Tandoori Tatanka

Pulling the trigger

I’m happy to hear the good news about Pandora. They’ve executed a good idea well and now it’s paying off.

Pandora Usage Stats Prove It’s iPhone’s Killer App

I want my ideas to be set up like a pyramid of tinder, ready to ignite. Sadly this is not the case today, despite over eight years of consistent toil. Bordertown Labs revenue is still directly tied to proportional time expenditure rather than residual sales.

Lack of focus is certainly the culprit. But what caused our focus to shift?

Siteprimer was overly complicated and our tiny team was consumed by tiny bugs while the market window closed.

Baseball Card Seeker should be run by someone who knows more about this market. Trading merchandise between private parties online isn’t my problem either. I see potential for managing local niche communities.

Vegbank won’t fully blossom until scientists revolutionize the way they share and give credit for data. Publications and references are the currency of academia, and it seems a simple task to quantify the objective contribution of any one dataset. Subjective assignment of credit is another issue and grant money isn’t distributed piecemeal. Lots of resignation exists among some the world’s brightest minds. If only scientists realized that they all face the exact same problem then they would more easily embrace the tools and methods profitably demonstrated by the open source software movement.

Pocket’s business plan ended before its funding did. Selling commodity services you can get elsewhere for free is tough. So we had some big ideas for spreading ads that people truly find useful, but we didn’t seek funding for the big ideas.

Myfuel was built on bad assumptions about the market, and then we didn’t even follow through to gather good failure data. I could see its custom log tools developed into an independent REST web service for other sites or possibly a Ruby on Rails plugin.

Jivepool is where I scratch my itches. It started as a niche based employment service but I couldn’t resist the urge to make a personal online media hub.

Jivepages was built on top of the Jivepool API, then it became a Rails plugin, now it’s a standalone YUI web page maker that I use for internal projects. It’s probably my old dbsimplicity and aspenos projects refusing to die.

Jivelab should be built with Moodle in one focused week in Austin this Winter.

Donation Democracy…some day.

Internal Records…who knows?

GoodBeers…living in Portland is a good start.

Motion Pages…open book adaptations. Hopefully before I die.

Tr3k…maybe I should release this to help remove my psychological blockage of victory.

Autosemantic Blender…choose your partners wisely. Another idea wanting a business plan.

Writecall actually works, but now we’re obligated to support old technology. It’s just barely worth it.

What will happen with the living product guide project? Will I be able to balance my constant work load with dogs nipping at my heels? And when’s the band going to release more music?

How do artists do it?