Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, January 30, 2008:
Blues Brothers on the Big Screen
Last week my sister scored tickets to Blues Brothers on the big screen. I never got to see it in a movie theater so it was a real treat.
Pictures taken with the bogus iPhone camera so they’re not great, but you get the idea. You have to be super humanly still to get a clear pic with this camera. Worst part of the iPhone.
Designers Take Note
Very interesting comments on the Washington Post redesign by Edward Tufte: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0002nk
A Few Interesting Posts
My father’s had a few interesting posts on his blog lately. Worth checking out for a little change of pace from my normal dribble.
Battle For The Streets - Wheelies Versus Walkies
KenRockwell.com
I linked to this site indirectly the other day, but it really deserves it’s own link. If you’re in the market for a digital camera and specifically a DSLR from Nikon or Canon then this site is simply a must read. I’ve literally been through every article. Ken’s writing style is great and the information is first rate. He’s making his living from the site so he must be doing something right. When I purchased a new camera last week I made sure to buy it through his affiliate link.
I wish even a fraction of the content I read online every day was anywhere near this good.
More Coverage of NewsGator
A few interesting articles:
http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/Article/NNWFree-2008-01-09-19-00 (thanks to Mike for the link).
http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/2008/01/scorched-earth.html (nice post from a competitor RSS reader)
How long until Brent and Nick move on you think? It makes no business sense to keep 2 of the premier developers out there working on free products. The products will do great (for a while) without them being free.
Anyone out there who creates software for a living should be pretty unnerved by this. Your livelihood just took another little hit.
Is there any chance they made them free because they weren’t doing well financially? I suppose it’s possible that sales were not up to snuff, though it seems unlikely.
Best Mac RSS Reader?
Since I’m done with NetNewsWire (you have no idea how sad it makes me to say that) I’m looking for the next best thing. Thoughts?
Yikes!
I don’t know about this (more from the owner). I think I’d rather keep paying for NetNewsWire than have to go through opting out of all their undercover “attention” gathering. Not so much for myself, but for all the other users out there who will download it having no idea they’ve opted into something like this by doing so.
Seems awfully sleazy for a group of really good guys. Though Nick denies this in his post it sort of sounds like the beginning of the downward slide of Newsgator. I mean if you could charge money wouldn’t you? I guess selling the data to the highest bidder or perhaps using it to build some meta site might make a few bucks, but you’re moving from a clean, clear, well known business model to a fuzzy one of finding uses for “attention data”.
HelpSpot on Gillmor Gang
I sent $100 to Jason Calacanis last week as a gag mostly for a mention on the Gillmor Gang. I have to say Jason is a hysterical marketer and gave HelpSpot a long plug. He got a few of the facts mixed up, but hey what do you want for $100! One thing to clear up is that you can run HelpSpot on your own server, hosting is optional.
You can hear the show here: http://www.gillmorgroup.com/media/TheGang-2008.01.04-1.mp3
HelpSpot is mentioned at 39:10
How to Afford Anything
Pretty good article. How to Afford Anything.
HelpSpot In the Wild: Formspring
Long time blog reader and HelpSpot customer Ade Olonoh has just put up a nice post introducing his new HelpSpot portal (previously he just used it for email support). Ade did a great job integrating it into his companies website (Formspring). He even ported his forums from vBulletin to HelpSpot and provided me the code to do it so I could post it for others.
Bye Bye CaseDetective
Looks like another one of our compatriots is biting the dust. I can’t blame Ian, that’s not a lot of revenue for all that work. I really thought it would be doing better than that. You need to know when to cut your losses. Being an add on product to a larger one is always a tough way to go as you’re naturally limited by the main product and are always at risk of your key features being added to the main one.
Good luck in your next venture Ian. Hopefully you’ll be able to put this experience to good use.