Toluu

WeBreakStuff

A blog on entrepreneurship, user experience, and web innovation. Published by Fred Oliveira.

Weekend inspiration for November 29, 2008November 29

This entry is cross-posted with my personal blog at hellofunction.com (RSS feed), mainly because I figured this might be of interest to the readers of both.

I like slow weekends when I’m not under the gun with work. Matt Webb says this feels like “zero gravity”, and I have to agree. I typically take this time to catch up on my reading, so in case you’re interested, here’s what’s caught my eye in the past week.

1) This interview with Jeff Bezos on Smartmoney (about the future of Amazon.com) is interesting. I’ve always been a huge fan of Amazon and I do admire a company that manages to pull away from what most would call its core business (online sales) to fill a need of others - which is the case of their Web Services platform, that we‘ve been using for a few years now[1] - or the Kindle, which follows Bezos’ vision that people will read again.

2) My copy of Adaptive Path’s

Elsewhere on the internetNovember 27

I have been dedicating some of my time to catch up on reading and doing some writing of my own. I’ve started to publish a few of my thoughts on my recently opened personal blog, and hopefully some of you who’ve been subscribers to this one for long will enjoy the things I’ve been exploring.

Yesterday in particular I posted an article on peak potential (and how some people unfortunately never reach it) that I’d love you to read and discuss. It talks about how talent needs nurture from the individual himself and the environment or team around him.

If you like that one post, here’s the rest of the blog and the RSS feed so you can subscribe. I hope to have some of you as readers of that blog as well as this one. Thank you!

PS: naturally I’ll still be writing on this blog about both what we’re doing as a company and the topics we think and work on: design thinking, development and web-based product strategy. So stick around, obviously.

Dealing with growth painsNovember 18

Growing a company is tough. I found (or we as a company did, I should say) that quite often things get lost in the shuffle of managing a business. And I don’t mean small things like remembering to blog or twitter often, or maybe to order coffee supplies every once in a while. I mean it’s easy to forget the crucial bits, things like why you started the company in the first place.

A few years ago when we started there weren’t that many companies like ourselves out there. These days, there’s quite a few. I feel it is important to share one very important thought we sometimes overlook: you should never forget where you came from, why you are where here, and where you want to go next.

Our solution, CEPs

When we first started (when there was only 4 of us) I thought it would be a good idea to keep an updated list of Concerns, Expectations and Priorities [1]. So we created that list in our private wiki (more on how we use our wiki in a future post). Every one of us went in and wrote down his concerns, expectations and priorities.

I feel like writing these things down was almost as important as writing down our core values for several reasons. One, it made us actually consciously communicate what we want to get out of the company (personal satisfaction, money, experiences). Two: it made us understand others better, because quite often, communic

Be a virtual sticky note ninja, with Melee!October 21

It’s pretty easy to let routine take over. No shame in that, everyone gives in. This weekend we popped out of the same old, same old and decided to build something new - sure, there was a motive (Rails Rumble 2008), but we just took it as an excuse. In 48 hours (well, we slept two full nights, so make that about 24) we sketched, built and privately launched a new product called Melee.

If you do agile work (design or develoment), you probably do the stuff Melee helps you with, but with sticky notes and office walls. Melee is an agile brainstorming app. What does that mean, you ask? Let me give you a couple of use cases.

1) You’re a design and development shop who just got a RFP for a new social network. You might brainstorm a few ideas, throw them at the wall, cluster them, prioritize them, and build a proposal. Melee is your new wall.

2) You’re a development shop that uses SCRUM (ed: if you don’t use it yet, give it a try, you’ll love it). You maintain a produ

Intel, sign me upOctober 20

Look, I get overly exceited about stuff - sometimes that’s unwarranted, other times, it totally is. I believe this is a good reason to be at the edge of my seat: Intel showed off a prototype of a handheld - based on their Moorestown platform - today at the Intel Developer Forum. And I’m drooling. Here’s why:

I have an iPhone and I love it. I love how it looks, how it feels, the possibilities it has as a platform, the whole experience. But now I want this. Sure, the form factor may be weird because it’s tall/wide, but if the tilt experience is as good as on the next few videos, I’m hooked.