Scott builds Software

Cow mooing

One of my first applications was just approved by the Apple Store last night. Woo-hoo!

Pushtone 1.0 is an app for sending hilarious alert sounds to an iPhone or iPod touch. If you’re offended by movies such as Wedding Crashers, Animal House, or comics like Chris Rock… this isn’t for you. If not, grab two iPhones or iPod touches, and pushtone to your heart’s content. Your phone never sounded so inappropriate.

I wanted to experiment with the new Push service, play with images, sounds, animation effects, table views, registration, XML feeds, backend servers in the cloud, embedded feedback through email, SMS gateways, and more. This little app packs a lot. The hard part was making it really easy and viral.

Registration? Its automatic. Sending a pushtone? Three taps. Tap once to get a list of pushtones. Tap a second time to choose a Pushtone. Tap a third to send it to yourself, or tap the phone number and quoted saying to send them to a friend.

The SMS gateway was an interesting challenge. Carriers are more than happy to let us send SMS and MMS messages from a cloud server. You just have to pay for it. Handsomely. Think a nickel an SMS, thirty cents per MMS.

I found a database of over 300,000 phone entries, held by an obscure US Government agency. By law they publish a list of all phone number “sets” and who owns them. A set is defined by the first 3, then the next two digits in a 10-digit phone number. This works pretty well. However, the agency hasn’t yet figured out how to track numbers that were ported.

For example, suppose you first had 914 555 2345 on Verizon. If you bought an iPhone and wanted to keep your number, the phone companies “port” your number from Verizon to AT&T. So, even though Verizon technically owns the set of numbers 914 55x xxxx, they’ve made an exception for you, 914 555 2345, and given it to AT&T. These are apparently not reported to the agencies.

The end result is that the database is mostly accurate — except for ported numbers. I mapped that database to the known email gateways, then send the SMS by sending an email to the appropriate carrier gateway, using their addressing format (e.g. Verizon would be 91455552345@vtext.net).

Ants on Site

Back when we did the web site for the Olympics, we’d occasionally take a break over pizza and brainstorm about geeky “cool” things to add to the site. We called the site our WomBeast. Wom stood for Web Object Manager. Beast was what it felt like working with the sprawl of machines and code 24 hours a day.

One of my favorites was “WomAnts.” The idea was to track where everyone was on the site, in real time, like ants walking around a picnic blanket. We could inspect the ants, interact with them, chat, and see the pathways they created. With the flip of a switch, we’d see ants crawling on the site. Click! We’d talk to you. Flick! You’d be logged off. Ooo, the power of it all.

Now that I’ve had this blog and a number of other sites, that curiosity is as strong as ever. I now create avatars anonymously for all that visit here. For chat, I’m trying out Google Talk. You can see your avatar on the upper left of the title bar. If I’m online, you can click and chat with me. Soon I hope to be able to chat with you, in reverse, for free.

This will take a bit to write in my spare time. Still, its a fun hack.

Are Apps the next gold rush?

Apps are on the cover of Business Week!

The article talks about the $1B App market and young companies like Zynga, Social Gaming Network, Tapulous that are minting cash. Little Zynga has exploded to several hundred employees, offering engineers perks like a Lamborghini for a day. Virtual goods, virtual gardens, social games, Dance-Dance revolution clones for your fingers, business apps, and more are rocketing to the tops of the charts.

But why Apple? Why didn’t this happen before now?

Apple was the first company to release a real, bonafide operating system on a mobile device. The OS includes a graphics pipeline, fun sensors (an accelerometer, magnetometer, realtime audio, realtime video, proximity), mobile networking, gobs of storage and computing power, and the ability to program in near machine language (C, Objective C). No other phone comes close.

These bite-sized apps are such a breath of fresh air when compared to PC bloatware and enterprise drudgery. Apple has made software and computing fun again! We’re happy to pay the buck or two for the pleasure.

Myers-Briggs is popular at major corporations, startups, psychologists and more. They have developed a 4-dimensional matrix of personality profiles, based on whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, thinking or feeling, intuitive or sensing, judgmental or perceptive.

Today a colleague offered up four questions to quickly guess your personality type. I didn’t think it would work. The results were surprisingly accurate (though clearly anecdotal).

Let’s call it Myers-Briggs for Idiots. Here they are. What personality are you?

1. After a long day of meetings, do you like to (A) move on to a party to relax, or (B) go home and be by yourself?
2. Do you prefer to hear about things (A) in general, or (B) more about details? Describe today’s weather. If you say “nice day,” you’re general. If you say “it started off at 56 degrees, rained a bit, then cleared around noon, when the sun came out at 3…” you’re clearly detail oriented.
3. When making a big decision, do you (A) think mainly about the impact on people or (B) prefer the objective right thing to do?
4. Do you (A) like quick resolution to issues, or (B) prefer to brainstorm all the possibilities?

Answers:
1A = E, 1B = I, 2A = N, 2B = S, 3A = F, 3B = T, 4A = J, 4B = P

String your answers together, E – N – T – J.

I was playing with Ooyala this morning, helping a client build streaming video into their site. The tools are easy to use, beautifully designed. We were up and running in less than five minutes with a demo account. Lots more to learn, of course, but its quite impressive. The Ooyala ex-Googlers have a winner here! I’ve included a sample video here that I downloaded from their video exchange.

A Hip Hop Marketer shows off an App in USA Today

Marketers are increasingly looking to apps — little interactive games, utilities, and entertaining toys — to reach a massive, on-the-go audience.

USA Today had an interesting article today about marketing and mobile applications. Besides the standard frothy statements about the future size of the mobile market, they hinted that new, mobile social networks and applications may emerge. These newcomers could displace today’s traffic monsters like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.

Possible? Sure. Just think. Twitter didn’t exist three years ago. Now you can’t avoid it.

Foursquare is my latest favorite. On the iPhone, I’m addicted to Sonic Media’s global network of leaf trombone and ocarina musicians. Try being a judge, meet two new friends. Hilarious!

North Highland Partners

Peter Drucker said it best. Every business starts with a customer.

Earlier this year I helped a customer build a few apps. Apps to me are the next wave of widgets. I’m pretty excited about the prospects of the iPhone platform, Flash 10, and cloud computing. Apps are seemingly everywhere, on the phone, the TV, my car’s dashboard, blogs, Twitter.

The customer’s CFO emailed me. “Where do I write the check?” I quickly incorporated, naming the company after the street where we built our first house: North Highland Partners. Today I put a placeholder at our domain northhighlandpartners.com.

In the last tech wave, we’d build the Powerpoint, craft a Web 2.0 slik sight naim, look for investors, attend conferences, send out fliers, get a logo, design t-shirts. We’d buy traffic, hook up AdWords and more. We hoped to be the next Four Square, Twitter, or Facebook.

In this economy Drucker rules. Start with what you do best, get a customer to pay for real value. Deliver quality. Cash the check. Repeat. Referrals will build when you deliver. Thirty days in, we crossed six figures in qualified opportunities. Last week we crossed seven. I was stunned.

The App wave is growing. Fast. Now, back to coding. We’ve got this really cool iPhone app for a movie that… well.. can’t say yet. Its under NDA.

Kanye West disses Taylor Swift
source video

In 2008 Fitim Blaku and I were playing around with ideas for manipulating video. Over a weekend I threw together a little site, tubechopper.com, for extracting animated GIFs, MP3 clips, and video thumbnails from a YouTube video. Its a fun hack with curl, ffmpeg, Image Magick, a JavaScript image cropper, and some jQuery dance steps.

Youtube later changed their techniques for publishing videos, which broke TubeChopper. I took it down.

Recently I saw that GifSoup began to get some traction on exactly the same idea. Argh. Don’t you hate it when that happens? I hand it to those guys, though, for good marketing, getting coverage in CNet, and adding the gallery for sharing videos. Google Adwords cover the site to extract what they can for their work. Nice touch.

For yuks I dusted off the code, fixed the Youtube scrapery, and posted the animated GIF Youtube converter to this blog. The code respects Youtube video providers who’ve asked that their videos be protected.

Recovery.gov Heat Map

Over the summer I worked on several Flash Apps to help track and visualize $800B in recovery spending by the US Government. My favorite is the app on the home page. This little guy has over 50 sprites, each for a state, hooked up to an XML feed… right from the data vaults of the US Government. We apply a bit of statistics to determine the mean, standard deviation, and T values for each state, put them into 5 buckets, choose an appropriate color, and voila. Working with TMP Government, Axispoint, and others was a pleasure. The team crammed months of work into weeks, toiling on weekends and nights. It felt just like a startup but within the aura of the US Government.

The site went live today at Recovery.gov.

The Instinct e-commerce Plugin

This morning I met an independent designer in London. He designs and builds e-commerce sites for a number of small businesses and marketing agencies. His background is almost all design, so I was curious where he got his programming chops. Then he mentioned Wordpress.

Ah.

So how does he do commerce? What about Magenta, Authorize.net, Paypal, Ektron and all that? Nope. He uses Instinct, a rapidly growing e-commerce plugin for Wordpress from New Zealand. The plugin looks intriguing. LAMP commerce is deliciously powerful, especially if it has integration with several card processors. I’m going to give it a whirl.