Box.net is a leading collaboration platform with an innovative approach to managing and sharing content online.  Joining Box allows us to bring our simple document visualization and collaboration to more people than ever before.

Two members of the Increo team — Jeff and Kimber — have joined Box as part of this transition.

We have prepared a short FAQ with more information about this acquisition and the benefits it will bring Box and Increo customers.

As you might notice, the Increo on Ideas blog is on hiatus. We’re in the process of going through an exciting transition, and will post here again when that transition is complete.

Don’t worry, the Increo products you know and love will remain up, open, and largely free during the transition and in the foreseeable future.

Thank you very much for your support and patience during this time.

“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.

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.

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!

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.

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 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.

The importance of having an accurate schedule for any project — software projects most certainly included — is hard to overstate. When I’m wearing my “project manager” hat here at Increo, I usually follow the Spolsky method of scheduling, and it works really well for us.

We started doing this last September after one of our releases ballooned out of control, going from an initial “deadline” of two weeks after we started to a final release seven weeks later. Talk about lessons learned, but suddenly our eyes were open: our next couple of projects eked out ahead of schedule, and office morale skyrocketed.

Programmers straight out of school often don’t realize this, but “the old college try” isn’t sustainable. Saying you’ll give it your best shot and that that has to be good enough doesn’t cut it: everybody already is doing their best, all the time. We have a luxury that most people would kill for: a team of total rock stars who get to do what they love to do every day.

Projects don’t fall behind schedule because the people aren’t working hard, and they don’t fall behind schedule because the people aren’t talented enough.

They fall behind schedule (and they seemingly always fall behind schedule in this gig) because the scope of the project tends to get bigger and because the estimates at the beginning were too small. Spolsky nails it:

Many rookie software managers think that they can “motivate” their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, “tight” (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I’m behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I’m working ahead of schedule, I’m cheerful and productive.

Programmers, even as dehumanizing as it is to say this, are a finite resource. Each person working on code has the ability to create a fixed amount in an hour. If you want to do more with your projects, you have to spend more time. If you want to spend less time, you have to do less, and there’s no better way to form a cogent argument for figuring this out than to have a realistic, correct schedule.

What, then, of the opportunistic heroism in doing an entire week-long project in one hour? After all, it’s no way to organize your projects, because if you start expecting the impossible, all you’ll find is that you’re really bad at estimating.

Instead, successes that come from your elite programming skills really should serve their intended purpose: that extended high from writing really great code that only true nerds like you and me can fully appreciate.

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.