Make it Happen

Tim has just finished up at the Office 2.0 conference in San Fransisco, I would love to embed the the video of the panel discussion he was involved in ‘Getting things done with Office 2.0‘, but this particular thing is quite hard to get done, so here’s a link.

The video is mainly an overview of the tool each panelist has been involved in building to help get things done… The videos are filmed live so don’t have any fancy editing, which means that to get maximum benefit, it’s probably worth noting down the names of each application and exploring them further after the video is finished.

Watch Rowan Simpsons keynote at last year’s TechEd. To put it simply, it’s awesome. Not only is it inspirational for anyone with an idea, a ’skanky flat’, and dreams of making it happen, it’s an incredible story just to listen to.

Trademe have a knack of creating beautiful presentations, I’ve never NOT enjoyed one. So if you’re in business and thinking of getting out there and talking, watch it purely to glean ideas of how to make a presentation that people can’t take their eyes off.

Enough raving, watch it:

Last week Tim and I accidentally managed to gatecrash a talk Sam Morgan from Trade Me was giving the folks from Xero. While we devoured the pizza on offer (do we have no shame?) Sam made a superb point: All web products are aimed at people. This may seem to be nothing revolutionary, but think about how many web products you come across that are actually aimed at people.

We make business tools. These are normally defined by complex workflows, a ‘professional feel’ (small test sizes, dull colours etc etc) and industry slang. However, our users are first and foremost people. When you look at it like that, most tools are targeting the wrong audience. What people like dull, boring colours? What people don’t struggle with tiny fonts and find it hard to decipher complicated tools? Who doesn’t just feel dumb if they can’t understand the jargon that litters the tool they are trying to use?

Such a simple point, such huge ramifications for software.

2 of the PlanHQ crew Koz and Nik are up at Railsconf in Portland, Oregon for the week. Railsconf is the global get together for the development community around Ruby on Rails, the technology we use to build and run PlanHQ.

Koz is on the core team of Ruby on Rails and is speaking on ‘the Rails Way‘ and will reviewing a web application live and showing how it can be done better using Ruby on Rails. Nik also won a ticket to Railsconf by contributing to the Ruby on Rails project, which is awesome, so we hooked him up the flights from New Zealand and Koz and him are working it with some of Koz’s buddies and other leading guys in web development.

Why Ruby on Rails is good for you as customers

If you don’t know much about the technology beneath web products like PlanHQ, thats OK, here’s a 2 line summary as to why its a smart move and helps us help deliver a better PlanHQ experience for you

Ruby on Rails fits with our approach of making PlanHQ simple, and constantly improving. Ruby on Rails is fast becoming the most popular technology in pioneering the modern web, with huge success in products like Basecamp. With Ruby on Rails we’ve got pretty fast development times, so we’re able to get our hands on the working application and into the hands of you, quicker. This enables us to get real feedback and make enhancements quickly. We release things to improve PlanHQ often several times everyday, so this really important.