Genuine Parts

Shift

polo — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 16:57:20 +0000

Our plan for Decurate was to establish retail flash sales at some point. We’ve decided to move ahead now rather than wait. As we looked around we see we that in addition to ourselves, we have many resources in front of us.

My co-founder Jordan and I met and worked together at an online retail provider for hotels. We’re still good friends with many of the people there. They’ll be invaluable in helping us avoid as many issues as possible.

The most important next hire is an account executive to help coordinate vendors. In another amazing, wonderful coincidence, our good friend Tamie and account manager at a games company quit her job this week. She starts with us on Monday.

On the design front, our illustrator should have the first sketches for us Monday.

I’m expecting things to not be this perfect in the future. I’m writing this blog to remind myself it’s OK, we’ve had quite a bit of luck regardless.

Our Third Curator

polo — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 21:08:34 +0000

Our next curator is Irene from New York. Welcome. We’ll be sharing more details about them soon.

Another New Curator

polo — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 23:12:27 +0000

We just hired another new content editor, or curator as we call them. Welcome Karyn. Her style is more traditional, but clean and elegant. Her style could be mixed with just about anything modern. We’re lucky and grateful.

Our newest team additions

polo — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 12:57:46 +0000

Before launching Decurate we’re building a team of great content editors, and evolving the design of the site. We were lucky enough to find Brittney from California to be our first design editor. She has a modern, clean style.

We’re just as fortunate to have found an amazing artist to work to help us with graphics work, Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo, from Spain.

More to come.

Santiago

polo — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 09:26:56 +0000

We left LAX on July 2, summer, and were lucky enough to be offered exit row seats as we checked in. The seats were mid-center, in front of an aisle. This gave our legs as much room as business class and made the 14 hour flight feel half as long.

Arriving in Santiago on July 3, winter, we were met at the airport by our program’s assigned and gracious padrino at 5:30 AM. We packed our bags, monitors, and Jordan’s snowboard into his car. He dropped us off at the temporary apartment I found on Craigslist at the last minute for a cheap $29/night.

We slept for about two hours until the apartment manager came by to collect a deposit. He gave us a hysterically animated tour of every electronic device, appliance, faucet and kitchen drawer of the 400 square foot space. The portable electric heater that was the only source of warmth, blew a fuse as he was demonstrating how it worked. We managed to sleep for another two hours in the freezing cold. Later, our padrino met us and took us on a tour of the upscale east side of Santiago, with a clear view of the Andes from almost everywhere.

Since then, it’s been a blur. After three days of searching we found a furnished three bedroom apartment in a great neighborhood, Lastarria. That left us free the following weekend to visit Valparaiso, a beautiful city by the ocean 40 miles from Santiago. It’s filled with graffiti, stray dogs, 37 hills with century old inclined elevators, amazing views and architecture. I loved it. We ate at a great restaurant, Bijoux, where you discuss your options and preferences with the chef before deciding on a meal. We feasted on fresh fish caught that day, beef and pisco sours. As we explored the hill around our hostel, we met two local university students and were invited to join them in drinking boxed wine out of cans of Budweiser. I did, while Jordan deferred.

In the two weeks since we landed, we’ve received our Chilean social security numbers, bank accounts, gone through the program introduction, launched the alpha release of our latest project, and hired two people.

Next week we go to the north of Chile to attend a class at a university and share our start up experiences with the students. We’ve set aside some time to see the Atacama desert and will hopefully spend a few days in Bolivia.

I can’t say enough good things about our program and Santiago. Start Up Chile feels like a great opportunity.

New Ideas Rarely Are

polo — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:11:26 +0000

I was lucky enough to meet Douglas Englebart a few years ago in a seminar at Berkeley. In 1968, he introduced the mouse, hypertext and other ideas to a group of 1000 computer scientists via video conference. It’s amazing how long it takes to see something right in front of us.

Building a Gameboy emulator. In javascript.

polo — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 02:09:10 +0000

What can’t you do with JS?

imrannazar.com/

The Electronic Home Library

polo — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 23:32:04 +0000

Why don’t we imagine the future as much as we used to? This article from the Chicago Tribune in 1959 shows an electronic home library where you could project information onto the ceiling. It may not have been correct, but it took a lot of thought to forecast something so far from what technologically possible. Via PaleoFuture.

The sum of our parts

jordan — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 07:31:40 +0000

I just realized the other day that as Specify continues to grow and add new features, we are constantly leveraging more and more third-party services to get things done quicker and more efficiently. That list has gotten long enough to warrant a blog post! So here are some of the tools that we have found useful (or at least interesting). We don’t use all of these, but have spent some time checking them out.

Beanstalk. I love Beanstalk deeply. Its automated deployment system has changed the way we write software as a team. If you use SVN or Git, check out Beanstalk.
WordPress, of course (it powers this blog). Heard of it?
KISSmetrics. We haven’t started tracking data with KISSmetrics yet, but I am impressed with the product. We recently got a lifetime free account through an AppSumo deal and have been playing around with its API a bit on our development server. Very cool and powerful. A big step up from Google Analytics.
Chargify. Chargify gets an honorable mention here, even though their latest pricing maneuvers really pissed us off. If you can afford their premium pricetag, they offer the best subscription billing API out there. We even wrote a ColdFusion API wrapper for it.
Strophe.js. We wrote out own XMPP chat client in javascript using Strophe.js to power our collaboration features. Strophe is a great tool for adding XMPP support to your app.
Openfire. Openfire is our XMPP server of choice.
UserVoice. We’ve just started using UserVoice to allow our users to give us feedback so we can improve Specify.
SnapEngage. Another one we haven’t started using yet, but it looks great. We are going to add it to our home page.
TypeKit. TypeKit is the best! We use it for the nice font on this blog. Excellent service, well done.

Postling

polo — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 05:51:00 +0000

I have a new favorite for managing our social media. I tried Postling last week and it was fantastic.

It was designed specifically for posting to other sites and is not another place you need to manage. It’s a manager for everything else. For me, it did two things really well.

We have a product blog, a corporate blog and I blog for Decorati. It connects to any WordPress account you have, whether it’s a WordPress.org or .com site.

In a few seconds I updated two company blogs, twitter, and facebook. It’s nicely set up so as you’re creating an entry it’s streamlined if you choose twitter. You get both a larger form for your blog and facebook, and one just for Twitter.

That alone was good for me but it does one other great thing. It searches across the web for any comments on your posts. And you can respond back directly from one interface.

You can also update your Facebook status and schedule posts for later.