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Tue, Dec 14 2010

Y+30 // The Future of Digital Communication
By mike at 12:40 am

What do you think the world looks like 30 years from now?

I don’t know either, but that’s the question they asked at tonight’s panel at 92YTribecca talking about the future of digital communication. Listed below are some of the ideas I glommed from the discussion. All in all, I found it quite fascinating. Your mileage may vary.
- always connected
- personal publishing
- artistic medium
- language evolving
- open source/content/culture
- IP rights when everything is 3D printable?
- shift from consumers to producers
- ephemeralization of technology
- increasingly higher levels of abstraction lead to diminishing ability to grasp details
- pluggable culture
- design for hacking
- facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration
- technology shapes our interactions/decisions
- are we headed to tyranny of the majority?
- defense and gaming: leading edge of computer-brain interface
- not only humans will be online, devices too. multiple personalities, fragmentation of the self
- machines have not made people more rational, just more mechanistic in their thinking
- spreading ourselves thinner across more areas of knowledge leads to a greater reliance on technology to fill the gaps (google)
- privacy – where do you draw the line? most problems due to lack of understanding of consequences of sharing information online
- trust networks
- boundaries disintegrating. micro-niches of shared interest/belief
As the discussion came to a close, I realized that I was still unable to see the future any clearer than before. But i did leave with a feeling that i had learned something valuable tonight. and it’s that the future will undoubtedly be … quirky.
Wed, Nov 10 2010

A Quirky Milestone
By mike at 12:01 am

This email was sent out to all of Quirky staff tonight. And it applies equally to all of you Quirky people that make this possible. Congrats!

Hi all.

I was looking at our order data tonight and noticed that sometime this afternoon we shipped our 10,000th order. What I think this means is:

A.) Holy crap, it’s kinda awesome.

and

1.) You all seriously rock.

Last November, there were 4 of us packing PowerCurls and FedEx boxes in Ben’s apartment all night to get our first shipment out. Now we have factories and warehouses around the world that will soon be shipping out 27 products globally and rewarding thousands of people for it.

That’s a product going to market and people getting paid EVERY OTHER WEEK. WTF?! Nothing short of amazing.

Thank you all for making it happen.

So let’s rock this retail thing and see how fast we can reach 100,000, ya?
- Tags:
- growth,
- love,
- orders,
- sales
Wed, Oct 20 2010

Qv3: An Update From The Tech Team
By mike at 6:27 pm

Hey there,

We’re preparing for the launch and patching up some last-minute holes. We were hoping to get this all finished by this afternoon, but programming can be pretty unpredictable. Bugs and glitches can rear their heads at the worst times.

We’ll launch the site when it’s ready, possibly later tonight.

We don’t want to bring down the site until we’re good to go, so all you Quirks are in luck — you’ll have a bit more time to say your goodbyes to the old Quirky.

–Lacy
- Tags:
- quirky v3,
- relaunch,
- tech
Tue, Jul 27 2010

Calling All Quirky Web Developers
By mike at 11:33 pm

We’re hiring …

ABOUT US

Quirky is a social product development™ company that brings consumer product ideas from sketch to store every week and rewards the thousands of contributors to these products with a share of the revenue generated by their sale. We are seeking to hire an exceptional Ruby on Rails web developer to join us and help us change the product development industry.

RESPONSIBILITIES

As a rails web developer at Quirky, you will be responsible for contributing to all aspects of building and maintaining the Quirky Technology Platform as we scale the business out to meet increased product demand and greater product development participation. This will include:

* end-to-end web application development (database, business logic, front-end) for new site features

* backend system development (shopping cart, order fulfillment, etc)

* financial reporting

* customer service tools

* operational support

REQUIREMENTS

At minimum, you will have at least a few years of professional experience with the following technologies and software. These are the tools that we work with everyday and that we expect you to hit the ground running with. The quantity of your experience is not nearly as important as the quality of it.

* Ruby on Rails

* MySQL

* HTML/CSS/Javascript (jQuery)

* Git

* Lighthouse

* Basecamp

* Agile, Iterative Development

Additionally, as your code will be deployed in a high-volume e-commerce production environment, performance tuning and testing will be critical to success.

BONUS POINTS

Building a global product development company is no small task and we are seeking individuals excited by the challenge and who have experience with the following areas of our business. The more you can bring to the table, the more we will have to talk about.

* Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, RDS)

* Deployment Management (Heroku)

* Payment Processing (ActiveMerchant)

* E-Commerce/Shopping Carts

* Warehousing and Shipping

* EDI

* Accounting (NetSuite Integration)

* Social Media Integration (Facebook, Twitter, etc)

* Crowdsourcing

* RESTful web service API development and documentation

* Database Schema Design and Indexing

* Data Warehousing

* Startup Experience

Ideally, you will have experience working on one or more highly-trafficked websites. Attention to detail and dedication to quality are non-negotiable.

Please send your resume and a quirky cover letter to techjobs at quirky dot com.
- Tags:
- jobs,
- quirky staff
Mon, Jun 21 2010

Hmmm … Upgrades
By mike at 6:33 pm

Dearest Quirkies,

Tomorrow night around 11-12 PM EST I need to bring the site down for an hour or so in order to upgrade our database server.

You see, the little guy grew out of his baby booties and he’s talking to our web servers all the time now. So much so, in fact, that his wee little 1.7 GB brain can’t keep up. As traffic to Quirky peaks during the day, he gets all like, woah, wait a minute, lemme think about that, which – in database world – is bad.

So in order to avoid our database throwing an epic tantrum and shutting down Quirky as a result of having too small a brain, we’re gonna issue some upgrades and make that brain much bigger. What this should mean for you is a faster and more responsive site and one that can grow up eventually to be a teenager someday. Let’s just hope it doesn’t talk back and get all rebellious.

Cheers.
- Tags:
- neo,
- system,
- tech,
- teenage angst,
- upgrades
Wed, Jun 2 2010

Getting Our Old On
By mike at 10:03 am

All the world is birthday cake, so take a piece, but not too much. ~ george harrison

A year ago today, we turned the Quirky machine on and told the world about it. Here’s what’s happened since then.

People have spent nearly 100,000 hours on quirky.com. That’s 11 years.

We’ve been seen in every country around the world except the following: Sierra Leone, Guinea, Western Sahara, Niger, Central African Republic, Somalia, Eritrea, Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Svalbard and Jan Mayen.

The top 10 cities that love Quirky are (in order): New York, London, Los Angeles, Sydney, San Francisco, Singapore, Chicago, Paris, Atlanta, and Hamburg.

The iPad is the top mobile device used to get quirky.

52% of you are a PC. 39.7% a Mac.

And the following chart lists the most popular Quirky staffers as determined by Google stalking, er, i mean, search results. Those flying under the radar will have their names withheld in order preserve their personal SEO ranking, or lack thereof.

There’s so much more I can say about the last year but you probably have the attention span of a gnat so I’ll keep it short. Quite simply, none of this would have been possible without you. Thank you so much for taking part in this Quirky experiment and making it a success.

Having gone from 3 of us sitting in a shared office space in midtown to 20 people and 1 robot now filling our sweet SoHo office with a constant creative buzz, I am nothing short of amazed of what we’ve been able to accomplish. It’s our job to help bring people’s ideas to life and I cannot tell you how much fun that is.

I am greatly looking forward to this next trip around the sun. I can’t imagine what you all will surprise me with next.

All experience is an arch wherethrough gleams that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move. ~ alfred, lord tennyson
- Tags:
- bday,
- google stalking,
- love,
- quirky team
Fri, May 21 2010

Dear Internet, Please Buy Me A New Camera
By mike at 12:35 pm

Hello Quirks. Let’s talk crowdsourcing for a moment. For the record, most of us here at Quirky cringe when we hear the word. To give you an understanding why, let’s take a look at what Wikipedia, the veritable arbiter of truth in these internet days, has to offer for a definition of the word:

Crowdsourcing is a neologistic compound of “crowd” and “outsourcing” for the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call.

And it’s typically followed with ‘for free’ or ‘cheaply’. The unspoken implication in the word is that crowdsourcing is simply a more cost-effective form of outsourcing facilitated online. And as we approach our first birthday here at Quirky, having spent the past year watching you all ‘crowdsource’ some pretty sweet products, I cannot disagree more with this accepted definition.

What we’re doing here is much bigger than virtual outsourcing. We are collectively creating things that have never existed before and which would not be possible without the specific input of non-anonymous users (i.e. you) on our site. In a way, we are the antithesis of crowdsourcing. We want to reward everyone as much as we can and we are not merely delegating tasks to a crowd to save money. What we’re trying to build here is a pipeline for bringing your ideas to life. An incubator for your imaginations. In a way, it is so NOT crowdsourcing.

The problem though is nobody has made up a new word yet to describe it. ’Crowdcreation’ and ‘collaborative creation’ are more representative of what we do, but they are too much of an alliterative mouthful for social media gurus to eloquently rattle off at whatever internet conference they’re speaking at this week. Thus we get stuck with the word ‘crowdsourcing’. What’s needed is a word that not only captures what is, but also what might be in this quirky and creative online world. And crowdsourcing as a catch-all term falls well short of the bar.

Maybe you have a better idea?

In the meantime, and speaking of crowdsourcing, I’m starting a project this summer to (hopefully) crowdsource the collection and curation of street art photos from around New York City (and eventually the world). And given the fondness I have for crowdsourcing, or whatever you want to call it, I’m running a little experiment to put the ‘crowd’ to work (and buy me a new camera and wheels for my bike). I’ve started a project on kickstarter to give it a jolt. If you haven’t heard of kickstarter yet, you should. Imagine our presales phase for art projects (or any project for that matter)… basically it doesn’t get made unless enough people commit to it. So ya, you know what to do … here’s the link
- Tags:
- crowdsourcing,
- kickstarter,
- new camera
Tue, May 11 2010

I ♥ Robots
By mike at 9:08 pm

“Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.” ~ mark twain
- Tags:
- 3d printer,
- 628 Broadway,
- robots
Tue, Apr 27 2010

No, No, No, Light Speed Is Too Slow.
By mike at 9:41 pm

“The CPU,” he said, “runs at a certain speed. It can execute a fixed number of instructions per second, and no more. There is a finite limit to how many instructions per second it can execute. Right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So there is no way, really, to make code go faster, because there is no way to make instructions execute faster. There is only such a thing as making the machine do less.”

He paused for emphasis.

“To go fast,” he said slowly, “do less.“

http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-to-write-fast-code.html

p.s. the site should be a bit faster now
- Tags:
- algorithms,
- code,
- lightning speed,
- technology
Thu, Apr 1 2010

Spring Is Nature’s Way Of Saying “Let’s Party”
By mike at 7:25 pm

Finally.

My first post that is NOT going to be about payments. Thank <insert-your-favorite-deity-here>.

Spring has arrived here in New York this week and one of the grandest of all algorithms is beginning to unfurl its beauty across the city.

With the arrival of warmer temperatures, trees have sprouted buds that are just now beginning to flower. A profusion of life is filling every street, every lane, every park. Ivy is beginning its slow and tedious ascent up the sides of buildings. Birds are singing impossible tunes and frolicking in the air. Hipsters are wearing ugly shorts.

All of this … the result of a simple genetic code coupled with a brutally efficient algorithm: live and reproduce, or die.

It’s the way in which myriad forms of life express their unique genetic code under the stress of the great equalizer that is the algorithm of evolution … this, besides payments of course, is what fascinates me to no end.

If there is a god, I’m pretty sure (s)he’s a computer programmer.
- Tags:
- algorithms,
- programming,
- spring,
- ugly hipster shorts