Business Logs – Page 33

9rules Round IV Results: 111 Sites Make The Cut

I opened up my feedreader of choice this morning and it seemed as though my entire list blew up with chatter surrounding the 111 sites that were selected out of the 700 who submitted (Paul forgot hyperlinks on the 9r blog entry, Tyme has a big clickable list.)

The official entry received over 50 trackbacks, and my Feedster and Technorati feeds for the “9rules” query blew up with hundreds more hits from bloggers who talked about the list. It seemed like I couldn’t go anywhere in the blogosphere this weekend without reading about 9rules — a concept and feeling that is fantastic considering all the hard work the team and I (and the members) have put in over the past year or so.

We may not have a Techcrunch profile, San Francisco offices, open bar parties, or 7 figures of VC money, but we do have thousands of people who want to join the 9rules Network along with a massive group of evangelists who support us 100%, and I wouldn’t trade those in for anything else in the world.

Fun With VoIP, Netgear’s New WiFi Skype Phone

I’m not sure how I missed this, but it seems Netgear is coming out with a WiFi Skype phone that looks very slick:

I don’t use Skype for calling friends, however nabbing this phone and using SkypeOut to call their regular numbers seems pretty fly. I read somewhere that the bummer is that there’s no web interface for the phone, so if you’re at an airport or another “hotspot” that you don’t control and have to login through the web to use, you won’t be able to do so, so no free calls. But at home I think that could be really badass.

I do use VoIP in my “office” already: I have a Cisco 7940 hooked up to VoicePulse Connect, with my G5 acting as the Asterisk server. Running Asterisk on my work computer (with Photoshop, Mail, TextMate, Adium, iTunes and Transmit running 100% of the time) takes the voice quality down a few notches, so I’m seriously considering buying an Intel Mac mini, sticking it and the Cisco phone on its own switch, and then running Asterisk on the mini to boost phone quality. Add to that the new Netgear Wifi Skype phone and a SkypeIn number and I’ve got some serious hotness.

So what’s your VoIP situation look like? Are you already running VoIP? Is it through your cable provider, Vonage, or a do-it-yourself plan like VoicePulse? What’s up?

Six Apart’s New Focus: From Pro Dev To High School

Six Apart’s focus over the past few years has switched from catering to the professional web development and enterprise audience, to the tweens/teens MySpace crowd. After their acquisition of Live Journal in early 2005, you could tell that their focus was shifting. The world of LJ is entirely different than the blogosphere that I know about, here’s a good quote from Zephoria:

Live Journal is a culture, not simply a product or commodity that can be bought. From an outsider’s perspective, it might appear as though they are similar properties – they are both blogging tools, right? Wrong.

Jump inside LJ culture. People who use LJ talk about their LJs, not their blogs. They mock bloggers who want to be pundits, journalists, experts. In essence, they mock the culture of bloggers that use Six Apart’s tools. During interviews with LJ/Xanga folks, i’ve been told that MovableType is for people with no friends, people who just talk to be heard, people who are trying too hard.

I saw the LJ acquisition as a way to break into the 12-18 year old market segment of the population, but didn’t think much about it until I heard Project Comet (now named Vox, an awful name that I will refuse to use in this entry) was coming out soon. Comet is the new lifestyle publishing platform coming from Six Apart, which they describe as “combin[ing] the publishing power of TypePad, the community aspects of LiveJournal and the years of insight garnered from Movable Type.” I anticipated that Comet would be a way to merge the free LJ users into a TypePad-esque payment structure, but now that screenshots of Comet are out I can see that they’re taking it a few steps further… Comet will be taking on AIMPages and MySpace for a slice of the youth audience pie.

Google Hires The #1 Designer In The Industry

My buddy Doug Bowman is headed to Google. Doug — who I believe to be the best designer in our industry — was snatched up by Google to lead all their design efforts across all their products. This position wasn’t around before this announcement, it was a special position created just for Doug. Wow.

I truly think that both large companies and startups need to put “usable and attractive design” higher up on their priorities list, because right now design seems to be below Aeron chairs and cappuccino machines. I hate to quantify this opinion, but I’d venture to say that for every 10 companies reviewed on Mashable.com, Read/Write Web, Solution Watch, and others, only 1 or 2 have both an attractive and usable design. I can count on my fingers the number of startups who actually put thought and money into their user interface… hmm… here we go: Joyent, Cork’d, Rollyo, JotSpot, and Wayfaring off the top of my head.

So my question to all the entrepreneurs and businesspeople out there, do you have a “Doug Bowman” on your team, or did your cappuccino machine eat up your design budget?

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