Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It saddens me a little that the new Ubuntu Edge Project did not reach it's goal of $32 million but it didn't come as a surprise. It is a considerable amount of money and the campaign was most successful in the first few days. However the bar for the future of smartphones has been set.
Has someone ever told you that your product sucks? Has a customer cancelled his service because he found no use of it? Did you release your product to get feedback and your feelings were hurt? Believe it or not that's what people do and it's actually a good thing. That's the signal you will use to improve your product.
I hope this post doesn't turn into meta-blogging but since this idea is itching me I might as well get it out. It has been 4 months since I started this blog, after many unsuccessful ones, and I sure am satisfied. I have not written any master piece (yet) but people did seem to enjoy a thing, or two about what I have to say. By enjoy I simply mean that I had lots of visitors on those pages. The comments section says otherwise; and boy comments can be mean sometimes.
A simple and elegant solution
You can write emails, play video games, shoot a movie, take pictures, read a book, listen to music, tweet, see what your friends are doing, start your microwave oven, lock your car and much more with your smart phone. When was the last time you used your phone to make phone calls? Are there any reasons at all to use this little feature of your phone? Turns out it is the one thing that actually matters.
Most of your projects will be crappy. You just have to accept it so you can improve it incrementally. I am learning this first hand as I started mine a few month ago. I went on and checked the competition and was dissatisfied with theie services (note that this is what everyone say about their competitors). So I built a tool that provide the exact same result, but for a much lower price. I got a few sign-ups and then it became a ghost town. How did it happen? Well my theory is I built something just for myself.
I always start a new project full of hope and inspiration. Ideas just keep flowing. I start write the code. It is amazing how sometimes you are only limited by how fast you can type. Then comes the time where you have your minimum viable product or MVP and all the inspiration goes away. But then you start thinking about a new idea and the cycle repeats itself.
Hi my name is Shackleford, Rusty Shackleford. I run a successful web service with millions of active users. It is a one man show but through sheer luck I designed it in a highly scalable way from the very beginning. I am a programmer so it is very important for me to make my service very secure and user privacy is treated with utmost importance. I write today for one reason. Tomorrow, I am shutting down my very profitable business because it is the only way I can hold my end of the privacy contract I promised my customers.
When Google announced that Google reader will be shutting down, every tech news site or tech blog went crazy. "if Google can shut down a popular service just like that what is going to be next Gmail?", this was the mantra every one was saying on those sites. Well here is something people forgot to take into consideration, most people don't even know what Rss is.
If it wasn't for Ubuntu I would never be a regular linux user. From all the linux flavors I tried, it is the most user friendly and there is less fighting the OS and more work getting done. Recently I did notice that other flavors are finally looking out for the user (I'm sure they are following Ubuntu steps). I have been closely following ubuntu phone experience http://www.ubuntu.com/phone it looks very interesting. Today Ubuntu started a campaign on indiegogo with the very ambitious goal of $32 Million for the new Ubuntu Edge: the next generation of personal computing: smartphone and desktop PC in one state-of-the-art device.
