Notches, Inc. News Bites

We are presenting Tues eve at the second Founder Institute investor session. We'll be in the Bay Area in case anyone wants to meet up - spending today in Palo Alto. on July 26

Preparing demos and slides for the 2nd investor session at TheFunded's Founder Institute next week. on July 20

Are you building a barnacle or a boat? http://bit.ly/MDABR on April 22

I wrote about the role of risk and ambiguity, and the distinction between them. http://bit.ly/17OKV3 on April 09

Preparing a first cut of our OpenSocial app. Personally, I find the Facebook platform to be a bit better designed and easier to work with. The fact that OS is completely client side also makes performance and tweaking very important - simple things can get heavyweight quickly. on March 17

Back to basics with an old school hacking day, rocking out to Last.fm. on March 12

Working relentlessly on our OpenSocial product and trying to find the right balance between simplicity and features... on March 11

Sorry for the lack of updates - we've been heads down working on a new product to be launched under a tight deadline in two weeks. More to come on that. on March 07

We're working on our strategy for reviews in the social context. Obviously, the incentive model needs to be slightly different to appeal to users vs. e-commerce companies. What do you find useful about existing social reviews tools? What could be better? on February 24

From our blog: "Regardless of the veracity of [the Yelp extortion] claims, the story does highlight an important issue about credibility online reviews, credibility and conflicts of interest." http://bit.ly/Okr2e on February 20

Thanks to the organizers of the 2009 Venture Symposia & Conference at the UN. Lots of interesting discussion and networking. on February 08

Was challenged today to think about marketing our data "facts" services as strongly as our review capabilities... Interesting... on February 04

Inspired by simple apps like http://whenshouldwe.com/ on February 03

Reading the slides from a conference on recommendation systems in Amsterdam last week: http://tinyurl.com/ba3jk5 on February 02

Space for a 2 person company just opened up in our awesome share SoHo office space. http://bit.ly/mdn4 on January 30

Thinking about how we can improve login/registration. In addition to "normal" login, we also support OpenID and Facebook (Twitter once they roll out oAuth), but need to simplify. Ideas? Any great examples out there of people who just nailed the signup problem? on January 30

Looking at simple, integrated CRM tools. Highrise? MS Biz Contact Manager? Suggestions? on January 29

Updating the pitch deck for a meeting tomorrow. It never fails to get me excited. :) on January 28

Readying a screencast of the self-service portion of our newly named "Notches Wire" tool. on January 27

New homepage rolled out. http://notches.org on January 26

Working on a refresh of our site in anticipation of a new product launch. on January 22

Working on stuff that matters. http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/01/work-on-stuff-that-matters-fir.html on January 21

Notches internal "potential partner" list stands at 92 total companies/sites. We've whittled it down to 36 targets. on January 20

tremendously interesting brown bag lunch at DFJG today, including insights from the founder of LinkShare. on January 16

February 23rd we are going to do a NextNY event: "Technology Primer for Business Folks" on January 15

IT stuff we rely on: MozyPro, Hamachi, VMWare, Live Mesh & Sync (both), MS OneNote, Beyond Compare on January 14

Just reached out to John @ BookMooch for notches integration. If anyone knows him I'd appreciate an intro. on January 13

Gearing up to do a round of UX engineering with Whitney Hess and visual design with http://artua.com/ (maybe) for our plugin module. on January 13