Tiny D went a littttttttttle overboard on Mardi Gras. We found him here, collapsed in our two-week-old king cake, on Wednesday morning. The guy could barely put two sentences together. We didn’t even ask about his multiple strings of beads. We don’t wanna know.

One thing that has always bugged me, is why do wizards wear glasses? If they’re so awesome, why don’t they have better vision? I understand that everyone that reads books about magic is probably a little awkward (or at the very least wears glasses, since all the cool kids read vampire books) and you have to do everything you can to let them identify with the protagonists… but shouldn’t such a glaring hole blow away all suspension of disbelief?

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Hello my quirkies, a quick update on payments. I appreciate your patience.

1. We’re working with a kickass database team to ensure that our systems are rock solid and capable of handling the number of payments that we are expecting to process every day… which is many.

2. Gui has been diligently digging through the code and updating the influence and payment algorithms to accommodate our new changes. Trust me, it’s a lot to comprehend in your first two weeks. My hat’s off to him.

3. Today (Wednesday) I’m going to plan out the migration with Gui and our database guys to make sure that we have our bases covered and a schedule for doing it.

4. We’re going to test everything on our staging environment first. We want to make sure we get this right. I’ll be pulling data to that server today and prepping it for test runs.

As you can (hopefully) see, we’re close. By the end of the day, I should have a pretty good sense of where we stand. We’ve done the hard part (which is understanding this beast) and now we’re focused on applying the finishing touches to Frankenstein.

So with testing starting on Thursday, I’m looking at next week to launch this sucker and get you all PAID! Once we spark this thing to life, its gonna churn out payments to thousands of users every day for years to come. Boooya!

In the meantime, if you find yourself in need of some brain candy to tide you over, dip your hand into this virtual cookie jar of ideas and sample at will. This stuff is way more exciting than getting paid anyways.

JK

With love,
your chief logic bomber

P.S. They have wifi in court…

It is snowing more/

Our town needs a sunny day/

Pray on DigiDude.

I wanted to alert you to an interesting discussion happening on the Community Forum — if you haven’t checked it out yet, the forum’s on the site under Learn.

Sandra Lehr wrote: I would love to know what our most active quirks are doing with respect to social sales. How are they reaching the right people? I think those who aren’t big into the social media aspect might find this type of info helpful.

Matthew Toghill responded: Currently standing on >9000 referrals (hits on my links); 112 registrations; 119 orders. Admittedly the majority of this is due to some luck with the big gadget blogs using my referral link (and others copying the link or sourcing such sites), this was before they probably realised what the whole link meant and since then they seem to all shorten links to just the standard store page/ quirky home page.

Sandra responded: I have nearly 2400 referrals and 18 orders. So lookout — I’m catching up to you! I do twitter a couple of times a day links to the site. I’m trying to hit different people without being super annoying so that they unfollow me. I think if I can continue to get the right folks to follow me (through Mr. Tweet or even Twellow) and get noticed on some of the other boards I’m on, it could pay off.

Michael Mattox responded: 1285 Referrals, 6 Registrations, 1 Order  Many of my friends have gone to the site with my original link, but never registered at that time. They would simply go to Quirky days or weeks later without using the link, then register and order.

Do you have any super tips for social sales? Hit up the forum and share your expertise with the rest of the community!

Here’s a shot from yesterday on Avenue A:

Meanwhile, across town on Broadway (between Bleeker & Houston) our friends Peter and Carlos are finishing up construction on Quirky’s new HQ & Lab (forgive the blurry cell phone pictures).

Our new space is 5x the size of what we have now, and will have a fully functional Model & Prototype Shop, Conference Rooms,  as well as plenty of Design & Community Support / Sales Space.

We’re excited to be growing up a bit, and look forward to showing you the new space once it’s all set up. We plan on moving the second half of next week.

Hey Quirks,

So we’ve noticed some rumblings on the comment boards for Product 0032 — “Snowman Mold.” It seems that some of you are unhappy/confused/disappointed with the Quirky team’s selection in this product evaluation round, so I wanted to give y’all some insider info on what went into our decision.

The top vote-getter for this round was the “Foldable Water Bottle” — a great idea, but one that is already on the market! Check out all the results when you Google “foldable water bottle”:

Another top vote-getter this round was the “Ironing Board with Sleeves.” We also love this idea — who doesn’t wish their ironing board was wider or had swivel attachments for shirt sleeves? — but after doing a quick search we discovered that there was already an issued patent on a very similar item.

Unfortunately, if there are intellectual property issues surrounding your idea, we can not select it — sorry!

A general note on our selection process:

Here at Quirky, we select winning ideas based on the community vote as well as the Quirky team’s vote. We have expert design, research, and engineering staff here that review all data and submissions from the community, and then we take it a step further by performing our own internal research during each evaluation period. Our team looks into competitors, the current market, feasibility in hitting the pre-sales threshold, etc., and that all weighs in to the mix, as well. There is no straight computer algorithm or strict dedication to community consensus, and it is this collaboration between the community and the experts that’s helped make Quirky successful so far.

So after mulling it over, we decided to go with the Snowman Mold, which also received a significant number of votes. Why, you ask? Three reasons:

1. We jumped at the chance to enter a new market. The Snowman Mold is unlike anything we’ve ever done before, which would enable us to reach an entirely different group of consumers and retailers.

2. Depending on how the industrial design process goes, the Snowman Mold could be relatively inexpensive to produce. We have a lot of quality, but slightly pricy, products in our store, but it’s also nice to throw in some cheapies for good measure.

3. We thought the community would have a lot of fun quirkifying this thing. Imagine… DigiDudes heads! Obama! Miley Cyrus! The possibilities are endless.

So there you have it, Quirks. We want to make sure that we keep this process as transparent as possible, and we hope this blog post has cleared up some misconceptions. Feel free to keep hitting us back with feedback!

– Community Ambassador Jess

Check out these puppies. Hipster puppies. Yeah, you heard me right.

http://hipsterpuppies.tumblr.com/

The office is going crazy for them!

Like Quirky’s community collaboration model? Then you might dig Threadless, a website that allows users to upload and vote on t-shirt designs. If your design is selected by the community to print, you could win major bucks. If you love our logo competitions, this is definitely a site worth checking out! Plus, their shop has reeeeeeally fly tees.