Geeky Peek

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…