Man, it’s good to be back in Austin. I’m not completely thawed out yet, but I’m still beaming after watching two good college friends get married in Boston this weekend.

Weddings are pretty amazing things. We’re surrounded by friends and family, and love seems to be everywhere. And of course, like the sap I am, I found myself falling in love too.

With a clothing iron.

Now, feel free to chuckle (the rest of the wedding party sure did), but I’ve never been so enamored with a home appliance. As I was getting ready on the morning of the big day, nothing seemed unusual about this device that emitted a beep and a cool, blue-colored glow as soon as I plugged it in. But after a short pause, another soft beep and a hue change to green, I wondered if something might be amiss.

I propped up the iron and took a step back. Am I doing something wrong here? Had I deviated from my tried and true Ironing Playbook™?

- Plug in iron. Check.
- Crank the dial all the way up. Check.
- Start ironing immediately. Check.
- Singe shirt. Check.
- Quickly spin the dial way down. Check.
- Realize I went too far and crank it back up. Check.
- Get frustrated that it’s 2011 and I STILL don’t have a flying car or a robot to iron for me. Check.

Seemingly sensing my apprehension, the iron beeped softly once more and turned a rosy red. It was only then that I noticed the colored dots on the temperature dial. Subtly, and elegantly, this device had obliterated years of pent-up frustration with ironing, with a small light that simply told me how hot it was.

The lament I hear most often from budding entrepreneurs is that “I want to go out on my own and start something, but I just don’t know what to build.” Sadly, most follow the crowd and try to catch a ride on the hot wave at the moment, but my advice is always the same: Find a pain point and remove it. Figure out what annoys you, your friends, and your family every day, and create a novel way to eliminate it.

The very best products remove that pain and make us mini-superheroes. Whether it’s my personal goal of turning fans into Super Fans that are never the loser at the watercooler that missed the big game, or you’re the product designer that transformed me into an Ironing Ninja creating shirt creases so sharp I need a concealed weapon permit, your goal should be to make customers better at what they do every day.

Build a product or service that’s able to do that, and you just might see me walking it down
the aisle.

(ed. note: i’m still the only person on the internet to use the phrase “fail whale’s teat“.)

It’s been 4+ years since the News Feed launched, and it’s hard to remember the site without it. Four years is no insignificant period of time. There have been countless startups either influenced by, or were flat out clones of the News Feed that no longer exist. A couple are still hanging on, the occasional one gets beamed up to the mothership, but most ease their way into the deadpool.

This one (massive) feature has become as ubiquitous as the dropdown, but it hasn’t changed at all in the past four years. Maybe there are a couple more options to hide annoying Farmville badges, or keep your ex out of sight, but it has always answered just one question: “What just happened?”

On the surface, that’s only subtly different than “What is happening?”, but at the core, the difference is vast. Why must News Feeds be focused on the Past? Aren’t the Present and the Future just as, if not more important?

What if you took the notion of a Past/Present/Future News Feed and installed it at my bank? Wouldn’t it make me a more educated customer? Couldn’t it be the perfect home for “good behavior incentives”?

October 11th
- Your Visa payment of $101.86 was received on time

October 19th
- Late Fee charge of $35.00 waived

Today
- Pending charge of $6.44 at Chipotle
- Pending charge of $21.64 at Best Buy

Thursday
- Your 2nd Mortgage payment of $334.98 is due

January 4th, 2011
- If you continue making payments on time, you will receive a $500 credit limit increase

What if you took the notion of a Past/Present/Future News Feed and installed it at a sports startup?

Find out tomorrow.

It’s a shame, really. You’ll just have to imagine all of the obscene, over-the-top alliteration I would’ve used.

Quick recap:

• The car2go 24 hour project was a ton of fun. Got to meet with their CTO and hear about what they have planned for the future. Since car2go.markphillip.com launched, Austin CarShare died. I’ll let you read between the lines. More importantly though, I now have a little blue car2go USB drive that I like to chew on. Win.
• My HVAC died back in June and I was AC-less for almost a month. Any discomfort for those few weeks is overshadowed by the awesomeness of the new cooling system. I’ve never been so thoroughly obsessed with a home appliance. Two-stage HVACs, ftw.
• Twitter is still dumb.
• Through some dumb luck and quickly-written emails, Are You Watching This?! was on ESPN.com and Deadspin. RUWT?! momentum is really good right now.
• I’ll be travelling a lot over the next six weeks. Get your airport abbreviation dictionaries out, kiddies.

Night, kids.

car2go.markphillip.com

Thought you’d like to know.

Build #2: car2go.markphillip.com

This build is start to look a whole lot more like a mobile app. One big question though: Who exactly are we building for?

iPhone/Android/Palm are of course at the top of the list, but what about Blackberry? Sure, it’s the odd-man out when it comes to a Webkit browser, but I rock a Blackberry. Am I really building something that I can’t use?

Yes and no.

I definitely won’t see the hawtness that the iPhone/Android/Palm triumvirate will enjoy, but with graceful degradation I’ll still accomplish the overarching goal: a super fast app that can get me to my car2go when I’m on the go. And the good news? With their next OS, Blackberry will finally join the cool kid Webkit club.

So all is peachy, right? Instead of building a native app on four different platforms with four different languages, I’ve built just one using the ubiquitous HTML. Not exactly.

While wrapping these pages into native apps and posting them to their respective stores is trivial at this point, I’ll never have access to core features like GPS detection. For this app, more than most, is an important feature. We worked around it by remembering recent location searches, and squeezing all the performance we could out of the app, but it will always be brought up up by the native app purists.

And that’s really, really too bad. Many in the tech community will rail against the evil that is the closed, proprietary Flash, yet will happily spend months learning Objective-C to build an app for the most closed-off platform we have.

Peter-Paul Koch had a great post last year (Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid.), but sadly backed off it the very next day (Native iPhone apps vs. Web apps).

Truth is (and admittedly this is excessively blunt because I’m tired), native app developers on any single platform are stupid. And it’s not just the smartphone developers—I’m looking at you, Seesmic and Zynga.

Jeez, this post has taken me a long time. I’m gonna cop out, end it there, and get back to work. Trust me, it was gonna get even more boring.

car2go.markphillip.com

Not wanting to repeat the same mistake I called in my go-to designer (and fellow, car-less, scooter rider) Tara to make it worthy of car2go’s clean, modern design.

She’s already paying big dividends.

There are always bugs in software development. Nothing is scarier than doing a code read of a big mess of work, and not being able to find anything wrong with it. No typos, no comments to be updated, and nothing to optimize. There are always bugs. Always. And if you can’t find one, it just means you’re not looking hard enough.

Things are going so well that I’m due for a whopper.

Looks like the Google Geocoding API will have to make an appearance sooner than expected. Their daily limit is 2500 requests per IP. Normally that’d be a ton, but with almost 200 cars, I’d whip through 2500 requests pretty darn quick.

I had planned an in-memory address/latlon cache, but if I don’t persist the results in the database, my fatfingered coding stylings might put me in a world of hurt.

Already down to 14 hours and change, but thankfully I woke to a server at the ready with car2go.markphillip.com patiently waiting for it’s first task.

So what exactly are we doing today? First, some background.

car2go is a car-sharing program that descended on Austin earlier this year. Unlike any other program I’ve seen, it’s completely focused on one-way trips. Find a car, hop in, drive it, park it, walk away. There’s no returning it to where you first picked it up, or even searching for a sanctioned parking zone. You just park it at any legal street parking spot (meters are okay too), and shed your 90-hp speed demon like a NASCAR tearoff.

It’s pure genius.

There are 200 cars scattered about the Austin area, and with a quick swipe of your membership card you’re off an driving. For someone that lives Central and hasn’t owned a car since 2004, it’s pretty much the best thing ever. Except for one small thing…

Finding, and even reserving cars online is a breeze, but what about when you’re around town running errands? I’m not an iPhone-owner so I can’t use the official app, and the CSRs on the toll-free members help line, while quite polite don’t know the Austin area very well. They’re based somewhere in Europe so I can’t really blame them. If you called me up to ask for directions to Trafalgar Square, I’d struggle too.

car2go needs to have apps for all smartphones, and today the goal is to build it for them. We’ll be building a Webkit-focused mobile site that has as much functionality as we can squeeze in. If it all works, not only will there be a mobile-friendly URL that any phone can visit, but we’ll be just a hop, skip, and a jump from installable apps on iPhone, Android, and Palm.

Enough blabbing. Time to go slurp up some data.

Okay, I know I said I was headed to bed, but as I closed my browser I was greeted by an image too funny-looking not to share. Do I really look like that?

Okay.

Bed.

Back in ’08 CapMetro started publishing all of their stop and schedule data using the Google Transit Feed Specification. To a public transit geek like me, that’s pretty awesome stuff. You can keep your Twitter API (shot at Twitter? check.), I’ll be over here hanging out with my real world people data.

I made googly eyes at the data for weeks, never able to rationalize playing around with it to see what I could build. I finally solved the painfully geeky internal struggle by giving myself 48 hours to play with the data. Once the time was up, I had a to let it go and get back to real work. And surprisingly, it turned out pretty awesome. CapMetro’s CIO noticed, and I got to visit them and talk some GIS shop.

So why has the time-based title made a comeback? Because I’ve become obsessed with car2go. We’re talking serious fanboi here, people. I haven’t gotten middle-aged-woman-watching-twilight bad, yet here I am on a Saturday night talking to you.

I just spun up a new server, and all of my domain ducks should be in a row come morning. I’m only giving myself 24 hours this time–hopefully it’ll be enough to knock it all out.

Night, kids.

Here’s 12 minutes of me talking about sports and race, along with a veiled shot at Twitter tossed in just for fun.

The crazy rotation that’s a part of any contractor’s life continues, but most of my gig time since HomeAway has been spent doing work for Ace Hardware. A handful of Facebook apps and a microsite made up the hit list.

I’ll actually be at work during the Super Bowl, sweating through one of the most nerve wracking launches I’ve ever been a part of. My contract gig at HomeAway is wrapping up, and after two months of ActionScript-slinging and Airport-sprinting, we get to share it with the world.

Third Quarter. Griswolds. Stay tuned.

Admittedly, it’s hard for me to hate Walmart more than I already do—the real travesty is that this puts Halloween officially in our rear-view mirror, and I must bid adieu to The Mash. It’s easily in the Top 5 of cool projects I’ve had the luck to contribute to, the best use of Facebook Connect I’ve ever implemented, and the team was an absolute blast to be a part of.

Check it out quick before it’s retired and we’re left with another season of going to Jared.

You should come check out my talk on building add-ons for Firefox and Fennec at this month’s Refresh Austin meeting.

Tonight. Buffalo Billiards. 7pm.

There’s food. There’s beer. There’s ample time to heckle me.

Be there.

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=170821558189