In a recent TechCrunch article, it was made known that BrightCove.tv was discontinuing the ability for consumers to upload videos. Instead, they’re changing gears and focusing their effort on catering to the 4000 media clients who use their service.

This, in my eyes, is a brilliant business move. Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch, however, sees it as a weakness. According to Erick, “I am tempted to put it in the deadpool, but will refrain for now. If it disappears completely, or arises Zombie-like in the future, we will let you know.”

I believe this is the wrong attitude to have. Erick’s article outlines only the negatives and looks for reasons to call BrightCove a failure. Since when did adapting to your customers needs become an act worthy of labeling a whole business as dead?

(Read more…)

Well, I decided to update wordpress to 2.3.1, and upon doing so I uploaded the 2.3.1 files… long story short, my FTP client (Transmit 3 from Panic Software) deleted all of my themes and plugins, including my brand new theme, launched last week.

Soooo I suppose you’ll be looking at a bare theme for a while… I’m so pissed off that I’m not even mad. It’ll probably hit me later, though.

This is pretty much unrelated to technology, other than being a website. I had a spark of an idea the other day… one of those ideas that would just be cool, but serves no purpose really, and has no route to profit. Then I thought about how it could be made super cheap and super quick… so I enlisted the help of Chris Casper, my former partner on skinnyr and one of the brilliant minds behind C2 Labs, and together we created an hour long project called MerryParade.com.

The site is, very simply put, a slide show of christmas lights set to christmas music. Hopefully the site can spread a little joy to shut-ins, nursing home patients, other people who are homebound… and generally anyone who enjoys the magic of christmas time.

The site is simply a flickr slideshow of photos that have been tagged with “Christmas Lights”. If you want to add your own, by all means, go for it. Send the site to your moms, dads, siblings, and your grandparents… maybe it’ll bring a little relaxation.

MerryParade

This is just a quick link to a site I found rather interesting. We’re all aware of design patterns and what they mean to programmers, but it never dawned on the that the same concepts apply to UI design. I found this site, which deals with such patterns. Although there are only a handful of patterns up right now, I thought it would be a fun quick link to share.

[via]

The old school developers will remember, and for the new ones, a quick history lesson. In the 1990s, Netscape Navigator (Mozilla rendering engine) was the dominant browser. It “had a few bugs”, and as a result, when Internet Explorer started playing catch-up, there were a lot of reasons to start using IE instead of Netscape. Towards the end of the paradigm shift, we all started doing something deemed unacceptable by todays standards. The dreaded “Your browser is not supported” page.

(Read more…)