We recently introduced Polyvore Badges. We wanted something that reflected each person’s profile on Polyvore and was also simple and streamlined. I am happy with what we came up with: a strip of colors reflective of ones recent activity on Polyvore, refreshed once a day. Enjoy 
I have not been a Sprint customer in recent history, but I did use a Sprint phone for a few weeks. The following exchange with the Sprint Voicemail should illustrate why so many people are fleeing to other providers (each ‘-’ represents a small mechanical pause between each computer utterance).
- Sprint Voicemail: You have 4 new messages and 3 saved messages. To listen to your new messages, press 1.
- Me: [ Press 1 ]
- SV: First message, [ pause ] from caller 4-0-8-5-5-5-1-2-3-5, left on [pause ] December-11th at 4-20-A-M.
- Message: “Hi Pasha… call me back” [ a 2 second message ]
- SV: To replay to this message, press 7, to save, press 8, to erase, press 9, for all other options, press 0. (Note: you can’t press a key to interrupt the computer voice and jump to the next message, you have to listen to the entire explanation, every time).
- Me: [ Press 9 ]
- SV: Message erased. [pause] Next message from caller 4-0-8-5-5-5-1-2-3-5, left on [pause ] December-11th at 5-30-P-M.
- Message: “Hey man… just calling to say hi”
- SV: To replay to this message, press 7, to save, press 8, to erase, press 9, for all other options, press 0. (Note: this 15 second explanation repeats for each message and you can’t interrupt it).
And on and on… the point is that while checking voice mail, you spent 3 minutes listening to the computer voice and about 5 seconds to your messages. Now, I am sure there is some way to configure the voice mail system to be more terse, but it would probably take you a few hours to get to it. With this level of disregard for people’s time, I am not surprised they are losing customers.
The rich grow richer, the poor poorer and the middle class is vanishing. If it is so, does it make sense to develop products targeted for the middle class? Or will the world be divided between Walmart and Cartier, Bently and Hyundai, with no Safeway or Toyota in the middle?
I prefer to use Safari as my web browser on the Mac because it is so much faster than FireFox. Unfortunately, Gmail does not work reliably in Safari. For example, the address book auto-complete does not always work, or worse, hitting the send button sometimes hangs (this got me into trouble a couple of times where my email to say cancel a meeting never reached the other party). I think the problem is with the way Safari handles simultaneous XHR requests. The ’send mail’ request gets queued up behind other in-flight XHR requests. Perhaps Gmail should have different priorities for XHR requests and high priority ones should jump to the front of the queue or even preempt in progress requests.
Note to mozilla developers: speed should be #1 priority, just ask Google.
Also: does it make sense to call Safari and FireFox web browsers? In this context, they are more like web application containers or runtimes.
Climate change and its implications for humanity are getting more and more mainstream attention. There will no doubt be all sort of crazy technological “fixes” for dealing with the causes of climate changes and its effects.
What if I told told you that I have invented a machine that:
- Captures CO2 out of the atmosphere and trap it in solid form
- Is solar powered and does not require any other energy source
- Can be cheaply deployed in a wide range of terrains and climates
- Ships in a tiny package and after installation self-assembles from local materials.
- Low-maintanence: self-repairs in case it is damaged
Of course, I am talking about plants. It seems to me that we already have the ultimate technology for dealing with parts of the climate change challenge. But I am sure people will try to re-invent the wheel and create an “artificial tree” anyway.
In general, we seem to be locked into a cycle of creating technologies to solve problems created by our previously created technologies.
If one day I found myself running a big company where due to the sheer number of employees, a lot of people were leaving at any given time, I would institute this policy:
Employees would vest 5% of their options (or some other incentive) if they choose to leave at a time when their project has reached a stable state.
As far as I know, other than protecting their reputation, most employees have no incentive to leave at times that are “convenient” for their projects. The cost of someone leaving at a critical phase of a project (eg: just before launch) is probably more than the incentives for persuading them to stay on until a less critical time.
We recently moved and had to buy some curtains for our bare windows. As it happened, we had a chance to try all the different types of curtains sold at IKEA. Since this does not happen often, I thought I’d write up my take on each system.
INDEX: The basic curtain system that you find everywhere — rods and hangers. Nothing new here.
KVARTAL: IKEAs more slick take on the curtain. These are hanging panels that create a more modern look. You can even hang them in the middle of a room to divide the space into two. The main problem with them is the installation. It involves a fair bit of assembly and it is difficult to assemble the curtain panels such that they hang straight down. Our first attempt resulted in a crocked teeth effect It is also hard to move the panels in the rails.
DIGNITET: This a simple steel cable that you attach to opposing walls to hang curtains on. It is the simplest to assemble and install. The only requirement is that you have something solid in the wall to bolt the end points into. Using their hanger clips, you can use most curtain panels with this system. The end result is very slick and minimal in appearance. This is my favorite by far and I recommend it where you the opportunity to use it.
I have owned a 23″ Cinema Display for the past one and a half years and I really enjoy using it. It recently stopped working and would not wake up from sleep. The problem turned out to be the power supply brick which I just replaced for $80 (including shipping).
I did suspect the power supply and took it in to a repair shop to see if it was the problem or not. It worked fine in the store. However, we did not leave it plugged in for long enough to realize that it would shut down after a minute from a cold start and after a few seconds on subsequent tries.
So, if you have a problem with your Cinema Display, verify the power supply before sending in the whole unit for repairs (~ $400).
I have recently left Yahoo! to pursue some personal projects.
This is a good time to recap my six and a half years working at Yahoo!
I joined Yahoo! in November of 2000 (the dot-com crash was almost in full swing, but having recently left college, I was oblivious to it).
My first noteworthy project was conceived two years after I started. It was called SmartSort. It saw the light of day as part of Yahoo! Shopping sometime in 2004 after it won Yahoo!’s Innovation Award (thanks to Koshi and Beach). SmartSort was notable in that it was doing a lot of computation in the browser before AJAX was all the rage.
About the same time, I had started working on an interactive map for Yahoo! Travel. That project went on to become Yahoo! Maps SmartView (don’t ask me; I didn’t come up with the SmartX names). SmartView was one of the first interactive, multiple point-of-interest mapping products on the web.
There is an interesting back story behind SmartView. At the exact time we were launching SmartView, a small company called Where 2 (founded by the brilliant Rasmussen brothers) was trying to raise VC funding. Their deal fell through because of SmartView’s launch. They were however introduced to Google who decided to acquire their company. They went on to develop Google Maps and the rest is history…
After SmartView, I started working on SmartTrip (just kidding). The product I worked on next was called Trip Planner and it was one of Yahoo! earliest in-house vertical social applications. It has held up well.
In mid 2005, I worked for a few months at Google with the Google Maps team (I will save the details for another time).
I returned to Yahoo in the end of 2005 in a new role where I was given a lot of latitude to come up with new ideas and pitch them as projects to the management team. I developed several prototypes, including an early prototype called RSS::Pipes. This project was green-lighted by Jerry Yang and become Pipes. Needless to say, the entire Pipes project was an incredible experience for me on many different levels, both during its design & implementation and the months following its launch. Pipes is now being run by Jonathan Trevor (who developed most of the amazing Pipes Editor).
I will try to condense my learnings into a few points:
- Aim high, life is too short for anything else.
- In life, you do what you do, not what you think or say you are going to do.
My new project is called Polyvore.
More great coverage of Pipes at ReadWriteWeb.
BTW, There have been a lot of new modules added in Pipes, check them out if you have not done so lately.
