June 2011

Wyoming is a great place to have a business:  no corporate or personal income taxes, a GREAT Secretary of State office, low bureaucracy all around, and a overall pragmatic approach to life and work often expressed as “git’er done.”

The State of Wyoming’s Executive branch just took one of these pragmatic steps and became the first state in the nation to ‘go Google’ and move to Google Apps for Government from a hodgepodge of ?13? (that’s what I heard on the radio anyway) different, incompatible email and office platforms.  Check out this article from WyomingNews.com for details.

We use Google Apps here at SPG and are very happy with everything but the spreadsheets.  The email is GREAT!  The Word equivalent is capable, fast, and has a wickedly useful group editing capability that has consistently helped us when we’re trying to do things like hammer out  task lists with the remote interns.  The only app I’ve had any dissatisfaction with is the Excel substitute.  It’s slow, the features for auto-saving and sharing with others aren’t quite the same as the doc features that work so well, and overall it just seems cumbersome to use.  None of that is a huge issue for us.  We don’t use spreadsheets as much as email/docs and I’ve got that handy copy of Excel sitting on one of my old machines for when I need it.  So, assuming the state hasn’t done something silly like go through and uninstall all the copies of Office that were already on employee’s machines, I expect that the State number crunchers will do ok  until the Apps spreadsheet feature is improved.

I’ve been remiss in not writing anything yet about the ‘Summer of Code’ thing we have underway right now.

We have two great interns, Sara and Zack,  working remotely this summer building phone apps and, in parallel, employees Hokan and Matt are working hard on new phone apps here in the Sheridan offices as well.  The bit of eye candy to the right is a screenshot Matt sent in yesterday of his progress so far to get HazMatPlacardsPlus running in the emulator on his development machine.

As always, in a startup, we’re trying to accomplish at least a couple of things at the same time: 1) get more product out into the marketplaces and 2) work out our tools, processes, and systems for utilizing short-term and/or remote technical resources.

There was a really interesting post and exchange of comments on the Hubspot blog earlier this year about how hard it is to find great developers in the Boston area.   Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in DIA on my way home from Microconf, the conference  for small software startups that I just attended in Las Vegas.  This was a “first annual” conference, put on by organizers Rob Walling and Mike Taber.  I highly encourage them to do it again next year and beyond.

Close to a hundred attendees heard just under a dozen speakers tell their own startup stories (successes and failures), give advice on where to spend their time (a commodity both more precious and more available to a self-funded startup than money), and how to keep on going through the dark and the busy times.

Most of the speakers were great.  A handful (Sean Ellis, Ramit Sethi, Patrick McKenzie, and Hiten Shah) stood out for me personally, both for the quality of their presentation and because they spoke to where I happen to be with my own startup right now.

I’m not going to waste my own time or anyone else’s trying to summarize the individual sessions.  Almost all the speakers are bloggers and big chunks of their ideas are available in their own words online or in books they have published. (*)  I’m just going to share what I’m personally taking away: four themes and one slightly more specific bit of actionable advice. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re in the midst of pivoting the company direction away from B2C phone apps targeting specific professions (nurses, truck drivers, first responders) and towards B2B apps for all sorts of businesses (although certainly those that employ the same professions).  I owe this topic a longer post but today just need to put a stake in the ground and announce the publication of the Minimum Viable Product that makes tangible progress for us in this new direction.

SnapToMe appeared in the Android Marketplace yesterday evening.

Hokan has, once again, put his head down and carved reality out of one of my hand-waving product ideas.   Read the rest of this entry »