Kevin Whinnery
Titanium Tip: Twitter update w/ HTTP Basic

Here’s an answer to question I get a lot, which is how to post a tweet using Titanium. It’s not rocket science, but I thought I would write it down real quick:

Treat the JavaScript global window scope like a public toilet. You can’t avoid going in there, but try and limit your contact with surfaces when you do.
Dmitry Baranovskiy [paraphrased, but I think pretty close]
JBoss: A classic Freemium model (Article)

Great article on how JBoss built their sales organization:

Full Article »

Excerpt

JBoss is a great example of the Freemium model. It perfectly illustrates several important principles of the Freemium model:

  • By giving away a really great product for free, JBoss developed a loyal following and active community that virally spread the word to other developers.
  • This led to an incredible adoption of the product, which could be converted into leads that flowed in at a rate that was many times higher than that experienced by most traditional software companies.
  • JBoss realized that they would never monetize their entire user base. When we reached the $65m run rate level, we calculated that we had only monetized about 3% of the customer base. However that 3% represented a very attractive, and fast growing > recurring revenue stream, that was worth a lot of money to several acquirers that bid on the company at the same time as Red Hat.
  • One of the key points to understand about this model: instead of building a very expensive marketing process like their competitors BEA and IBM, JBoss used their R&D resources to build a free product that achieved the same goal: widespread product awareness, and high customer demand – all for zero marketing costs.
If you ask me, it’s best to steer away from naming anything ever. I never had these problems hand-coding 6502 assembly language on my dear old Apple ][+. I knew what memory address $C030 was for, by gum, and I never asked some so-called elite “expert” for a name for it. This “Roo be” thingamajig and all these new-fangled high-level languages are just another modern boondoggle. Keep your grubby hands off my fixed address space, my two acres, and my mule!
Paul Cantrell, MN Ruby User

A very quick and dirty guide to distributing iPhone apps to beta testers when using Titanium mobile.

The dumber the customers, the more effort you expend on the process of selling things to them rather than making the things you sell.
Paul Graham of Y Combinator, from What Startups are Really Like.
On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you’d think it was some kind of bug.
Farhad Manjoo highlights my least favorite “feature” of Google Wave, in It’s Just Fancy Talk. (via davidkaneda)
Let’s not pretend that we know what time it is because we know what we saw last time we checked our watches.