Blog

On my morning bike ride down Market St. to the SolutionSet San Francisco office, I’ve taken to counting the number of other bikers I see. The numbers are pretty impressive:  on June 18th around 8:30 am, I counted 45 other bicyclists on the 2.4 miles of my commute.  At one light there were 12 of us lingering in the crosswalk waiting for the light to change. On June 24th around 8:45, I counted 37 other bicyclists. At one light there were NO cars waiting but 9 people on bikes. Woo!

I haven’t been counting bikers long enough to substantiate any trend beyond “there are more bikers when there’s nice weather,” but my gut tells … Read More »

Over the past year, I have worked very closely with the community managers for over a dozen large enterprises, several of which are in the Fortune 500. Using a social community in business is no longer a new concept, and by now there is a body of widely accepted best practices for achieving community success. Certainly all of my clients would agree on one of these practices, which is the importance of having a dedicated community manager. This person is the business owner of the community, the evangelist, the person responsible for the community’s success. Typical community manager responsibilities include promoting the community, moderating content, measuring success via analytics, training internal folks, encouraging community participation, … Read More »

The relationship between designers and developers is too often overlooked on projects. Commonly the two teams are removed from each other and designers are asked to simply throw their work over the fence to the HTML monkeys who faithfully turn the designs into a webpage using 10,000 typewriters. At SolutionSet, the “front-end” of a website is a combined effort of three different teams; The IA/UE team does the sitemap and the wireframes, the design team creates the designs, and the HTML/CSS team takes the designs and turns them into a web page. It is all too easy to fall into a pattern of non-communication between the departments … Read More »

Two days ago I got word that I won the Grand Prize in the DreamHost API contest for my entry called Dreambot. Entries can be found here:

http://blog.dreamhost.com/2009/06/22/big-boy-time-is-up/

Dreambot is a secure Instant Messenger (IM) robot that runs on your Dreamhost server and performs possibly any server related tasks for you on demand. Dreambot’s core uses the XMPP protocol currently with Jabber Google Talk. Dreambot is fully customizable in that you can configure your Dreambot to respond to your specific set of commands sent to it. Dreambot is open source, object oriented, built in PHP5 and licensed under MIT.

More information on Dreambot can be found here:
http://dreambot.openovate.com/

This week on the Twelve, we meet Jeff Haggin.

1. What’s your role at Haggin/SolutionSet?
I am our fearless leader, that is, CEO and President of the company. I work primarily on business strategy, and new business development (not only for our Haggin and SolutionSet business units, but also I-Centrix and GetMembers.com and GetSales.com.)

2. How long have you been with the company?
Since the beginning! I started the company with two partners in February, 2001. In the early days we used cardboard boxes for tables, and we did not accept “no” as we went to market.

3. Where are some places you’ve worked prior to Haggin?
Since 1984 I have been doing this — direct marketing — in a leadership capacity … Read More »

Last year I wrote a post about SolutionSet’s local, non-profit work.  A number of the sites have been launched since then, and we’ve done some more great work for some deserving organizations.

We’ve had a long tradition (well, as long as the company as the company is old, that is) of working on pro-bono projects or discounted projects.   As the person responsible for the company and it’s overall financial health, I’ve often been asked why we do so. 

It feels good to do good - supporting worthy projects and causes creates a better work environment for all involved as they can feel like they are contributing
Some of our most creative work comes out of these projects as they are not mainstream, corporate … Read More »

This week on the Twelve, we meet Greg Macchi.

1. What’s your role at SolutionSet? 
I’m a technical project manager, which means I have the dual role of managing projects and interfacing with the client, but also occasionally get my hands dirty in code.

2. How long have you been with the company?
I started with SolutionSet way back in August 2006 – so I’m rapidly approaching my three year mark.

3. Where are some places you’ve worked prior to SolutionSet?
Most of my previous experience was when I was living in NYC and London.  I spent some time kicking around mtv.com, vh1.com, and sonicnet.com (r.i.p.) back when they were organized under a grouping called MTVi.   I also spent … Read More »

In my last post I mentioned that we were planning on using Silverback combined with screen sharing software for our next round of usability research. Well, to follow-up, the testing went really well. We set up one conference room for the moderator, which included a MacBook pro with an additional external webcam and Silverback, Skype, and GoToMeeting software installed. Then in a second ‘observation’ conference room we set up a PC and large screen monitor with Skype and GoToMeeting. With this set up the observers could see the participant’s facial expressions via video from the external webcam on Skype and their screen interactions via GoToMeeting. In fact the setup could allow clients … Read More »

Suffering from incurable writer’s block this week, I’m going to cop out and share a practical solution perfected during a recent (long) layover in the airport lounge.  You can see I run out of things to do when Wi-Fi is down and I’ve shotgunned eight cans of apple juice and eaten every conceivable cracker/nut/chexmix bag in the place.

I was pulling my iPod headphones out of my bag and once again found them in a typical tangled mess. With time on my hands I set out to fix this once and for all.

Total assembly time for the item below is under two minutes.

Step 1

Take a standard business card and draw the following guidelines on it (1cm from either side, 2cm … Read More »

This week on the Twelve, we meet Kevin Ng.

1. What’s your role at SolutionSet?
I am a senior Java developer. Usually I am playing a role of mentor to lead new members and bring them up to speed.

2. How long have you been with the company?
I have been working in SolutionSet since April 2006.

3. Where are some places you’ve worked prior to SolutionSet?
I have worked in various startups like Advenix, eBoomerang and Lake 5 Media.

4. What’s your favorite thing about your job?
The most interesting things about this job is the challenge. The way you approach a project, the solution you apply to it, and the time you spend to solve it, together with different technologies, different environments–there’s … Read More »