Friday, April 13, 2012

Introducing IsThereAGiantsGameToday.com


Single serving sites have always been a fascination of mine. You know - the ones that only do one thing really well in the best cases with a twist of humor involved?


Or the myriad of Mozilla related sites like "Are we we fast/mobile/pretty/slim/small/first yet?   
Simple does one thing well.

That's why when I took a "Intro to HTML" class here at Mozilla I was inspired to use my new-found skills to better mankind, one small problem at a time. 
 (Above: A studious Mary, William, and Laura hard at work. Laura throws out the universal hand-sign for html bracket)

To solve the sort of pint-sized problems that can plague thousands, if not millions of people. 

To answer such profound questions that can make or break someones day...

...questions like: 
Will my CalTrain car be full of drunk people? 
Will I be able to find parking in SOMA tonight?
Will I be able to get into 21st Amendment or [your favorite SOMA restaurant here]?

And more. 
 
That's why I teamed up with the amazing William Reynolds to create a new website: www.isthereagiantsgametoday.com. A San Francisco Giants schedule for the rest of us.


And we're launching today. Check it out! Bookmark it. Fork it. Save it to your phone's homescreen. Share it with your friends! Moreover use it to make your life a little easier those 9 months out of the year when baseball season is "Game On!".

Update: Here's William's technical overview of Is There A Giants Game Today.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Our market insights team rocks


I have to hand it to our Market Insights team, who keeps turning out fantastic competitive analysis like the one I received today:

This weeks marketing insight will focus on yesterday's Chrome Personal Transporter Beta release. Summary below:

On Friday Google launched Chrome for Personal Transporter Beta, as a first step towards making Android the standard method for intergalactic transportation.

The Transporter is based on Chrome v210229 and V89. It does not have personal baggage support, and the lack of Clothing Transport upon atmospheric reentry in particular has been the main negative reaction to its launch among a lot of positive ones. This is also the reason for most of its 1 to 2 star ratings in the Android Market.
An Android Central poll asking "Is a lack of Clothing Transport support a deal-breaker?" has 47% of "Yes" answers and 52% of "No, I Kind of Like it."

Speed, discovery, and universal harmony are its main user propositions, while the Holodeck, User Body Sync, and the Orbitbox are the main promoted features. For developers, Personal Transporter comes with remote dematerialization debugging and boasts interplanetary travel standards compliance and warp drive acceleration.

Branding is persistent in the product on the "New Transport" page. Messaging tone is similar to Chrome on the earth: friendly, familiar, easy-going, and simple-minded. Tagline is "Your turf, away from earth."

Great stuff, guys, keep it up!