Apr

27

Outsourcing my web development

Filed Under Etch Connection | Leave a Comment

I posted the job for the development of the Etch Connection site on two ridiculously useful sites: Elance and Scriptlance. Any technical stuff I need done, I just post a description and bids from developers around the world start rolling in. Similar to eBay you can see each developer’s history of projects, ratings, and comments about them.

Apr

26

I’m here to help: Why you should use RSS

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Click To Play

If you read websites for more than 10 minutes a day, it’s worth setting up an RSS reader. The above video explains in almost insulting simplicity how useful this whole RSS thing is.

Why obsessively check this site on an hourly basis when you could have the site come to you?

Step 1: go to Google Reader
Step 2: Click “Add subscription” and past this in there: http://feeds.feedburner.com/coinnovative

(Or if you don’t dig on that, just submit your email address in the box to the right to get a nice email update of my brilliant posts.)

Apr

26

Go read it: brought to you by the letter l

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h50_top.jpg
Completely off topic, but I just have to share: You like well designed clothes? household items? artwork? jewelry? Then why aren’t you reading brought to you by the letter l, by the lovely and talented Lyn Dwyer (or Spataro if you’re into that whole patriarchal construct)? Lots of pretty pictures too.

Just don’t ask her to make monkey bread.

Apr

23

Intellectual Property Rights Considered (This post: only for law freaks)

Filed Under Etch Connection | 2 Comments

Threadless, Crowdspirit, Instructables, and Cambrian House
Given that I will be dealing with designs submitted to The Etch Connection site and any future product design/development , I’ll need to figure out the best way to handle intellectual property (IP) rights. Here then is a quick review of how a few sites handle IP. (I will follow up soon with my take on an IP statement for Etch Connection.)

Threadless (click on “Legal terms” at the bottom of the page.) deals with designs submitted for open online evaluation, so their policy is the closest to what I will be working with.

Threadless.com retains exclusive rights to the submitted design, if chosen, for printing and selling on clothing. Threadless.com also retains rights to the design itself for use on the Threadless.com website, and any Threadless.com promotional material. The participant will keep ownership of the submitted design. The participant may display or archive the design in a portfolio or personal collection, but may not sell or reproduce the design for commercial purposes for ninety (90) days after the design has completed scoring. In addition, during this period, the participant cannot submit the design to another company to be potentially produced.

It goes on to say that the work must be solely owned by and the original work of the submitter. Further, if applicable, Threadless will register the design with the US Copyright office with “the designer as the primary copyright owner with Threadless.com being listed as an additional copyright claimant.” (Hmm, one consideration for Etch Connection along these lines: One of the etchers is in London. Does that matter in terms of copyright considerations?)

A similar section follows describing the slogan submissions (Threadless deals in both text and graphic submissions), but the main difference is that Threadless owns all submissions regardless of whether they are printed or not.

Instructables provides a forum for anyone to post pictures, video, and text descriptions of how to make and do stuff. They start out with several pages that basically say: don’t lie to us, don’t do anything illegal, we can change anything on this site at any time, and this info is provided without warranty for your reading pleasure. Given that this is a purely informational/community site, “the author retains all patent, trademark, and copyright to all Content posted within available fields, and is responsible for protecting those rights, but is not entitled to the help of the Instructables staff in protecting such Content.” So submitters must both own all of their own content and didn’t steal it from anyone else, but if something is used without the author’s permission due to their posting it to Instructables, Instructables is not at fault.

But at the same time:

You grant Instructables the world-wide, royalty free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, publicly perform and publicly display such Content solely for the purposes of providing and promoting Instructables.

I suppose that means they can write a book based on Instructables content without paying the author.

This could be useful:

If you believe that your work has been copied and is accessible on this site in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, you may notify us by providing our copyright agent with the following information in writing.

(Yikes, they even protect themselves from the possibility of users experiencing siezures as a result of certain light patterns viewed on the screen.)

Crowdspirit
Although Crowdspirit hasn’t launched, they do give an overview of how they will handle rights.

The simplest way for CrowdSpirit to manage this is to hold the IP and to have standard terms and conditions based on a person’s contribution - e.g. a certain value associated with the original idea, another value for the refinements, another for the distribution etc.

Apparently all IP will be the property of Crowdspirit, which makes sense. Will be interesting to see the exact legal language of this when it comes out.

Cambrian House
Hmmm… IP rights don’t seem to be spelled out in their terms and conditions… curious.

Apr

17

How to set up your small business IT needs for next to nothing…

Filed Under Business | Leave a Comment

Given that I will be attempting to run this little project while in school, keeping on-going costs as low as possible is key. I will have no physical inventory and will be working almost exclusively online or on the phone. So my goal was to pull together a powerful set of software tools for next to nothing. Given the recent explosion of online tools and software as a service — and of course Google — it wasn’t that difficult. Most of this stuff is free.

Email, calendar, spreadsheets, docs: Google Apps (Up to 50 accounts free on my domain! And it supports Blackberry! Now I just need a Blackberry…)
Phone: Skype
Scheduling: Time To Meet
Domain/Hosting: GoDaddy (Okay, this isn’t free but it’s cheap enough for now.)
Project mangement: Basecamp
Contact management: Highrise
Blog: Wordpress, Feedburner
Conference calls: freeconferencecall.com
Wiki: pbwiki.com
Surveys: surveymonkey.com
Video: YouTube
Payment: Google Checkout, Paypal, Yahoo Merchant Services.
Fax: (Who faxes!?! But it’s free so, what the hell.) eFax

That’s not to say I don’t have a few programs up my sleeve that are just ridiculously expensive, but nice to have considering: Microsoft Office, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Quickbooks.

As for outsourcing of web development and other technical stuff out of my reach, I will be looking to elance.com, scriptlance.com, or rentacoder.com. At each of these sites you post your needs and coders/designers bid for the job.

Any questions?

Apr

13

What all companies should be doing.

Filed Under Web2.0 | Leave a Comment

Josh Bernoff, over at my fabulous former employer Forrester, is working on a book related to just about everything I am talking about here. He’s got a great post up laying out the major sections of Groundswell, which he is writing with Charlene Li. (Who I helped out with RSS research back in the magical early days before syndication took off.) Here, again, is another great example of the philosophy I am trying to leverage with Etch Connection (or The Etch Connection or etchConnection) and my fanciful product development scheme.

LISTENING. Finding out what your customers are really saying. Best tools are brand monitoring, private communities like Communispace, ratings/reviews.

SPEAKING. Connecting with your customers in new ways, extending PR and marketing. Best tools are blogs, podcasts, participation in MySpace/YouTube and other user-generated media.

ENERGIZING. Getting your best customers to evangelize your products. Best tools are public communities and ratings/reviews.

SUPPORTING. Helping customers solve their own and each other’s problems. Best tools are blogs, forums, wikis.

EMBRACING. Working with your customers to make products better. Best tools are communities, user-generated media.

Apr

13

And the winner is…

Filed Under Etch Connection | Leave a Comment

Etch Connection. Or The Etch Connection. Either one, I guess. Beating out etchable by a solid 1 vote out of 12 - the competition was vicious and ugly. I’ll have to buy the winner a beer (Rob you can grab one of mine out of the fridge, thanks!) I own etchable.com too, so I suppose I could switch the site to that address, if I find Etch Connection to be obnoxious. (I guess I’ll have to see The French Connection now…) We’ll see how it works out…

Apr

13

Summary of Crowdsourced Innovation

Filed Under Crowdsourcing/Outside Innovation | 1 Comment

Brilliant research by this Finnish fella. Exactly what I have been saying, but more… concise and professional-like. I totally buy into open and crowdsourced innovation, but, there is still a solid place for the old style. Case in point: iPhone, iPod, MacBook… really anything Apple does. It’s very secretive with it’s creations and generally comes out with a brilliant, simple design that gets to what consumers always needed without knowing they needed it.

Since I am not a Jobs, I am more drawn to the crowdsourced and open innovation model, bringing in customers and the crowd whenever possible. Apple is the exception, outside innovation should be the rule. Why limit yourself to the ideas within your company or network of partners?

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