Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

On Friday I had lunch with the founder and CEO of Return7, Amro Mousa.  The discussion of course covered the state of iPhone development and what makes money on the App Store. Sure there are some folks putting deposits on Ferraris because they built super useful or fun apps. But there are other’s in the Ferrari dealership because they made something like iFart or SoundGrenade. Apps that don’t really do anything, but are cheap and appeal to sophomoric sensibilities.

Amro spent some time soliciting stupid app ideas. It wasn’t until later that the realization that these aren’t dumb app ideas. These ideas are brilliant.

Fart apps and their ilk were simply too hard in the past. First, there are technical hurdles. Any mobile platforms do not allow speakerphone access from an application. A desktop version is too bulky for an effective prank.

Then there’s distribution. If someone pranked me with such an app, there would be significant effort involved obtaining the app for a counter attack. The App Store makes it easy to get revenge, adding to the app’s viral nature.

Finally, the cost-benefit analysis is crystal clear. I know what the app does. It’s a dollar and it makes a fart sound. If that floats my boat, I get it, otherwise I pass. Simple and without the hidden cost of a time investment.

Which is why these ideas are brilliant, they created something that did not exist in the market place before. The vast majority of useful apps are a variation of “something that I use, but mobile.” There are two problems with these apps. First, most apps that are useful that I should be using a lot, I simply don’t. Pandora, RememberTheMilk, Mint, etc are all great, but I simply don’t check them enough. Second, I, like most folks I know, are near a computer almost every waking hour of the day.

I don’t really need a mobile version of the apps I’m not using. I would pay for a mobile version of an app that I never had before. The road to riches on the App Store is figuring out what that is.

Cloud Camp was a topical mini-bar camp that was about, of all things, Could Computing. While I’m glad I did attend, I felt it could have been even better and had some reservations about some of the sessions.

I think the biggest disappointment of the night was the panel discussion, which was just some of the sponsors pitching their wares.  To their credit, they did answer the audience’s questions.  However, they seemed more interested in pitching how their products solved the problem.  It could also have used someone forcibly taking the microphone away.  The worst offender was definitely the blue shirted MSFT sales guy of death.  You know somebody brings  zero value when he assumes the entire world runs Exchange and Sharepoint.

While the expert panel was subpar, the individual breakout sessions by Splunk, Puppet, and Jungle Disk were superb and worth the trip.

Splunk’s talk was on their log monitoring tool, which looked incredible.  When wearing my administrator hat, there is nothing as frustrating as shifting through the log directory in attempt to find the root of the problem I’m attempting to track down.  The cloud portion of their talk focused on how using EC2 they were able to prototype ideas that would have never gotten of the ground if they had to buy servers and infrastructure.

Puppet is a system management tool written in Ruby.  It sounds like it lets you do almost anything with configuration.  While not strictly about the cloud, this was the most topical presentation I attended.  Virtual infrastructure still needs to be managed and new instances need to be brought up to speed quickly.  This looks like a great tool for those tasks.

I only caught the tail end of the Jungle Disk presentation on how he built his business.  Jungle Disk stores petabytes of data and does not own a single server.  I find that pretty amazing.

While these sessions were really good, I was a little disappointed in the lack of technical details.  Of course, this was an unconference, so I probably should have asked those types of questions.  A few actual code snippets would have been nice.  While I walked away feeling that I had more knowledge, I don’t necessarily feel I have more knowledge of how to use Cloud computing effectively.

Finally, the organizer (who’s name I can’t remember) and the ATDC can’t be thanked enough for providing these forums and getting these kinds of events organized.  There is a real community in Atlanta and these events keep it healthy.

I can’t believe that it’s already been 2 months since I joined Premiere Global’s UI team for their email marketing platform.  Joining Premiere is a bit of a shift for me.  First, PGI is a public company, it has more employees than I can remember, and for the first time in years, I actually have a title, well two if you count Chief Spacial Officer.

The most surprising thing for me is that I don’t find the whole experience soul crushing.  It has been the opposite.  The folks that I’m in direct contact with want to build a better product.  I find that fact to be a pre-requisite for any good workplace environment.  Having a cute girl on the other team also helps a lot with the workplace environment.

On the other hand, I also now have big corporate horror stories, about IT and silly tests about computer usage.  It’s only been two months.  I can’t wait for the stories about messed up bureaucracies and decision makers who live on another planet.

Of course, I’m not there soley to pontificate on the quality of employment in mega corp.  I’ll be utilizing my Appcelerator and general UI knowledge to help them to build a competitive application.  My specific action items are to find ways to make the interface easier and more intuitive, improve the IE experience, and add compelling new features.  Which is great for me, because what I enjoy the most as a software developer is building solutions that people actually use.

Of course, Premire is a java shop, which means that there will probably be more blog ranting about java and xml and the silly things people do to be “enterprise-y.” We’re probably only a few days away from a post about how dumb the idea of compiling software is.

After two months, I still like going to work in the morning.  There are a lot of very interesting and important problems to be solved.  There are a lot of solutions that haven’t been thought of yet.  I don’t think there’s more you can ask of your work (other than more money).

(Editors note: no, this is not a positive post because my bosses read the blog.  I actually do like my job)

Some people have noticed, but siince most actually just read the RSS feed, I guess most didn’t notice. I had a few major reasons for changing the theme. I liked the custom theme that I used to have, but it was just one more thing to maintain. It got somewhat tiring keeping it up to date with newer wordpress features. It as just not something I wanted to deal with anymore.

Along with this change, I’m also moving my photo galleries off of Gallery2. The reasons were the same, it was yet another system to maintain and another set of themes to keep updated. Just not worth the time and effort. I’d rather spend time uploading pictures and blogging than making css and php changes. I get enough of that kind of stuff in the day job.

I half-way debated about paying for a flickr pro account. I might still go that way eventually, but I’ve been hosting my own photos since before flickr existed and I didn’t want to give up that geek cred.

My criteria for new photo software is that it had to integrate with WordPress so that I’ll only need one theme. It also had to be incredibly simple to keep up to date.

Eventually I settled on the Nextgen Gallery for WordPress. It appeared to be the most feature rich and complete gallery for WordPress. I’ve migrated a few of my galleries and it is easy to use. Of course, it has some limitations that weren’t present in Gallery 2. It does not have an interface for rotating images. Having it so that the interface supports both the original and scaled images requires some hacking. These limitations are small compared to the work required to make two pieces of software look the same.

Of course, since I was in a plugin happy mood, I added a few more. Just in case you’re interested, this is the full run-down of all the software I’m now running on this blog:

Interface:

• Aeros Theme by The BuckMaker
• Background Image: A shot of I-75 taken by me during the snowstorm Atlanta had in 2008

Widgets:

• Skribit Widget for blog suggestions
• Nextgen Gallery image widget
• Twitter for WordPress

Plugins behind the scenes:

• Google Analytics
• Add to Any social bookmarking (expect this to be used a grand total of 0 times)
• Akismet
• Broken Link Checker
• Google XML Sitemaps
• MobilePress (you can now actually view this site on a smart phone)
• WordPress Gravatars
• WP-syntax