Category Archives: Technology

Start Me Up: Interview With Calley Nye About Dashbuzz

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With the economy the way it is and VC’s tightening the reigns on the funding they are giving out, a startup is hard to do right now, especially without a prototype. Recently, I came across Calley Nye(SiliconCalley) through a tweet from social media genius Gary Vaynerchuk, and they spoke about a stealth site that she was quite tight lipped about.

Yesterday, was the day that she finally shared some information about this site it will be called Dashbuzz. However, she currently doesn’t have a prototype to present to venture firms, so she is seeking to raise twenty-five thousand in grassroots funding through a program she’s calling Start Me Up. I decided to interview her to see if I could get more details that what she had given on her post. She gladly provided answers and I would like to see this service get funded as it looks like an amazing marketing tool.
I have provided the interview below.

I understand that your site is still in pre-alpha stages correct?

Yes, Dashbuzz is currently in very early stages(pre-alpha), but we are moving along quickly and hope to come out with a beta in early 2009.

Is Dashbuzz a marketing tool, and who do you plan on the service targeting, professional marketers or the general public?

The roots of the idea lies in marketing, but not traditional marketing. My marketing experience is in social media marketing and using grassroot techniques. Rather than coming out with a tool that is solely for marketing companies and professional marketers, I’ve decided to provide the general public with the tools that they need for marketing, in hopes that it opens the social media marketing industry to everyone.

It will be a freemium service so there will be different levels; they will range from average social media usage(1-5 services) to extreme social media usage(5+ services). I feel like the site everyone has the right to understand how to get their content out there, whether it be a blog, art, music, films, or their business. We will eventually offer and enterprise size application that will take advantage of the usage statistics from the other users.

What value do you see this service providing to this group?

It will offer a new way to look at how we use social media. Currently, we are using all these services, but we don’t know what kind of activity sparks what kind of traffic and sales. Maybe when you post at 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Facebook, you get more page views than you do at 10:30 o’clock in the morning. Have you ever had a spike and didn’t know where it came from? These are all things that we are attempting to figure out, and I think the knowledge of such events will offer great value to our users.

What other ventures have you been involved with and how successful were they?

This is my first company that offers a real product. I had a social media marketing company for several years, but that was a service, so it wasn’t scalable at all. I made good money for awhile, but couldn’t build it up too much. I decided I wanted to start building things, instead of building things up for other people. So, I started my blog SiliconCalley to learn more about startups. After a brief stint writing for TechCrunch, I started an LA based tech news blog called TechNews.LA. It hasn’t been around that long, but it’s doing very well.

What will the people investing in your service this early be receiving for their assistance?

They will be enrolled on the beta tester list to be the first people to use the service. They will also receive discounts on the site when we open up the premium memberships. Bloggers who invest will then be the first people to write about the service. Service providers and advertisers( and potential partners) who invest will also be considered first when the time comes the top 100 investors will receive free lifetime memberships.

If anyone is interested in providing funding to help start this company please visit her site here, where you can read what she’s written about this, donate to the cause, or contact her for further information.

Issues That Windows And The Government Share

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While jotting down some notes for another post; I wrote 3 issues that the government and Windows share. This lead to me coming up with more and more so I decide I’d give you a list of what I came up with. I would love it if you shared any that you can think of.

  1. When your in the direst of need for there services an error occurs in which everything must be restarted.
  2. They are bloated trying to provide everything to everyone.
  3. They have services you didn’t know about consuming precious resources.
  4. They come with programs that are never used.
  5. The user interface can be horrible, it always looks great but doesn’t always respond.
  6. If you’ve got the money you can get a better experience.
  7. Pretty much everyone knows about these issues but the majority don’t mind and continue to use it.

Come on people share any that you can come up with.

My Personal Productivity Suite

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Someone on Twitter, several weeks ago, asked me how I manage close to a dozen social profiles and life. I didn’t really have a proper answer at that time, however. So, I’ve been trying to figure out how I manage to be as efficient as I am, and it comes down to several good apps and just some simple real world note taking.

Browser

The #1 productivity tool I have is Firefox. It trumps the rest of the browsers in usability, speed, and security. I have issues with the other three, IE is slow and not quite secure, Safari is pretty much Firefox without any real way to improve it’s productivity, and Flock seemed way to cluttered for regular use. I use a clean filing system on my bookmark toolbar to make it easier to get the sites I want when I want them.Then I also use several add-ons that also reduce the time I spend completing tasks. The 3 that I use most often are:

Feed Sidebar, provides your feeds anytime you want without having to visit another site. I find it better than Google Reader as it provides same pre-content viewing when you click the link and opens it when you double-click. It has a multitude of options that allow you to set how often it updates, how long the list remains, and how you want to have the pages opened. The only thing is that your feeds don’t exist in the cloud.

CoolPreviews, formerly CoolIris Previews, an add-on that displays a little mouse-over button that provides a preview of the page on the other side of a link. Think Snapshots without the automation and annoyance of interruption.

Firebug, this one’s going to help web developers and designers out a bit. It provides debugging for your web pages, quick viewing of how a technique someone has on their page that you would like, and also provides some nifty tricks for scraping media.

One more thing to add, not an add-on per say, but Ubiquity is a nifty tool so far. We’ll see if it gets better.

Microblogging and IM.

I use Twhirl for staying up on Twitter and if I need to I can cross post something to Pownce. Very productive tool as I can catch up on close to 200 peoples tweets for a period of 4 hours in a matter of 10-15 minutes.

For my IM client I use Trillian, it allows me to incorporate all my accounts into a single interface and provides me with alerts when I receive an Email so I can respond relatively quick. The cloud variant of this is Meebo but doesn’t provide the email updates, but still a nice piece of browser based software.

Notes, Writing, and Schedule

Notes depending on what the content is. If the note’s just something simple and I’m at my desk I’ll just scribble it down on an index card very simple and old school. If it’s something a bit bigger like a chunk of info off the web I just quick copy it to MS OneNote and clean it up later. I occasionally use Evernote but, it hasn’t become a necessity as I usually am on my own computer.

Writing, I use Onenote because If I need to post something to the web i can just drag it out of the window and drop it. Makes the copy and paste an inefficient process.

For a schedule, I use an old school calendar and just write my info in real quick.

Desktop

I use Vista, honestly not that bad but, I have 1 icon on my desktop, Recycle Bin all the programs and folders I use are stored in the quicklaunch. Quicklaunch means I don’t have to leave my browser window to open up Photoshop, Trillian, ITunes, Secondary Browsers, or my editors.

P.S. This is just what I do to stay productive I don’t know how much or even if any of this advice would help you.