A Karate dojo moved in upstairs of us. While funny for the first few days, the sounds of fury all day long get a bit tiresome.
We won a very prestigious award, we were recognized for Design Distinction in this year’s uber prestigious ID Magazine Annual Design Review! One of our early goals was to make a beautiful-looking device. We went out and worked with one of the top design firms - IDEO - to make this happen. We went through umpteen crazy drawings, shapes, designs, etc (one was pill shaped!) to come out with what we have now. And it was all worthwhile as we have now been recognized with one of the top awards in the area… pretty cool.
http://www.id-mag.com/annualdesignreview2009/?catid=8077&slide=5
If this link doesn’t work select ‘consumer product’… we are one of them.
There have been many topics of conversation around this blog about what Peek should do next in terms of features - IM, calendar, etc. Well, we decided to go in a slightly different direction than adding more stuff… we decided to rip cost out and reduce the price. Some of you may have noticed that the Peek now sells for less with some of our retail partners. Thanks to some good hard engineering, negotiating, business-thinking, etc we’ve been able to lower the price. And we’ll continue to do it, so stay tuned for more.
I am going to switch to Ubuntu 9.04 from Windows Vista! Why you may ask?
1. My wife went to the open video conference in NY this weekend. There is pretty sick stuff happening in open source video these days and it made me remember the importance of the open source movement. We almost take for granted very recent changes like creative common licenses, mozilla, linux, etc.
2. I finally got around to using the Ubuntu desktop, its super easy to use!
3. I then tried it on my home PC and it had all the apps I needed for work.
So I’m going to live with the slight uncomfortableness of a new OS and make the leap!
I officially hate this area of the world. Every company I have ever worked at has problems here. Wrong data, not enough data, systems are too expensive, no systems, etc.
At Peek, we don’t have a ton of systems so its easier for us to get data. We have two tools:
1. An internal website that uses PHP & SQL to present & get data.
2. Ad hoc SQL queries.
It seems like we’re at the stage of needing a real solution. Streaming, aggregating, averaging data and more from multiple sources.
My leaning is towards Pentaho on Amazon EC2 with MySQL. But I’d love to hear if any of you have experiences otherwise with reporting products. Apparently Pentaho has an Amazon AMI image, though I can’t seem to find it…
Well, I can only apologize for the past seven days. Annoyingly I can’t talk a lot about what happened.
I’ll be factual on outages that happened - last Tuesday we had a several hour full outage (4 hours). Since then about 30-50% of gmail users have been ’slow’ - some emails would come in a few hours late. Users with their own domains (e.g. joe@mycompany.com) have been even slower.
I can once again only praise the services of Amazon AWS. We had to rebuild a large amount of our environment quickly. In that few hours we were able to build a large number of servers from scratch, it was pretty amazing.
Once upon a time in a past life I used to know a lot about other mobile email solutions out there - my job consisted of hopping around the Caribbean, island to island, launching BlackBerry’s. From Haiti to Bermuda I saw it all. On top of that I used to regularly have Nokia & Sony Ericsson sales reps around with their latest and greatest smartphones, and other mobile email solution providers hocking their goods (Seven, Good, Visto, Motorola, etc).
But in the past few months, in the deep thicket of Peek here, I have sort of lost track of the development of other solutions. So when I read the New York Times article “Why Push Gmail For BlackBerry is a Big Deal” last week, I was a bit perplexed. I was sure that at various points in my past lives I had used gmail and it was push??? And can’t users get BES & BIS to solve this answer ultimately?? But still, the fact that BlackBerry took this long to integrate Gmail to their corporate offering seems strange.
You see the secret to Gmail’s push has been around for a while. Gmail uses IMAP Idle. It is public and it is a standard’s based interface (well almost). It launched in October of 2007, and anybody can use it or build software using it. To hear that BlackBerry is only integrating it now in May of 2009… and on top of that they haven’t integrated very much with it - no tasks, one-way calendar, etc. I know, I know… some of you think its wrong of me “who is Peek to disparage somebody elses feature set”… but we don’t pretend to be a do-everything enterprise solution!
So now I’m curious, what do other mobile email solutions offer these days? I know Windows Mobile is a horrible experience - polling only (no push), eats battery, etc - but I wonder where the rest are at. I’ll post once I try a few more out.
We are growing here at Peek and we’re looking for somebody to help lead our mobile software development on the Peek. You get to work with our awesome product management team to help figure out what we do next on the Peek and plan for it. Then you get to develop and deliver on it.
If you are interested email me (dan at getpeek).
This Friday we are hosting New York’s iconic Jelly co-working event - http://wiki.workatjelly.com/JellyManhattan-2009-05-01
My wife is a freelance video editor and attended one of the Jelly’s a while back which got a few of us thinking about hosting the event at Peek. Jelly rotates around getting hosted by companies, people’s homes, co-working spaces, etc. I think Jelly is an amazing idea, there are tons of freelancers, bootstrap entrepreneurs & folks who work from home who look to get a chance to work in an office with others. Jelly has been the perfect answer for those folks and I think its great that it is catching on wildly across the US (and even globally).
So if you’re in NY and you want to stop in for a bit and work with the crew at Peek feel free to stop by. We’ve got wi-fi (I hope it holds up with the extra guests), whiteboards, and coffee. Seating is not unlimited (I think we can handle 15-20 people).
I will make one note - we do not have the usual start-up super trendy all open concept space loaded with sofa’s (cough cough drop.io). We have a bunch of separated rooms with walls and cheap Ikea desks (but nice chairs). Peek is a functional-driven company 
It was a very cool night. Lots of Peeksters came in to get their devices upgraded and we got to talk to lots of customers which is always learning and helpful.
I showed lots of people how to use some of the apps we pre-load (weather@askpeek.com, news@askpeek.com, etc). There was lots of customer delight in getting crc’s incredible weather report with images and all (http://www.charleschilders.com/ent/).
The other moment of customer delight was the overall snapiness in using the device from before. I’d love to get reactions from some of you on earlier versions vs Pronto and usability.
We did a few video things at the event there that I’ll post later (some interesting, some silly).