Facebook is tight-lipped about its revenue numbers, which is typical of private companies. The most it has said publicly is that it became “free cash-flow positive” as of last September. At the time, we estimated it was set to bring in around $550 million for the year in revenues based on previous reports that we and others had heard, and from our own calculations. But how did the year actually end? Somewhat higher. And sources estimate the company could make between $1 billion and $1.1 billion in total revenue this year.
(Link: Facebook Revenues Up to $700 Million in 2009, On Track Towards $1.1 Billion in 2010)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized facebook, monetization
Work: it does what it’s supposed to do and adds value to the user.
Pretty: it’s easy to use and looks good.
Fast: there’s no performance bottlenecks and the software is scalable and easy to extend.
I’m a programmer but I also want my software to look good and be easy to use. The last thing I worry about these days is performance. Not because performance isn’t important but because it’s usually not a problem until you have enough users and you will never get enough users unless you focus first on the other two.
(Link: Make it work. Make it pretty. Make it fast. « Opportunity Cloud)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized startups
Creating icons is a lot of work, but today you can download more than 500!
(Link: 500 Free Icons for your web apps | TCA inspired design)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized icons, webdesign
PaperRater.com analyzes documents immediately, 24/7, in real-time. We provide in depth analysis to help the student improve grammar and writing.
You would expect PaperRater.com to take into account all rules related to spelling and grammar. However, you may be surprised to learn that Paper Rater also helps the student to improve the document’s readability, word choice, and style.
Additional analysis and comments are provided that help the student to improve his/her writing, not only on this assignment, but in all future writing assignments.
(Link: Pre-Grade Your Paper)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized essays, grading
You seem to have become a community manager almost overnight, what’s it like to manage a community of designers and developers?
So far I’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback and constructive criticism; I think it’s hugely beneficial that this product happens to be for designers and developers — it makes distilling bug reports a lot quicker, and everyone’s had really valuable insight into what’s working and what’s not (in many cases, backed up by mockups and code snippets to illustrate their point — I can’t complain about that!).
(Link: Forrst: Where Designers Who Code meet Developers Who Design | Carsonified)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized development
Lesson: Pick one, two, or three up front
We also discovered that sometimes one week or three week iterations are better than two week iterations. We experimented with a three week iteration for the last iteration of the two month term. It made sense for one of the projects (to be released soon), but it definitely contributed to sloppiness and missing the deadline on another project. With more time it was easy to say “We’ll deal with that tomorrow” or “We can worry about that next week.” Turns out when you start saying that you’re often already in trouble. Without a looming deadline you can feel (you can feel the pressure two weeks a lot more than three weeks), scope creeps and things get pushed off. So we decided that next time around we’ll experiment with one week, two week, and three week iterations — but that call needs to be made up front. You can’t start with one week and turn it into two or three. A team will say “This is a one weeker” or “This is a two weeker” etc.
(Link: A New Way of Working: A Two-Month Recap – (37signals))
BrentSordyl Uncategorized management, programming
Development is a unique job with unique requirements. Two requirements that stand out are the need to work for stretches of time in complete isolation, concentrating intently on a problem, combined with the necessity of group collaboration. How, we asked, could we create a workspace that grants a developer access to both complete isolation, while allowing instant collaboration? We’d tried all manner of offices and desk arrangements in the past, then thought, why not build everyone their own house? On wheels.
(Link: Developer Town – Developer Town Blog – Why houses?)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized programming
The potential for adaptive learning technology goes beyond SAT and grad school test prep, and could easily be applied to teaching English grammar, math, and a host of core skill sets in other educational settings. CEO Jose Ferreira says the company is keeping those possibilities on the back burner. “We’ll definitely add other test prep products as well as other direct to consumer offerings. Those may include the after school tutoring or home schooling markets,” Ferreira said over email, “and, yes, we may go after prep for K12 tests but no plans to anytime soon. And we definitely plan to license our platform to other educational groups, especially textbook publishers and schools themselves.”
(Link: Knewton launches adaptive-learning SAT Prep Course)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized e-learning, testprep
Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails) allows for easy and scalable deployment of Ruby on Rails applications on Apache or Nginx servers. Part of what makes it so easy is that it comes with suitable default settings right out of the box, so that you don’t need to concern yourself with any of the details when deploying your application to production.
(Link: Performance Tuning for Phusion Passenger (an Introduction) – Alfa Jango Blog » Blog Archive)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized passenger, performance, rubyonrails
For certain, if you are looking for products that offer so-called Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) functionality, then there are a plethora of Open Source solutions. Companies have successfully implemented Mule ESB, Apache Axis2, Apache Synapse and Apache ServiceMix
(Link: Open source solutions for SOA: Check your bias at the door | ZDNet.com)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized soa
Images says more than a thousands words. It is common sense and wise people has followed this rule for centuries by creating illustrations of thier ideas and thoughts. Today it is easier than ever as the technology for presenting nearly any type of information as a graph or chart on a web page is getting really mature. Reading through this article you will be faced with the problem on what technology and specific implementation you should use. It is not a trivial question and I recommend that you use comments on this article to share your ideas, concerns etc. with peer readers. This way you may get the input from the community that you need to create the optimal solution.
(Link: 75+ Tools for Visualizing your Data, CSS, Flash, jQuery, PHP | tripwire magazine)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized charts, visualization
Guess what? Cassandra is going to tweet. The open source Cassandra data management system is going to replace the MySQL database system at Twitter, the latest of several MySQL replacements at social networking sites, according to Ryan King, a software engineer at Twitter.
Facebook and Digg, which used to rely on the open source MySQL database system, now part of Oracle, have already made the switch.
(Link: Twitter Drops MySQL For Cassandra — Cloud databases — InformationWeek)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized mysql
Borrowing a page or two from Kanban, I propose that we can use the following additional metrics on our Scrum projects:
* Quality – number of bugs opened and closed per sprint
* Cost – the amount of money it cost to produce a feature or user story
* Lead Time – the amount of time it takes a feature to go from planned to implemented
* Feature Complexity – if you are breaking features into stories, you can measure how many stories it takes to complete a feature
(Link: What Scrum Can Learn From Kanban – Metrics)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized methodology, metrics
This set contains all of the following elements in three distinct styles: glossy, satin/light gradient, and one-color. The satin/light gradient set is available in 7 different colors (which you’ll find all of in the psd file). Here are the individual elements included in the set:
* Control buttons including arrows and basic symbols
* Info and text boxes
* Breadcrubs, buttons, and other navigation elements
* Drop-down and collapsible box styles
* Speech bubbles, search forms, loading elements, and more…
(Link: Freebie: Massive Web UI & Button Set » MediaLoot Blog)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized icons
The Hot Potatoes suite includes six applications, enabling you to create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises for the World Wide Web. Hot Potatoes is freeware, and you may use it for any purpose or project you like. It is not open-source.
(Link: Hot Potatoes – create interactive multiple-choice, short-answer, jumbled-sentence, crossword, matching/ordering and gap-fill exercises)
BrentSordyl Uncategorized authoringtools, e-learning
