“What’s your advantage over your competitors?”

“Oh, the other systems are so complex; we’re so much more easy to use!”

Oh really?  You and every other web application out there.  Increo is guilty as charged.

Don’t get me wrong.  Usability is extremely important and very much the backbone of what we do here at Increo.  But it’s easy to get caught up in a single, unified concept of “ease of use”.  As though every human on the planet would find the same things easy or difficult to use.

It’s not a matter of degree.  If you take the “usability” that makes a web application more intuitive to me, the Increo team, and the technically inclined worldwide, and simply turn up the volume, adding more and more “usability”, the system is not going to become much better for my mom.  Similarly, the properties that make an application usable for my mom are likely to make the software feel clunky and heavyweight to me.  The division isn’t just tech-savviness; the concept of what is easy to use varies across cultures, backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking.

Certainly great advances have been made in what makes something more usable to more people more of the time.  We should listen, and design to be as universally usable as possible.

We should not, however, forget that usability is in the eye of the beholder.

Some time ago, I was honored to speak on an SVAMA panel on Entrepreneurial Marketing alongside Donna Wells, CMO of Mint.com and TJ Schimone of Slice by Karim, partybeans.com and what seems like a handful of other ventures.

In addition to the usual advice “Be exceptionally careful who you hire” and “Manage your network effects”:

• None of the panelists had spent any money on advertising in their current role save a couple thousand bucks on a HARO ad here and there.  Takeaway: A great story and some PR investment is exponentially more effective than traditional advertising.
• With today’s network effects in the Business to Consumer world (and increasingly in the Business to Business world) product is king.  A great product does not guarantee success, but it certainly helps.  A poor product is a ticket to the deadpool.
• You will not get network effects without giving something away for free.  This can be your product or your content–preferably both.

Hi everyone, my name is Eric from Carnegie Mellon University and I’ve recently joined the Increo team to help with the sales and marketing side of the company. Carnegie Mellon University is located in PA while Increo’s headquarters are over 3,000 miles away in CA.

Over the past two weeks I partook on an epic journey across the nation from coast to coast. The inspiration? George Motz’s Hamburger America. The reason? It was the simple solution to a pressing issue of transportation in California. How often are you faced with a problem where the simplest solution is also the one that’s the most satisfying? I considered flying to California and renting a car for the summer, but the cost made that idea laughable. I thought about buying a car upon arrival and selling it before I left, but the transaction costs were far too high and inconvenient. I contemplated shipping my car via transport, but I adore my car and worried about possible damage, and with the best alternative taking me on a trip of new experiences through places I have never been before, the opportunity to quench my thirst for adventure was the obvious choice.

On my trip, I ended up eating at four different burger locations: Tessaro’s in Pittsburgh, PA, Rotier’s in Nashville, TN, the Golden Light Café in Amarillo, TX, and In-n-Out in Barstow, CA (and scattered through Southwest America). Each burger joint represents a different take on the classic cheeseburger, but in the end the least known cheeseburger was the best to epitomize the quintessential American cheeseburger. Let’s talk a bit more about the cheeseburger from the Golden Light Café.

The Golden Light Café is a cozy dive bar right on I-40 (Formerly Route 66) and has been serving up their greasy concoctions in the same location since 1946. I ordered up their original cheeseburger that started it all along with a green chili cheeseburger to split. I watched the burgers as they sizzled on the griddle next to burger buns getting a quick toast job. The burgers came with mustard, lettuce, two thick cut slices of tomatoes, onions, pickles, and of course American cheese (all burgers cooked well-done). The first bite was pure bliss with the perfect combination of complementing textures of chewy bun and slightly melted cheese with the crisp lettuce and coarse beefy patty with just the right amount of bite from the onions and mustard.

Being smack dab in between Albuquerque, Oklahoma City and Dallas, it is a fair distance away from major cities and ends up only being frequented by locals and travelers. If you ever find yourself driving along I-40, remember that you just might pass the quintessential American cheeseburger.

This year for Earth Day, the team at Increo wanted to help contribute to the cause.  So, in honor of Earth Day 2009, we’re giving every free or new Backboard account holder two full weeks of premium Backboard features.

If we all use Backboard, we can save thousands of trees by not having to print out documents to give feedback.

Head on over to http://www.getbackboard.com to get started. If you’re an existing Basic Plan user, we’ve already taken care of upgrading your account for you.  If you are new to Backboard, sign up and you will be given a free 14-day Premium Backboard account as well.

Premium accounts enable you to create unlimited password-protected, SSL-encrypted Backboards from large files, and allow you to invite up to five other people to experience the benefits of your trial.

We are also having a random drawing to win a free premium Backboard account!  It’s easy to be entered to win - just create a Backboard during your two-week trial.

This offer is only for a limited time, so go to http://www.getbackboard.com to get started today.

Happy Backboarding!

In our quest to be completely buzzword-compliant, we’ve implemented Backboard and embedit.in as “cloud computing” applications; that is, the servers on which they run are virtual private server instances. It’s great: we can add as much capacity as we need without having to acquire and set up hardwarea and scale to traffic dynamically.

One piece of software without which this would be much less enjoyable is the RightScale libraries, released as open source by RightScale. They’re great, wrapping all of the Amazon Web Services APIs — and Amazon’s competitors’ APIs, too — in a straightforward, well-documented Ruby library. It’s interesting that RightScale is doing this open source play, since their bread and butter is creating deployment solutions and magic scaling sprinkles for cloud-hosted applications. But their libraries are solid and comprehensive, to boot.

Installing them is:

sudo gem install right_aws

after which you can use them from IRB or from Capistrano or from your application. No downloading one set of Java command-line tools for EC2 and a a Firefox extension for S3. No configuring environment variables and setting up a Java Runtime Environment. Easy!

One caveat to point out if you’re using JRuby: the jruby-openssl library doesn’t support SHA-256 for generating HMAC signatures, but it does support generating SHA-256 digests. This defeats the mechanism in right_aws for figuring out how to sign Amazon Web Services requests. To work around and force SHA-1 for request signatures, this monkey patch works:

# Icky, icky monkeypatch.
module RightAws
  def AwsUtils.blow_away_sha256
    class_variable_set '@@digest256', nil
  end
end

# Called later:
RightAws::AwsUtils.blow_away_sha256

We love the RightScale libraries for their completeness, allowing us to avoid learning a new library for every place we might want to do something with cloud computing or web services.

Yesterday, Seth Godin shared his thoughts on how to make a conference call more effective–by setting up a chat room for all participants and typing and conversing at the same time.

If your conference call is about a document or set of documents, why not set up a Backboard instead?  Share with all participants before you start so everyone sees the document in their browser.  Unlike screen sharing or typical web conferencing, there is no need for conference participants to download any software to get started.

Like Godin’s chat, comments are real-time and help to guide the conversation, but with Backboard you can see markup, annotations and approvals as well.

It all started with Jeff’s tweet from a week and a half ago:

It got me thinking: what, then, does motivate us? My initial reaction was to disagree: nothing is a bigger de-motivator than a project schedule that’s unrealistically short. As soon as I got over my sense of smug satisfaction from having a decent counter-argument, though, I understood what I believe to be Jeff’s real point. I think it comes across better as the converse:

Never miss an opportunity to make something happen quickly and successfully — it will leave you feeling motivated like nothing else can.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over at 24 Ways, Paul Boag has a great list of 10 ways to get approval from clients on design projects.  Notably, many of his tips make sense whether you are seeking approval from clients on design work or colleagues on the next quarterly update.

Here are some highlights:

• Avoid multiple concepts - they take time from the designer and cause confusion rather than clarity.
• Present your designs and provide written support material - it’s important for clients to understand the why behind what you’ve done.
• Use mood boards and show clients samples from sites you preselect as well done - otherwise you might be asked to replicate a terrible approach.

Why 11 ways?  Well, we designed Backboard to facilitate feedback and approval on every stage of all of your projects.  By providing clients with a centralized place to view your work and your explanation behind it where they can also give concrete feedback and approval, you get quicker feedback and can address each point before it becomes an issue.

Yesterday, I was reading a thread on evolt.org’s thelist, perhaps the oldest community of web designers and programmers around.

The topic of the thread was OpenID, the implementation of which on websites is one of the most contentious issues I’ve seen in a long time. Some of the input from the thread:

I have discovered OpenID,
Here is a link if you haven’t heard of it, http://openid.net/
I am un-sure at the moment whether this is a good secure service and I was wondering if any of you folks had any experience with this.

Last I checked, it was going to be too much of a headache for us to implement

I’ve only seen it used on stackoverflow.com, which is even a headache
for a user if you don’t habitually authenticate with one of their
OpenID providers whenever you surf.

I gazed over the specs and that’s exactly what happens.

Personally, I wouldn’t even bother with it. I think it’s a case of “good
ideal, bad implementation”.

Given that Backboard allows you to authenticate with OpenID:

and that embedit.in requires you to do so (the buttons for AOL, Yahoo!, and Google are merely shortcuts to the OpenID URLs for those providers):

you might suspect we have something to say about the whole matter. And you’d be right. The way we see it, OpenID fundamentally solves two very important problems while creating one new problem.

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I was speaking to a young man at a Silicon Valley American Marketing Association meetup a few weeks ago who was interested in entrepreneurship.  He mentioned the whole process of starting your own company seemed chaotic.  I looked back at him and said, “If you don’t like chaos, you might want to reconsider.” After a round of chuckles, the group I was in had a discussion about the role of chaos in entrepreneurship. Our conclusion came to something like this:

The great, fun, interesting and successful entrepreneurs we know enjoy the process just as much as the result.  Your enjoyment of the chaos along the way (and a lot of learning) is it’s own reward.