latoga labs

More Than a Quote a Business Philosophy

March 28, 2008 Leave a Comment

“I’m happy about the fact that I’ve retired more people than I’ve fired.”

That quote is from a friend of mine and wins my Business Philosophy of the Year award. In a period of time when you hear stories in the news about how the rich keep getting richer, you see wall street firms imploding under their own house of cards that they built, and you hear stories from friend after friend of how mis-managed the companies that they work for are that hearing someone who is building a business make a statement like that is down right impressive. (Even more so when you know them well enough that it comes from the person’s heart and they mean it.)

I guess it’s the fact that true sentiment like that is so hard to find when you work in the get rich quick world of high technology and vulture capitalists that I felt it was worth sharing…

Green Scene Hits Your Code

March 20, 2008 2 Comments

Since my mind is on efficiency this morning (see previous post about Facebook) I wanted to share an interesting blog posting I’ve had open in a browser for a few weeks now. Steve Sounders, web performance guru from Google and previously Yahoo, posted some interesting thoughts on how green is your web page?

Steve did a quick mental experiment of calculating the CO2 emissions caused by bad code on a large website, he used wikipedia as his example. I find this a bit interesting on the cyclical nature of the topic. I might be showing my age a bit here, but back when I was a lad learning how to code up on the frozen tundra, we actually took into consideration efficiency and the cost of operations (maybe it was our proximity to Cray Research that drove this…). I find it interesting that the green movement is causing this topic to be thought of again but in a different way.

I have been doing a little fun project like this myself at home. A friend loaned my a device called Kill A Watz, which you plug into a power outlet and then plug other electrical devices into the Kill A Watz. The Kill A Watz then measurs how much electicity you are using on that one outlet. It can track over time and give you the KW over a time period as well as real time watt usage. I am using this on our home entertainment center to measure how much electricity is uses when it’s in standby mode. Watch for a posting on that next week. (I will give a teaser and let you know that a flat panel plasma TV uses twice the electricity when displaying a bright scene than when displaying a dark one…)

Is Facebook Really Efficient?

March 20, 2008 1 Comment

In my morning reading I came across the BusinessWeek article Facebook CEO Admits Missteps. I found one specific statement in this article a bit contradictory (in my mind):

“We are trying to help people communicate really efficiently, and we are going to allow developers to build some of them inside Facebook.”

I find thiscontradictory because the Facebook interface is the last thing I would think of as efficient. Maybe it’s just me, but since the first time I logged onto Facebook, I had a hard time trying to figure out how to use it. And when I started looking into developing a Facebook application I ran into the same issue. For a company that is trying to enable “efficient communication”, they should look at making their application interface more efficient and user friendly.

Am I along in this thinking? Does anyone else think that the interface to Facebook is hard to use. When I compare it next to LinkedIn, I find it very hard to use.

Maybe that’s part of the problem, what I use as my reference point. LinkedIn has a very clear purpose and (in comparison to Facebook) is very narrow in focus. When you’re trying to be everything for everyone, it’s hard to keep the usability.