MixMobi is mentioned in a short article on mobile coupons this morning in the St. Paul Pioneer Press. MixMobi is a lightweight, extremely easy to use, mobile campaign management system. The article mentions MixMobi using Twitter for mobile coupon deployment, which is one of the more popular ways our customers are deploying offers. MixMobi can also be used to deploy news, events, and other types of offers via nearly any online avenue including other social media such as Facebook, mobile messaging such as SMS, and embedding in other mobile media such as company or event websites.

MixMobi is currently in private beta. If you are interested in being a beta participant for MixMobi, please let us know.

One of the projects we have been heavily involved with (and super excited about) is MixMobi, a lightweight, extremely easy to use, mobile campaign management system. We are currently in closed beta with around a dozen companies trying out the service. We are now just starting to get the word out.

As part of this pre-marketing MixMobi was a sponsor of today’s unSummit at the Minneapolis Public Library, which I attended. It was fun and interesting to hear that many of the people I talked to had already heard of our service and appeared genuinely interested. While the sampling is heavily skewed to local business supporting, new technology evangelists willing to spend a Saturday with other local business supporting, new technology evangelists, it is nonetheless encouraging for a start-up.

If you are interested in being a beta participant for MixMobi, please let us know.

There is a huge group of people in the software development community who love to trash Microsoft. Every good story needs a villain and MS keeps playing the role so well. I’m not a fan of Office, ASP, .Net, etc., but its hard to argue with the impact that Windows has had on both businesses and consumers worldwide. Having worked on many complex enterprise applications I also appreciate the complexity of the MS world: The thousands of coordinated decisions that must be made each day in order to just survive much less thrive. Its easy to talk about a clean solid code base for your single application in a greenfield. Try it when you have dozens, hundreds, thousands or millions of demanding customers, all running a different set of versions, patches and customizations.
» Continue reading “Oh, Microsoft”

I presented Zippy Stat at MinneDemo on Friday night and wanted to share a little about the experience.

Zippy Stat is a project I’ve been working on to record, monitor and share “Micro-Statistics” in your life. Things such as miles you’ve run, business cards collected at an event, business auto mileage and really anything else you can think up. It came about because there were a bunch of these little stats that I wanted to record for :coderow and didn’t want 30 different spreadsheets or 30 different apps to manage them. Furthermore, as a rabid developer, I’m always looking for another fun application to build.

» Continue reading “Zippy Stat at MinneDemo”

wikipedia photo

This weekend I flew to Seattle for an hour. My flight left Minneapolis at 9:55 pm and I was back home at 6:00 am the next morning. To mark the occasion I purchased a genuine Seattle ballpoint pen for $2.99 in the only gift store open in the airport. I made this 2,650 mile, 8 hour, overnight journey to keep my elite status with Northwest (soon to be Delta) Airlines. I needed to fly 2500 miles before the end of the year, and Seattle was the cheapest flight I could find.

I was too tired to do any real work, and too awake to sleep, so I mostly thought about why I’d make such a crazy trip.
What I came up with first is a list of real annoyances that disappear when you are a “preferred” flier. » Continue reading “flying to seattle for an hour”

a story of frustration and redemption

In the last two days I feel like I’ve been through both the worst and best sides of being a software developer.

frustration:
Yesterday started off as a day of possibilities. Another day to build really great stuff that I’m proud of and hopefully helps a few people out. Instead it was riddled with a host of issues on my own laptop including a hosed Ruby 1.8.7 upgrade, Readline compile failures, $PATH issues, a crashing IDE and a general feeling of crankiness. A lot of people, including myself, have talked about how exciting it is to code, especially in Ruby. How the philosophy is so different, and it is. But I couldn’t help but get the feeling that software development in general is still in its infancy — that some things that should be simple are not. It feels like we are still hand-cranking the Model-T to get it started. We’ve come a long way and are helping a lot of people, but we’ve got a long way to go before we are driving an all-electric Mini Cooper.
» Continue reading “shoes to the rescue”

Up until recently I’ve hosted all of my hobby/small Rails sites at Textdrive. It was inexpensive, the documentation fairly thorough, and support was responsive. About a month ago, I started putting together another small Rails site. I built it locally and was ready to deploy to my server at TextDrive. However, the server had an old version of RubyGems, and I found out that wouldn’t be upgraded. My plan was being outmoded, and needed to upgrade my plan (aka, spend more) and move my code.

I really wasn’t in the mood to do this, and so I took the opportunity to look into some of the other services getting a lot of press lately: Namely the “managed” cloud services–those apps that use EC2 or other elastic services, but put a nice front end on more easily manage deployments. The following are some first impressions on each of the services I worked with:

» Continue reading “working in the clouds”

Just a quick note that we are moving our blog site from blogger to a local WordPress install.  The site may be down or look a bit odd tonight.