Update: My entry in the RailsRumble was BidBuildBill.com.  It fared well, coming in 3rd among Solo apps.
Rails Rumble is a “48 hour design/develop/deploy competition”. The 2008 Rails Rumble is the weekend of October 18th and 19th (GMT) and the Rails Rumble blog is now online. The organizers explain the rumble this way.
For those of [...]

From an article I wrote in 2006, here are some ways small software companies should rejoice in and respond to the Innovator’s Dilemma (Amazon). Listed here are principle causes of company failure as identified by Christensen. In response to each one, I have identified how these pitfalls can be avoided, and indeed exploited, [...]

Morph Labs and FiveRuns Partner
Mor.ph is a scalable cloud-computing deployment “Platform as a Service (PaaS) ” with features like backups, distributed processing, and 99.9% reliability built-in. FiveRuns “provides simple and affordable products for monitoring Rails applications and their supporting infrastructure.”
I have used both companies’ products and services and am excited to see they will be [...]

NetBeans
Started using NetBeans for development this week. So far, so good. Things I have found useful:

Inline, real-time syntax error checking (no more missing ‘end’ statements or misspelled keywords at test or runtime – catch them while typing and in the ‘flow’ instead).
Code completion, including model attributes (was that attribute name [...]

Here is a summary of PlaybookIQ updates this week.
List Export
PlaybookIQ users can search by any contact field, by tag, and by combination of tags. The search results can then be exported as a csv file. This is a powerful way to create lists for email or postcard mailing providers such as Vertical [...]

Here is a summary of PlaybookIQ updates this week.
List Export
PlaybookIQ users can search by any contact field, by tag, and by combination of tags. The search results can then be exported as a csv file. This is a powerful way to create lists for email or postcard mailing providers such as Vertical [...]

There is an interesting panel discussion with Tim Ferriss and Derek Sivers at Tim’s blog and a transcript at Derek’s. For micro-ISV owners, business owners, or anyone looking to take a different approach to their career: Tim and Derek are two worthwhile people to watch. Being a New York Times best selling author, [...]

Enhancement: Search results
Management of PlaybookIQ search results got some attention and enhancements this week. Details at the product blog.

SSL for All!
We added SSL to all accounts, even the 30 day free trials. Blogged here.
Lighthouse and Github
Moved the product’s repository to Github and our milestones and issue tracking to Lighthouse. Highly recommended products [...]

Looking for a more professional look to match our small business CRM target audience, the PlaybookIQ product site got a complete revamp this week.
The previous site was – in the tradition of web 2.0 – simple, sparse, and curvy. The new design is pleasant, yet more focused on the facts and geared toward business [...]