cschmitt

yes.. I have checked out prefinery. I think it is okay. But I wanted to go deeper into the management of the beta to increase participation. So I ended up developing a new platform for my day job. Now I am thinking about launching it as a new service.

What are you using for your stuff.

I am playing around with the idea of developing a new beta platform. I have been running beta's for my current company and am frustrated with the current state of beta management services.

Let me know if this is something that you need, or what you use instead to run your betas?

slow down and don't jump the gun on your decision, get more information, talk to other people and get their opinions.

Thanks for the comment yolesaber.. I had the same reaction when I started using rapportive. Any additional information to help me decide if this person is legit or not would save time and money for new leads. I am kinda shocked there aren't more tools like that out in the wild.

No traction so far. I would love your thoughts on why you might think that is. Feel free to shoot me an email (chris@getkontxt.com) if you have any other thoughts, suggestions or just want to see what your sample report would look like.

I love the submissions so far.

Here is my latest side project: http://www.getkontxt.com. Think Rapportive for content and Stripe for the api. My thought was adding additional data to signup/contact forms to provide the users with additional context on the person. I would any feedback you guys have.

I recently launched this beta site to generate feedback and see if this idea resonates with potential customers. My goal was to provide businesses context about who is interacting with them. I envisioned this as a cross between wuffoo (cheaper and minus the form editor) and rapportive (but with more information).

Thanks in advance for checking it out and letting me know what you think.

Thanks for the link.. I will definitely check it out.

You should checkout the jQuery timeline plugin. I could see that being a very effective with the horizontal scrollbar to control playback at a macro level.

Cool project. The sample you have makes it easy to see the uses. It would be cool if people could submit "fun" or good examples of great timelines. I think that would bring the social aspect into the project. Most people won't have the time to put together the criteria to produce the "query" so having a set of samples would be helpful in gaining traction

I totally agree.. In the end all you are doing is devaluing your service. You are basically saying.. sure I want $64/hour but the work is really worth $20/hour.

Take the extra time you would have spent on those clients to beef up your skill set so you can start offering more services or charging more.

No problems, I left at lot of the details out because I didn't think it was relative to the posts. The contract was a fixed price to deliver the system and only gave me 18 months of income. This was the first large contract for both of us, so the language was not as crisp as it code of been. Finally 2 months before our release date they switched almost the entire executive management team and everyone I had spent the last 17 months building relationships with. The new team wanted additional capabilities and looked to build out an internal team. I then got a small retainer from them for 3 months worth of support why they transitioned support and enhancements to inside developers. After that I struggled for the next year of so picking up the odd client here and there. The loss of money came during the last couple of months when I tried bootstrapping my own idea (which ultimately failed) and increased advertising to find new clients. So it was a little of both.

Thanks for the question.. I would love to know if you have any other feedback for me. As you can tell I am somewhat new to blogging.

Thanks for the advice. I didn't want people thinking I was just link baiting so that is why I included a description.

Clickable link: http://oakcitylabs.com/2012/10/17/how-i-interpret-jeff-atwoo...

Not off the table just yet. But I was looking for a hosted 3rd party solution.

good thought.. thanks for the comment

Depending on the monthly cost of outsourcing I have thought about running a jabber server. Can you setup your jabber server to pass through authentication over to gtalk?

I was looking at hipchat and I do have some past experience with it. Thanks for the comment

Here is the simple criteria I am using: 1. Must use gtalk 2. Must have persistant history for at least 48 hours (searchable is a bonus) 3. Must be accessible from adium or other chat clients 4. Must be private for our org.

So far I have identified, Jaconda, hipchat and campfire (although I think it is out due to the lake of gtalk integration)

(Sorry for not posting this right up front)

I just started a new blog and this was my first post. I would love some feedback.

Thanks in advance.

I would love to learn/develop a true strategy for validating ideas. To gather insight before I go off and build an MVP.

Make sure to have some paper with you to write down names or questions. Sometimes you will hear a technology that you can research after and reference in your thank you note. It shows interest into what the people are doing and that you can grasp new concepts.

I can not agree more with this. if you don't know it.. say you don't know and then be ready to say how you would research or find the answer.

Thanks for the tips.

I totally agree.. and thanks for the links.

I have bookmarked this for further reading, but after skimming it this seems like a great article.

This is pretty cool.

I have been known to do this as well, but I have also found that I am more creative when I have more than one thing going on. Generally I find that a solution in one application will lead me to rethink a problem in the other.

That being said I also go through times when I want to work on both or use one to procrastinate from working on another one.

So you are not alone. I have found the best system that works for me is setting small goals and deadlines. That gives me the flexibility to move from project to project while also feeling like I am accomplishing something.

I typically wear a nice pair of jeans and a collard shirt. During the summer I have been known to wear a nice tee-shirt and shorts on friday.

I like the topics ideas, as someone who is very interested in the ASK HN threads. I think this is a great start and a way to get new people more involved.

Thanks for the response!! I will take a look at slowing down the rotation of the slideshow and see what that looks like.

I think it is a good idea for non developers, but as a developer I would know how to implement this feature without needing your service. So I would be a little worried about your target audience and really making your webpage speak to those people.

Here's my 2 cents on some things I saw: - Plans and pricing has some css issues - Signup page has three sign up callouts. Maybe put some benefits on that page and remove the duplicate call outs.