Whirlycott / Philip Jacob

That’s a good way to put it

Philip Jacob — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:51:41 +0000

if you feel compelled to comment, please try to think of something interesting to say. youtube needs remarks like “awesome song” and “this video sucks” like it needs another shaky, blurry, garbled & distorted, 27-second camera-phone clip of Feist performing 1234 in [YOUR TOWN HERE]. thank you.

The Ben Adida HMAC Smackdown

Philip Jacob — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:41:16 +0000

Ben Adida is a super nice guy until you start misusing message digests. He once gave me a smackdown (I like to think of it as a learning experience) that was very helpful and now he’s done the same thing in public: don’t Hash Secrets.

Don’t make the cryptographers cry. Especially not Ben.

Algorithms, Architecture and Caching

Philip Jacob — Thu, 22 May 2008 03:50:24 +0000

How to scale « François Schiettecatte’s Blog
It not about the language, it is about the architecture.

Nearly: good algorithms and proper caching are also part of the picture. Sure, caching is part of good architecture, but it makes such a difference that it’s worth calling it out separately.

(This should really be a much longer post…)

So long, YottaMusic

Philip Jacob — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 01:49:03 +0000

I’ve enjoyed using YottaMusic ever since Jake told me about it last year. I signed on and became a paying Rhapsody customer but I used the YottaMusic frontend for streaming my music. I was wondering why YottaMusic shut down over Christmas and now I know. If anybody knows of another service like it, I’d love to know. The Rhapsody.com website sucks rhino and I’m certainly not going to continue paying for that slow, buggy heap of junk.

Thanks for killing one of the best legit music experiences, Rhapsody. You’re losing at least one customer (me) over this nonsensical decision.

Never Forget

Philip Jacob — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:47:15 +0000

The Key to Shopping 2.0 Success: Empowering Customers

Philip Jacob — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:54:29 +0000

I have an opinion piece in the the E-Commerce Times today about the need for openness as a critical factor in the way that retailers market their products. Rather, the way that retailers provide tools and content to their customers to help them market their products.

In unrelated news, we had some fun at the StyleFeeder office today:

Photo courtesy of Eric Savage. Eric, I “remixed” your photo! I just love remixed User-Generated Content (rUGC).

Radiohead’s Warm Glow - New York Times

Philip Jacob — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:59:18 +0000

Radiohead’s Warm Glow - New York Times
Today, music lovers are left but two options: pay list price for an album, or perform what a fan might call a free download and a record company would call theft. Radiohead’s experiment suggests a third way out: let fans pay what they want and give them lots of touchy-feely reasons to want to give as much money as they can.

There’s nothing touchy-feely about it. Enough people are both willing to pay for the music (because they like it) and quite happy to contribute to an effort that is part of a wave of reform crashing down on the music business.

Guest blogging in dot NL

Philip Jacob — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 20:46:06 +0000

This week, I am guest blogging on the popular Dutch blog IN10.nl and I just put up my first post where I attempt a silly experiment to get in touch with the band Soko. I guess I am living in Holland this week, mentally, anyway.

Singing the praises of Nginx

Philip Jacob — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 02:21:55 +0000

I just put a post on the StyleFeeder tech blog about my new favorite webserver: Nginx.

East coast startups redux

Philip Jacob — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 03:48:02 +0000

François writes about east coast startups and Bijan writes some more, all in response to Scott Kirsner’s article in this past Sunday’s Boston Globe (shameless plug: StyleFeeder is mentioned briefly).

There seems to be a dimension of the conversation missing here, though. My view is that there is a veritable wellspring of local developers already working in the consumer space (and even more who want to be). If Boston has any deficiency of b2c/c2c Internet companies, it’s not for lack of technology talent.

It is substantially harder to hire good marketing, bizdev and design people who haven’t spent the last ten years working at banks, biotech companies or consulting companies (with financial services and biotech clients). In fact, most of the design work for StyleFeeder is done either by Canadians or Brazilians and not because they are cheaper or easier to work with than Boston-based designers. It’s because I can’t find a deep pool of design talent here. Boston designers tend to be fairly conservative, which generally isn’t what you want when you’re trying to build for consumers. If you’re a Boston-based designer who thinks I’m wrong about that, I’d love to hear from you.

Marketing and bizdev people with consumer experience are equally tricky to find, again due to circumstances that I have to attribute to the dearth of consumer companies in the area. Technology skills are reasonably portable across industries, but contacts (the proverbial rolodex) and “getting it” are not. We were able to attract a few great candidates to both of the positions that they now fill, but it took a while and required a lot of patience. Bringing Dina Pradel and Shergul Arshad to StyleFeeder rounded out a truly kickass team and we’re extremely fortunate to have both of them.

My message to local designers, marketing and bizdev people: speak up and get involved. The local venture/PE community can certainly help you connect with technology talent, plus there are many events in the area to attend.