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Category Archives: Internet
TechStars Boulder 2013
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Congratulations are in order to the newly announced summer 2013 class at company incubator and accelerator, TechStars Boulder. It’s hard to believe this is already the 7th group of companies to spend their summer in Colorado.
Having chatted with David Cohen back in July 2006 about his new “summer program” idea, I can remember that TechStars was exactly the kind of thing that young companies and entrepreneurs should clamor to be a part of: access to great mentors, help with raising funds, building a product or service around a market, etc. At the time I had no co-founders, no company ideas, and no good foundation to take advantage of the opportunity about to launch in the coming months…
Fast forward six years and having observed from the outside and made friends in TechStars and working with Alex (a Boulder TechStars mentor) and a very smart group of folks at at Crowd Favorite: I’ve learned a lot about successfully building a web application, designing a solid web experience, taking something from concept to implementation, hiring, iterating and dealing with feedback, making decisions, presenting to stakeholders, communicating, and so on.
Through a circuitous route1, I’m happy to say that the newly-inducted team at Elihuu (pronounced E-lay-who) has asked me to help lend advice and mentorship around building their web-based company. The idea behind Elihhu is to use proven processes and allow technology to connect designers (with product ideas) and manufacturers (who have extra capacity) to create products together and sell them in lieu of the typical agency / brokerage model. I’m proud of what the team has designed and built in a few short months and it’s been fun to watch and be involved in. Now it’s time to turn it into a business… I’m excited for what the summer will bring!
Kudos class of 2013 and best of luck this summer…
- AdsNative
- Augur
- Brandfolder
- Elihuu
- Given Goods
- GoodApril
- hull.io
- LeChat
- Prediculous
- Shopventory
- ShowShoe
- I’ve worked with Susanna in Boulder since I was in college and I had met Dorian, a family friend, through her many years ago. She re-introduced us a few months ago when Dorian started looking for a team to design and build her company concept and knew that was the kind of thing I did day-to-day now. ↩
The team at Crowd Favorite has been working on a solution to a problem a lot of designers and developers (and folks that work with designers and developers) didn’t quite realize they had: when working on a project you typically take notes on the side… but you usually throw that away and lose the snippets of code, outlines of todos, open questions and decisions, etc.
Capsule replaces that scratch document you have open when you’re coding. It creates an archive of your development artifacts.
Instead of keeping a text file open when working on a project, using Capsule means you can have a simple archive of all those notes and easily reference them in the future.
Initial reactions and reception have been very positive from the development and WordPress community so we’re all very pleased.
Be sure to check out Alex’s post on Capsule to read more about the thinking and decisions behind this (free) product.
I whipped up a quick WordPress Shortcode to add a ‘Save to foursquare’ button to WordPress posts for cosnow since I had never tried creating a shortcode before. Hopefully someone else finds this useful… find it on GitHub and WordPress.org.
From the Forecast Blog:
…if it looks and feels like an app, and lives on your home screen, it’s an App. With a capital “A.” I’d go as far as to say the best weather App in the world right now is a web app. I may be biased, of course, but the fact that Forecast is even a contender is kind of a big deal. It raises the question: why aren’t there more high quality mobile web apps that have the look, feel, and performance of their native counterparts?
Some of my favorite apps are “just” web apps or bookmarked mobile sites on my home screen: Forecast, COTrip, OpenSnow, TestFlight, GameTonight, Untappd, Techmeme and on and on.
I don’t know many folks outside the web industry that realize this is a feature. I hope apps like Forecast continue to pave the way…
From Peter Bright at Ars Technica:
Of particular interest to Web developers: there won’t be any -blink or -chrome CSS prefixes; like Mozilla, all new experimental features will require developers to enable them in the browser’s options page.
Shucks. I was really looking forward to trying -blink-text-decoration: blink.
Amazon.com, Inc. today announced that it has reached an agreement to acquire Goodreads, a leading site for readers and book recommendations that helps people find and share books they love.
Daaaaangit. I just moved my reading lists from Shelfari over to Goodreads because, get this, Amazon stopped maintaining Shelfari after purchasing it back in 2008. This doesn’t bode well for the future of Goodreads…
Chris Brogan, on Ev William’s Medium:
I’ve written five posts, all of them in a different collection … I’ve written about what mantras and chanting have done to improve my business. I’ve written about Microsoft Windows 8 and how it’s a disruptor. I’ve written about my mostly plant-based eating choices. All over the map. If I wrote this way on this blog, it’d be hard to know whether to subscribe or not. (Yes, I write somewhat varied material here, but there’s still a general theme.) That, to me, is the magic button of Medium.
I disagree. Lots of services already aggregate long-form discussions around a common taxonomy (Tumblr being of note).
Plus, this is something Chris Yeh first talked about back in 2007: The Grand Unified Theorem of Blogging — I piggy-backed on it with my own post titled Blogging Audiences and Feedback
In short: the more you talk about, the less focused you are, the less readership your site will enjoy. In other words, if you don’t write for a niche you won’t be “successful.”
As Yeh followed up in the comments: “Success means different things to different people. Like you, I’m content to write about the things that interest me, and to let the chips fall as they may.”
While Medium certainly reminds me of the blog networks and webrings of the early years, I’m confident they’re also aware of the reasons we no longer see webrings and blog networks. “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
Some of my writing has been featured over on the Breckenridge Connection blog again for GoBreck (the chamber of commerce). This time I looked at the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day holiday and highlighted some events and venues for celebrating the day of food and feast (the best kind of day, in my opinion). Click through to read the post on GoBreck.com.
A few weeks ago I published a look at one of my favorite restaurants and breweries in Colorado over at the Breckenridge Connection blog: Breckenridge Brewery & Pub. You don’t have to twist my arm to get me to go for happy hour when up in Breckenridge. Check it out if you’re interested in learning more about the little brewery that was early to the craft brewing scene here in Colorado (going on 20+ years now).