Company blog

My last post discussed what it means to be a lean startup. In it, I suggested that lean startups need to "release early and release often."

Earlier this week, I discussed (or, more accurately, ranted about) Microsoft adCenter's incompatibility with non-Windows systems.

The internet has opened up all kinds of new opportunities for businesses in the last decade. At Less Annoying Software, we're taking advantage of a relatively new internet-enabled approach to business called "the lean startup."

Search-based advertising, in which short text ads are displayed alongside search results in major search engines such as Google, are one of the biggest revenue generators anywhere on the Internet.

Over on the software side of the Less Annoying world, Tyler and I have recently been working on a pretty substantial redesign of the interface for LAS.

There are a number of decent software tools to help you stay organized, but I was never able to find anything that seemed to really do the trick. Until now.

I just read this post on Lifehacker (and watched the accompanying video which I embedded above) and I'm feeling very liberated from normal grammatical constraints.

Regular expressions are an extremely useful programming tool for finding and manipulating patterns in text. Unfortunately, the syntax can be pretty overwhelming if you've never used them before (or even if you have).

Last week I wrote about how AT&T's poor service effectively makes the Apple iPhone a bad product in many areas. This is consistent with a common theme on this blog: nothing matters except user experience.

I've recently had occasion to try out a variety of different sports websites. During the process, I ran across a live game cast from Comcast SportsNet that I hated on first glance; after about 5 minutes of using it, however, it had turned in to one of the best game cast tools I've used.

I live in San Francisco. As you may know, AT&T cell phone service is absolutely awful in San Francisco (like many other major U.S. cities).

When we made our own mobile website, we commented that many iPhone apps would probably be better served as mobile websites.

If you work at a software company, then you know how hard it is to avoid feature bloat. You obviously want to listen to feedback from your users, but if you implement every feature requested, your software will end up complicated and uninspired.

Much like just about everyone else, Microsoft has spent a lot of time of late talking about the importance of the cloud in the future of both computing and of Microsoft.

You may have heard that Windows finally released a new mobile operating system called Windows Phone 7.

As you may have heard, Google is giving up on Google Wave. Wave was a new communication and collaboration tool that was meant to reinvent email.

I was looking through the table of contents of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) earlier this week, when I ran across this article about how search volume can be used to "predict the present" as well as the near future.

I have a confession to make: I'm terrible at negotiating. I'm a complete pushover and I just can't hold my own.

inDinero is a startup company that's generating a lot of buzz for its simple approach to financial software for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

While similar in many respects to Dropbox, Syncplicity offers a few differentiating factors including the ability to sync any folder on your computer, and integration with web services including Google Docs.

Syncplicity is one of a number of file sync and backup services along the lines of Dropbox, but with a few extra features.

You've probably noticed by now that Google just made a major change to their search product. Results now appear as soon as you start typing your search query and they continually update as you refine your search.

I recently started checking out an online collaborative desktop service called Kohive.

At Less Annoying Software, customer service is very important to us for two reasons.

For reasons that aren't worth going in to, Tyler and I have recently begun the process of setting up a server through Rackspace's cloud services.