Top Startup » Software

It’s time to Thrive.

Colin — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:01:02 +0000

Amidst the financial crisis and impending fire and brimstone of the economic apocalypse (isn’t the media great), I’ve started a new chapter in my journey towards a Top Startup. Thrive.

Avi Karnani, our tenacious CEO convinced me to forgo dreams of the west coast and join the team in New York. I started in the beginning of September as the Product Manager.

What are we doing?

…we’re building the first on-line, 24/7 financial advisory for young adults. We help people in their twenties and thirties gain control over their financial lives by helping them figure out what to do with their money-aside from spending it!

The Loudwater Labs team had been hard at work with Thrive before I joined, and I’m honored to be working with such a talented group of people. The website is ready for you to use it, so try it for free and tell me what you think in the comments below.

p.s. We’re also looking for talented software engineers to join the team.

Watch the good2gether 6-minute presentation at DEMO ‘08

Colin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:16:54 +0000

If you missed the opportunity to watch good2gether launch live (we’re still not public though), don’t worry. Watch this video to see Greg McHale rock the auditorium in Palm Desert. Everyone on the dev team (Jon P, BDV, Bill) and the design team (Jon R., Tim) made miracles happen to get the platform as polished as it is for DEMO. Check it out after the jump:

I made a mistake about Mozy – it sucks.

Colin — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 12:00:06 +0000

I wrote last month about how great Mozy was. Well, It’s a month later and I was never able to backup my 30 gigs. It was slowly getting there. I had 3 gigs remaining. The problem is, Mozy’s servers cant handle the capacity. During the week I was always getting errors that the server couldnt be reached.

In addition, the Mozy client for mac is a resource hog. When it prepares the files to send, it renders your computer unusable. Im pretty sure it’s not necessary to slow your computer to a crawl to back up.

Thus, I withdraw my endorsement of Mozy. Even with Time Machine on your mac, an off-site backup of your data is highly recommended. I’ll try out a few options and make a recommendation.

Now the iPhone does mail as well as a blackberry

Colin — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 12:00:13 +0000

One of the biggest problems with the iPhone is how it handles email (especially if you use gmail). If I read something on my iPhone, it was still unread in my gmail, and my inbox.

Basically, the way it should work is: if I read it on my phone, my laptop, my desktop or the web, it should be marked as read everywhere. You couldn’t do this out of the box.

I took a crazy approach to making this happen. One weekend, I set up my own IMAP server on my Slicehost server and downloaded my mail to my slice. I then connected all devices to that IMAP server.

Well, someone else though that was a good idea. Google. Finally, google has started providing IMAP for Gmail. Check out these instructions on how to set up IMAP for Gmail on your iPhone

If you still don’t get why IMAP is cool, check out this diagram comparing POP and IMAP.

I heard about this first on TUAW

Three Key OS X Leopard features for startups

Colin — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 15:39:16 +0000

I wont waste your time with the B.S. marketing. Here’s why you’re going to want to upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard.

Time Machine – One of the features Apple is pushing hard for this release. Time machine is document versioning for your entire system. You do need to have an external drive for it to work, but once you do, you will never lose a document by accident. Time machine makes document backup and recovery easy.

iChat screen sharing – If you have an office standardized on Apple, you get a huge benefit from being able to share presentations, do video conferencing and more. If only it supported the protocols that AdiumX does, it would be useful!
Other minor improvements – This release is not a quantum leap forward, but there are a lot of changes that add additional usability. Spaces, Quick Look, Stacks on the desktop

Im installing it next weekend. I’ll put a full review up when I have Leopard up and running.

How much whitespace should a resume have?

Colin — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:27:35 +0000

This is the question I have after seeing the new resume templates in Pages ‘08. I have to update my resume, so I was thinking about snazzing it up. Im really not sure about these resume templates. They all look great, but isn’t a resume primarily about a font large enough to read, and getting your message across?

Should I cut out content from my current resume to fit in this format?
Or should I use my current format and say “Forget you apple”?

Here’s my current format:

Check me out on your iPhone

Colin — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:13:18 +0000

I found a great plugin to Wordpress – iWPhone. If you browse the site on your iPhone or using iPhoney, you should see a site optimized for the iPhone. For such a small market, there sure are a lot of people investing time into the iPhone. I wonder how many users the iPhone has vs. the Blackberry?

Shovebox – A mac app that rocks

Colin — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:00:26 +0000

One of the things I like to do on my blog is shamelessly promote my friends. The criteria for shameless promotion is high. It’s about as high as the criteria for me calling you one of my friends. My friend Dan Grover at Wonderwarp Software just released version 1.0 of his new app Shovebox

Shovebox is great name, because that’s what the app is. It’s a box that you shove stuff in to. It competes in the same class of apps as Yojimbo and Eagle Filer. The Shovebox approach is to have a little box in the menu bar like you see below:

When you want to add something, drag and drop it to the box. Organize your notes and clippings later. Shovebox allows you to dump your brain when you get a thought or see something interesting. This allows you to focus on the activity at hand.

Basically, I use shovebox to store “stuff” and Actiontastic to store “things I need to do”. Shovebox is a great addition to my arsenal. I had been toying with Yojimbo, but couldn’t find a reason to justify the $40. $25 for Shovebox is easier to swallow.

Things I’d love to be able to store in Shovebox

Passwords (integration with keychain)
Serial Numbers
Web archive from firefox (only works w/ Safari now)

Skype – Software for business people in startups

Colin — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 18:42:27 +0000

Unless you’re living under a rock, you know Skype. Skype lets you call other people free using your computer. Im going to show you some ways to use Skype in your startup to maximize your effectiveness.

Get Skype-in

What is it: Skype-in is an add-on that gives you a land-line number
Cost: $60 / year per number

Don’t want to do everything on your cell phone? You can give people your New York office number when you’re sitting in London. Skype-in makes it easy to get a number virtually anywhere in the world . I lived without a cell phone for about two months. During this time, I gave everyone my Skype-in number. Now, I primarily forward this number to my cell phone. No reprinting business cards. You can give prospective customers the illusion of stability, for a mere $60 per year.

Record your calls

Negotiating a business deal? Dealing with customer service reps? Record those calls. Call Recorder allows you to hit record on those important conversations. You can even send the audio to Chillibreeze or a similar service to transcribe it. Audio converted to text makes really easy to find what someone promised / said six months ago.

Skype-out

The big problem skype hasnt figured out is caller id. A lot of people complain that my caller id shows up as 123456789 or 100000000. If you’re using skype, skype out will save you money. Call quality is good, and it is pretty cheap.

Other devices

For the older entrepreneur, check out Phillips VOIP841, a skype phone that requires no computer. Just plug it in to your broadband connection and it works. My parents have one and love it.

As for headsets, on the mac, I’ve previously reviewed Sennheiser’s PC150 headset. I love sennheiser for audio quality and would highly recommend them to anyone serious about skype.

For other software for business people in startups, check out my article on CSS Edit

CSSEdit – Software for business people in startups

Colin — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:52:46 +0000

Unless your pockets are lined with gold, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty. This is the first in a series of software for business people in startups.

Use Case: You’ve outsourced the design of your startup site to a professional design firm (you’re smart enough to know not to hire an in-house designer yet). The website has a small change that needs to be made. You can either pay your design firm $500 to make the change, or do it yourself.

Tools: CSS Edit from MacRabbit
Platform: Mac Only
Cost: $29.95

What is CSS?

Modern websites have 95% of their styling done in CSS, Cascading Style Sheets. With CSS, you can change the colors, font size, and even the position of elements on the page.

I can’t do that, Im a business person!

That’s just not true.

CSS Edit lets you preview a site on the internet in real time. I can try different variations on google.com or cnn.com if I want.
CSS edit will show you what tag to change by clicking on a part of the page.
CSS Edit also gives you the list of options for each tag.
- When you make a change you can see it updated instantly
- You haven’t changed anything online yet, so you cant screw up the site!

I recommend you give it a shot and try playing around with Google.com to see how CSS Edit works. You’ll see how easy it is to use!

Once you’re well funded, sit back and relax. You can hire someone to do make updates! Until then, CSS Edit makes styling a website easy for less technical folk.

Edit: There is a free tool with a little less gloss. It’s called Firebug and it integrates in with Firefox. It will work on Windows, Mac and Linux.