed people to show up. Yes, Ann coordinated presentation selection and handled... announcements. ;) But it's leaving out the biggest part...

The participants.... Without the people who showed up, who volunteered, who volunteered to speak, who asked questions, who gave their opinions, who shared drinks after, who kicked around and tore apart ideas... the whole thing wouldn't have worked. That's what an unconference is. It's self-organizing and the good bits and information float to the top and the real experts and opinions filter out. That's what happens.

And if you don't believe me on how much people enjoyed it... check out the generous coverage:

Jimmy Gardner (sponsor), Shashi B of Network Solutions (sponsor), Ann Bernard (organizer) on WhyGoSolo and her own blog, Dave Troy (organizer), Ken Yeung, and Greg Cangialosi (sponsor).  There's a larger sample of the coverage in Twitter via Hashtags and Summarize.

For a more visual review, check out SocialDevCamp on Flickr, Jimmy's photo collage, Mark Scrimshire's photo collage or maybe the videos from Ken Yeung or Dave Troy.

The final - and my favorite video - is from Shashi B. Yes, I'm in it and the first half is dedicated to WhyGoSolo, but the second half is key. In the second half, I share how we managed to collect the last 20% of the funds to pull off SocialDevCamp East. If you ever doubt that one of these events are community driven, listen to that half of the video and think about it. This unconference happened because of the community, because of the participants, and we - Dave, Ann, and I - were simply lining people up in the same direction.

I heard this interview with Michael Moritz, the Sequoia Capital venture capitalist, on Radio 4 the other day. It's well worth 30 minutes of your time. Moritz talks about his journey from childhood in Wales, history degree at Oxford, journalist for Time magazine and on to Sequoia where he has invested in, among other companies, Google, Apple, Yahoo!, PayPal and Cisco.

Here's an excerpt (apologies for the ropey and inaccurate transcript):

Peter Day: Many investors throw their money at lots of investment targets, hope that two or three will be survivors and that one will be a superstar success.

Michael Moritz: That isn't how things are done at Sequoia. It's not the way you think of it. Every single time you write a cheque you expect, or pray, depending on your inclination, for that investment to succeed.

You can hear the interview as .ram streaming audio, or a downloadable mp3 (note the interview doesn't start until about a minute in). The Radio 4 web page is here.

In July I will be giving a keynote address at GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, being held this year in Istanbul.

In September I will be speaking again at the Business of Software conference, being held this year in Boston.

And finally, for something completely different, don't miss the Jam Session at Tech-Ed on June 3^rd.  Several of us minions from SourceGear are planning to take the stage and give our rendition of Pinball Wizard.  It'll be me on acoustic guitar, our development manager Jeremy Sheeley on bass, and our product manager Paul Roub playing the Evil Mastermind Schecter PT that will be given away later that week.

And BTW, none of us will be dressed as The Evil Mastermind.  This should be obvious, as The Evil Mastermind would never do something actually cool like a song by The Who.  Rather, he would do something like a Kelly Clarkson song and mistakenly believe it was cool.  :-)

I've seen some write-ups on preventing software piracy and cracking in your applications, but this one is absolutely amazing:

http://www.inner-smile.com/nocrack.phtml

Steve Friedl wrote this page about credit card forms on eCommerce sites asking users to format their card numbers a certain way. As a tech savvy person, I completely understand where he's coming from. As someone who has done a lot of customer support for eCommerce sites, I think I can provide some feedback as to why this happens so much.

What I really disagree with from the page:
"If there were some security or integrity reason for disallowing these characters, I guess I'd buy it, but I've not found a single good reason for it. The consensus among those that I've spoken to is that it's nothing but lazy, sloppy programming. I completely agree."

Ouch.

I guess he is frustrated that programmers can't put in some simple regex or other string parsing routine to change the format of the numbers, but that's not really the point, it's not about our ability as programmers to do this - it's quite easy, agreed, and though I'm not sure about this, some of those forms he highlighted may actually do the regex after the form is submitted.

It's actually about customer support.

Believe it or not, sales are lost because people don't know if they are supposed to put spaces or dashes when typing their credit card number. You literally have to tell people exactly what to do when it comes to your order forms. Any questions, and people will walk away.

It's absolutely true. It was more true back in 99, but it still happens today. I will get an email from a potential customer on one of the eCommerce websites I help manage, prior to purchasing, asking me whether or not they need to put their middle initial with their name on a credit card form, or if they are supposed to put dashes or spaces in their card number.

Having these "no dashes or spaces" statements and restrictions on credit card forms comes from years of handling customer support issues and then applying that knowledge to the setup of an eCommerce site. After 2 people email with the same question, and after possibly losing 1 or 2 sales, most of us just slap this language on the forms without thinking twice about it.

If someone has to ask themselves even one question about their purchase with you, many times, they simply will not buy.

A personal purchasing story:

I was just about to purchase a great "skinning" component for my apps that made them look very pretty, but during the purchase process, I wasn't sure if I should buy a "single developer" license or a "company" license - all because the language didn't make sense to me. I was only going to use this component on a SINGLE development PC, but I was going to use it within my COMPANY for a commercial product.

I didn't buy the component right away.

I even emailed first to ask which license I should buy.

The email bounced back. Gah. Now they definitely aren't getting my order.


Customer Support Story:

One customer kept entering 10/04, 10-04, 1004, etc for the expiration date on their credit card. They emailed saying it wouldn't let them through to make the order and they've tried every possibility for their expiration date.

Turned out their card expired in September. That would be 09/04 :)

From then on, expiration date fields are made up of 2 drop downs:

Jan-1
Feb-2
Mar-3
etc
/
2008
2009
2010
etc

*************************************

Lastly, think of it this way:

Have you ever stood in line at the grocery store, swiped your debit card, then it said to enter your pin, hit the green OK button, then the Yes button?

Then you go across the street to the hardware store, swipe your debit card, and it wants your pin, hit the third key in from the top to say Yes, then the big OK button, then you are done?

Have you ever noticed that some of these places have little pieces of paper scotch-taped to them to help people understand what to push and when?

It's the same thing online. Everywhere you go it's a little different. We, as vendors, must provide every instruction needed to make it through the buying process because we aren't right there to help them, they need that little message scotch-taped to the order form.

I recently got my hands on a copy of the book Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads. Overall I have to say it was a very good book, it really explained a lot of the key concepts in web conversions at a high level (sales conversions, lead conversions, etc.). For example I know our site isn’t perfect, and we already have a lot of work planned towards this end, but what I really liked is that most of the “enhancements” we’re planning for the future are described in this book. At least at a high level. This book is not about the details of the implementation, but it’s a high level description of what needs to be done and why.

Which is the key thing to remember about this book, it’s written at a high level, meaning it’s aimed at people who are newer to the concepts of website conversions (sales, leads, etc.). Therefore if you’re already well seasoned on concepts such as sales conversions it won’t be as exciting for you. It’s not as detailed or thorough as books like Call to Action, but it’s still very good. This book will be especially interesting for you if you’ve been mainly focusing your attention on traffic generation and ignoring any efforts on items such as sales conversions, etc..

I’d highly recommend this book for anyone who has a website where they’d like to increase their conversions, be it sales, leads, etc. It’s a good introduction and will get you going. What I really appreciated was the “Digging Deeper” chapter at the end. The authors really hand picked the best books and websites on the market to recommend as further resources to investigate. Personally I’ve almost read every single book they recommended, as well as follow most of the websites they recommended. Some examples of the books they recommended (which I’ve recommended - even reviewed - before here on my blog) include: Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, Call to Action: Secret Formulas to Improve Online Results, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. And some examples of the websites they recommend include: Marketing Sherpa, Guy Kawasaki’s website and blog,

Overall I recommend this book, especially if you’re just starting to get into the market of increasing the performance of your website. It’s not as advanced as some of the other books out there, but that’s not it’s intention. It’s a great book to start with and build up from. Well worth the purchase.

A weekly roundup of Micro ISV news, announcements and relevant blog posts.

News and Announcements

• Paul launched YesCalculator, a calculator. via BoS.
• Give away of the day results on BoS (followup).
• BdJ results from Follow Steph.

Relevant Blog Posts and Articles

• Why making a fool of yourself is a good thing, from Neil Davidson.
• It's the tech guy, obviously, from KC.
• Amazon S3 for Micro ISVs, from 47hats.
  Also, Information overload tips for Micro ISVs.
• 7 steps to speed up your technical support, from Dennis Crane.
• Notes from MIT Underground 2008, from OnStartups.
• The evolution of a software startup, from Instigator.

Further (mostly relevant) Reading

• That big project and your relationship, from WWD.
• The art of war for entrepreneurs, from Pam Slim.
• What do you know? from Seth Godin.
• Big Bucks from tiny computing startups, from Information Week.
• Aesop's top 7 tips for a happier life, from The Positivity Blog.

Tags: microisv digest entrepreneurship startups shareware

...just don't blog.

Research your Processor

Having never overclocked a PC in my life the first step was to do some research. Just entering overclocking into Google gives plenty of resources for you to read up on the topic. To narrow it down trying entering the name of your processor as well, chances are you will find plenty of people giving reports on how they overclocked your exact processor.

I found several people that had overclocked the QX9650 to around the 4Ghz level without much difficulty. The more serious overclockers have managed 4.5Ghz using just air cooling. While I am not interested in trying to reach such record breaking levels, if there is some free extra processing power available then I might as well grab it.

Overclocking Tools

Getting started means downloading some tools. Start with the excellent CPU-Z utility which gives detailed feedback on your machines setup. Next you need a tool that can be used to stress test the processor and memory to check if your new settings are stable. I used OCCT which was created by a group of French overclockers and is really simple to use. It thrashes all four cores and memory and when it detects a stability problem gives a nice sound effect to alert you.

The bane of all overclockers is the processor temperature, I used SpeedFan to monitor and graph the temp of all four cores. No point in running fast if that expensive silicone is being turned into cheap charcoal.

Baseline

As all good programmers know, measuring performance requires a baseline set of data to use as a point of comparison. Here is the default setup of the hardware via CPU-Z…

To measure the real world performance of the machine I am going to use my build script. There are plenty of synthetic tools to measure the raw performance of memory, processor, graphics and so forth. But as far as I’m concerned I want to see the benefit in real work and not just some theoretical benchmark. Running the build of Krypton game a time slightly over 36 minutes…

Note that I only ran this test just once. To be more accurate I should have run it half a dozen times and taken an average of the different times. But frankly I am not bothered with that level of accuracy and don’t want to spend 3 hours gathering the data.

Updating the BIOS

Doing the actual overclocking is simple. Enter the BIOS at startup and then modify the cpu multiplier. You can see in the CPU-Z picture above that the default multiple of 9 gives a 3GHz speed based on the base 333Mhz speed of the bus. I can increase this in 0.5 increments via te BIOS and so did just that. Adding 0.5 and then running the OCCT stability test for 30 minutes to ensure it was stable and watching SpeedFan to ensure the processor was not cooking.

Repeating this process I managed to get a stable system with a multiple of 10.5 giving a cpu speed of 3.496Ghz with the temp peaking at around 63c. Going above this caused the system to become unstable with regular crashes.

In order to get stable again I increased the voltage to the cpu. Usually this will solve the instability at the cost of running the cpu hotter. Slowly increasing the voltage caused the temp to increase markedly and too much for my liking. Once I was getting 75c I decide to stop as I don’t want to fry a very expensive processor. 

Note that I am using the stock Intel cpu fan that comes with the processor. Switching to an aftermarket cooler/fan would probably have reduced the temperature enough to get a higher stable multiple. I did buy a Zalman fan for my machine but it was far to noisey for me to tolerate listening to all day long, so I switched it out for the stock fan before starting the overclocking.

I now changed tack and tried overclocking the bus speed, giving a boost to the FSB and the processor at the same time. This has the added benefit that you can make small increments in the cpu speed rather than having to jump in large increments.

Starting from the default of 333Mhz I upped the value a little at a time until the system become unstable. Then backing up to the last good setting I managed to achieve 340Mhz. This gives a FSB speed of 1360 and ups the processor to 3.570Ghz. You can see the settings here…

This seems to be about the best I can manage. If the cpu is any faster the temperature goes to high for my liking and making the bus faster results in an unstable system. This is someway short of the 4Ghz that others report but the I am using a stock Intel fan for cooling and bog standard DDR2 memory.

Real world performance

But how does this impact actual real world performance? Running our build script we now get just under 31 minutes…

This represents an improvement of 16% which is very close to the actual processor overclocking of 19%. Given the build process includes a fair amount of reading/writing to disk this is very respectable. I then ran the OCCT stability test for 9 hours overnight and it didn’t crash. So I feel confident in leaving these settings alone and running with them all the time. After all, why turn down a free speedup of 500Mhz!

Intel Observations

It seems strange that Intel are releasing processors that seem to be capable of running so much faster. Why would you sell processors rated at 3Ghz when clearly they can run much faster? Obviously they are going to sell them with a safety margin but the difference between the rating and actual maximum speed seems odd.

I don’t remember previous generations from either AMD or Intel having this level of overclocking ability. Are Intel deliberately holding back because they already have a big performance lead over AMD? If AMD start to catch up would Intel suddenly start selling faster rated processors? I wonder.

Hot out of the Helium Foot Software Forge is MercuryMover v1.1.2. Get it right here. 1.1.2 fixes a long standing latent issue that caused MercuryMover to crash on start after a reboot. Fortunately, this issue only affected Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) users. Fortunately (for me) i have some of those users as customers! Unfortunately for those customers, they had to reinstall MercuryMover after each reboot. Although it's downright embarrassing to release a bug like that into the wild, this cloud is not without a silver lining. There were a number of customers that helped me track this bug down by sending in bug reports, console logs and preference files and i always enjoy meeting and corresponding with my customers. ...

I'm becoming an increasingly big fan of infrastructure services like Amazon's EC2 and S3. The reason is simple: You pay for what you need at around the time that you need it. This is the point I made when recently interviewed by Erica Naoone of MIT Technology Review in an article aptly and succinctly titled "Cheap Infrastructure".

In the interview I was my usual, highly opinionated self, but this particular statement that made it into the article jumped out at me: "There's no correlation between the amount of money an entrepreneur actually needs and the money a venture capitalist puts into the business." Of course, there are some qualifiers here: I'm talking about software companies and I'm talking about the Series A investment (first institutional money). Also, if I had done the interview in writing, I likely would have said there's little correlation instead of no correlation. But, my larger point still stands. The way the system works, you often don't raise what you need, you raise what you can.

But lets shift gears just a little bit, before we get deeper into the VC funding stuff.

In the early stages of an internet startup, one thing that's always difficult is predicting the level of infrastructure that is needed to support the volume of users/customers. Entrepreneurs often overestimate how popular their software is going to be. There's also the notion that too much infrastructure is better than to little because "you only have one chance to make a first impression." Finally, there's that whole nagging thing about reliability and uptime.

The net result, before EC2/S3 and similar services, there were few options. Costs were relatively high and somewhat "spiky" (you bought a few servers, threw them into a co-lo, bought more servers, etc.). There wasn't a good way to handle this common situation: "Hey, we only have X users right now, and we expect to grow by Y%, but we need to make sure we can handle Z users just in case we get written up on TechCrunch or get on the front page of digg." You ended up compromising somewhere. Either you spent little (and dealt with spikes if/when they came as best you could) or spent too much, resulting in a fair amount of "unused capacity".

Now, back to the VC funding part. When my co-founder, Brian Halligan first kicked off HubSpot, we thought a lot about the capital needs of the company. I funded the seed round. We later successfully raised some angel funding -- about $1 million. We felt that was enough to get us to the next "milestone" (product launch). The rationale we had was reasonable: Raise a little money early, raise more money later. By raising money "closer to when we needed it", we felt we could continue to reduce the risk, increase the value of the company, and ultimately dilute less. And in fact, this is how the VC process sort of works. You raise a Series A, Series B, etc. and each round is targeted at getting a company to the next "milestone". The problem is, it's awfully "spiky" . This led us to ponder the other side of this spectrum. In theory, the "optimal" path would be for us to sell just enough shares every month based on the cash needs of the company at whatever the right "price" is at that time.

In a way, the Y Combinator folks do this as the first step. They give founders just enough to get through the first few months and build a prototype. Many of the YC startups then go on to raise follow-on funding from VCs. But at that point, the funding process looks like the usual -- it becomes "spiky" again. We don't have a pure incrementally scaling model for startup funding anywhere.

Of course this scalable funding model probably only works in theory -- and even then, it's a stretch. There are lots of reasons why this doesn't work in practice. Here are just a few:

1. There's no efficient way to appropriately "price" the shares that frequently.

2. Entrepreneurs don't want to worry about whether they'll have the cash they need next month.

3. There's likely not going to be agreement on how much cash should be burned month-to-month.

4. There'd likely be some friction and transaction costs.

There are ways to mitigate some of these challenges, but I still don't think it's practical and would work. My VC friends (and yes, I do have those), would likely agree.

But, the geeky and analytical side of me still finds the purity of this model appealing for the same reason I like Amazon's EC2. You get what you need and grow incrementally instead of spikily (yeah, I made the word up).

What do you think? Yes, the idea is crazy and wouldn't work, but just how crazy is it?

---

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Original Article
Copyright 2007, Dharmesh Shah - OnStartups - Software Startup Blog

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In the latest version of Presio, we have redesigned the Review Tab. We’ve divided the “Review” process into two,  more logical (and functional) options called: Preview and Edit. Using the Preview tab, you are now able to see what your Presio published presentation will look like to your end viewers, before actually publishing it. The audio/video plays back and all the slides are in synch with the media.

The Edit tab allows you to modify your project by managing captured slides and clips that have already been recorded/imported. You can change slide titles, slide notes, or slide time points.  You may also import/export clips and slides as well as use the new crop tool to trim any clip within Presio.

To understand how the features of the Review Tab work, take look at the screencast:

http://www.ipresent.net/support/tutorials/review_tab_overview/index.html

Apologies for the lack of posts. I've had a couple of weeks on holiday on the fantastic North Yorkshire Moors Railway. I'm not a trainspotter, but the kids simply love it, and Grosmont is a village in a time vortex.

I was getting twitchy about being disconnected for two whole weeks, but you know what, it was great.

Normal posting will resume on Monday.

It's Friday afternoon, so I hope my readers will indulge me a bit of gloating over three recent moments of personal triumph:

1. Playing the 12^th hole at my regular course, I made a shot from about 80 yards out.  Unfortunately, it was for par.  :-(
   
   
2. This past Saturday I walked the Indianapolis half marathon in a personal record time of 14:57 per mile.
   
   
3. After setting up my new subwoofer, I put in the Return of the King DVD and zoomed ahead to the Minas Tirith battle scenes.  Seconds later, my younger daughter ran upstairs and cried, "Daddy, your movie is shaking the whole house!"

All three of these were moments of great personal satisfaction.  The third one was the only one to result in maniacal laughter.

I learned some time ago - and this has been reinforced many times since - that my sense of humour is not a good guide to marketing decisions. Luckily, other people at Red Gate quickly overrule me any time I try to get involved in marketing. That's why, if you visit Red Gate's stand at Tech Ed this June, you'll get a funky Red Gate t-shirt rather than a cool pair of Red Gate underpants.

Occasionally, and regrettably, I get my own way though. And that's almost always a mistake. That's why I sent out 140 Seth Godin dolls out to last year's attendees of Business of Software 2007. Seth is speaking at Business of Software 2008, and I thought this would be a really cool way of getting people who came last year to sign up to this year's conference.

They seem to have sunk without trace.

Or have they? I want to find out. I'm running a photo competition. If you have a Seth Godin doll (from me, or maybe you have one anyway) then e-mail a photo of your Seth doll to me at neil.davidson@businessofsoftware.org, and I'll post it up.  The more interesting the better. Assuming that anybody enters (a big assumption), I'll send out a copy of one of Seth's books to what I judge to be the best photo.

[Update: you can't post images in typepad comments so you'll need to e-mail me the photo and I'll post it up]

The entries

Jim Kring:

My entries:

Here is Tom Randle's entry:

You can see another of Tom's Seth Godin photos, and read the story behind this one, at Tommy Toast's flickr stream.

Mr Flibble's entry:

Mr Flibble's flickr stream is well worth a look too.

These three are from embe:

This one from s3a is called I said bring me a Sith, with an i!

You can find a larger version at s3a's flickr stream.

MicroISVs live, breath and swim in a supersaturated solution of information, so I’m always on the lookout for new/better ways of coping, especially tips from people I respect. Hope springs eternal that someone, somewhere, other than Tim Ferriss, has mastered the art of staying on the crest of the Info Wave day after day, month after month.

Google Blogoscoped is one of those blogs I rss to keep up to date for hat #5 (writing for Web Worker Daily). They have good stuff. So today when I saw, Tips for Dealing with Information Overload with advice from the likes of Matt Cutts and Noam Chomsky, my hopes rose that this bunch of smart people might have some really good insight I could grab.

Alas, there’s no magic bullet, app, technique, incantation, RSS reader or email filter. Of the 14 tips, most are common email/rss sense, a few illuminaries confess to information bankruptcy and Dave Winer plays Merry Prankster.

Here’s the best tip of the lot. It’s brutal, but it’s so right:

Shelley Powers, Burningbird.net: «Frankly, the people who are having problems with information overflow are people who want the information overflow. We’re all big boys and girls here. We don’t need specialized technology or social gurus to tell us when we’ve subscribed to too many feeds, or are on too many social networks. We don’t need calendaring software to tell us when we’ve taken on more work than we can handle. What we need to do is prioritize the demands on our attention, and when we find ourselves overwhelmed, lop off the bottom distractions.

In all honesty, people who talk about how “noisy” their lives are one moment, while extolling the virtues of Twitter for FriendFeed the next would be the first distractions to go, and easily. Other distractions may be more difficult to drop, but if we want to be known for something other than “she gave great Twitter”, we have to make the decision, and live with the loss.»

If you spend more time on your email/rss feeds than you do building your microISV/startup (Bad Developer, Bad!), give this post a quick read, check out the page I have on GTD at 47hats.com. And give yourself a pat on the back for wading through another week of Too Much Information in no worse condition than some of the brighter lights on the net.

I'm looking forward to BarCamp Boston coming up on May 17th and 18th. If you're in the Boston area, and reading this, you're probably just the type that should be attending.

1. How To Run ASP.NET Apps on Google App Engine

2. Why RoR Doesn't Rock: Productivity Is For Pansies

3. How To Install and Run Firefox on Windows Vista SP2

4. How To Tie a Tie Without Strangling Yourself

5. Careers in COBOL: Not An Oxymoron

6. Learning RSS: Because It's Really Not So Simple

7. Stylesheets? We don't need no stinkin' stylesheets: If Al Gore wanted us to separate content from presentation, he would have included CSS when he invented the Internet.

Yes, I know, humor is not a talent of mine. Don't worry, I don't plan to quit my day job. In any case, register and attend BarCamp Boston 3. I promise there will be funnier people there.

---

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Original Article
Copyright 2007, Dharmesh Shah - OnStartups - Software Startup Blog

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We took a quite open way in development when we started working on Dead Wake game. We set up the forums and started launching a public version every 1-2 months. Right from the beginning.

I’ve been pleased with this experiment and can confirm that having some kind of versions right from the start does a world of good to any project.

Here’s some good things that have happened thanks to opening the development to the public:

• We’ve got players to test the game. We have set up a mailing list where we announce big events related to the project. There are signups coming everyday.
• We are getting quite a lot of publicity. Reviews such as this come out of nowhere. People & press are listening to our story and writing about us.
• Players are getting more and more involved: gamers at the Dead Wake forums say that “we need to do”. They are not calling “you should do”, they are taking the product ownership and saying that “we are doing the game”. I find this very important. The players are involved in the design - and they like it.

And of course there’s always some challenges which one could consider:

• It takes time to promote the game: I have not put much effort to promote the game, but it could take a lot more if I wanted. So far I’ve wanted (almost) everybody else to handle the promotion, while we focus on developing the game. I’ve sent some press releases and given some answers to those who have been interested, but that’s pretty much it.
• It takes time to manage the community: luckily we’ve been fortunate to have great, positive people who have contributed - and helped to moderate the forums. The more popular the forums grow, the more moderators we shall take. Naturally this takes some time away from development, but good moderators can be really valuable resource.

Magazines and players seem to get astonished when we say that we develop the game according to customer ideas (as long as they fit in the core idea of the game): it makes a good press story. And it helps making the game such that our players really enjoy it.

If you liked this entry, feel free to visit GameProducer.net to read more similar articles.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately as to whether or not Presio templates can be customized or not. Presio ships with a set of webcast templates for both audio and video presentations and for a particular media output format. You can see some examples here.

You may however, create your own custom player templates. With some basic HTML skills, you can customize any aspect of an existing template or create a new one from scratch.

Here’s a screencast tutorial that shows an example of customizing the “Default” template by creating a new version with one key modification to meet your needs:
http://ipresent.net/support/tutorials/custom_templates2