MADE IN DETROIT

In Detroit for a few weeks...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:42:41 -0500

Tomorrow I’m heading to Detroit for a few weeks (until after Thanksgiving).

In addition to a wedding, a turkey, a coney, Hunter House, (at least one) trip to the casinos, and spending time with my family, I’m hoping to meet some people.

If you’re working on/interested in mobile applications or web startups or software or startups in general and you’re in metro-Detroit (or Ann Arbor, or pretty much anywhere within a couple hours of Detroit), I’d love to meet up.

I know Detroiters are much cooler, more successful, and more innovative than the national media portrays you, so I’d love to learn about the cool things you’re working on. In exchange for letting me listen, I’d be happy to buy you a coffee.

Feel free to call me (406-IAN-1337) or email me anytime if you’re interested.

Opinionated Architectures? (Or: The Amazon Way vs The Google/Facebook Way)

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 03:34:57 -0500

(This post is really about hearing the thoughts of others who have gone through this, so if you have anything to add, please do so!)

While we’re still a relatively small site, we’re growing pretty quickly (onappstorehq.com as well as running a decent number of white labels and also recently taking over the iPhoneDevSDK forums) and I’m beginning to think about the architecture I’d like to see long-term. I don’t have to make any decisions yet (we’re a fairly standard Rails site so we can scale using fairly standard techniques for some time), but I’m beginning to form some opinions for when the time does come.

The problem I am most conflicted about is arguably the highest-level decision I’ll need to make: Should we have an opinionated architecture or should we have an agnostic architecture? Should we force structure upon ourselves in an effort to simplify, or should we take each case individually and answer it as necessary.

We can represent this problem well by comparing the architectures of Amazon (both the retail site and AWS) with those of Google and Facebook. Amazon takes the agnostic approach, while Google and Facebook lean heavily towards the opinionated approach.(As an ex-Amazonian, I know the ups-and-downs of the Amazon approach, but I’m partially guessing on the Google/Facebook approach so feel free to correct me.)

The Amazon Way

Amazon has an extremely services based architecture. Each team operates autonomously and only interacts with other teams through a set of well-defined APIs. Almost every bit of architecture behind those APIs is up to the owners to decide. The only things that are forced upon a developer are the hardware and the network infrastructure.

The upside to this approach is that each problem is looked at with a blank slate and can be solved and implemented with the approach that fits best. Moreover, with the full stack in your control, debugging operational issues can be less hairy with the full view of what’s occurring.

The two main downsides to this approach that I saw were that (1) the majority of services were very similar, so each team was essentially reinventing the wheel, and (2) each team had higher-than-necessary operational costs because they were fully responsible for everything except the hardware and network (and even some of those because as a developer redundancy/failover is your responsibility).

The Google/Facebook Way

Unlike Amazon, Google and Facebook appear to be much more opinionated. If you work at Google, your background heavy-lifting will likely be done with MapReduce, large storage will be with GFS or BigTable, etc. There are massive clusters of those services already set up and teams who manage them. Similarly, at Facebook, you’re probably storing data in MySQL with a big memcached in front of it.

The advantage here is that service owners can focus on the work that matters to them and their users, while teams dedicated to the core infrastructure pieces (GFS, MapReduce, BigTable, etc) can focus on scaling and managing those for the company. You can also have teams who focus on supporting the live software while other teams focus on developing new features (this is almost impossible in the Amazon way as the only people who know how things work for each service are the developers themselves).

The major disadvantage I see is that not all problems are alike and you may be shoehorning your problem into these solutions. Additionally, debugging operational issues from your end can be more difficult when you lose control of some of these data and services (you don’t have the ability to view the whole stack).

Conclusion

I still have no good answer to this problem, and probably won’t for a long time. However, right now I lean towards the opinionated architecture approach as I think freeing up the developers to focus on solving problems for users is the best use of time, even if it’s at the cost of less than ideal solutions.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this process, especially if you’ve gone through a scaling like this and had to make decisions…

Google custom Twitter results. I knew Bing was doing this, but I...

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 23:09:55 -0400

Google custom Twitter results. I knew Bing was doing this, but I hadn’t heard of Google doing it.

Time, Inc's Assignment Detroit

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:37:42 -0400

Time, Inc has a new cross-publication, multi-article assignment on Detroit. I’m only through reading the Sports Illustrated articles, but here are some quotes and links to all the rest I could find thus far:

.

When you come downtown only for a show or a game or a $9.95 filet mignon at The Detroit Pub, you can get fooled into thinking that things aren’t so bad here. It’s like going to New Orleans and never leaving the French Quarter. “The seats are full, the restaurants are full, and you start wondering if it’s really not as bad as everyone makes it sound,” Granderson says.

Major leaguers can escape most financial realities, but over the winter the Tigers held an auction for their foundation at the Motor City Casino and offered fans a chance to buy blocks of time with Verlander, Leyland and Carlos Guillen. “That’s when it sunk in,” Granderson says. “Nobody was bidding. It was really awkward. Players had to bid on each other to get the price up to $5,000.” One item up for auction was a painting of Granderson and Ordoñez. Miguel Cabrera, the Tigers’ $152 million first baseman, ended up with the winning bid.

Granderson thought the climate might be improving this summer, when his foundation held a wine tasting and auction at Big Rock Chophouse in the upscale suburb of Birmingham. With prodding from a few Tigers, a woman paid $12,000 so her son could take Cabrera and Guillen to school for a day. Granderson’s mother, Mary, was in Detroit for the event, staying at the Greektown Casino Hotel. Granderson walked to the hotel after a game one night and was overjoyed to see the streets abuzz. Then he took the elevator up to his mother’s room on the 27th floor and looked out her window. “I didn’t see a single light on in any of the other buildings,” Granderson says. “It was depressing.”

If he can imagine, 42 years ago it was worse. In July 1967, local police raided an after-hours drinking club in northwest Detroit, igniting a smoldering discontent into five days of rioting and looting. Forty-three people died, 1,189 were injured and more than 7,000 were arrested. After a doubleheader, outfielder Willie Horton drove to 12th Street in full uniform, hopped on top of his car and, with fires raging around him, pleaded for peace. A year later the Tigers won the World Series. “For us, it was all about overcoming the riots,” says Al Kaline, star of the ‘68 World Series, and now a special assistant with Horton in the front office. “Today, it’s about the loss of jobs. We can’t get anybody a job, but we can give them something good to watch on TV and read about in the papers.”

Michigan State’s basketball team made it to the national title game in Detroit in April but lost. The Red Wings made it to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals in June but also lost. Leyland knows what a championship would do for the locals. He grew up 70 miles south in Perrysburg, Ohio, and his gray mustache and gravelly voice would fit as well on an assembly line as they do in a dugout. “We have to be careful because we make a lot of money and these people have lost jobs and homes,” Leyland says. “I know what that money means. I know how much it costs for that ticket and beer and hot dog. It’s tough for these people. You can tell. You can feel it.”

Sports Illustrated Assignment Detroit

CNNMoney.com Assignment Detroit

Time Assignment Detroit

Time-Lapse of USA Solar Panel Installations

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:41:05 -0400

The Cooler Planet folks made a great visualization. It’s a time-lapse Google Maps heat-map (that’s a mouthful!) of the solar installation inquiries they’ve received over the last 2 or so years. It’s quite interesting to see where the most solar installs are going (many in predictable places like SoCal, others not so much).

Here it is (if you’re reading this in Tumblr’s Dashboard, click on through to check it out):

More solar energy information.

The Cost Savings of Living Without Cable TV

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 13:10:47 -0400

Preface

I’ll be completely honest: I’m a TV junkie. TV is extremely therapeutic for me. It’s a great way to shutdown my brain after a long day of work. I like news, sitcoms, dramas, reality shows, game shows, and especially sports. I didn’t think I could live without cable/satellite, especially given my reliance on watching sports (ESPN was really the only thing holding me back).

However, recently I moved from Seattle to Los Angeles. I also left a fairly high-paying job at Amazon.com for a not-so-high paying position as a co-founder of a new startup, AppStoreHQ. Colleen also went from a full-time worker to a graduate student with loans. These things have made our lives much more frugal. We’ve really tried to cut back on many things, especially any recurring expenses. Here’s where we cut back on TV.

The Setup

First, how we watch TV (see pics at the end):

HDTV Antenna: We hooked up an HDTV Antenna to our LCD TV so we can get local HD stations. This supports watching many of our favorite shows, like The Office and 30 Rock and Two and a Half Men, etc. It also supplies us with the big sporting events that tend to be played on the networks (think: playoffs, Super Bowl, Olympics, etc). The antenna itself can be slightly flaky and we have to move it down to the ground and place it in the right position to make sure the signal is good, but once we get it set, it works really well and the quality is actually probably better than Comcast’s highly awful HD.
The Computer - MacBook -> Apple Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter + Belkin Y Audio Cable Splitter -> DVI to HDMI cable -> Samsung 32” LCD HDTV: This supplies most of the other TV programming. We use a variety of services to give us programming now, but mostly it’s a combination of Hulu and ESPN360.
DVD Player: Right now I’m actually using an original XBox for my DVD player until I get my Blu-Ray player replaced (lost in our move), but it works fine. We get our DVDs from Netflix.

The Benefits

Cost: This is the biggest benefit and see below for a full-analysis of cost savings.
Time-shifting: I can watch all of the Hulu and ESPN360 and Netflix programming any time I want, and I don’t have any limits on how much I can store on my hard drive or how much I can record at once. And I don’t have to pay for a special box to do so.
Less Ads: There’s actually less ads while watching Hulu or Netflix than if I watched the shows on TV. ESPN360 still has a lot of ads, but surprisingly, they’re not selling any — every single ad is for ESPN (which can get quite annoying after watching the same 5 commercials for an entire day of college football). Given how much money Hulu apparently generates, I’d be shocked if ESPN isn’t working hard on this.

The Pitfalls

Quality: The quality of certain things — particularly ESPN360 — is pretty low. Hulu’s is high, and Netflix is high, too, so it’s not all bad. I do wish that ESPN360’s quality was better, though.
Loss of computer use: This is annoying. When I’m plugged in and watching a show, I could be using my computer (and sometimes still do), but I have to literally stand up and use it in front of the TV. I’d love someone to make a device which allows me to wirelessly stream to my TV so I could keep the laptop in front of me and watch the streaming on the TV.
Not quite real time: This is particularly true for ESPN360 as I learned yesterday during the Michigan game. ESPN360 appears to be about 30-60 seconds behind live, which is terrible if someone calls or text messages you about a play you haven’t seen yet.

The Cost Savings

This is the biggest win overall, so let’s see how much I’m really spending.

Starting with the up-front costs:

HD Antenna: $35
Cables: $5.50 + $5.50 + $26.00 = $37.00
Total: $35.00 + $37.00 = $72.00

And the recurring costs:

Netflix: $15/month.
AT&T DSL Internet: $35/month.
Total: $15 + $35 = $50/month

Now let’s see what the old system cost, again starting with up-front costs:

There was some Comcast installation charge for the TV and internet, I don’t remember what it was, but am pretty sure it was around $50.
Total: $50

And the old system’s recurring costs:

Netflix: $15/month.
Comcast Cable Internet: $40/month.
Comcast Cable TV (HDTV+DVR): $60/month.
Total: $15 + $40 + $60 = $115/month.

Now let’s consider the total costs over a two-year period:

Old system: $50 + 24*$115 = $2,810
New System: $70 + 24*$50 = $1,270
Total Cost Savings Over a Two Year Period: $2,810 - $1,270 = $1,540

That’s pretty solid if you ask me. And I fully expect the service quality, features, and available programming to get far better over the next two years as well. Finally, here are a couple pics of what it looks like, first while using ESPN360 and second while using the HD Antenna.

A Quick Greasemonkey Script To Add A Link To Google From Bing

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 23:44:08 -0400

I’ve been using Bing a lot recently. It’s really quite good. There are a few places it falls down SO HARD, though, and one of those places is with programming queries. This really hurts a developer like me. But, I wanted to keep testing it, just without having to do all the typing to get into a new search engine.

So I went ahead and spent 20min creating a Greasemonkey script that simply adds a link to Google for the same search. If you don’t find what you’re looking for on Bing, you’ll get a link called “SEE GOOGLE” on the left side of the screen. One click and you’re at the Google results. Here’s the code if you’re interested (please excuse my nasty JavaScript… if you have any cleaner ways of doing it, please let me know!):

Last week Scoble dropped by the Founder’s Co-op offices (I...

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:12:12 -0400

Last week Scoble dropped by the Founder’s Co-op offices (I had no idea he was coming), and did some video interviews — along with some tweeting — with a few of the startups in the office. Here’s the interview with me about AppStoreHQ.

My Idea of Health Care Reform

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 01:35:00 -0400

It’s entirely clear to me now that healthcare reform will not happen in any real way via the current system. With too many cooks in the kitchen — all having a vested interest in the dish being served to customers — we’ll never get anything done. I fully believe Obama will get some version of reform passed, but it’s mostly a matter of how watered-down it is and how many politicians and citizens he upsets in the process.

My opinion is reform MUST come from the bottom-up. Somebody who will change the paradigm as much as possible. I also believe this business is going to have to be scrappy, with little funding (compared to the rest of the industry). Here are my thoughts on one way this should work (and like my two posts about the power grid, this is an extremely uninformed opinion and I welcome reasons why things like this would/wouldn’t work):

It all starts with this assumption: Americans generally believe (conciously or not) that their own health is out of their control. We believe in order to be healthy we must generally be “made healthy” by someone else.

This is obviously false. In fact, according to studies, medicine has very little to do with health. On the other hand, diet, exercise, and lifestyle contribute greatly to health. Those three things are fully within the control of each of us. Note that I’m certainly not claiming doctors aren’t useful at all. Far from it! I’m simply arguing we rely on doctors for too much, rather than focusing directly on the root of many of the problems (our lack of control over of our health). We also spend too much on the treatment of diseases, rather than the prevention and early detection of diseases.

Knowing that being healthy is really in our own hands (and not a doctor’s), why do we frame “health care” in terms of how much medical coverage (doctors visits, hospital stays, etc)? Why don’t we frame “health care” in terms of how you choose to live your life and keep yourself healthy?

This is how I would change the paradigm. Rather than buying “health insurance,” I would instead offer a much stricter definition of “medical insurance.” I believe doctors are both necessary and amazing mostly for the things we can’t control ourselves, like being hit by a bus, or — in many (but not all) cases — cancer. Let’s focus on lowering the probability of ever getting many diseases rather than focusing on increasing the care after those diseases are already in place.

And as a software guy (as well as a fan of libertarian paternalism and choice architecture), of course I think there are many ways technology can help. I would create my “medical insurance” firm with a great web-based interface. Think of it as Mint.com for your health. You’d keep track (maybe via things like an iPhone app?) of everything dealing with your health: how much you’re exercising, what you’re eating, etc. Every time you do something good, you earn “points.” For example, going for a three-mile run nets you +250 points. Every time you do something bad, you lose “points” (e.g. smoking would cost you -100 points per cigarette, while eating McDonalds would cost -75).

Next you turn points into currency. You can either rollover points and use them for the cost of your insurance later, or even — for the uber-healthy — you could turn them into a rewards program (much like credit card points). In effect, you get paid to be healthy.

By providing the points system, you’re essentially providing nudges to keep the country healthy. And, with scale, you achieve a healthier population, the ideal goal in the first place. Then, with a healthier population, you can reduce much of the costs of health care by removing much of the unnecessary parts and bureaucracy.

Perhaps this is the kind of paradigm shifting idea that the health care industry really needs? Again, I am extremely uninformed on this topic, so please help me understand what major flaws there are in this idea?

How To Wirelessly Set Up A Lexmark X4550 Printer (All-in-one) with a Mac OS X 10.5

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 16:04:32 -0400

(This goes down as one of those posts you’re saving for your future-self and hope somebody finds it via Google and makes use of it.)

The better part of this weekend was spent unplugged from the grid and unpacking from boxes after our move into our new place. I ended up spending over an hour trying to re-set up our printer, a Lexmark X4550. This printer works wirelessly, which is how it’s always worked for us. However, when we moved, we also bought a new wireless access point and named it something new. This meant the printer didn’t know how to connect to it. Moreover, we didn’t have the USB cable anymore, so we couldn’t reconfigure it using that, either. However, I did manage to finally figure it out, so here’re the rough steps I took to do so:

On the printer’s control panel, reset the wireless network settings.
After some time (it seemed to take a couple minutes for me), the printer will create it’s own P2P wireless connection. Look on the printer’s control panel again to see what it named itself (in my case, I think it was “print server 123456”). Connect to this using your Mac.
Back to the printer’s control panel: Check the IP address of the printer. Open a web browser on your Mac and go to that address.
Click on Configuration on the left-hand side. Then click Wireless. Set the SSID to your new network’s SSID and change the BSS Type to Infrastructure. Setup whatever security your network has. Click Submit. Now your printer should connect to your network, so reconnect your Mac back to that wireless network.
Now you have to set up your printer on the Mac. Make sure you have the latest Lexmark drivers from their web site. Open System Preferences, click Print & Fax, click the + icon. The Address is the IP address of your printer (again, can be found from the printer’s control panel). The rest should fill in automatically.
Here’s the magic part. Open a text-editor (emacs, for instance) and open /etc/cups/printers.conf (you’ll need to sudo open this). For Device URI, replace whatever is currently there (ldp://… or ipp://…) with lexnet3://{ip_address_of_printer}:1
Save and restart your computer.

You should now be able to print!

fuckyeahdetroit: This Time Submitted by heybadger. MADE IN...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:56:05 -0400

fuckyeahdetroit:

This Time

Submitted by heybadger.

MADE IN DETROIT.

America's Best Colleges | forbes.com

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:09:26 -0400

America's Best Colleges | forbes.com:

caterpillarcowboy:

needtherapy:

bowlsby: whatthehale: christinefriar

Innnnnnteresting … I lose the sibling war for sure, though we Hale kids chill together in the 400’s:

BROTHER: Augustana (in SD) - 411

SISTER (& both parents): University of Nebraska at Lincoln - 463

SELF: Bradley University - 466

Wah, wahhh.

Pretty suspect list…. how is the US Military academy number 1? No thank you.

Yay! We made the list!

Wait, Cornell is 207? Explain that one to me. I’m not saying Ivy League schools need to be top 10, but two hundred and seven?

Yeah, it’s a pretty strange ranking. 21 is the lowest I’ve seen Chicago on any list since I applied. The methodologies of ALL college rankings are bum, but these seem particularly bum:

To answer these questions, the staff at CCAP gathered data from a variety of sources. They based 25% of the rankings on 4 million student evaluations of courses and instructors, as recorded on the Web site RateMyProfessors.com. Another 25% is based on post-graduate success, equally determined by enrollment-adjusted entries in Who’s Who in America, and by a new metric, the average salaries of graduates reported by Payscale.com. An additional 20% is based on the estimated average student debt after four years. One-sixth of the rankings are based on four-year college graduation rates—half of that is the actual graduation rate, the other half the gap between the average rate and a predicted rate based on characteristics of the school. The last component is based on the number of students or faculty, adjusted for enrollment, who have won nationally competitive awards like Rhodes Scholarships or Nobel Prizes.

At Chicago, not one person I knew used RateMyProfessors.. we had our own, internal system for this (every student would fill out a review at the end of the quarter and they would post it online for students to see). Plus, the faculty was generally so good that we just didn’t care and would take classes from anyone. I don’t know what the Who’s Who In America thing is, but just given the percentage of people in the Obama administration from Chicago, one would think it would have done well here; guess not. Estimated debt? Yeah, okay, I bet Chicago falls apart here. And four-year graduation rates: I knew a few people who left, but I had never heard of anyone on the five-year plan, so I have to imagine it was pretty high. Now, Rhodes and Nobels, I know Chicago does well on those (82 Nobels, 44 Rhodes, to be exact).

So, if I had to take a guess, there’s just a lot of obvious bias in these rankings.

Also, one thing to note about college rankings is that while schools don’t change that much year over year, the rankings do. The obvious reason for this is that if the rankings didn’t change, they would never sell any new versions. So, this leads to new players in the rankings game to try drastically different rankings, in an effort to get publicity (as is happening here) and to sell more copies.

The Future of Your Web Traffic

Sat, 08 Aug 2009 14:50:00 -0400

At AppStoreHQ, Chris has taught me a lot about the virtuous cycle we think will drive our business: Content <-> Distribution <-> Monetization. Focus on one of those three and you’ll help drive the other two.

Before we started, my idea of distribution was much simpler: build the content and let them come. Turns out, that doesn’t work. Distribution is hard work and is very much muli-faceted. We do things like paid-search, white label syndication, Twitter integration, SEO, widgets and badges, etc. Right now, Google dominates the market, but I think this will change drastically over the next few years.

On an average day, over three-quarters of our traffic is differen by Google organics and the rest split somewhat evenly between AdWords (paid-search), other search engines (Yahoo/Bing), other links (typically high-traffic news sites/blogs), and social media sites (Twitter/Facebook). My guess is this breakdown is typical for most content-based web businesses, especially new ones.

As you can see, Google has a lockdown on web-based distribution. But, that’s going away. Here’s a great talk by Fred Wilson on how Twitter will make money (hint: traffic often equates to revenue, people will pay for traffic, and Twitter is driving traffic):

Let’s assume this social media thing works out and drives significant traffic. And, let’s also pretend that with some growth — and the new Yahoo deal — that Bing’s market share grows as well. What happens if your site’s traffic sources looked more like:

40% from Google organics.
5% from Google AdWords.
30% from Twitter/Facebook/social media.
20% from other search engines (Yahoo/Bing).
5% from other links.

With 60% of the traffic, search would obviously still be extremely important, but less so. For many web publishers the focus will shift from optimizing for search engines to optimizing for users. As a result, both users and search engines will have a better experience, and both will deal with less spam. It will be extremely hard to trick thousands or millions of users to pass your links to their friends if they aren’t providing some value.

Netflix Culture

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 14:24:11 -0400

One of many amazing(ly aweful) stories about First Choice Moving and Storage (more stories to come)

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 18:20:22 -0400

Me: So, for the fifth time, you haven't called when you said you would - at noon today. Do you remember saying you would give an update at noon today?
Guy (that's his name): Yes, I do.
Me: ... but you didn't call.
Guy: No.
*silence*
Me: Sooo..... do you have anything to say about that?
Guy: No.
Me: Soooooooooo, you're not a man of your word?
Guy: [Completely seriously] That'd be appropriate.

"While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a..."

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 10:58:00 -0400

“

While markets are supposed to ensure transparency by showing orders to everyone simultaneously, a loophole in regulations allows marketplaces like Nasdaq to show traders some orders ahead of everyone else in exchange for a fee.

In less than half a second, high-frequency traders gained a valuable insight: the hunger for Broadcom was growing. Their computers began buying up Broadcom shares and then reselling them to the slower investors at higher prices. The overall price of Broadcom began to rise.

”

- Traders Profit With Computers Set At HighSpped - NYTimes.com

One mistake I’ve seen repeated over and over again in this recession is the conflation of “deregulated” and “poorly regulated.” In my opinion, very few to none of our industries were deregulated to the point that would make them as efficient as possible. Rather, they were regulated to a point that allowed certain individuals to benefit greatly by finding the biggest loophole in the regulations. Here’s another example of that.

fuckyeahdetroit: Yankee Air Museum WWII Veteran Poster...

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:15:54 -0400

fuckyeahdetroit:

Yankee Air Museum WWII Veteran Poster (detroitgreatestgeneration.com)

Image captures 720 vets (detnews)

I love this. Read the linked article and then be sure to check out the trailer for the movie. The Greatest Generation is something I don’t think I’ll ever learn enough about or get tired of. Each and every story you hear is amazing.

Week In Review

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:34:47 -0400

The last 7-10 days were pretty great all around, so I figured I’d recap it for those following along:

Finally found an apartment in Los Angeles for Colleen and myself. Colleen arrives in LA on the 21st and we move in on the 25th.
Went with my Dad to Germany where we stayed in a great hotel, drove the autobahn, and, most importantly, made the pilgrimage to Nurburgring for the F1 race. That place is killer for car lovers.
AppStoreHQ was mentioned in the NYTimes.
Not only that, but we were also selected to participate in the MobileBeat conference. Chris did a bang up job there and came home with the judges award!

All in all, a week worth reviewing.

Colleen Dilenschneider

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 18:27:35 -0400

Colleen Dilenschneider:

Colleen has started her own blog… and I like it!

She’s been writing a bit about non-profit stuff, which is an appreciated break from my standard tech news. If you’re interested in non-profits, museums, Colleen, etc, check it out.

AppStoreHQ gets a shout-out in the New York Times

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 23:56:04 -0400

AppStoreHQ gets a shout-out in the New York Times:

appstorehq:

We’re web guys to the bone, but there are a few old media outlets we pay attention to and the New York Times is top of the list. So we were understandably stoked to get a nice mention in today’s Gadgetwise:

“Of course, there is another option. Give consumers better tools to sort through the stores themselves. One stab at that is found at the Web site App Store HQ. In addition to being more organized and informative than the iTunes App Store… it also has a sortable search. So instead of just choosing from 1693 apps categorized under music, you can then choose only those rated four stars and up (158 apps) then narrow it to those that cost 99 cents (38 apps). Still not perfect, but a step in the right direction.”

Perfect or not, we’ll take it - thanks for the shout out, Roy.