THE PENDING DRAFT

Solve almost no one’s problem

February 1, 2015

The chances that everyone is going to applaud you, never mind even become aware you exist, are virtually nil. Most brands and organizations and individuals that fail fall into the chasm of trying to be all things in order to please everyone, and end up reaching no one.

(Seth Godin)

It’s easy to fall into this trap. We had a similar discussion when we started working on picu some time ago and at first it felt intriguing to try and build The one and only tool for photographers™ but we quickly realized why that’s going to be a bad idea.

What really helped us to figure out what exactly we want to build, and what not, was writing down imaginary user stories of potential clients who could use our product when its finished. What problem should it solve for them, how would they use it and so on. But maybe even more important than that, we wrote down what we called “anti-userstories“. Use cases we deliberately said no to, problems that we don’t want to be able to solve, photographers workflows who will be better served with other tools.

While this seemed silly at first and was a funny exercise, it actually helped us a lot to stay focused and made a lot of our decisions along the way easier.

We are completely aware that our plugin won’t serve every photographer out there, maybe, not even most. But we hope that almost no one will be amazed.

Seth Godin – Almost no one

Random Darknet Shopper

January 31, 2015

The art project i posted yesterday reminded me of another automated art project by the swiss art collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik called Random Darknet Shopper.

The group set up an automated shopping robot, gave him a budget of $100 per week in bitcoins and let him shop around in the Darknet – on it’s own. The items he bought were then displayed in an exibition called “The Darknet: From Memes to Onionland“, at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.

The Random Darknet Shopper is a live Mail Art piece, an exploration of the deep web via the goods traded there. It directly connects the Darknet with the art space (exhibition space). By randomizing our consumerism, we are guaranteed a wide selection of goods from the over 16’000 listed on Agora market place.

The robot bought things like fake Diesel Jeans, a pair of Nike’s, a baseball cap with a hidden camera, a fake Louis Vuitton handbag and also 10 ecstasy pills.

I think the project cleverly forced us to ask some interesting questions, like who’s responsible for a violation of the law if a robot commits it that acts autonomously. As Mike Power wrote in his article “What happens when a software bot goes on a darknet shopping spree” in the Guardian:

Can a robot, or a piece of software, be jailed if it commits a crime? Where does legal culpability lie if code is criminal by design or default? What if a robot buys drugs, weapons, or hacking equipment and has them sent to you, and police intercept the package?

It looks like. On the morning of January 12, the day after the three-month exhibition was closed, the public prosecutor’s office of St. Gallen seized and sealed the work.

It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited by destroying them. This is what we know at present. We believe that the confiscation is an unjustified intervention into freedom of art.

Random Darknet Shopper (2014) by !Mediengruppe bitnik

Google Will Eat Itself

January 30, 2015

Actually a pretty funny art experiment.

In this project we wanted to buy Google via its own money. We generated revenues by serving Google text advertisements on a network of hidden websites clicked by bots. With this money we automatically bought Google shares.

Google Will Eat Itself

WordCamp Europe 2015 in Seville

January 29, 2015

Logo WordCamp Europe 2015The third WordCamp Europe will be in Seville, Spain 26 – 28 June 2015. Looks like i will spend some time in Spain this June.

In a third consecutive year the growing European community will gather together for three days of knowledge sharing, networking, having fun and creating long-term friendships.

Looking forward to it!

WordCamp Europe 2015

picu

January 28, 2015

picu - Client Proofing for PhotographersWe finally announced our upcoming WordPress plugin “picu” today. It’s a client proofing solution for photographers, which intends to bridge the gap between the photo shooting and the following selection process with a client. The idea initially came up during the development of a photography website, when the client told me that he was searching for something like this for a very long time and wasn’t satisfied with any of the options available. After a bit of back an forth, Florian and I decided to give it a try and started with the development soon after.

Right now we just started with a closed alpha phase in which we will gather some further feedback from a broader range of photographers in different fields and soon we will launch a public beta. Everything’s still a bit rough around the edges and we have tons of ideas how we can improve and make this thing even more useful for photographers. But as Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, once famously said:

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.

Let’s see how embarrassing it will be. Exciting times, stay tuned!

picu.io

BOOM

January 27, 2015

This article by Brian Krogsgard (Post Status) came just in the exact right moment to motivate me even more to finally reveal what we’ve been working on.

Like I said, I interviewed about a dozen photographers from different backgrounds. None of those interviewed felt particularly satisfied with their web workflows. There is room in this market. My question is: who will fulfill their needs?

Looks like we’re onto something. More about our little project will follow this week.

Stay tuned!

Post Status – WooCommerce is going after photography

WordPress Plugin RICG Responsive Images

January 27, 2015

Browser support for native responsive images via the srcset-Attribute is getting better and better and it’s time for WordPress to provide a native solution. Luckily there’s a bunch of very smart people, including some from the Responsive Images Community Group itself, working on it as a Feature Plugin, which i’m sure will land in core some day.

I just stumbled upon the plugin and have yet to try it myself, but it looks very promising. If you’d like to contribute to the Plugin head over to the GitHub Repo.

Basically, responsive images allow the browser to choose the best image from a list. This plugin works by including all available image sizes for each image upload. Whenever WordPress outputs the image through the media uploader, or whenever a featured image is generated, those sizes will be included in the image tag via the srcset attribute.

RICG Responsive Images Plugin on WordPress.org

Maybe what we call Responsive Design today isn’t that new after all. Wouldn’t have noticed it myself – maybe i was already too much in the “CD-Generation” – but it shows again that most of the fancy new stuff had been there before, in some way or another.

In some ways, this felt like an early form of what we might now call responsive design. Over time, designers adapted to the new formats, and came up with a process that took that into account. They had less control over things like the aspect ratio, and that forced them to work harder and more flexibly.

Raymone Brigleb (Needmore Designs) – The Cassette Tape as Responsive Design

Techcrunch had put together this satirical guide on how to speak Startup.

“We’re growing 500 percent week-over-week” — Last week we had one user, today we have six.

Techcrunch – How to speak Startup