Google recently moved the Google Reader link into the "More" section of their top navigation bar (you know, that black toolbar that they added to all of their sites when they launched Google Plus).

For those of us who use Google Reader regularly, it's quite an annoyance. Not only the fact that it's now harder to access Google Reader, but the fact that Google can change whatever they want in these tools that we use daily, and we pretty much have nothing to do about it.

So I took the opportunity to create a Chrome extension that adds it back to where it belongs, on the navigation bar itself.
The extension was pretty simple to write and gave me a chance to brush up a bit on my Javascript skills (especially JQuery stuff).

If you're interested, you can find the Chrome extension for download from the Chrome Web Store (it's free obviously).

Comments are welcome...

We recently changed the name of our company and one of the implications was that we needed to create a new logo for the company.
The name of the company is iglloo (igloo.com was taken, big surprise, but we managed to grab iglloo.com) and when we chose that name I immediately envisioned us having some kind of cute logo, although nothing specific came to mind.
For some reason, we thought it would be pretty easy to create the imagery that goes along with the values what we want our brand to represent (in a nutshell we build apps, primarily for iPhones and iPads), but we quickly learned that creating something "real" out of our vague thoughts, was not an easy task.

We tried a few concepts but the designs that we got were too literal. We kept getting images of igloos.
Things like this:

I actually really liked the concept (I guess I'm just in love with my own ideas) but the problem was that it doesn't scale. At small sizes that little igloo image is totally not clear.

After about 2 months the logo issue came up again and I went back to 99designs to see the old submissions, maybe looking at them again would give a different perspective. Still nothing spectacular.

Since 99designs offer a refund if you don't pick a winner, I sent them an email and asked how I get the refund. They replied that they can only refund within 60 days and that more than that had passed.

They did offer to reopen our contest and basically start over. So we reopened the contest, again for 1 week.
This time we got WAY fewer submissions. I'm not really sure why (I asked their support and they didn't have any good answers). They also offered to give us their PowerPack for free which basically gets you better listings in their directory along with a few other tweaks so it stands out (usually $85).
The PowerPack didn't make any difference, we just got a few random submissions, nothing even close.

Then while looking at all the different submissions I suddenly ran across this design from the original contest:

The meaning of the icon according to the designer

Ok, I can live with that.

We then went back and forth playing around with different fonts and stylings, these were among them:

So do I recommend using 99designs?
To an extent. While looking around there at different projects (I was looking to target designers who created things I like) I saw some pretty good designs.
My feeling is that it's kind of a crapshoot, with relatively good odds.
You may be able to get something really good for not a lot of money but you may leave disappointed.

If you can afford $299 then I would give it a try.
I think logos are particularly difficult to design (the story behind the Conduit logo is quite long too) but if you are looking to design a website you'll probably be able to get good results (although 99designs may be a bit more expensive than just buying a template and customizing it a bit).

One of the annoying things about Twitter is that things that you tweet just vanish into the ongoing flow of tweets and disappear forever, never to be seen again by a human being (and Twitter's horrible search engine makes that problem even worse).

I recently ran across a great service that addresses this problem - Twylah.
Twylah analyzes the content that you put on Twitter and automatically generates a site for you which gives your readers a beautiful summary of who you are and what you tweet about.
That page is also optimized for SEO which is a great way for you to drive new traffic back to your content.

So basically, instead of sending people to your boring old Twitter page (which may be filled at the moment with irrelevant tweets because you just happen to be in an ongoing conversation with somebody on Twitter about the latest episode of Beavis and Butthead), you send people to your Twylah page.

That page will show them your personal trending topics and what you are all about.
My Twylah page, for example, currently shows that I tweet about Twitter, iPhone, Apple, Games, and Nike (I recently ran in a Nike run so I've been tweeting about it).

Look at the difference between a regular Twitter page to the Twylah page generated from it:

It's much easier to understand what kind of stuff you tweet about and it looks much better.

I assume Twylah is mainly targeting brands to use this but I see no reason why any individual who is on Twitter wouldn't want to use it.

Check out my Twylah page and you can request a beta invite to get your own.

Here's a video of my talk from the last Casual Connect conference in Hamburg, Germany.

The topic was next generation platforms.

My part starts at about minute 11:30.

This is a repost of an article that I originally wrote for Technorati and was published there.

South By Southwest Interactive is (finally) over and we can all get back to our normal lives (unless it's normal for you to go out every night, meet hundreds of people, and get free food and drinks everywhere you go).
For those who don't know, South by Southwest (SXSW) is a set of interactive, film, and music festivals and conferences that take place every spring in Austin, Texas.

Here's the rundown for this year's SXSW highlights, disappointments, winners, and losers. These are all based on both my personal experience there and on feedback that I got from talking to tons of other geeks and techies there.

Highlights

• Klout party - Klout rented a house, had food, drinks, and a live band (Audio Runner). But what made it stand out was that they had a good crowd and the timing: noon on Saturday, which is kind of a downtime in terms of events. Just a good time talking to cool people on a Saturday afternoon.
• 140conf party - Tons of great people at the Lanai + open bar = great time. Jeff Pulver really knows how to draw in a crowd and everybody enjoyed themselves.
• Lean Startup party - SXSW is all about people, people, people. Dave McClure and Eric Ries got a great group of people together, that's what this event was about. After a few hours at the Lean Startup party, the group I was with that night actually left to go to the foursquare party, and then came back to the Lean Startup event since it was so much better.
• Conduit pool party - obviously I'm totally biased here so I didn't want to include Conduit's party in this list. The only reason I decided to include it was because other people kept saying it was one of their highlights. So for those who missed it, Conduit had a pool party BBQ on Sunday afternoon. The setting was quite different from other events: it was held at the pool of the prestigious Ashton Austin condos. The setting, timing, food and drinks were great and lots of people actually got in the pool despite the cloudy skies.
• SVB - SVB packed the two floors of the Parkside on 6th with top notch people. Everything from investors like Tim Draper to bankers and entrepreneurs were there. And they had a live 80s cover band, great dinner, and surprise show by Andrew Mason (CEO of Groupon) playing the piano to top it off.
• Pud meetup - this relatively small meetup (probably about 30 people) was organized by Phillip (pud) Kaplan founder of Blippy (among a ton of other things). Forget the pizza and hotdogs, just chatting with cool people like Alex from Million Dollar Homepage, Aaron founder of Urban Dictionary, and Bram from Bittorrent was awesome.
• Foo Fighters surprise show - for those who got in (the lines were LOOONG) was a fun way to end the SXSWi craziness.

Biggest Disappointments

• The conference itself - most people I know didn't even bother to try to go to the sessions. A surprisingly large amount of people actually didn't go pick up their badges. The best parts were all the events around the conference, the actual conference was not an attraction.
• Fousquare party - tough time getting in so you'd expect it to be killer (and lots of people were talking about it) but checking in here was not worth it.
• Mashable Billiards - a lot of noise around this one. The people at the door were REAL a#@holes. Not what you'd expect from Mashable
• Twitter retreat - this was a weird one. Expected it to be big and fancy since Twitter was hosting. Was very small, secluded, and not that interesting.
• Facebook developers garage - a bunch of people I know tried to find this event but couldn't. Either they canceled last minute or Google maps is WAY off, because nobody I know managed to find/hear anything about this (and we looked a lot).

Winners

• Hashable - forget business cards, Hashable is the way to go when you meet somebody new. I would say 3 out of 5 people I met at SXSW were using Hashable, especially people from NYC. Hashable rocks but I do agree with what my friend Nate Lustig wrote, the only downside is that Hashable strips the personality of your business cards into about 100 characters available in a Hashable tweet. I enjoy seeing the creativity in business cards each year at SXSW.
• GroupMe - there were tons of group messaging apps trying to push themselves at SXSW. For some reason GroupMe caught on. If you managed to get on the right GroupMe group you'd get insight to where the hot spots are (and get a lot of junk messages).
• Plancast - one of the hardest things at SXSW is to know about all the different events. Plancast are awesome at tracking where people are planning to go and letting you follow people that are in the know.
• Foursquare - another method of tracking where everybody is going: just follow the right people on foursquare and see where they checkin. Gowalla were surprisingly quiet even though they are based in Austin.

Best Giveaways

• Squarespace - free food. Good food. Every day.
• Sobe - had an outside bar with both cocktails based on Sobe and just free Sobe lifewater drinks. Lifesaver. Plus always a nice crowd there.

Best Hangout
Driskill Hotel lobby - at the end of every night (and beginning actually) the Driskill lobby was always packed with TONS of very interesting people. Really can't beat that.

Biggest Pain

• Cellphone battery life - With all the checkins, Hashable, Google Maps, Plancast, etc… you'd be lucky if your iPhone lasted through (free) lunch. Some companies tried to help by giving away free battery packs but only a small elite group managed to get those.
• Craziness - just trying to keep up with all the craziness was hard. So much going on there was no way to really keep track. And forget about trying keep up with the real world and answer emails.

One thing is for sure though: see you next year South By...

This is a repost of an article that I originally wrote for Technorati and was published there.

Once again, it's the time of year for reflection and predictions. I always enjoy reading what others thought about the past year and what they're expecting from the year ahead. With so many interesting happenings in technology in general, and specifically in the Internet space, it's a fun task.

2010 – Year of the Consumer

2010 could be termed the Year of the Consumer with vendors introducing consumers to location-based services (Foursquare, GoWalla), social couponing (Groupon), and a vast array of apps. Apple's iPad changed the game for apps on both web and mobile devices, creating incredible consumer demand. Coupled with the mainstream evolution of smartphones, this demand has launched an explosive market opportunity.

On the development side, there has been a lot of noise about HTML5 and CSS3. All the big guys are behind this, and Adobe even has a tool that converts Flash to HTML5. The popularity and compatibility of HTML5 is increasing every day, but there is still a ways to go before it becomes mainstream.

And let's not forget cloud computing. For the past few years, the technology for cloud computing has been maturing and slowly adopted by many companies. Evidenced by the new TV commercials, cloud computing is now an accessible infrastructure that enables web companies of all sizes to scale relatively easily. And pretty much everybody is using it now.

Top Predictions for 2011

If 2010 was the Year of the Consumer, 2011 will see the inevitable market impact of this shift. New technologies will emerge, and only those with the best user interfaces and marketing strategies will survive. I expect that app mania will continue and businesses of all sizes will expand their footprint on mobile and web platforms.

My Top Ten predictions are:

1. HTML5 in action. Browser support for HTML5 is getting better (in both desktop and mobile browsers), so we will start seeing HTML5 and CSS3 more and more in mainstream Web applications. Life for Web developers will finally be (a bit) easier, and user experience across platforms will converge and improve, although not fast enough.


2. Tablet wars will get serious. Apple currently has 95% of the market, but that's because they have been the only real player in the market. That's changing fast with Samsung and others debuting their own tablets. Who will dominate in 2011? Still Apple, especially if/when they launch iPad 2. Dell, Samsung, and HP will be the other major players there.


3. Android will gain more market share and close the gap with iPhone, but will not overcome it. They aren't doing enough to appeal to the non-techies.


4. Mobile and web platforms will continue to converge. The web has become ubiquitous so there will be less of a fine line between web and mobile. This has already started with the iPad (is it a mobile device?) and will crossover to other devices like Google's Chrome OS notebook (which still has a ways to go before it can become popular).


5. The number of app platforms will expand: smartphones, e-readers, televisions, Blu-ray players. I'm not sure we'll see apps in the fridge or washing machine in 2011, but who knows... I look forward to CES in January.


6. More of our information will be stored in the cloud, and streaming services will increase in popularity. This includes photos, documents, music, and maybe even videos. The pricing will need to become more competitive to make this prediction come true.


7. Social analytics. We need easier ways to measure and analyze people's interactions in social networks (person-to-person and person-to-brand). This year, we'll start seeing some successes and standardization in this area (which will probably lead to Google acquiring the leader).


8. Richer TV experiences. Google TV, Apple TV, and Boxee are all working hard to create richer television experiences for us. These products may not yet become mainstream, but will no longer be novelties reserved for hardcore geeks, either. 3D television will not become more popular as some people are expecting.


9. We will start to see actual adoption of peer-to-peer micro payment systems (Square, for example). It will become more and more popular to just pull out your cell phone when you want to pay for a cup of coffee. This year, though, there probably will be more people accepting payments than people actually paying, but that's the first step towards replacing our old-school credit cards.


10. Maturing of the location-based application market. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, My Town (Booyah), SCVNGR, Facebook Places, Google Places, Yelp, and Groupon are all about the places that people go for deals in their business and personal locales. I think some big players will stay on top (Groupon, and Living Social with the help of Amazon). We'll see some co-operations/mergers, and smaller players will go off to silently die in a corner somewhere. Groupon clearly intends to dominate after sending Google packing.

I'll wind down 2010 playing Angry Birds, which for the record, I predict will expand this year and become a major Pokemon-like brand (only cooler).

Happy New Year!

I recently spent a lot of time traveling, both as a tourist and as part of my job (in my line of work, there isn't really a clear line between the two). The more I travel the more I discover that, thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet and the advanced capabilities of smartphones, traveling hasn't changed this much since Columbus set sail (ok, maybe since those Wright kids got bored with just biking around their backyard).


Preparing For Liftoff
It starts off even before I embark on my adventure, while organizing all my plans. I use a great (free) service called TripIt which easily aggregates all my travel information (flights, hotels, rentals, etc...) and lets me access them from one spot both on the web and my phone. Adding all of my information is a cinch, I just forward all those flight confirmation e-mails (and such) to TripIt and they take it from there (they even have a Gmail plugin that does that automatically if you want). Using the TripIt app on the iPhone lets me easily check my flight status and gate changes, right before my flight. Very useful.


Getting Online
In my day to day life I rely on the Internet quite a bit (anybody say addiction?) but once I land in a foreign country it becomes my lifeline to learning about my surroundings, making my way around, connecting to people who have experience in the new wilderness I've been flung into, and sharing and documenting my experiences.

Once I land in a new country my first order of business is getting online (how else am I supposed to checkin on Foursquare at the airport?). Cellular roaming costs are a biiiiatch, so I would stay far away from that, but I've had different experiences with getting online in different countries. The best being in London, just walking in to a T-mobile store and £5 later I had a working cellphone with unlimited bandwidth for the month. In other countries the experience was less seamless (especially depending on the people's competence in English) but after some running around I always manage to get a local SIM (in Europe you usually want to ask for a "pay as you go" SIM with a data plan, but they don't always understand the "data plan" part). The prices vary but they usually have deals where you can get more than enough bandwidth for pretty cheap.

What I usually do is try to find some offline map apps for my iPhone before I leave home so that I at least have a map at my fingertips when I land and have yet to setup a reliable Internet connection. There are many different apps for this depending on where you're going, a quick Google from home will do the trick to find reviews about the best ones for your destination.


Then the Fun Begins
Being constantly connected with a smartphone while abroad used to be a fantasy (those are the kinds of the things I fantasize about :) but now it's a necessity.
It affects many aspects of my travels:

• Getting around - whether it's how to get to a conference venue, finding out where the hell I am, or locating the nearest subway station or nearest McDonald's (a man's gotta eat). Google maps is the killer app for this on the iPhone and Android. If you're in a major city like New York it will even show you public transportation times as part of the walking directions it gives you.
• What sights to see - when in tourist mode you don't really know what to see and where to go when planning a trip in a new city. I discovered that there are TONS of great iPhone apps for doing just that - many of them free. The best experience I had was with mTrip (specifically their app for London but they have guides for other cities). Although it's not free ($6, which is less than any travel book you'd buy) it gives you both offline information about tons of different places to see in your city of choice plus an awesome automatic day planner. What you do is tell it where you want to start your trip (your hotel for example), what kind of things you want to see (sight seeing, shopping, churches...), and how many days you have, and it automatically sets up your schedule for the entire trip. You can then manually edit your schedule (add/remove spots, rearrange stuff...) and it gives you transportation instructions from each spot to the next. It's like your own personal travel guide, the easiest way I could think of to getting to know a new city.
• Connecting with people - whether it's asking for tips and recommendations from friends or getting help with something when stuck, always being connected to your Twitter and Facebook friends is something that we will increasingly be relying on. I got great recommendations for restaurants and cool exhibits while in Amsterdam and even got a few people searching for me in real time for what settings I need in my iPhone in order to connect to the Vodafone network in Amsterdam (it's kinda hard to search when you don't have Internet :).
• Sharing and documenting - the reason people take cameras on trips with them is to both document the experience for themselves and to share with others. I find that by using services like GoWalla and Foursquare I can do both in real time. Ok ok, so GoWalla wont replace my camera entirely, but it's a great way for me to be able to look back and see exactly where I was at what time (and I get information about the place while checking in). And all my friends/followers can see where I am and share their experiences from that place. Invaluable (plus my mom keeps tabs on me this way).

Now I can hear all you naysayers saying "can't you disconnect from e-mails", "I go on vacation to get away from being connected",...

I think that attitude will disappear in the future as we cease to perceive e-mail and IM as work (actually future generations will probably only use Facebook, but that's another post) and the Internet becomes an even bigger, integral part of our lives.

Nobody forces me to answer emails or IMs while on vacation, even if I am connected, and it's up to me when to reply and at what length. It's like turning off the phone while you're away. Feel free to do it, but when you need the phone you turn it on.




What's Next
The two improvements that need to come next stem from the two biggest problems I had when travelling like this:

• Battery life
• Getting online

During my day to day I'm usually 1 hour away from a power outlet at worst. Most of the time I can plug my iPhone in and not have to worry about its abysmally short battery life (all smartphones currently suffer from this problem). However, while traveling I'll be away from power for at least 8 hours at a time, sometimes it can get up to almost double that. And these are not normal days where I use the iPhone occasionally (is once every 10 minutes considered occasionally?), while traveling I'll be using the phone every few minutes at times: to look at the map, open a travel guide, checkin to a location, take a picture, god forbid even upload a picture... All these things suck the battery like Snoop Dog’s toilet when the cops come.

Battery life needs to improve significantly so that we get to a point where we can do all of these things without having to worry about them killing the battery. Just like the good old days when your Nokia phone used to hold up for a week between charges.

The second road bump in my experiences (aside from losing my luggage, but who cares about that), is getting online in a new country. This needs to become entirely seamless at some point in the future so that you land, turn on your phone, and are connected (without the ridiculous roaming charges). Once demand increases, phone companies will need to realize that their services are a commodity, and as such we expect them to be readily available at our beck and call.

Until that happens, this will remain a luxury only for hardcore geeks.