Archive for 2009

Being the Best

By John Moorhead on August 31st, 2009

First of all, to our readers, we apologize about the lack of posts.  As anyone knows that plays in the 2.0 space, sometimes technology is its own worst enemy.  With that being said, we have been diligently working with our partners, customers, and prospects in defining what Free Air Collective is.  These discussions have also been important in our internal dialogue.  Defining what we are is indeed important.  Deciding if we are working with customers or if we are our own customers (building our own applications only).

But what is known is we strive to treat others, as individuals and companies, with respect and honesty.  Our company was built on personal, faith and convictions that unite as brothers in JC.  What I find as awe inspiring is that we are not alone in this mission.

So as Free Air Collective continues to grow, we hope and pray that we are able to live up to the responsibilities that have been laid in front of us.  Enjoy the articles…

Here are a few blog posts that have really spoken to me:

Stuart Ellman’s Respect

Mark Peter Davis’s:

Entrepreneurs & VC’s

VC’s & Entrepreneurs

Right Thing

Until we speak again…

Working Remotely – Still Small World

By John Moorhead on July 6th, 2009

Free Air Collective started with a concept, Travel and Gather.  It was a concept that I had been working on for a couple of years.  I had met with potential investors, venture capital groups, and the final answer was: build a prototype.  It was not until I read Guy Kawasaki’s book: The Art of the Start that things started to really click, literally and figuratively.

It was there that I connected with Jake Stutzman, a college friend and a business owner himself.  I knew that he had worked for some impressive clients designing and helping them with their overall brand image.  It was with Jake’s presence and ownership that we were able to take another huge step forward with Travel and Gather.  Under Jake’s expertise, we were able to determine that we’ll need someone that knows how to create a Website database application, and we wanted this person to have a shared set of values with us.

It was then that we were introduced to Robert Evans.  It was at this point that Travel and Gather took yet another huge step forward.  It was through this collaboration on one product that created Free Air Collective as it is known today. (Side note: Travel and Gather is still being developed and no launch date has been set)

Now, let me take you full circle, back to how this is a small world.  I was recently contacted by a designer that lives in Central Nebraska, near me.  She had seen our interview on Silicon Prairie News, and reached out to Robert via Godbit.  After speaking with her, she also mentioned that Jake taught her some design at one point in time.  Finally, I am going to be meeting with her for coffee this week.  So she went from Kearney, NE (area), to San Diego, CA, to Hastings, NE and now back to Kearney, NE for coffee.

This is what Free Air Collective is to me… A small community of entrepreneurs looking to do some cool things, and at the same time building our network of contacts.

With this growing network, our portfolio of products, applications, clients and partners also grows.  Free Air Collective continues to develop new products, and partner with firms like Stage Two Consulting to develop their concepts.  Our biggest challenge to date is learning: What is Free Air Collective?

We are not an advertising agency.  We are not a Venture Capital Group.  We are not an Incubator.  Yet, in a way, we are all of these things.

We have worked with traditional clients to redesign their Website.  We have taken on equity in projects in lieu of money to assist an entrepreneur finally get to launch.  We have met with numerous groups and entrepreneurs to discuss their product idea, concept, business plan or bar napkin.  These are the struggles that we face externally, and yet we face struggles internally.

How do we manage the project list that we have building?  Do we start to work on projects from clients, our own internal products, or further develop the products that exist today?  What role does everyone play?

These are all questions we’ll answer in later posts.  Now it is back to work fulfilling our commitments.

I leave you with another Guy Kawasaki-ism.  ”The Art of the Start”:  In it he basically says, if it takes a partnership to get the product live, do it.  Don’t worry about making it perfect, get it live and in people’s hands.  Let them find the bugs.

Thus, as we move forward, stay tuned to our Website.  We’ll have new product announcements, new partnerships, and much more to announce.

Trivia on Twitter post 2 days

By Robert on June 19th, 2009

We’re closing in on our second day after launching Trivia on Twitter and it’s be a ton of fun watching this grow. We’ve had some issues, which I am sure people are aware of – specifically the LeaderBoard and people not getting credit for their answers. I wanted to take a moment and explain what happened and what we’ve been doing about it, but first I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has playing, tweeting about it and providing us with feedback. You guys are awesome!

As we said in our previous post, Trivia on Twitter is a joint venture between Stage Two Consulting and FACollective. We are thrilled to be working with Stage Two on this product. I’ve had the pleasure of working with them previously on Legacy Locker, which is a great product for storing your digital assets – if you haven’t checked it out, take a moment and look. We have a lot of plans for Trivia on Twitter and Triv140 that we’ll be talking about here and on the official twitter accounts in the future. So if you aren’t subscribed to this blog or following @trivia and @triv140, you really need to do so now, I’ll wait…

As I said, we had some issue with the leaderboard where we were exceeding Twitter’s Rate Limit of 100 requests an hour. While we had all the available information on twitter itself and our servers to remedy the issue, it did make people feel somewhat cheated. For that I apologize. It was my bad for not getting our servers white listed before releasing Trivia. This was however fixed rapidly with the help of the Twitter team, and we’d like to specifically thank Twitter’s Doug Williams and Jason Goldman. Thanks guys, you rock!!

While that takes care of future issues, we still had the past issues to remedy. To do so, I pulled an almost all nighter last night going through our system and twitter’s adding and updating all the accounts I could find that were in error. I wrote up some scripts that would process the answers for me and then double check what was updated to make sure it looked good. I know I probably missed some – it was late, I was really tired – but that fixes the issues we had remaining.

If you feel something isn’t right about your account you can either email support@triv140.com or go to our other product, Site Remark, and make a comment leaving your twitter screen name and what issues you are having. Don’t forget your twitter screen name. I’ll need that look it up in our system and then verify your answers as well as when they were answered. I will be actively watching both places and am adamant about keeping things open with our players.

Also, keep in mind that if you have a private account and you aren’t followed @trivia we cannot view your answers. You’ll need to follow @trivia in order for us to view and count your answers in our system. While you are at, follow @triv140 too. We’ll be sending out special announcements and various other things through that account.

We are committed to making sure everything is running as it should and making sure all players of the game are scored correctly. Again, we apologize for the inconvenience’s that have popped up and sincerely want you to know that we want to make this the best Trivia game out there.

Thanks again for playing Trivia on Twitter and Good Luck!

Trivia on Twitter (Triv140) Goes Live!

By John Moorhead on June 17th, 2009

Free Air Collective would like to announce a new company formed in partnership with Stage 2 Consulting.  The company, Triv140, utilizes this little thing called Twitter, and makes a game out of it.  Answer questions and win prizes… Simple as that.  The smartest, brightest and of course fastest will win prizes.

Just like Facebook, Twitter has been slow to come up with a revenue generating model.  We believe that this a strong tool to get people to pay attention to Tweets.  To be actively involved in the Tweeting process.  140 characters are not going to waste.

Not to be cliche, but we have been following the Twitter Trends, just like everyone else.

Jeopardy on Twitter.  Trivia Pursuit on Twitter.  You get the idea.

Did I mention that there are prizes?

On Twitter, we can be found at:  @trivia and on the Web at: TriviaonTwitter.com.

Play often, play today, and compete against all of our Twitter followers.  Just make sure that you still find time to sleep, eat and get some work done.

Triv140 is a white labeled option for corporations, conferences and groups to utilize.  If you want to hold a contest for a free prize with questions that center on your organization then sign up.  Contact us at sponsor@triv140.com for information.

Good luck!  It is game time!

info@triv140.com

Git Hooks

By Robert on June 13th, 2009

Like most development shops, we use Git for source code management and campfire for internal communications with our team. We have a lot of projects going on, so it is important for us all to be aware of what the other is working on and doing.

We’ve been using a post-commit hook which notifies our campfire room whenever someone commits their work locally. It spits out the message, who wrote the code, and a timestamp. Again, nothing unusual but rather common and a best practice.

One of the annoying things of doing this is having to repeat the steps, mostly cut/paste, for each project that we want to keep in our repository. This is pretty much any project and experiment that we might be working or tinkering with – we like to keep our experiments in a repository that we can glean from later.

In the spirit of being productive, efficient and destroying any nonsensically repetitive tasks, we wrote a little gem that will create our post-commit hooks for us and populate it with the necessary details (campfire subdomain, login, password, room) and place in the .git/hooks directory of our project and then make the file executable.

We aptly named it “githooks” and it has it’s own command line tool for getting the job done – albeit it is long: githooks project_name –login login –pass password –domain domain –room “Super Duper”

With that being fairly long for the sake of flexibility, you can create a bash script that will populate the login, password, domain and room for you, so you just need to pass in the project name, e.g. campfire_hook project_name

You can find the code, it’s open source, on github, githooks. There is a read me that goes over how to use githooks and how to create the bash script I spoke of. Currently, it only supports campfire – it is all we need – but if you need something else, feel free to fork it and submit patches.

An involuntary experiment in time constraints

By Jake on June 8th, 2009

I was awoken the other morning at 4am to the sound of rushing water. As I searched the house for the source, I found the sound coming from inside the laundry room wall opposite the garage. As I ventured into the garage, I found a flooded area as water poured out from under the wall. I investigated further in the backyard only to find that my dogs had pulled the hose (connected to the faucet) out and broke a pipe inside the wall. Needless to say it wasn’t the best way to wake up on a Saturday.

As usual, I had plans to get a lot of work done before my family woke up at 8. I like to get a good 3-4 hours in before the natives awake. I knew that I needed to get my water problem handled ASAP, but i still wrestled with the idea of getting a little work done prior (confessions of a work-a-holic, i know). I knew I needed to put my family and home first. So, I called the city and they had my water turned off by 4:45. I showed some grace by waiting til 6 to call the plumber. Meanwhile, I swept water out of the garage and used the wet vac for the rest. The plumber arrived at 6:30 and had everything fixed and running by 7:30. All before my family awoke at a quarter to eight.

Despite all that went on I managed to get quite a bit of design work done on a new project. It seems with the time constraints that I was more focused and decisive and therefore, more productive. I spent a lot of time working on it in my head and then executed swiftly when I had time to sit down to the computer.

It was a productive morning after all. I put my family and home as the priority and also learned some lessons about work in the process. It taught me that I don’t always need as much time as I think. I encourage you to give yourself some time constraints when tackling a project, you may find your performance increases. That being said, I don’t recommend breaking a water pipe in your house to do that. Try something a bit less destructive. I’d love to hear stories of what you do.

Respond below.

The Burden of Social Media

By John Moorhead on June 2nd, 2009

I recently read an article in Wired Magazine that I found ironic.  Why ironic?

The article, The Burden of Twitter by Steven Levy, talked about the guilt associated with not using your social sites enough.  The reasons are obvious, social sites are addicting as you get to peer into others lives, with little or no work.  You don’t have to maintain friendships, but can stare from a distance.  You don’t even need to engage in the practice of sharing until the guilt in your belly tells you that it is time.

What I find is ironic about these sites is the time they steal from you, and the pure volume of choices.

All of these sites remind me of yesteryear, and took me back to those days of having an IBM, green screen and typing in RunWin to get to a Word Document.  This morning here is a list of the things that I’ve logged into or opened up:

MacBook, MacBook Air and a Dell.

Programs I opened:

• Entourage
• Messenger
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Campfire
• iTunes

All of that in order to feel connected and ready to participate for the day.  I then sync my phone with my MacBook with Missing Sync, and stare at my desk.  Where do I begin?

It is amazing what is out there in order to communicate.  While working for VASCO Data Security, I had Email, phone, fax, cell, and IM… All of those ways I was able to be connected.

How do we simplify the login process for all of these sites, using a central identity?  How do we coordinate tasks across multiple applications?  How do we consolidate amongst different jobs, computers, and Email accounts?

We must be more efficient and yet survive with choices.

Stand Bias

By Jake on June 1st, 2009

No matter how hard we try to look at something objectively, our bias’ soon take over. Whether it’s food, art, cars or real estate, our preferences ultimately prevail when making decisions in the consumer space. When we are making a purchase you would think we would turn to objective facts and statistics right? Wrong. Instead, we turn to total strangers who rant on blogs, rave on twitter, or ramble on about a product or company. However, it’s not the fact that they are ranting, raving or reaming that matters; It’s the value of that response based on a person’s experience. When we can hear it from the mouth (or keyboard) of someone like us, we tend to follow suit.

That being said, I will pose this question: Are you as a company providing a platform for the ranters, ravers and ramblers to share their experiences with other current and potential customers? Giving your loyal customers a place to rave about your latest product or share a recent experience with your great customer service department allows them to sell your company to other people.

You may ask: What happens if they speak negatively of our product or company? The answer is simply, fret not. Authenticity is what your customers are looking for, so give it to them. Use criticism as an opportunity to communicate with your customers in front of everyone, and respond by improving your product based on that feedback. This shows them that you are willing to admit mistakes and fix them. More importantly though is the fact that your loyal customers will be there defending the company that they so love. A company who is willing to embrace this level of transparency is more likely to keep current customers and win new ones.

All of these are opportunities for you to communicate transparently with your clients, improve your products or services and show your commitment to your customers all while building community and encouraging the spreading of a bias based on good experience with your company.

Site Remark is a tool you can use to provide a forum for your customers to evangelize each other and promote authentic community around your company.  Sign up is easy; you could be giving your customers this remarkable privilege today.

10 ways to Rapid Development

By Robert on May 28th, 2009

Often times when you think about rapid development you think about what frameworks you are using to make the development process fast. While frameworks help a great deal, it doesn’t stop there when you need to push out products quickly – especially prototypes.

At FACollective we primarily use Ruby on Rails for our web development framework as well as jQuery – we also use Erlang and other languages. These two frameworks aid in rapid development, however we can’t push things out as fast as we do if we stopped there.

Here are a 10 quick tips to expedite your development time:

1. When developing anything/everything always think about code reuse. If you can reuse that piece in other parts of your current application or in other applications, take the time to make it into either a plugin or a gem.

2. Rails Generators. A lot of people will tell you you’re doing it wrong if you are using the scaffold generator or any generator. They’re full of it and it is simply not DRY. Write your own generators that covers the 80% of what you’d normally add to any project and use it. It is better to have a good starting point immediately then spend that time rewriting the same setup for every app you work on.

3. Rails Templates. At the end of 2005 I wrote a Gem that would setup your rails apps with the normal things you’d always add to your apps: testing, authentication, users, etc. As of this year, Rails has added Templates which makes this pretty easy. Use them. We employ a few templates that will build out accounts, plans, user management, authentication, ecommerce, blogs, etc. From there, we customize it to suit the application’s needs.

4. jQuery Plugins. You’ll find that you will write the same JavaScript code over and over for applications: flash messaging that shows up and then fades out, hover animations, ajax forms, ajax links, etc. Make them all plugins with options that you can easily pass in to change certain behaviors.

5. Tools. We find that we create a ton of gems for things and we like our gems setup a certain way. So, we created our own gem to create them how we like them. Bash scripts and gems are awesome for taking care of those little things that you repeat often. We use Bash scripts for aliasing ‘rails’ to create a new rails application using a template which pulls from a local version of rails 2.3.2 – which is always kept current. We also use Shell Scripts for various build processes.

6. Deployment. Capistrano or Vlad are great for deployments to various servers. Add your generic recipes to your Templates so when you create a new rails app you have your recipes to get started.

7. Freeze Everything. When collaborating with others, freezing your gems and rails to specific version in your application is a huge time saver for them and for you. Do it.

8. Form Builders. This has been a huge time saver for us. We have settled on specific HTML blocks for all of our forms which provides a lot of flexibility via CSS. So, we created a Form Builder for this and use it everywhere. Since most applications are just a bunch of forms, this has saved us a ton of time.

9. Extend Rails when needed. There are times when you need specific functionality in various areas of rails, that rails does not include. Take the time to extend rails in a plugin that you can reuse in other applications. Not only can you reuse this in other applications, but you will have saved a lot of time in maintaining that piece of code, especially if you are using it in various areas of the applications.

10. Experiment. Experimentation is vital for any programmer or designer, IMHO. It breeds creativity, motivation, and is a nice break from the mundane. People will tell you that you need to keep yourself focused when working on project, which is true, but if your mind has already wandered off on an idea, you’ve already lost focus. I’ve found that it is best to follow that idea for a small bit of time because you won’t ever have that same insight and motivation for that idea again. Experiment with it to keep yourself motivated in your craft and you might possibly learn something that you didn’t know, which ultimately makes you better at what you are doing anyways.

What development practices do you employ to build applications rapidly?

Rethink Communication Flow

By Jake on May 26th, 2009

Ah.. remember the good ol’ days when you as a company could just sit back and fire out TV ad, after newspaper ad, after magazine ad, after radio ad and people would come? When you told people who they were, what they liked and what they were going to buy? You sat in a lofty high-rise raining down words of wisdom on the consumer. You controlled their dreams, their goals, and ultimately their purchases. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on who you are), those days are over.

The days of the one-way street of communication are long gone and a ‘conversation’ has arisen about your company. People are talking about your products and services and they didn’t even ask you what they should say. They didn’t ask you what their dreams should be or how your company could help. They’ve decided what they think about your products; They’ve decided whether or not they appreciate your services and you know what else their doing? They’re telling their friends.

My question is simply this: Are you participating in this conversation or are you denying it’s existence? I submit that you MUST be participating in this conversation and being as involved as you and your company can. You can learn a lot by listening, or better yet, providing a place in which this interaction can occur. When you choose not to join this conversation, you miss your customers. The choice is simple: Join the conversation or die.

Site Remark allows you as a company to provide a place for that interaction to happen. It is a perfect way to hear what people are saying, respond, hear some more, respond, hear some more, and yet again, respond. When you are participating in this conversation, it shows your customers that you are serious about knowing them, their needs and fulfilling those needs.

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