Jacob Reiff jaacob.com

Photo featured on Schmap

A photo I took of the Lotus Cafe in Portland was included in the Schmap Guide to Portland (Top Nightlife section). The site is a pretty cool concept, putting together guides to cities using materials found on sites like Flickr, but they’ve really got to work on their load times. Firefox 2 on OS X took nearly 3 minutes to load the thing.

Takeout from Inc., July 2007

* Short story with a lesson when raising capital at the beginning; don’t sell stock, sell convertible debt. And don’t promise the moon.

* SpotScout: Online marketplace for parking spots. All that buzz (NYT, Boston Globe, Financial Times, CNN, etc.) comes from it being a novel concept, but will it turn into a money-making venture? (2006 revenue = 0, with 7 employees.)

* Inspiring: Kidrobot‘s Paul Budnitz on making time for creative thinking.

* Part Nine (of nine) of Norm Brodsky’s adventure in selling his business: One key lesson learned—always know who has the final say when negotiating.

* TechShop: I totally want one of these near me. It’s like the gym, but instead of working out, you get to play with welding equipment, lathes, 3D printers and other fun stuff. [Inc. article]

* Elevator Pitches: Wow do I need help with mine. Most of the time, people kind of scratch their head while their eyes go glossy—and I don’t even do anything unheard of. Great tips on discovering the core of what you do and refining how you say it.

Takeout for Juxtapoz, March 2007

One of the best things about reading Juxtapoz is that the advertisements are often as interesting as the content. (Which is definitely not a criticism of the content.) I’ve included links from both that I want to remember.

* Kenji Hirata—colorful, clean acrylics. This style of work (2 pianos + trumpet x 1 handclap specifically) never seems like it would translate well to me as a painting, it’s too clean, too precise, too reminiscent of Illustrator. Yet somehow, Hirata’s painting breaks through.

* Buff Monster—colorful, pretty and filthy. (NSFW.)

* Greg Lamarche—collage with a focus on typography. Handmade so clean, it looks like a computer produced it. Great colors & composition.

* Wooster on Spring—show at 11 Spring Street held prior to demo.

* Richard Colman—I’m lost in the detail, characters.

* David Ellis—intricate forms, all scales. Installations.

[ March 2007 Issue Archive ]

5 invites to Pownce

I’ve got 5 invites left to Pownce—post a comment on why you want to be my friend (or just want into Pownce) and I’ll send you an invite.

(I need your email address to invite you—perhaps a *name* [at] *domain.com* will do the trick?)

The iPhone.

While I can’t do a better review than other people out there, I’ve got a few bits of my own to throw out.

But first off, the overall: yes, it’s amazing. Groundbreaking, phenomenal, etc.

The ease with which you can do most things blows all other phones out of the water.

For example: this morning I needed to find a Chase Bank to deposit a check. I was already in the car. Loaded up Google Maps, told it where I am, then searched for “Chase Bank”. Up popped (within 8 seconds, over EDGE) a bunch of little red pushpins. Clicked the closest, got turn-by-turn directions. Done. On the Nokia E62, that would have been a _fight_.

Typing is a non-issue. Yes, you’ll misspell a lot of words if you try to type fast. Doesn’t matter, the software fixes over 90% of them correctly. Rarely, it doesn’t register a key press; I’m not sure if it’s because I’m going too fast, or the lack of tactile feedback is causing me to not push “hard” enough. It’s almost always the spacebar that it misses.

I’ve been using Ta-da Lists (love the updated iPhone-only style, dislike the colors) for my to-dos, since (for whatever @!#$@# reason) iCal’s to-do lists don’t sync with the iPhone. Sync’d beautifully with my E62, now they are useless. Praying this gets fixed with an update.

A few of other observations:

* The speakerphone is a joke. My E62 had an incredibly loud, clear speakerphone—I used it on 90% of my calls. This one is near-useless. (Which is strange, because the speaker is a lot louder when watching YouTube or video podcasts. Something about a phone call?)

* It’s hilariously stupid to see the weather widget on the iPhone (data from Yahoo / The Weather Channel) “compete” against the weather widget on Dashboard (data from Accuweather.com).

* The Notes app is incredibly goofy looking, forcing you to use Marker Felt. I’d love to know the reasoning behind this, when the rest of the device is so sleek.

* You can’t drag/drop individual MP3′s onto the iPhone—you have to create a playlist for it to sync. (Maybe this is only when auto-sync is turned on?)

* You can’t have individual signatures for each mail account, which is unacceptable to me. You set a default account, and that’s what the phone uses for all mail sending not done through the Mail app. (So if you send a link via YouTube, or a photo from Photos, etc.) There’s only one signature, and it appends itself to every email, regardless of which account. You have to manually delete it out if you don’t want to include it.

* On some mail accounts, I want to use SSL to send. On others, I don’t. The iPhone thinks that just because I have a single SMTP server, I wouldn’t want to have different settings on other options relating to that server. So if I change one email account to use SSL, they ALL change to use SSL. Annoying. (Especially since I pay to send via authsmtp.com (and SSL sending costs double), so I don’t have to do any annoying SMTP switching depending on what network I’m on.)

* Setting the SMTP authorization mechanism to anything other than Password won’t “stick” plenty of times. Even worse, it’ll say “Password”, but then attempt to connect via NTLM (which my provider didn’t support), throwing an error and not letting you send email. (Syncing the account via iTunes somehow fixed the issue.)

* It makes a decent (audio) iPod, but I can’t figure out how to do: on-the-go playlists? how to put a song repeat? how to put an album on repeat?

* I never cared about video podcasts because I never had time to watch them in front of the computer at home. Subscribing to them and having them auto-sync to the iPhone though, I’ve now always got a few hours of video content ready to watch on the gorgeous screen. Of course, there’s always YouTube as well (with the H.264 encoded videos that look fantastic). I’ve been enjoying Cool Hunting Video, MAKE Magazine and shralp! (I’d make these links to their individual pages in iTunes, but am struggling to figure out how.)

* The Google Maps app on satellite view is incredible.

* NYTimesRiver.com (all of NYT’s feeds put together, courtesy of Dave Winer) is great for scanning news stories quickly.

* iPhoneMiles.com is a nifty little app made by Ray and Kandace over at Needmore—while I don’t do a lot of business-relating driving, this will be handy on those rare occasions.

Apple also released some web developer documentation for the iPhone, in case you missed it.

**Update:** I just discovered that in Mail, while in the list of messages view, if you quickly drag your finger from right to left a short distance over an email, a Delete button appears. Makes for much quicker deleting than going into each message and clicking the trash can!

Takeout from Inc, April 2007

* Credit card processing: There’s the small resellers with spammy looking sites you aren’t sure you can trust and the giants that don’t have your best interests at heart—I see a wide open space for somebody to step in and do it right. While the article does a great job of showing you all the ways CC processors are ripping you off and hiding it, the best tip is how to find your real rate; just divide your total fees by your total monthly credit card sales. If it doesn’t match the low, low percentage you were quoted during the sales pitch, then you’ve got a problem.

* the Elevator Pitch for Personal Pediatrics: normally I love the Elevator Pitch, but this one feels off. I think it’s just the benefits the article pushes though—the doctor pays $50k and gets a portable office including a fridge for medicine plus access to a secure website for admin tasks and medical record storage, while the patient pays $1.5k/yr and gets 24-7 phone access to their doctor. Since Personal Pediatrics has little to no brand cachet ($0 revenue in ’06, one unpaid temp employee), I’d be wondering what I’m getting for my $50k as a doctor, and as a patient, I’d be hard-pressed to believe I’ll get 24-7 phone access to a doctor since past experience has always been so poor in that regard. Since the clientele is basically buying the right to have a doctor (with the annual fee) and clearly desires the high-end experience of in-home treatment, I’d assume the doc’s hourly fees aren’t cheap and with that comes a higher-end customer base that will make it worth becoming a 24-7 phone slave to new parents. Then it’s just a question of signing up already-known pediatricians with strong reputations and riding them to the tipping point of brand recognition. Because otherwise, you’re selling parents on a specific set of doctors that they have no referrals for—and who’s taking their kid to a doctor nobody can vouch for, especially at that price?

* Speed up your sales cycle: good anecdotes on rethinking how and to whom you sell.

* Cyber insurance: I wonder how many web2.0 companies handling sensitive data have it?

* The story of eSys: taking advantage of what each country has to offer around the world to reduce costs to a bare minimum; brilliant, but it sets off “cheater!” alarms in my head. probably out of envy though. it makes the author “uncomfortable”, for reasons like standards of living and governments needing to tax the companies that operate in their bounds. if everybody followed the eSys plan of formation, it could definitely be disruptive on a large scale.

* How I Did It: great first-person account of a guy doing business in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

[ April 2007 index archive ]

HOWTO: Leave/Get ousted from your company with grace and dignity

Derek Powazek + Heather Champ ≠ JPG Magazine

* Derek’s post

* Heather’s post

* Metafilter conversation

* Flickr discussion

* 8020/Paul Cloutier blog post

Like so many on MeFi said, we don’t know the whole story, and I doubt we ever will.

As a paying subscriber to JPG though, I doubt I’ll be renewing my subscription. There’s plenty of other photography communities out there—no need to support one that isn’t true to itself.

Because it’s boring.

My favorite from Michael Bierut’s Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface

10. Because it’s boring.
Tibor Kalman was fascinated with boring typefaces. “No, this one is too clever, this one is too interesting,” he kept saying when showed him the fonts I was proposing for his monograph. Anything but a boring typeface, he felt, got in the way of the ideas. We settled on Trade Gothic.

(Read the rest of the list over at Design Observer.)

Takeout from Wired, April 2007

* A Google Maps mashup I probably don’t need to know about: Mappy Hour (find the nearest happy hour)
* I **really** want to try the Glossophobia Sim at Hofstra University—practice public speaking in front of “the rudest audience ever.”
* MobileIris sure sounds nice, but right now I’d settle for my cell just giving me clear calls all the time, ringing _everytime_ someone calls, you know… the basic stuff. (Although the Bluetooth modem did work out nicely at Webvisions when the Convention Center’s internet went down. Average speed, 24k/sec on Cingular EDGE.)
* Sport Beans. Way to find a new niche, Jelly Belly.
* Jayisgames.com—I think I’m the last person to hear about this site.
* To read: Why Beauty is Truth
* The Urban Cactus—holy shit. Although I bet the BoKlok is cheaper.
* Computerized Sewing Machines: I’ve wanted an embroidery machine I could hook up to Illustrator for a few years now, but never had any luck finding the appropriate kit online. Didn’t expect to see a comparison review in Wired!
* Inspired by the story on transparent CEOs, even though I’ve heard the same rhetoric plenty of other places. The Redfin story was a nice example, since real estate is such a black hole of a process to most people. As a small business owner, I know this is one place I need to increase my efforts 100x.
* Shot Spotter—these articles are the reason I read Wired. Triangulate murder scenes based on big brother-esque realtime recordings of the gunshots? Wish I thought of it.
* Remapping / “growing” new senses by plugging them into our existing 5(.5)—fascinating. Seems like just the start though, I wonder what they’ve got that they aren’t showing us.

[index archive for issue]

About to cancel Highrise

I’m having trouble seeing the value in Highrise, but maybe I’m just using it “wrong”. I was excited for months prior to launch because I need _major_ help with CRM and tracking business development, but right now my Highrise is basically a glorified email archive that I can segment and group. While the very well-done email parsing stuff is slick, I don’t need another to-do task list, and sending a task via email isn’t near as quick as just adding it to my phone (which syncs with iCal). (Will the email parsing feature move into Basecamp? Pretty please? Messages and To-Dos via email!)

For the $29 a month, I’d rather put that money into a more powerful tool.

Any suggestions or help? Inspiring links on how others are using Highrise to take over the world? Or should I just seriously consider Studiometry? (Or something else?)