Cultured Code on their design for Things Touch.
I really like reading the Cultured Code blog about Things.app. It’s probably my very favorite application on OSX (after Firefox, naturally), and after Firefox & Mail, I probably spend more time using Things and managing my various to do items than anything else.
update: oops, their blog is actually here. The other link is a bit of a special case. Both are great.
Very happy to write that I joined the Board of Directors of TripIt this month. Simple story — I’ve been using their service when I travel for several months, mentioned it to one of their investors at OATV, met with the company, really liked them and their product, and here we are.
It’s a fun company with a really differentiated product offering that actually helps my life when I travel, so I’m excited to be involved. (Try it out!)
Great article on helping & supporting creative organizations by Ed Catmull, one of Pixar’s founders: How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity. Here’s something from the introduction:
I don’t think our success is largely luck. Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture.
It’s pretty long, but full of great, great stuff.
Beautiful storytelling by Josh @ First Round Capital about the invention of the modern mailbox (and their new investment, gnip). I really like the pacing & tone & content of the story, and it couldn’t make clearer what gnip aspires to do. (I have an interest in what they’re doing, of course, but hadn’t taken the time to read through all of it — with Josh’s story in my head, though, it’s both immediately interesting & compelling — perfect use of a story.)
I’ve been meaning to write about a John Markoff NYT piece from a few weeks back — it’s on the intersection of technology innovation & social mission. The featured company in the article is TechSoup (formerly Compumentor), and Mozilla features in the article as well.
I was really happy to see Markoff write this piece — it’s clear from here that there’s a new type of organization emerging in the world that we term “hybrid” — mission-driven companies like Mozilla and TechSoup, but who compete in the market with products and services. It seems to me that this is happening because the barriers to collaboration are falling precipitously — it’s easier and cheaper than ever to get together with a group of like-minded folks to work on changing the world. So people seem to be doing it, which is wonderful.
TechSoup is hosting the 3rd annual NetSquared Conference today (and blogging it here). The conference is outstanding, and was incredibly helpful to the PCF/Miro team last year, resulting in some long-lasting relationships.
NetSquared is a great gettogether of lots of organizations like this, and hopefully a preview of things to come, with more social mission organizations in the world. The TechSoup folks deserve a lot of praise for this sort of foresight and investment.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Some followup thoughts on my SOPA post
Feb 3, 23:21 › Travis: Man, SOPA and PIPA just drive me crazy. I am shocked Jan 11, 17:22 › John Stack: Have you considered #OPEN? Personally, it is as far Jan 11, 16:51 › Brad Feld: Fantastic John. I couldn't have said it better myself Jan 10, 15:34 › Robert Kaiser: "What I think we really need to figure out is how