Period Three Blog » Web Development

Feb162010

UMS design panel parts 1 & 2

Posted by Gene in Design, Web Development

In our recent design panel with Jason Beaird (@jasongraphix) and Molly Oakley(@mollyoakley) on unmatchedstyle.com, we talk about a few things, from current sites to design review processes within their companies to new and interesting techniques they are incorporating into their work.

In Part 1 above, we talk about Dribbble.com, the new (and still invite-only) social inspiration site.

In part 2 we talk about the design review process at their companies, then move onto to some new techniques being incorporated into their work. We finish up by focusing a bit on the great font site, fontsquirrel.com.

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Jan192010

Talking with Hiten Shah - crazyegg, kissmetrics to name a few

Posted by Gene in Business, Web Development

Disclaimer: This is a cross post from unmatchedstyle.com

Recently I was able to get Hiten Shah (@hnshah) to sit down with us and give us a quick run down of what he’s got going on with his great web products: KissMetrics, CrazyEgg, Survey.io to name just three. Keep in mind Hiten is probably the coolest person you’ll ever meet, especially since this is the second sit down he did with me as I completely destroyed the first recording we did. So a really big thank you for being so awesome Hiten!

We first got to talk through his great new analytics product KissMetrics.com, which is now in private beta (@kissmetrics). What makes KissMetrics so useful is it’s ability to get at the core of what’s driving consumers to your products and truly helps you analyze what makes them buy. In their own words:

KISSmetrics is different from other analytics platforms due to a combination of three key features. We focus on funnels and conversions and make them easy to track and interpret, use people as the basic unit of measure, and support tracking of highly-flexible custom data through our simple API.

We discussed Survey.io (demo here), how we are using it here on UMS and the background behind the creation of the survey system. You can read more about it here, but here’s some background on the survey itself:

The surveys you can create using Survey.io have been hand crafted by Sean Ellis. He has been practicing metrics driven marketing and customer development for 12 years. Currently he is advising startups to enable them to reach their full potential by applying his 12in6 methodology.

Survey.io was designed and developed by the KISSmetrics team. KISSmetrics is a customer development platform with sufficient flexibility to give you visibility into what’s working and what’s not in your product. The tools and technology help you measure what’s happening and tune the user experience.

Finally we covered the future and recent updates for CrazyEgg.com. We love CrazyEgg and use it all the time for our own design projects.

Thanks for the quick update Hiten!

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May142009

Episode 17 - UMS Podcast

Posted by Gene in Design, Web Development

This week we talk about two ‘green’ web companies, Studio 7 Designs and EnviraMedia.

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Apr142009

Jay and Gene discuss FOWA Miami at ColumbiaRefresh

Posted by Gene in Business, Web Development, Period Three News

As you may know Jay and I were able to attend Future of Web Apps in Miami this past February. We recently did a presentation covering what we got from the conference to the RefreshColumbia group.

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Mar232009

Episode 9 - UMS Design Review Podcast

Posted by Gene in Design, Web Development

This week we’re focusing on one site, the excellent nclud.com. We think it’s a really great example of the kind of work more people should be doing.

We reviewed the nclud site last week on gallery.

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Feb232009

FOWA!

Posted by Gene in Business, Web Development, Twitter

So we’re off to Future of Web Apps 2009. Really looking forward to hearing some of the speakers, people like; Gary Vaynerchuck, Jason Fried, Joel Spolsky & Kevin Hale.

If you didn’t know already, we keep up a another well known(ish) blog unmatchedstyle.com, we’ll be trying to meet some interesting people there who work on the web and gain some insights that we can hopefully share with our readers in some way. While we’re there we may even try out this twitter thing so follow us @ http://twitter.com/unmatchedstyle, you never know…

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Jan192009

Tweetdeck gets funding, insanity? really?

Posted by Gene in Software, Web Development, Twitter

Just perusing my RSS feeds and came across this article “Another Twitter App Funded: TweetDeck Raises an Angel Round. Next Up: A Business Plan” where Tweetdeck (or specifically it’s creator) is getting 500K in funding. I then came across this article on gigaom.com where Om Malik thinks it’s insanity. Or Twitter insanity. Reading his replies to other commentors he’s really not hip to it.

[Tweetdeck] one of the many Twitter desktop apps that use Adobe Air and has been downloaded 250,000 times, is getting just shy of half a million bucks from New York-based incubator Betaworks. I’m not quite sure why! Though I think I understand — it uses Bit.ly, a service that shortens URLs to be exchanged on Twitter and is also backed by Betaworks.

He goes on to reply later that he doesn’t understand it, since Tweetdeck is JUST and Adobe Air app…

I think is one of the things that people working in/on this industry (the internet) falls prey to. We get so caught up in how it all works and how its put together we forget the big picture. Normal people don’t give a crap. People will respond to something that looks neat and works, things that make them feel cool for what they are doing. Maybe Tweetdeck does that for ya, who knows. Now I know Mr. Malik is “IN” on the internet and he needs to write stuff, but seriously, I’m happy for Tweetdeck, I think it rocks they got some money for their creation. I’m not going to take anything away from them for getting investment money to continue the cause, especially in today’s financial climate.

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Dec042008

UMS Interview

Posted by Gene in Design, Web Development

New interview up on unmatchedstyle.com. This month we’re talking with Dan Rubin, a graphic designer, web developer, musician and Apple enthusiast living and working in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (US). He’s a founder and principal of Webgraph (a design and branding studio), co-founder of Sidebar Creative (a design collective) and Sinelogic (UI and usability consulting) as well as a web standards consultant, author and speaker. Dan also writes his blog SuperfluousBanter.

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Nov112008

Microsoft = OpenID

Posted by Gene in Technical, Web Development, Social Web

This fairly big news, Microsoft is making their Live ID an OpenID provider service. That could be big for OpenID since Microsoft is so big. I personally like using OpenID, it was a bit buggy at first but it seems they’ve worked it all out now.

Beginning today, Windows Live ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.

They go on to say:

All Windows Live product teams are committed to supporting open standards where such standards are relevant to our work and when they reach a sufficient level of maturity, and the Windows Live ID Team is no exception. We have been tracking the evolution of the OpenID specification, from its birth as just a dream and a vision through its development into a mature, de facto standard with terms that make it viable for us to implement it now.

Also, with Google having added OpenID to Blogger, they now look poised to roll it out for general Google apps, like Gmail, etc… Neat.

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Sep012008

Google Chrome

Posted by Gene in Software, Web Development

In case you missed this due to being offline on your day off. Google accidentally announced they are launching a competing browser. TechCrunch has some images and movies from a beta preview.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

Google says to check back today to get the preview beta download for Windows.

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