Archive for January, 2007
Drag a map around and see where the deals are
Last week, we released an update to the site that makes Valpak coupons mappable and searchable. The coolest part of this for me was navigating to the Seattle Restaurants page and dragging the map around and seeing which restaurants had deals in the neighborhood I was browsing. I’ve never paid any attention to the Valpak [...]
Spotted on the street
I enjoy spotting unusual bumper stickers and spotted this on a Mazda RX-8 parked outside my apartment this weekend. download sherlock holmes film in hd formats Awesome.
Marketing Innovation is Everywhere
This post on marketing innovation in the coffee market was sent to me and I had to share it: Sex sells. Usually, it sells things like beer, various liquors and – of course – fatty fast food hamburger, but some Seattle area businesses are using it to sell something else entirely: coffee. dinner for schmucks [...]
Functional Specs Matter
As part of the feature definition process, I’ve been focused on writing quick functional specs with wireframes and data requirements to facilitate discussions with developers and our tester on what we’re trying to accomplish from a product perspective. This process is proving to be extremely valuable, even in a quasi-Agile, get something up quickly and [...]
Understanding Customer Needs (via WSJ)
There’s a really interesting article in the WSJ this morning about really walking a mile in your customer’s shoes. Or, in this case, viewing a scene through his glasses. Mr. Sato is head of advertising and investor relations at Japanese eyeglasses retailer Meganesuper Co., which requires employees to wear glasses at work. “I change them [...]
Great Post on What's Next (via Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures)
Brad Burnham has a great post (which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog) about what’s coming next in the inevitable progression of the computer industry. He argues that we’re in a world where we no longer care about hardware or software but rather we care about data (Think Facebook, Craigslist). After data, he suggests that [...]
Sysinternals – If you're running Windows, you should check them out
There’s a great post on Michael.net about Sysinternals – Michael has listed each one with a brief description about what they do. It saves you a couple of hundred clicks on Microsoft’s site. These are a collection of utilities (that were acquired by Microsoft) that let you really see what’s going on in your computer. [...]
Relationships Matter
Fred Wilson has a post up called “A Return to Royalty?” in which he talks about the fact that if Hillary Clinton is elected, then the past four Presidents will have come from just two families. To tell the truth, I don’t find this surprising at all. I think in any endeavor, success is always [...]
The Importance of Training & Practice
I came across an amazing story in the UK’s Daily Mail which was making the rounds on the front page of Reddit. It was about a British Airways flight that flew through the dust cloud from a volcanic eruption near Indonesia in 1982 and lost all four engines. With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed [...]
Social Networks – Inference is better than asking
It’s far more powerful if a system or website can let a user register, fill out a profile and then tell them who they should consider connecting to. This way, the system generates immediate me-value for the user. As soon as the profile is filled out, there’s a payoff. LinkedIn does a great job with [...]