How to Manage Information Overload

Submitted by zzelinski on Thu, 06/04/2009 - 16:12.

10...9...8...7...


The whole point of consuming content is to *do something with it* -- but most of us are so deluged by incoming information that we barely have time left for execution. Marina Martin, owner of The Type-A Way, a Seattle-based efficiency consulting firm, demonstrates practical ways to take back control of your email, RSS, and responsibilities without declaring bankruptcy or writing mission statements. You'll leave with a blueprint for an organizational foundation that frees you, not restricts you, and proactively defends against overload.

Who: Marina Martin, The Type-A Way
When: 6:00 pm, Tuesday July 7th, 2009
Where: StartPad offices -- 811 First Avenue, Suite 480, Seattle, WA 98104
Cost: Free! (Pizza and drinks will be served)

Can't make it to our offices?  Watch the Live Stream from your desktop.

About the Presenter: Marina Martin is a business efficiency consultant and owner of The Type-A Way. In addition to business consulting, Marina specializes in helping Type-A personalities become more efficient in their personal and professional lives, with the ultimate goal of being able to leave for Paris on 56 minutes' notice, anytime you like.

This Startpad Countdown event is sponsored by:

Brown-Bag Lunch at StartPad

Submitted by mckoss on Tue, 06/02/2009 - 10:51.
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One of the benefits of being at StartPad, is getting the opportunity to exchange ideas and get help from other startup developers and entrepreneurs.  We've had a standing lunch each Thursday where tenants can come and talk about their week, maybe do a product demo, and get feedback.  Some weeks we just chat and shoot the bull.

I thought it would be nice to open this up to others who are nearby, and would like to join us.  If you're interested send mail or call us (206-388-3466) to tell us you're coming.

What: Brown-Bag lunch for startup developers and entrepreneurs

When: Each Thurday at 12:15pm

Where: StartPad's Conference Room

Bring: Your lunch(!) - we have soda and water here - help yourself

Last week I attended the Google IO conference, so I can share some info about what I saw there (new Android phone, new App Engine features, Google Wave, Google 3D plugin, etc.)

 

Seattle Tech Startups Meeting - May 13, 2009

Submitted by mckoss on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 21:42.

I attended the STS meeting at UW tonight.  They had two speakers, both of whom were really excellent.  I happened to have my netbook with me so I recorded these UStream videos (the quality is actually not too bad - I sat close enough that the mic is picking up the speakers pretty well).

  • Vanessa Fox gave an amazing talk on SEO, with especially interesting (and humorous) counter examples of what NOT to do if you care about how users find your site on search.
  • Scott Porad, CTO of ICanHasCheezburger covers the historical evolution of user generated content, crowd sourcing, and crowd recommendations.

Google AppEngine - A Story of Failure and Redemption

Submitted by mckoss on Wed, 05/13/2009 - 16:22.
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I'm a Google AppEngine developer (Go2.me), as well as a user of a friend's AppEngine application (puzzazz.com).  On Saturday morning, I noticed that I could not Sign In to any AppEngine application - I was greeted with a very opaque "Server Error".  This looked like a very serious problem - so I waited a few hours thinking that Google would be "on it", and tried again ... still broken.

Now I start looking for the official Google report on this bug.  There are several ways that Google uses to communicate with developers on AppEngine:

  1. AppEngine Service Status Page
  2. Google Developer Group (Forum)
  3. Google Service Downtime Notification Group
To my dismay, none of these pages had ANYTHING to say about the service outage.  Doing some more investigation, I found someone report on the developer group that they could not log in on iPhone.  I had been trying to log in on my Android (Google) phone; it had not occurred to me that an error like this would be specific to mobile phone access, but it was.  I could log in normally via a browser, but not via a mobile phone.

With no real way to reach a person at Google, I had to just wait and hope that Google would recognize this error and fix it.  Finally, on Monday afternoon, a Google engineer responded on the forum that they were looking into the issue.  Within hours, the problem was fixed.

Mature, well run, engineering organizations have several mechanisms to combat failures like this one:
  1. The use of automated testing before releasing software that tests the broad range of capabilities (including emulation of Sign In via a mobile web browser, for example).
  2. A well defined error reporting and response system to tell users when problems are identified, and give an estimate of their repair.
While you could argue that AppEngine is a "beta" product, I was surprised and disappointed by this incident for several reasons:
  1. Apparently every AppEngine application lost the ability for mobile (iPhone/Android) users to log in via Google Sign in.
  2. This problem persisted for 60+ hours.
  3. There seemed no clear way for developers to report this to Google (there were two bug reports on the Google AppEngine Group - but that's not guaranteed to be monitored or create an Issue Ticket).
  4. There were no errors logged in our error logs on AppEngine (though 500 errors were clearly being returned and so Google should have "known" about this as soon as they started happening).
  5. At no time was this issue ever acknowledged on the App Engine service status page.
I decided to send my thoughts on this to the engineers who fixed this problem.  I was pleasantly surprised to hear back from Chris Beckmann:

Thanks for reaching out to us. I'm one of the product managers for App Engine.

We take the login bug seriously and it was the topic of significant discussion at our teamwide engineering meeting today. As you can imagine, many of Google's external services are actually composed of the efforts of many underlying teams, and in this case a change made by another team affected login for App Engine apps. Generally speaking, there are several methods for catching changes that break another service including static tests, however, in this case, it managed to slip by the other team undetected. 

Concretely, we're working with the other Google team to make sure they incorporate additional tests specific to App Engine, as well figuring out some additional monitoring within the App Engine service to discover these kind of errors. From a monitoring perspective, logins are relatively rare compared to overall traffic, and since this outage affected only mobile logins, the increase in 500s didn't immediately raise the alarm.

You also touched on an important question regarding why this wasn't picked up earlier as there was a thread on the group. Just by way of explanation, the problem really emerged over the weekend when there's fewer internal folks monitoring the group, so it's more difficult to separate real problems from typical discussions or other noise. That said, we're working on making improvements to how we react to community input, regardless of the day or hour at which it is received. Our best option right now is to post to the group with a link to the Issue Tracker (http://code.google.com/p/googleappengine/issues/list) so that other developers can verify whether they are also experiencing these problems and escalate in general.

I hope that addresses some of your concerns. Thanks for reaching out to us and feel free to contact me with any other feedback or questions. 

What a great response.  While recognizing a failure in their systems, they reassured me that they are taking the problem seriously, and are working hard to address it to avoid repeating the mistake in the future.  I also get the feeling that they really are the high quality development organization that I would expect from Google, and that they are trying to do things "right".  Chris even agreed to let me share his email publicly.

This just goes to show the power of good customer service, and treating customers with respect and openness can go a long way in building trust and loyalty in their brand.

I remain, a huge Google fan!

Seattle 2.0 Awards a Great Success!

Submitted by mckoss on Fri, 05/08/2009 - 16:56.

By all accounts, the Seattle 2.0 Awards last night was a huge success:

The reception was still going strong, with lots of interesting people to talk to, when the Pacific Science Center had to kick us out around 10pm.

I think the event was invigorating for the broad Seattle startup community.  Talking to Marcelo at the reception, I think he was very pleased with the event (as he should be).  But his ambitions are still higher - he has plans to get even more potential entrepreneurs to test the "startup waters" and join the community than we already have.

While he said in his intro speech that Seattle will always be behind Silicon Valley, Marcelo is very motivated to help make Seattle the clear #2 Best City to start a technology company.

Seattle 2.0 Awards - Glenn Kelman's inspiring speech from Seattle20 on Vimeo.

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