Today I talked with Kevin Olsen from Sun’s Startup Essentials program a bit about what happened in our case. He said they were pretty overwhelmed with the few couple of weeks of inquiries, and it sounds like they’re doing them by hand. About 20% of their emails didn’t get through to applicants because they were caught in spam filters. (They’ve started calling and snail mailing to get around that.) Finally someone has mistyped the name of our company as Automatic instead of Automattic (two Ts) and a company that was older than 4 years had applied as “Automatic” and was rejected, and somehow our application got caught up in that.
Podcast: EVDO
Podcast #4 is on EVDO, and comes in at 2:39.
Edgework Interview
I was interviewed by Brian Oberkirch the other day at the Pier, and the podcast of such is now up.
Podcast: Steak with Ryan Boren
Podcast #3 is up, wherein Ryan and I discuss steak. (Before and after.)
JavaScript Badges
Advertising and Blogs
Podcast #2 is up, broadly about advertising and blogs. 2:30. The quality is still awful, I might still sound like a chipmunk if you play it in flash, but thanks for all the great suggestions on the post from yesterday, I’ll be trying them out over the next few days.
First Podcast
I’m diving into the wild and wooly world of podcasting, and here is my first “episode.” Expect much experimentation to follow.
Bayesian Noise Reduction
PHP5 Issues
Dreamhost upgrades their servers to PHP 5.2 (newer is better, right?) and most of their PHP5 customers break. WP 2.1 had a lot of workarounds in it just to run under 5.2. That’s stupid. I’m sure there is a perfectly rational reason why PHP core was “forced” to break existing scripts, but constantly shooting your users in the foot isn’t a good way for PHP to stay relevant. (I write this as someone whose entire company and livelihood is based on PHP.)
bbPress Desmond
bbPress 0.8 “Desmond” Released! bbPress is starting to pick up the things we found worked best in WordPress.
Better Voicemail
Callwave has a cool service which allows you to send your voicemail to them rather than the crappy service your cell company provides. You get an email with caller ID info whenever you get a voicemail and a link to listen to it. You can also check it from your phone, like normal voicemail. It’s a freemium model. I’m loving it. The setup is just typing in a weird string of digits into your cell phone.
106Miles
I’m speaking at the next 106 Miles on February 15th in Menlo Park. The question is “When is the right time for a startup to hire a product manager?”
Thunderbird Release?
What ever happened to Thunderbird 2? The nightly builds claim to be version 3 now.
New Blogger Importer
We now have an importer that works with the new Blogger, and Andy has a weird moustache thing going on.
High Resolution Mistakes
2.1 downloads
Version 2.1 of WordPress has been downloaded an average of 19,483 times a day since it was released. The increased traffic on the site as a result has put a strain of the single server it runs on, we’re adding more soon.
Solid State Laptops?
I’m in the market for a new laptop as my TX 690P (which I love) is getting old and beat-up from travel. Unless Apple comes out with something amazing this month, I have my eyes set on one of the new ultraportables with solid state flash drives, which means the laptop can be completely silent and fanless. However information on these gems seems sparse online, especially in English, and especially if you want to buy one. Anyone know how to pick one of these up in the US? Anyone have one yet?
Gallery: 2-4-2007
Auto-imported from old gallery:
Adium 1.0
I just upgraded to the new Adium after it reminded me that my version was 42 weeks old.