Our pals at Freshbooks asked us if they could use our office to host an upcoming workshop on “How to Build a Web App Business”. We were pumped to open our office to people interested in web apps and to get a visit from our favorite Canadian tech company.
On Feb 26th at 9 AM right at BlinkTag HQ Mike McDerment, Freshbook CEO will explain the secrets behind building a business around a web app. Read more about it on the Freshbooks Blog. Tickets will probably go fast, so register now.
I found this picture of when the Freshbooks crew on our swinging couch.
As long as we stay under 100 employees and keep our average annual gross receipts of $12 million we get a 5% bid preference on applicable state solicitations, waived fees and a streamlined bidding process for state contracts. Also, non-small businesses who use us as a sub contractor are eligible for some bid preferences. Let us know if you are interested in working with us.
Warning: sort of technical here, so this may not be of interest to everyone. But I still feel like people should know how to do this.
I was about the re-install Snow Leopard the other day because I did something real dumb and couldn’t figure out how to fix it. I was trying to install a postgreSQL client on my computer and was having trouble with permissions on certain folders in my root directory during installation.
So, stupidly, I recursively set all permissions in the /usr folder to read/write/execute, thinking I could set them back afterwards. Bad idea.
DON’T MESS WITH THESE.
The real kicker here is that if you screw up these settings, you also mess with your ability to use sudo to reset them from the terminal. I found a number of blog posts like this one or this one that basically said: you’re screwed. Wipe your hard drive.
Okay, assuming now that everyone knows what not to do, here’s how to fix it. Run Disk Utility and click “Repair Disk Permissions”:
Notice anything different in our URL? We just completed purchasing and transitioning to http://blinktag.com from http://blnktag.com. Note the lack of the letter “i” in our old domain name.
This new domain name is easier to communicate and matches our company name. All links to the old site redirect properly and all @blnktag.com email addresses forward to their @blinktag.com counterparts.
One of our clients, James Perry got written up in an article by Salon “The Best Campaign Ad Ever”. Hes running for mayor in New Orleans in 2010.
When a narrator, describing other candidates, says, “Political insiders and career politicians,” a woman’s face appears onscreen and she says, “What? Are you shitting me?” (The word “shitting” is bleeped out, as are all the other curse words in the add.) Then, a man comes on and asks, “Are you fucking kidding me?” He’s followed by another man who simply says, “What the fuck?”
We’re excited that James is getting good publicity and that he is getting recognized for his innovative campaign. Take a look at his website: http://jamesperry2010.com.
Jed and I are at Datacamp SF #cadata today. MUNI announced at the event that their real time arrival information is now open and free for developers to access. Its the same data that powers nextmuni. A while back we wrote a post complaining that this data wasn’t available. We’re excited about open transit data in general and its great that our local transit agency is leading the way to opening up its real time data.
The Bay Bridge just had a cable snapped and BlinkTag is on the wrong side. The Bay Bridge is closed, sounds like it could be 24 hours or more before it reopens.
I’m curious how long it will take google maps to automatcally reroute around the bridge closure and what systems they have in place for verifying and updating info on emergency closures to key transportation links. As more people start to rely on online maps for traffic info it becomes increasingly important for emergency info to make it’s way online quickly.
In honor of Geocities shutting down today, XKCD redesigned their site in Geocities style. This redesign included a prominent use of the blink tag (including some HTML mistakes to show the markup).
What’s even sweeter is that we figured every hipster with $10,000 bucks would have bid on this guy, thanks to SFist. But I guess the down economy has come to our rescue once again.
Burning Man, here we come. (We’ll probably pull this to South By Southwest too, depending on its roadworthyness)
The stats:
1984 articulated MAN
Make: MAN Company Website
Model: SG310-18-3A
Serial:EC720800
Fleet #: 6090 SF. Muni
Engine: MAN pancake
Fuel: diesel
Transmission: 3 sp. Allison auto.
Registration: non op.
Top speed: 55 mph.
Starter: pneumatic
Tires: 50% or better
Length: 60 ft.
Width: 102 in.
Seating: 55
Factual errors: When Charlie is confronted by Steve in the helicopter under the freeway, the buses in the background are MUNI buses. The movie takes place in Los Angeles; MUNI is the public transportation in San Francisco.
So this might be kind of a gray area terms-of-service-wise, so do what you want with it. But if you’ve ever wondered how to mashup the Google Transit layer with your custom map, here’s how.
While we aren’t advocating anybody actually do this, we’ve heard from a *confidential* source that Google implements new feature requests in rough proportion to the number of people who hack together stuff like this. Just saying . . . .
Firefox 3.6 beta was released today. It added support for “Orientation” events in web content. This javascript event can use a devices built in accelerometers to detect the orientation and update accordingly.
Since our company name is based on a non-standard HTML tag that makes text I thought it would be fitting to apply the orientation event to our entire site. To view, you need a laptop with an accelerometer (a newer macbook pro or Thinkpad) and to install and run Firefox 3.6.
It turns out that if you actually have orientation events enabled, this embedded youtube video will disappear as it doesn’t play nice with embedded youtube videos. However, if you are seeing this effect live, then you don’t need to see the video.
We haven’t posted pics of our office, which features Super Mario Bros wall decorations, a 7ft tall scale model of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower, a tiki bar and even some computers.
In partnership with 511ContraCosta.org, Blinktag is proud to announce the release of its very first iPhone application, iSmog. This is something we hope to be doing more of in the future, so be sure to contact us if you’d like one of your own.
From 511CC:
“511 Contra Costa is proud to announce the release of its very first iPhone app – iSmog!
iSmog displays air quality information for the San Francisco Bay Area. With just a tap of the screen, users will see an easy-to-understand map of environmental quality in the Bay Area’s five air basins, built using data provided by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). With this information, commuters can make more informed choices about environmentally friendly transportation options, and members of sensitive groups will be better able to stay abreast of information that can be, literally, life-or-death.
Push notification alerts users with allergies or other environmental sensitivities when the air contains unhealthy levels of contaminants including ozone, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, sulfur dioxide, and two sizes of particulate matter, all precursors of ozone. Notifications can be customized by level of sensitivity and by geographic area.”
As a volunteer effort, Blinktag Inc has been involved with building the website for myamericanhealthcarestory.org. (read more on our project page) Its a site where Americans can share their personal stories about the American healthcare system in video format. We’ve gotten over 100 video submissions and more are submitted every day.
It was fun working with a great team of volunteers to launch an awesome site on a short timeframe. Its the most video-focused site we’ve worked on to date.
The team recently posted a few funny videos highlighting the serious topic of healthcare reform:
Good Magazine has lots of great posts on transportation, technology and cities. They also have a sweet domain name: http://good.is
Their post on why gallons per mile (as opposed to miles per gallon) is a more effective way to discuss fuel efficiency in automobiles is very interesting. Its basic math, but I never heard this mentioned at all when cash for clunkers was being discussed.
most people assumed that improving a car’s miles per gallon from 25 mpg to 50 mpg would save more gas over 10,000 miles than an improvement from 10 mpg to 20 mpg. But when you do the math, the latter saves more than twice as much
The chart sums it up
This helps us understand that pulling cars out of the teens [in terms of miles per gallon] is so much more valuable than pushing an efficient car even higher. That only becomes clear when you start thinking about gallons per mile. That tiny increase from 10 mpg to 11 mpg saves essentially the same one gallon of gas every 100 miles as does increasing 33 mpg to 50 mpg.
Are there any advantages to using miles per gallon other than its what we’re used to?
I was really excited when I read about Google Chrome Frame yesterday. Its a browser plug-in for Internet Explorer that replaces the internals with that of Google Chrome, a much more modern browser that supports recent web standards and generally just works.
IE is notorious for rendering pages improperly and not supporting new web standards which basically require web developers to apply special hacks or design sites specifically for IE.
Google Chrome Frame is interesting because the user doesn’t need to seek out and install google chrome frame. If these people were interested in seeking out new software they probably wouldn’t be using IE6 in the first place. Instead, website authors can include a few lines of code that prompts users of IE to install the Google Chrome Frame plugin.
I set up a chrome frame test page with the google chome embed and lots of elements that don’t work well in IE6. and had a friend of mine who works for a very large bank where their computers are locked down to only using IE6 try visiting the page. I was hoping that somehow Google Chrome Frame would be allowed to install itself.
BART released a new version of its official map this week. Its a streamlined version: The folks at San Francisco Cityscape have created their own streamlined map that shows all the rail transit in the Bay Area. It makes the system look much more comprehensive and integrated than it really is. It includes BART, MUNI (streetcars & light rail), VTA light rail, ACE trains, Caltrain, & Amtrak. See the full size pdf or gif.
CitySourced launched today at the TechCrunch50. Its a website & iphone, Blackberry & Android app that allows users to submit notes and pictures about issues directly to city government. This could be anything from potholes to graffiti to unsafe pavement conditions on bike routes.
On the city’s end, CitySourced bundles the reports, sorts by type and maps them. Cities pay CitySourced an annual fee for the privilege of receiving the data.
Currently in San Francisco you can call 311 (or twitter them) to report issues to the city or get information, but the cost of staffing a hotline is high. The San Francisco MTA estimated that 41 percent of calls to 311 were for transit information and the average cost per call was $1.96. At the time, this was more than the actual fare for a bus ride.
I’m not sure how much the annual fee for using CitySourced is (San Jose apparently just signed up) but its got to be less than the cost of staffing a call center. As more people get smart phones this type of application will become more useful and will lower the costs of reporting & fixing issues while providing more timely information.
Each year Jed, Brendan and much of the BlinkTag staff take a trip to Black Rock City, NV for Burning Man. As a city planner & transportation person, its interesting to spend a week in a temporary city of 50,000 that gets recreated every year with no cars or commerce.
Shame is definitely not part of the city planning toolkit I learned about, but I’d agree that these things can be useful concepts outside of the Nevada desert.
For a historic look at the layout of Black Rock City and how it developed, this article by BRC planner Rod Garrett is worth a look. The overlay of Black Rock City on central San Francisco is particularly interesting:
The theme for Burning Man 2010 is “Metropolis: The Life of Cities” (Aug 30-Sep 6, 2010) so I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about the lessons that cities can learn from burning man as next year’s event approaches.
BlinkTagInc on Twitter
RSS
Notice anything different in our URL? We just completed purchasing and transitioning to 
