mindbites.com, our newest site has been released from the incubation chambers! MindBites is a social media platform that allows users to monetize instructional content. You know how to do something, you make a short video explaining how to do it, upload it to MindBites, and every time someone buys it you get a chunk of cash. Everybody wins!
The Polycot Labs crew will be present and accounted for at the Lone Star Ruby Conference in Austin this weekend. Jeff, Ethan and Matt B. will be in attendance, so if you’re coming grab us and say hi. See you there!
While we’ve been involved in community sites for a long time, the recent explosion of true social network sites has been really exciting for us. While communities may differ, the fundamentals of social networks don’t vary much. People want to post cool things they have, they want to find people with similar interests, and they want to talk about things they’re interested in. We’ve been talking to a lot of folks recently who want to start social networks, and the response has been great since we already have the core social network functionality built and ready to use. We can cut deployment timelines and because we’re doing development in Ruby on Rails, we can still offer a very customized user experience.
I realized a few weeks ago that it’s almost 10 years since I started working on my first e-Commerce site. We didn’t go live until early 1998, but the technical infrastructure was being put together in September of 1997. Ten years ago
Microsoft was buying $150 Million worth of Apple stock and the world was mourning Lady Di. A lot of things have changed in 10 years, but it’s interesting how much the fundamentals of e-Commerce have not. (more…)
Our very own Matt Sanders will be starting medical school next week, trading in his command prompt and text editor for a white coat and piles of textbooks. We’re sad to see him go, but excited about his new adventure. He plans on focusing on public medicine in developing countries or something admirable like that, so we’re guessing that he won’t be driving a Benz any time soon.
Exciting things are happening in the Polycot neighborhood. While Mars has moved on to SoCo, a new Italian place is moving in, and we’ve got our fingers crossed that they’ll be open for lunch. More exciting, however, was to discover that our across-the-street neighbor, Atomic City owner Jim Hughes is on the cover of the Austin Chronicle this week. Go Jim!
For the last 5 years or so we’ve had a Windows machine in the office for two things: Browser Compatibility and Quickbooks. Today, we’re about to retire our poor neglected Windows machine ship it off to wherever PCs go to die. (Or maybe we’ll load FreeBSD on it and use it as an internal test machine. Either way.)
The latest project from Polycot Labs is an update to the Specialized Riders Club, their bike enthusiast social network community. In this rev we’ve added blogs for members, on-site messaging, friends lists, video uploads and some cool profile enhancements.
Polycot Labs very own Matt Sanders and Ethan Burrow will be heading up to RailsConf in Portland this weekend. Matt’s the tall, lanky one and Ethan’s the shorter one with the beard. Chat them up about Matt’s new puppy Pele and Ethan’s homebrewing!
I wanted to experiment a bit with some layouts I hadn’t tried before with the new Polycot Labs site, and one of the things I didn’t like as much about our old Polycot Consulting site was that there wasn’t as much visual imagery as I’d like.
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