Tony Wright dot com

About 8 months ago, a software idea hit me that I really wanted to work on. Like all ideas, it was based on a hypothesis. In this case, the hypothesis was “if understanding how you spent your time was braindead easy, you’d be a lot thoughtful about how you spent (and often wasted) […]

Wow. Two posts in a row that link to Seth Godin. Does that make me a fanboy?
In his post “In praise of a blank page“, Godin is essentially saying, “if it isn’t REALLY good, don’t ship it and refuse to market it.” I’m interested to see if this stirs up a hornet’s […]

Urm, just read a great blog post by Seth Godin who managed to say the same thing I did in my previous post using only about 5% of the space. I guess that’s why he’s a published author! He writes a nice list of 15 ideas in a post entitled “The Realistic Entrepreneur’s […]

I just re-read “Getting Real” over my most recent trip to New Zealand. If you’re not familiar with it (you should be), it’s 37Signal’s manifesto on making simple web software. They are simply fanatical about making software that is as simple as possible.
It’s delightfully amusing when someone counters with the inevitable response of, […]

I’m a huge fan of tagging as a means to organize data. It’s powerful and flexible– and it oftentimes has some pretty exciting social ramifications.
If you aren’t familiar with tagging (and you want to be), you could get up to speed fairly quickly by checking on the wikipedia entry on Folksonomy. If you’re […]

The first day of SXSW was largely dedicated to picking of your badge (and getting a picture taken for it) and picking up your bag o’ schwag. The act of getting the badge involved standing in a HUGE line, riding up two escalators, standing in another line, getting my picture taken, and then waiting […]

Jobster is hiring! We’re having a devil of a time finding solid software developers (though we do have a new one starting Monday).
In my recent participation and attendance at Seattle Tech Startups meetings, our problem is not unique. I would say fully a third of the self-introductions I hear are along the lines […]

(Would it be cynical to have titled this post “Links are Currency… You should always say thanks when someone hands you a 5 dollar bill”?)
I’ve been struck by the power of saying “thank you” twice in the last 24 hours.
The first was when I was reading my fearless leader’s blog. He was writing about […]

Okay, it might be a bit of a stretch to say that building good software isn’t hard. It’s really hard.
But chances are, if you’re creating (or pondering creating) a software startup, it’s because you think you’re good at building software. Maybe you’re a great UI guy. Maybe you’re a killer coder. […]

In the web 2.0 world, user-generated content is king. Blogs, Forums, YouTube, Flickr– all have armies of users who are giving away content (some of which is actually compelling).
Regardless of the poor signal-to-noise ratio in user-generated content, it’s certainly turning marketing on its ear. It’s no longer what you (or your high-priced advertising firm) say […]