WHAT'S POPPIN?
Insights & Perspectives from the Folks behind PopScreen.
Warning: The PopScreen team has been hit by an unknown illness. While the case has not been verified to be h1n1 or even the typical flu. We have quarantied Glenn Gutierrez, patient zero. For those reading this blog and the rest of the PopScreen community… Now is the time to take preventative measures and get vaccinations for the disease of your choice. This has been a public service announcement by PopScreen!
Sincerely,
Glenn Gutierrez - patient zero
P.s. check out videos I’m watching to pass the time @ http://popscreen.com/glenn
PopScreen Featured in Houston Chronicle
It’s nice to know our hometown paper is supporting us on the press side. It’s always fun showing this stuff to our PopScreen members… oh, and to our folks too. Overall, it’s a good first experience seeing ourselves in a print based publication and it’s good for team moral. But more importantly, it’s a first time public statement that we intend to really show the world that great web companies can come from anywhere. Mind you we’re still in our early stages, we do have a vision in how the internet, and especially online video, will revolutionize the way we consume content forever. We hope to provide the best central platform for online videos and live web shows. We take our cue from ‘You’ the online community and with your support, we will build something great for everyone.
Sincerely,
The PopScreen Team
FYI: Here is the full article (missing the pictures of course): http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/tech/news/6666418.html
PopScreen “50 Best Websites for 2010”
Time magazine sure knows what its talking about
Nick Palacios (our front-end developer) is also Nostradamus.
Design is integral to technology. You may have a really cool proprietary technology, but if you can’t get people to use it — it’s worthless. In the technology sector, design is essential yet under valued. But there are several key examples that show how powerful usability and design can beat out proprietary technology companies.
1) Youtube - leveraged Adobe’s flash video technology to create a seamless way to post and share videos all across the web and sold to Google for $1.6 billion. Youtube had no underlying proprietary technology but they did create a usable system to distribute videos to the masses, leaving Adobe high and dry.
2) Mint.com - a personal finance management system had no propertiery technology was recently sold to Intuit aka Quickbooks for 170 million smackers. They had a really slick design and merely licensed the financial aggregation system from another company called Yodlee who has yet to make a nice exit and has had to recapitalize several times just to stay alive.
The point is to make sure that you give props to the design and usability of a product because it can make companies very very very successful… because people WANT to use them.
Anyways, the above picture is just a representation of where designers fall in various categories - you don’t get God status until the designer becomes a hit.
A) Gods - The guy that made Mint or the team behind Youtube. None had serious technology. They were just mashups.
B) Servant - The designer working for the man from 9-5 or who is a slave to his company… ahem Kevin Nguyen.
C) Prostitute - the freelancer who bounces around from project to project aka Nick Palacios and Andy Budd (j/k guys, you know I have mad rizpect for yall!)
D) All three - well…I guess you could say they are the startup designer who worked for a company but did freelance work and then hit it big —- Chad Hurley of Youtube?
Have you ever had the feeling that your heart was racing 90 miles a minute? Felt the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up like toy soldiers? Experience the sense of overwhelming doom and destruction?
No? We’ll that’s the feeling you would get when you think you’re server just got hacked. We at PopScreen just experienced that a little while ago. But it wasn’t due to a hacker but a misconfiguration on our end. Thanks Kenneth! j/k
Anyways, this fire drill taught us an important lesson… backup, backup, backup. Not only that but make sure you have measures to ensure what to do in the case of an emergency. Whether that emergency be a house fire, hurricane or downed server - you always need a backup plan.
Also, to any of our users who experienced glitches in the system such as not being able to sign in or save videos, we apologize. The downtime occurred over the last 4 hours.
Above is a picture of Kevin (The Chief Architect) as he was getting Serve’rd. You can see the anxiety in his eyes… almost as if he was turning more and more into a vampire or some other weird creature of the night.
