As you may have seen, 37Signals announced an affiliate program yesterday. a lot of companies do this, but 37Signals’ terms are very fair — maybe too fair: for whatever people you refer to them, they give you 50% of their first monthly fee, and 5% from then on.

As I said, a lot of companies do it. As you may also notice, TightWind’s sidebar now has the smallest available Basecamp badge. There’s a reason, or reasons, why I decided to participate in 37Signals’ program and not others: I actually love Basecamp and 37Signals the company.

My blog does not exist to pimp other people’s products. It exists as a means for me to write about whatever the hell I want, however I choose to write about it, and it exists for you to enjoy it.

I also have the intention of making some kind of revenue from my writing, but unlike many websites that use advertising (or most, really), TightWind’s intention is not to flood the page with ads for subpar products and services that no one wants to use. Up until today, TightWind has had a single, two-line adsense-supplied ad that is designed to blend into the page rather than grab your attention from what you are here for: the content.

37Signals is a company I admire. They make great products, and adhere to their stated philosophy faithfully: make simple, well-designed apps that people can actually use.

I use Basecamp every day, and I recommend it whenever someone is looking for a project management application. So instead of just recommending it in person, I am now recommending it with a small badge on TightWind.

I do not mind advertisements when they are subtle and genuinely interesting, which is why I love the Deck and hope they will replace adsense as my main adverts in the future. Ad-providers like the Deck add value to a website, because they bring useful products to a reader’s attention with dignified, well-designed ads.

The Basecamp badge is, like the Deck’s ads, well-designed. So, let’s summarize here: I can recommend a product and company I respect by using a quite nice badge in my sidebar, and make money doing it?

Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

A year ago, during his interview with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at All Things Digital, Walt Mossberg noted that Apple had let .Mac stagnate. Jobs acknowledged it, and promised that Apple would be “making up for lost time” in the near future.

Although Apple updated .Mac in August 2007 with excellent photo and video slideshow support and 10GB of storage, at the time I did not think this is what Jobs was alluding to, and it now seems clear that we will be seeing a more significant update to .Mac, including a possible name change.

As long as I have owned Macs (since 2005), I have been tempted to subscribe to .Mac. Before I owned an iPhone, I loved the idea of being able to publish my calendar online, and I loved the idea of having kylebaxter@mac.com as my email address.¹ Moreover, .Mac’s easy photo upload and slideshow is tempting, and having 10GB of online storage, that mounts like a hard drive in the Finder, would be great. I would love to have these things, but I have not subscribed to it because of its cost — $70 is reasonable, but was always too high for me to say screw it and order it.

Since owning an iPhone, though, .Mac has went from being a great service to potentially an indispensable one.

.Mac already synchs calendar, contacts, bookmarks, and notes between Macs. Now think of a .Mac fully-integrated with the iPhone. The end-user’s calendar, contacts, and bookmarks will always be in synch between their iPhone and Mac; their email will be pushed to their phone; and the iPhone suddenly has 10 GB of storage it did not have before.

Suddenly, its price — about $6 a month if you buy it on Amazon — is a steal.

Contacts and Calendar

Currently, to synch calendar, contacts and bookmarks to the iPhone, it must be physically connected by USB, just like a regular iPod. While synching over USB makes sense for media, which requires a fast connection, this logic does not apply to personal data. Unless you are using a Mac desktop, where you can leave your iPod hooked up in perpetuity, odds are that you only synch your iPod when you have a new album or video to put on it. I handle my iPhone the same way — I charge it from an outlet, and only hook it up to my computer when I would like to synch new music or a new video.

Which sucks, because I update my calendar and contacts regularly, both on my phone and computer. The two end up getting weeks out of synch with each other. My iPhone usually has the most up to date contacts, because I add and edit contacts while on the go, while my Macbook Air usually has the most accurate calendar information.

My contact and calendar information is devalued as a result. Calendar information on the iPhone is especially important, because when up to date, its list view acts as an excellent itinerary. But that is really no use when I cannot trust it to be up to date. It is just as important on the computer, too; I may edit, say, a meeting’s date and time on my phone, and if I check it later on my computer, if I do not remember to synch my iPhone and MBA, I may miss the meeting altogether.

You could say that the problem here is not the iPhone’s method of synching, but rather my laziness. Which is true — to an extent. Remembering to constantly synch my MBA — a mobile computer that I use all over the place, not strictly at a desk — is a pain in the ass, and I am not going to do it, period. But this points to a fundamental problem with wired synching: whereas media changes infrequently and is relatively unimportant,² personal data changes all of the time, is critically important, and thus requires a different solution. Over-the-air synching solves this.

It is easy to dismiss OTA synching of calendar, contacts and bookmarks as a non-sexy or needed feature, but I see it as a defining feature of a new .Mac service with iPhone integration. It keeps your shit together without any effort on your part.

iDisk

Because that is what the new .Mac should be: it should exist as the middle-man, the “cloud,” between your personal Mac and your iPhone. Instead of acting like two devices, which the iPhone and Mac still do, .Mac should exist to make them function like one device.

The iPhone has a significant advantage over the Mac: it has ubiquitous web access, and soon, relatively fast access. No Mac has ubiquitous access, so they depend on local storage.³ The iPhone, though, does not need to depend on local storage. 3G and WiFi means that the iPhone can access files from almost anywhere — and that makes things interesting.

.Mac’s iDisk mounts in the Finder and acts like any hard drive, and it could do the same on the iPhone. One of the strongest criticisms of the current iPhone is there is no way to store files on it other than through email, which is hack. Integration with .Mac would solve this, and make it even more powerful: rather than have the iPhone mount on your desktop as a hard drive, you would just stick files into your iDisk — and it would be in synch across all of your Macs and iPhones.

I can imagine Apple enabling iDisk on the iPhone so you are never “disconnected” from it — it connects more or less invisibly to your iPhone. No FTP login, password, and directory data to input, no UI even necessarily needed to login and connect — it does it itself.

Placing a file on your iPhone would not require the annoying steps of mounting it on your desktop, dropping it into your phone, and dismounting it. Instead, you would just drop the file in your iDisk, and suddenly that file is available to all of your devices, seamlessly. Forgot to print out a homework assignment or paper? No big deal; just access your iDisk on your iPhone and email it.

Effectively, your iPhone and your Mac would be tied together at all times by shared storage, whether they are physically connected or not.

This has another benefit, too: by using iDisk-access for document and other file storage, your iPhone’s flash memory, which is relatively small, can be dedicated to storing your music, video and photos, which are more dependent on local-access. You could even save more space by placing all of your photos in .Mac and accessing them from your iPhone.

Even cooler, though, is if Apple wrote into the iPhone SDK a way for third-party apps to plug in to the iDisk. Instead of using the iPhone’s flash memory for storage, apps could just save on the iDisk. A word-processing application, for example, would save its documents onto the iDisk automatically, without configuration. The last part is the most important — the application just does it, and thus without any effort on the end-user’s part, they would have instant access to the document once they are home and want to finish it on their computer. No setting obscure settings and logins. It just works.

WWDC

For students, freelancers and other professionals, this is great. Forget emailing documents and presentations to yourself and others — they will just put it on their iDisk, and have simple, ubiquitous access to their files wherever they are, and whatever device they are on.

With push email, OTA syncing of contacts, calendar and bookmarks, and constant access to iDisk, .Mac would fully integrate the Mac and iPhone. The barriers between the two would almost cease to exist — everything between the two would be in synch at all times.

We will see what Apple announces at WWDC. With the rumored name-change for .Mac looking all but confirmed, I am expecting some rather significant changes to .Mac. I hope these are some of the new features we see.

1. I love Gmail, but @mac.com sounds much better than @gmail.com. It sounds much more professional. [↩]
2. Although I will entertain arguments that not having a certain album during a long trip is as important as a meeting with a client, perhaps more important. [↩]
3. Or networked storage at home or office. [↩]

I first watched Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video a year ago, and have watched it many times since. Every time I watch it, though, I still get that child-like wonder feeling in my stomach, the feeling that accompanies a rare thought: “This is the future.”

Apple, under John Sculley’s direction, released the Knowledge Navigator video in the late 1980s, yet the device looks just as revolutionary today as it did then. We have realized bits and pieces of it — Apple’s Macbooks and iMacs have built in iSight cameras and microphones for easy videoconferencing, we can give remote presentations through iChat, and have access to a more thorough and accurate encyclopedia than anyone could have imagined in 1987.

But those videoconferencing, remote presentations, and even a huge database of hyper-marked knowledge are not what is most inspiring about the Knowledge Navigator video.¹ What is most revolutionary and frankly jaw-dropping is the Navigator’s interface: voice.

The Navigator truly understands human speech. It not only knows the definition of words, and the English language’s grammatical rules, but it can make sense of often complicated speech. The Navigator asks the professor a question, and he off-handedly responds, “Mmmhmm – yes,” and the Navigator has no difficulty understanding his answer. The professor very literally speaks with the Navigator; as he is walking out of the room, he instructs it on how to respond to specific people who may call while he’s away.

There are no commands. There is only human speech.

Unfortunately, we are not even close to true understanding.

But after remembering about Leopard’s new voice, Alex, and having it read a few things for me (which it does quite well), I decided to try 10.5′s speech recognition, an under-discussed feature in Mac OS X. Although voice recognition is not perfect, it is quickly becoming a useful part of how I use my Mac. Mac OS X’s speech recognition has two great qualities. First is it does not require to be trained. You can enable it and begin using it immediately; there is no period for it to learn your voice.² Second, it is adaptable. Not only can it be expanded (more on this later), but it does not require that you repeat commands verbatim. For example, if you would like to invoke the command “What time is it?”, you can also ask, “how late is it?” This also helps when you mispronounce something, as I found out.

Rather than just discuss what voice recognition can do (which you can find out by opening System Preferences and then the Speech pane), I am going to take you through how I use my Mac everyday, and how speech recognition makes it more enjoyable.

Morning

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check my email and feeds (lame, I know). I open my Macbook Air and say, “Get my mail.” OS X then opens or switches to Mail.app, and I go through and read new emails. Sometimes I even feel like responding, so I say “reply,” which does precisely what you would expect — Mail opens a new message with everything you would get if you clicked “reply” yourself. After typing out the message, I say “send” and OS X handles it all for me.

After catching up on email, I decide to read my feeds. “Open NewsFire,” and I’m off. After opening the articles I would like to read in Safari, I say “Mark all Read,” “Close this window,” which closes NewsFire, then “Switch to Safari,” which brings up the articles.

Sometimes Daring Fireball gives us a great and lengthy article, so instead of keeping my hand on the touchpad or keyboard, I say “move page down,” and Safari dutifully complies. After clicking on a link in Gruber’s article, though, I’d like to move back and finish his article. “Back” does just that.

I finish Gruber’s article, so it is time to move on to the next item in my feed list. I instruct the computer, “Close this window.” Gruber’s article closes and the next Safari window is brought to the front, ready to be read.

After finishing reading my feeds, I decide I’d like to check the news. I have Yahoo’s home page in my bookmarks bar, so I say “Yahoo” and there it is.

All of this with just my voice. This is not particularly groundbreaking, but it makes my mornings easier and more enjoyable. There is something satisfying about reading and replying to your email, and reading your feeds all without touching the touchpad or using a mouse.

Work

After getting a quick breakfast, it is time to do some work. I am going to need a few apps open, so I say, “Open iTunes,” (work without music? That would be a shame), “Open Coda,” and “Open Preview.” Time to get started. “Switch to Coda” brings it up, and I need to open the Sites pane in Coda. “Sites” brings that up. Now I have my HTML and CSS pages open for a particular site I am working on. After editing a page, I need to make sure it looks correct. I say “Preview,” and lo and behold, it does just that. It does not look quite right, though; I need to fix it. I say “Edit,” and I am back in the edit pane, ready to do some HTML gymnastics.

Well, the page is all done, but I need feedback from the company I am working with. Instead of clicking on Mail.app’s dock icon, then clicking “Compose new message” and typing out everyone’s name, I just say “Mail to [company name].” Mail.app opens a new message with everyone’s address in the To: field. I type my subject and message, and say “send.” Done.

With web design done for now, I need to finish up an article I am writing, so I say “quit from Coda,” and “open MarsEdit.” Ready to go.

Break

Time to grab some lunch. I’d like to go to Panera Bread with Kristen, so to see if she has some time I say, “Chat with Kristen.” OS X opens iChat and if she is online, it opens a chat window with her. Unfortunately, it tells me she’s not online, so I need to call her. It’s been a while since we have talked, so I forgot her phone number. No problem; “Phone for Kristen” brings up a large overlay with her phone number, and you can even have the computer read it to you.

I called her, and she cannot have lunch today, but she can tomorrow. Just so I do not forget, I say “Lunch with Kristen tomorrow,” and the computer adds it to my iCal calendar.

Well, I am off to get some lunch, so I say “Start the screensaver,” and I am ready to leave.

No Hands

OS X’s voice recognition is not perfect. Sometimes, I must repeat a command. But rarely do I need to repeat it more than twice. For the convenience it creates, though, it is worth it; I need to use the touchpad and keyboard much less than I normally would. But more important, it makes using a computer more enjoyable and even stimulating. Rather than sitting in front of your computer and using it silently, you are actively engaging with it. You use a part of your brain you would not normally use while working, and that keeps you more alert and creative.

We may not have Knowledge Navigators yet, but we do have voice recognition built into our Macs which can make work a little easier.

1. Although its ability to effortlessly access all scholarly articles and, I would assume, data and any other kind of knowledge, implies decentralized systems interfacing with each other over open knowledge-sharing standards, which is an incredible concept worthy of another article. [↩]
2. If you are interested in how this works, O’Reilly has an excellent article from 2004 on the technical side of OS X’s voice recognition, and how you can use it effectively. [↩]

Since I bought my Macbook Air and moved everything on to it from my Time Machine backup, my ambient light sensor flat hasn’t worked. The screen would not dim or brighten, and the keyboard backlight would not turn on and off no matter what. I tried several recommended fixes from across the web without success.

Today must be a good day, though, because after installing 10.5.3, it works.

I like discussing what I use to get work done, and it is a slow Sunday afternoon, so why not. If you are at all interested in seeing what my setup looks like, here’s your chance.

Hardware

From December 2005 to March 2008, I owned, and thoroughly enjoyed, a last revision 15″ Powerbook with 1GB of RAM and a 7,200 RPM hard drive. It was my first Mac, and it was simply the best computer I have ever owned.

After almost two and a half years, though, it was showing its age, especially after upgrading to Leopard in October 2007. It was slow, the battery (its second) was wearing out, and I was eager to upgrade to an Intel-based Mac. So after saving for quite a while (I am, after all, just a college student), I bought a Macbook Air at the end of March.

My reasoning was this: while the Macbooks are certainly sufficient for me, I love the Pro’s aluminum enclosure. They do not fade or warp with time, are strong, are easy to clean, and are not affected by skin oil as much as the Macbook’s plastic case.

Moreover, being a student and a freelance web designer, I don’t need a Macbook Pro’s power. What I do need, however, is mobility. I need to be able to effortlessly bring my notebook with me to class, the library, or a coffee shop for meetings with clients. It needs to be as easy to carry as a regular paper notebook, and that’s exactly what the Macbook Air is.

The Macbook Air is the perfect choice: it’s light and incredibly thin, yet has an excellent screen and keyboard, and a sufficient processor.

I use it every day as my primary computer, and it works brilliantly. It is faster than my Powerbook in everything except graphic-intensive work, and the keyboard is as good as my Powerbook’s, which was the best keyboard I have ever used.

I love the flexibility. I love doing work at my desk one minute, and then simply grabbing my Macbook Air and walking to the library the next. If I am bringing books with me, it only adds three pounds to my bag, or two and a half less than my Powerbook did.

As you can see in the picture, I also own an iPhone, which I got at launch in 2007.

Software

Paradoxically, new Mac owners decide to still suffer under Microsoft Office when Apple offers a nice alternative. I have never used Microsoft Office as my default productivity suite on my Macs, and I never will. I have used iWork all along.

Pages 2008 is a great word processor, especially for long papers. Making paper-wide style changes, like changing the body font or text size, requires making only one change, instead of doing it by hand across the entire paper.

Keynote is the biggest reason to use iWork, though. Compared to Powerpoint, it is actually enjoyable to use, and it is much easier to make good looking slides (not necessarily any easier to make a good presentation — that is dependent on the person making them, not the app).

I also use Numbers for my accounting class, which produces much nicer looking spreadsheets than Excel with little effort.

For web design, I use Coda. It’s a great application — well designed, and easy to use. Having HTML/CSS/everything else editing, FTP upload, and previewing all built into one app not only cleans up my workflow, but makes me more efficient, too.

For email, I use Gmail and Mail.app; for RSS feed reading, I use NewsFire, although I may experiment with NetNewsWire.

I use Safari 3 for web browsing because I enjoy its minimalist interface, and Firefox bugs the hell out of me on OS X.

Desk

Nothing special. It’s a nice darkwood desk, which I try to keep clear of clutter. I have a had habit of using my desk for storage because my room is small, but I can’t do work when it is a mess.

My favorite part, though, is the embroidery on my shelf. I got it while I was in China, and it is an incredible piece of work. Besides being nice to look at, it is always motivating to see it.

A friend of mine is a verifiable Indiana Jones-nerd, and so we waited three and a half hours in line last night to see the first showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The line was already quite long when we got there, longer than it was for Matrix: Reloaded on opening night in my town.

We first got bratwurst with a few other friends, and then waited in line. We bumped into a few friends from high school which we hadn’t seen in years; the wait in line suddenly wasn’t quite as painful.

Anyway, back to Skulls. I sat there wondering whether it was going to be a disappointment or not, as many hyped films are. Luckily, though, the beginning ended that speculation. I won’t ruin any of the film for you, but the beginning was great, refrigerator and all.

The film wasn’t perfect, but it was fun and entertaining throughout, despite my fighting off the urge to sleep. Action sequences, just like past Indiana Jones films, are shot live-action with little or no CG, and it is dramatically evident. I’ve become accustomed to good CG, so it isn’t even a passing thought in my mind. The contrast between Skulls and, say, King Kong, is great. It places the film in the time period it belongs — a 50′s B movie.

How it was filmed is great, too. It looks less like a 2008 movie, and more like a timeless movie of the past. The feel of the movie is worth it alone.

If you go in to the theater expecting a brilliant film, you are going to be disappointed. If you instead expect a fun and intentionally campy film, I think you’ll like it.

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone at Macworld 2007, the part of his presentation that stuck with me was in the beginning, where he criticized current smart phones. The problem with them, he said, was the controls were permanent. Once the phone was shipped, its control buttons were fixed in place.

When the Motorola RAZR was released, people didn’t want to own it because of its great software. They wanted to own it because it was thin and futuristic looking. (How times have changed.) Most phones are the same way: they are sold on their hardware design, and not the software that powers them. The software tends to be an afterthought.

Which, by contrast, highlights what makes the iPhone unique: it’s all about software.

The iPhone’s hardware is great. It is relatively thin, and feels like one solid piece of aluminum when holding it. The screen is absolutely beautiful.

But that is not why I, or anyone else, bought the iPhone: we bought it because its software is incredible. What is most interesting here, though, is that what makes the hardware great is that it gets out of the way. Rather than being a very blatant abstraction between the user and the software, like most phones’ controls are, the iPhone’s capacitive touchscreen makes the user forget they are using an interface to their software at all. As Jobs said at Macworld 2007, you are touching your music, or any other application running. There is no abstraction between the user and the software.

That’s the single-most intriguing aspect of the iPhone. Whereas other phones compete on what hardware they have (“it has a 3G connection, which is blazing fast!“), the iPhone competes on its software. The hardware is, rightly, a means, rather than the phone’s end. You do not want a 3G data connection just because. You want a fast connection to make browsing the web through great software an even better experience.

Which is why a 3G iPhone doesn’t excite me that much. Sure, it will be nice having ubiquitous access to WiFi-comparable speeds, but it is simply faster speeds. There’s nothing inherently new about it.

I am more excited for the iPhone software update coming next month, because each time we receive a large update like this for the iPhone, it feels like a new phone all over again. Because nothing is set in plastic, Apple can integrate whatever new features it comes up with, and past iPhone owners get these new features without needing to buy anything.

The future is wide open with the iPhone, because it is all about software.

I am just a few days away from finishing my sophomore year of college, which means that after five classes, a job, and freelance web design on the side, I am finally about to be free for the summer.

Free to find new hobbies, foods, read another Ayn Rand book, or hell, maybe even find religion.

Well, not really. Summer may be here, but my calendar will certainly not be empty. If all goes right, my current job as a web designer for a small, but quickly growing, renewable energy and HR consulting firm will continue through the summer, and hopefully I’ll find some small freelance jobs to do as well.

That will take most of my time. But I have several goals, too:

1. Launch Dawning Valley. We have a great set of writers, and I think this is going to be pretty damn cool. Expect an introduction article in the next few weeks for Dawning Valley and our writers.
2. Learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I am decent at HTML and CSS, but I’d like to be competent with RoR as well. I haven’t quite started learning it it yet, beyond reading the book I bought (which is, unfortunately, based on an outdated version of RoR, which should make it even more fun), but Ruby looks like an absolutely beautiful language to code in, and RoR looks like an excellent framework to develop in.
3. Read some more Ayn Rand, most likely Anthem. This is what I do for fun. Seriously.
4. Stick to a workout schedule. I consistently went to the gym and ran for a month or a month and a half, but it all fell apart in the last few weeks as finals approached. This summer: I will keep the schedule.
5. Relax: I’ve kind of gotten used to living with stress, and it has become a normal state for me. I need to break that.
6. Most importantly: Spend time with my lovely girlfriend and my family. Heidi and I have been together for nearly three years now, and they’ve been wonderful. She attends another university a hundred miles from our hometown, so unfortunately we do not see each other as often as we’d like. Summer gives us an opportunity to fix that.

   I miss being with my family, too, especially my brother now that we’ve both grown up to the point where we don’t want to kill each other every time we see each other. I’m looking forward to being with them all summer.

Those are my goals. I’m sure you’ll hear more about a few of them throughout the summer, and especially the first one.

While watching the first season South Park DVDs Friday night, I found that — to my delight — Trey Parker and Matt Stone offered mock introductions to each episode. Sitting before a fire with their dog “Scratch” (the type of dog changed throughout each introduction — one second it’d be a small dog, and the next there would be a golden retriever in its place), or as cowboys around a farm with their friend Indian Companion. Each episode, apparently, was their favorite, and answered some great questions, like Are you two, you know, a couple? (Parker explained that they’re all a little gay. Even Scratch.)

The intros are priceless. If you haven’t seen them, I suggest you correct that as soon as humanely possible.

Before “Mr. Hankey, the Christmas Poo,” Parker explains why it is their favorite episode:

The reason this episode is our favorite is it was the first one to introduce the school counselor, Mr. Mackey. He is based on an actual counselor I had in junior high school. I used to run around the hallways getting in trouble, and he’d say, “Trey, you need to calm down and get back to your school work, mmmk?”

Now I’m making a million dollars off him! (kids cheer)

I thought that was pretty goddamned funny. And not just because Mr. Mackey’s voice is hilarious, which it is. And not just because Trey Parker and Matt Stone are brilliant, which they are. I thought it was funny because it was a nice, big fuck you to anyone who’s ever told him to buckle down and get serious with your life.

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Gizmodo is reporting that Sprint is launching a $100 million advertising campaign for the Sprint Instinct, their attempt at an iPhone competitor. Gizmodo has two of the spots, and I suggest you watch them. 

The ads put the Instinct and iPhone side by side for comparison, with overly-loud and abrasive music and narration. It looks like they tried to make them amusing, but they failed rather miserably. 

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I bought my Macbook Air in late March 2008, and wrote a mostly glowing review of it.

But things, as they say, change. I wrote that review over a month ago, so it is time to revisit the Macbook Air and decide what I really love, and what I don’t. Think of this as a sort of performance evaluation that doesn’t, you know, suck. Continue reading →

Paul Graham published an essay this week on why he thinks successful startups are ones that “be good,” and act more like non-profits than a profit-seeking organization. It’s a great piece, and one you should read if you haven’t already, but there is one subsection was particularly intriguing. Graham writes:

How wide is this territory? Would all good nonprofits be good companies? Possibly not. What makes Google so valuable is that their users have money. If you make people with money love you, you can probably get some of it. But could you also base a successful startup on behaving like a nonprofit to people who don’t have money? Could you, for example, grow a successful startup out of curing an unfashionable but deadly disease like malaria?

I’m not sure, but I suspect that if you pushed this idea, you’d be surprised how far it would go. For example, people who apply to Y Combinator don’t generally have much money, and yet we can profit by helping them, because with our help they could make money. Maybe the situation is similar with malaria. Maybe an organization that helped lift its weight off a country could benefit from the resulting growth.

I’m not proposing this is a serious idea. I don’t know anything about malaria. But I’ve been kicking ideas around long enough to know when I come across a powerful one.

Interesting question. Can a company survive, even profit, by helping people with little resources?

Let’s shift the focus a bit to poverty, and set some parameters for the question. First, let’s limit it to the U.S. (tackling malaria, AIDS, or even lack of education in developing nations is clearly paramount in a globalizing world, but it also creates complications that are outside the scope of this admittedly-brief article); second, the company’s goal is to help pull people out of poverty; and third, the company must generate enough revenue to sustain themselves. That’s it.

There are two questions that immediately come to mind: What would this company look like, and how would they generate revenue.

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Rob Enderle, who describes himself as one of the most influential technology specialists, posted a generally terrible article yesterday on Apple’s biggest risks. You shouldn’t be surprised — Enderle is the same “technology specialist” who, in January 2007, compared the iPhone to the LG Prada and declared the Prada the winner because it is unlocked, “both… have touch screens,” and because its name was “legally acquired.” (Yes, I’m serious. If you’re wondering whether he’s a jackass or just an idiot, he’s both.)

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CMS platforms suck. Although powerful, most CMSs require developers to learn their system and model their site concept around it. Consequently, these systems are for mid to large-size sites, and thus smaller website designers are left with few options to turn to for a simple CMS.

That’s where CushyCMS comes in. CushyCMS, developed by Stateless Systems, aims to make content management for smaller websites simple to implement and use.

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