This morning I was walking around Capitol Hill listening to the opening keynote that Zappos’s CEO Tony Hseih gave at SXSW on company culture and good customer service. I think this is a must listen to. Like, listen to this right now.
If you’re in a position of leadership, it’s important because you’re going to walk away with some solid nuggets about how to run your business. If you’re an employee, it will give you some things to look for when you decide where you want to work.
I feel incredibly blessed. I believe that our leadership team at Clearspring, especially our CEO Hooman Radfar, really gets what Tony is talking about in this keynote. I feel like we have a great company culture, where folks are excited to go to work everyday. We also put a high premium on quality customer service.
It’s true. I’m kind of in love with TweetDeck. It’s a Twitter client that lets me see everything that’s going on in my world with all of my friends.
Well they just did something which took the usefulness of the product to a whole new level. They integrated Facebook statuses, to which I can dedicate a whole column of my TweetDeck. It’s pretty AWESOME.
I wish Facebook would let TweetDeck pull down more then just the status updates because then I could really abandon going to Facebook.com but this is good for now.
I thought this was pretty fascinating. TechCrunch has a story on some new comScore numbers around Mobile Web usage.
The number of people who access news and information daily on their mobile phones doubled from 10.8 million in January, 2008 to 22.4 million in January, 2009.
With the news industry reaching for any ray of sunshine that it can, it’s interesting that one of the biggest growth areas is the mobile phones. It shows that people like to be able to consume news when they’re on the go. It also shows the importance of allowing users to consume content where they want it.
Fandango has launched an iPhone app. You could definitely see this coming. The part that I’m the most excited about is that you can by movie tickets right from your phone. The bummer is that they don’t integrate with your existing Fandango account. You have to enter your credit card number right into the phone.
I’ve been playing with a couple of new Web apps recently and much to my surprise, none of them offered OpenID or Facebook Connect as an option for signing in or creating an account. They all required me to setup a new username/password, enter all my information in, and setup a whole new set of friends.
Haven’t we talked about this issue enough? Can’t we all agree that in 2009 there is some level of expectation that new Web apps are going to offer up some type of single sign on solution?
This all got me thinking… I think there are a number of different expectations that we have for new Web apps in 2009 but I’ll save that for another blog post.
One thing I’ve noticed recently is that a lot of my normal non-techie friends have started using Twitter. I think Twitter is slowly becoming mainstream. What do you think?
This morning I was thinking about how recently I’ve been having trouble finding things to write about, in my blog. I’m glad I’m not a professional writer because I can imagine sometimes you’re forced to write about the stupidest stuff just so you have something to write about.
I read just about every popular technology blog that I can get my hands on. I have to say that in the last 3-4 months I don’t feel like I’ve seen anything that’s been that innovative. There hasn’t been that much which has just blown me away.
When is the last time we had a new game changing technology?
Who’s going to be the next company which is going to come up with something that’s going to light a new spark in people? You saw that spark when the Apple iPhone and Facebook Platform opened for development by third parties.
But what’s next? Single sign on with Facebook Connect, the latest Twitter app, and the thirty sixth texas hold-em game or location based social network for the iPhone can only be so interesting.
So, there are now two more social networks that you can find me on. I’ve been playing around with Yelp and Tumblr (both links to my profiles).
I’ve really been impressed with Yelp and the extent that they’ve been able to create an ecosystem where they can influence which restaurants and services that patrons go to. That’s pretty awesome. It puts the power in the hands of the consumer and forces the establishment to step up their game.
Tumblr also fascinates me. I know a lot of folks that use it as their full on blog. For me, its just a place to dump the random/interesting things that I find on the Web. Sometimes these are articles that I may want to blog about later and sometimes not. Tumblr just put out a iPhone app so I want to have some fun with that and document more of the randomness that is my life.
So yeah… do you guys use Yelp or Tumblr? Any new cool social networky type Web apps that I should be paying attention to?
My buddy Mark Drapeau has got a pretty solid article in ReadWrite Web entitled “Government 2.0: The Midlife Crisis.”
Government 2.0 has reached its midlife crisis. Despite some leadership from influential individuals on using social software in government, there is still in many cases a disconnect between authorities issuing directives and ground troops carrying them out. In some corridors of Washington, this impervious middle section of government is jokingly referred to as “the clay layer,” the layer through which no light shall pass. Resistant to change and adhering strictly to doctrine even when nonsensical, people in the clay layer can halt progress. Despite their intentions and being in a strategic position, they often stop the progress being called for.
So… in addition to reading the NY Times on my iPhone, I recently downloaded the Amazon Kindle app for the iPhone, bought a book, and have begun reading on that.
Much to my surprise, it was quite enjoyable. It was like any other reading type experience that I had had. The book was good so I just flipped right through it.
It felt nice that I could have so many books in the palm of my hand. I didn’t have to worry about lugging them around with me in my bag.
After 20 minutes of reading, my eyes didn’t feel strained. They felt fine.
Battery consumption concerns me. It feels like because, when you’re reading, you always have the screen going that I’m going to kill the battery. I haven’t gotten a feeling for that yet so I’ll check back in.
Have you tried it out at all? What do you think?
