Buzz Out Loud PhD Raves and Facebook Rant

yey! exam launched. Get your diploma here: Buzzology Exam

Darn facebook. upgraded their api 4 hours ago and caused our app to crash. We would have at least wanted an email warning that they'd be releasing an upgrade. Shows everyone how they see developers...

Buzz Out Loud

I'm an avid fan of podcasts. It's like my daily habit. My daily commute takes me 45mins.-1 hour per way and I just have so much time on my hands. On one of my daily commutes, I was listening to Cnet's Buzz Out Loud. Tom Merritt made a challenge to the listeners that he'd come up with the questions for a Buzz Out Loud exam and give out a diploma to anyone who wishes to take the exam if one of the listeners would come up with a non-bot-able game engine.

I remembered that was two Fridays ago. Don't know what came over me, I sent out an email to him and offered doing the engine for the BOL podcast community. That was then and we've been working with him during the course of the week taking time out during our spare, to work with him on it. Think we're getting close. Anyday now...

Surprisingly, Tom's very polite and very easy to talk to. Didn't expect him to be so nice. Hope Ruby on Rails doesn't fail us.

Monday's Innovative Breakfast #1

2 years ago, we've started what we call "Monday's Innovative Breakfast" (MIB) . Technically, the idea was for us to be able to sit down and shoot the breeze to share the ongoings in technology and help the team think.

Fast forward to today, we still have our MIB sessions but we thought about expanding it digitally because we ended up not being able to follow up on things that we've discussed. There are just so many things on the web that we can do!

Below is one of the said sessions where we tried shooting the breeze. Anyone who's willing to share some ideas is welcome to participate!

So here goes:

Jan. 19, 2008

Hi guys,

Guys, I'd like to expand our MIB sessions as we haven't been able to get to do a lot of it in the recent months. I'd like to use this medium as an opportunity to act as an extension to our learning.

Just two weeks ago, Steve Jobs released Mac Air. It is a laptop where it's merely .36" at its thinnest and .75" at its thickest side. Several engineering feats have to be made to make Mac Air a reality. Intel had to redesign the Core Duo chip to make it smaller, the hard drive had to be resized and the keyboard had to be re-engineered. You will read that the Mac Air keyboard has keys that are glued on to a silicon pad -- I wouldn't know how the tactile experience would be but knowing Steve Jobs, I'm sure he's had his team do one heck of a job on that.

How is this relevant to us? As we convert ourselves this year into a products company (think magicfudge.com , my7hops, eatstime and a few more we're pushing out this year) from being a services company (think The PRA, Draftpick Online, and others) , I think it shows us two things.

1 - It shows how design can evoke emotion and influence people to vote with their wallet, consequently, because of this, we do not, CAN NOT, sacrifice user experience.

2 - It shows how design is holistic. It is not limited to only a portion of development, on the contrary, it dictates and pushes the limit of engineering to make design a reality. A good analogy would probably be The Guggenheim Bilbao Museum - This entire museum is covered in plates of pure titanium. After the museum had been rendered digitally, the architects had to use titanium because it exhibits a certain desirable color quality when the sunlight hits it during sunrise and sunset. Nothing in history came close to amount of titanium used for construction of a building.

Now to bring the example back to us, I want us, as a team, to grow in every aspect of web applications development. We have a good team to start and we have to push both of our main sections - design and engineering - to create something fantastic. During 2006 and 2007, we had been playing catch up with technology from our roots in mobile development. I had to push you guys to do sites to gain the experience of what is needed to come up w a website.

Admittedly, we've focused more on the engineering side - I believe Russell and Sherwin knows that. Now that we've barely caught up, it's time to push design.

Now, I've been keeping myself busy this weekend trying to see how I can help everyone expand their creativity to create excellent and inspiring work. I realized, that to grow, we need to gain exposure. What better way to do this than by looking through designs that we can pull inspiration, learn and emulate (mind you, this is not copying) from.

Let's start our "exposure" trip through a few links that I've gathered to use as a springboard. Additionally, I've purchased some books for everyone to look at. These are books on typography, logos, possibly layouts. Do take the time to take a look at them for your enjoyment.

http://swissmiss.typepad.com/weblog/2005/08/swiss_sign.html

http://ffffound.com

http://www.lagalerie.biz/con/cms/front_content.php?idcat=87&toggle=87

http://www.swisslegacy.com/

Guys, we spend more time working together than the time we spend with our families. There are days that I hear you put teams like Google, Facebook on a pedestal. To be honest, aside from their impeccable timing, what they've done are not beyond our reach.

An aside if I may - there is a phase in the life of a startup called "The Valley of Death". This is the time in which we are at our lowest point. A point where you start doubting yourself and you question yourself -- "Am I doing the right thing?" It is during this point that we should find our core strength / product and it is the most important point in our life and I'll tell you why later.

After the valley of death, there is the upward slope. This is where optimism grows, a time when we can start putting in resources to execute and scale bigger. Now, if we did not find our focus in the valley of death and we keep on just hammering away, we will only amplify our mistakes because that is what money does - it amplifies who we are. It is for this sole reason why The Valley of Death is extremely important and I believe we are now at the tail end of our Valley of Death.

I believe that there are 2 things that we need to help us define ourselves better - 1 is a willingness to explore and innovate. 2 is the exposure.

For 1 - I think that by working here, I've expressed time and again that there are a few things that I require from you - a willingness to learn. That said, you have this company to use as your playground to explore your skills with. From a lot of the stories I hear, I also know that there are a few companies who will let you do that so use the opportunity wisely.

2 - is exposure. Now this is a bit harder to do but I really think that the steps are in place for us to get to the level of exposure that we need to be and we have all of the tools that we need to achieve that even more -- the internet.

Take the time to research. Search and Explore. Go and see where everyone is going - facebook, digg, google and see what everyone's talking about. Hopefully you get some insight and some inspiration so we can come up with our own version of these sites if not better.

Bing

Welcome

We've finally got a blog. Hopefully our work is meaningful enough for anyone who's willing to listen. Feel free to chat us up. We're all about the new web. We're here to share and shoot ideas!