http://coryforsyth.com The Life of Me Tue, 15 May 2012 01:38:32 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=6421 http://coryforsyth.com/2009/01/26/tripit-my-favorite-startup/ http://coryforsyth.com/2009/01/26/tripit-my-favorite-startup/#comments Tue, 27 Jan 2009 02:39:44 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/?p=226 twittered about tripit after using their service the other day but 140 characters wasn't quite enough for me to write out the reasons I like them. They're my favorite startup right now because they do a really great job of solving a particular pain that I have had. Tripit is an online tool for managing your travel itineraries. You can forward them the email itineraries that you receive from airlines, hotels, priceline, etc. after you book travel online and tripit parses the email and emails you back (immediately) with a link to your itinerary on their site. Good startups work because they give the people something they want, typically by solving some pain point for them. The time I really got into tripit was when I was booking a lot of flights to travel back and forth to San Francisco last fall. I was chasing cheap hotels with priceline, and booking the cheapest convenient flights I could find, which meant I was flying lots of different airlines and amassing a lot of confirmation emails. My gmail account threaded the emails so in order to look up an itinerary I had to dig through a couple emails in a single thread and check the arrival and departure dates to make sure I was looking at the correct email. It was a huge pain, and I started forwarding all of the emails to tripit. After doing I had a single place to go to where I could see all my flights and hotel stays and easily look up any information I needed, such as confirmation numbers and departure times, for any of them. Like any successful startup should, using tripit made my life better. Once you've nailed the execution of the core promise of your app, like tripit has, there's a lot of opportunity around the margins to experiment with other features. This is often where a startup's revenue will come from, and at the least it's the thing that differentiates them in the marketplace and keeps users from switching to a similar service. In tripit's case, they offer a bunch of useful features, many of which are obvious (flight delay information, links to check in, ads for rental car packages) and some that aren't (a link to seatguru, for example, to give you advice on which seat on this particular model of plane has the most legroom). They also show you some cool information like total number of days traveled and total miles traveled, and there's a world map on your dashboard showing previous trips as blue dots and upcoming trips as red dots. The net effect is that I enjoy using their service so much that I want to book more travel just to see my mileage increase and get more red dots on my map. If you're using tripit and you know me, you can connect to me by inviting me at my gmail address.]]> http://coryforsyth.com/2009/01/26/tripit-my-favorite-startup/feed/ 35 http://coryforsyth.com/2008/04/08/google-app-engine/ http://coryforsyth.com/2008/04/08/google-app-engine/#comments Tue, 08 Apr 2008 22:40:55 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/2008/04/08/google-app-engine/ EC2 and start deploying my apps there. Until today. Today Google App Engine was announced and I spent all morning daydreaming about how I could easily deploy stuff with it, and have a great excuse to play with a new platform to boot. That is, until I read the documentation closely and saw that the sandbox environment runs Python. Darn. I'm still very excited about the idea. Al3x has a good post about the benefits and drawbacks. It's good to see the bar continuing to be lowered. Used to be that in order to have a blog you had to start an account with a hosting company, register a domain, and install MT or WP. Now, anyone is about 30 seconds away from a new blog at blogger. Likewise, if you wanted to create a web app you had to have a hosting account, create a database on it (at least they have an admin panel), and start writing. Now, with EC2, S3, App Engine, Scalr and so on, the hard work of setting up a database and finding a hosting provider is getting further abstracted away. There are two good things happening here. App Engine and Scalr and EC2 are making scaling a more manageable problem, but they're also first steps in making it really easy to launch an application for the first time, without having to deal with the sysadmin-style stuff. We're closer to being able to write code on your local machine and push a button to deploy it live, no need for setting up an environment on some host, it will all be abstracted for you into the cloud so you can focus on creating something innovative. We are also seeing more building-block type applications, like Ning, that are trying to abstract away the code-writing in addition to the sysadmin-ing. There are a lot of people with creative ideas. And there are some people with the technological fluency to use unix, install databases, and write code. Innovative startups used to happen at the intersection of those two groups. These new tools make that second skill set a lot less necessary. And the first skill set will become a lot more valuable.]]> http://coryforsyth.com/2008/04/08/google-app-engine/feed/ 0 http://coryforsyth.com/2008/01/18/bobby-fischer-dead-at-64/ http://coryforsyth.com/2008/01/18/bobby-fischer-dead-at-64/#comments Fri, 18 Jan 2008 19:35:04 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/2008/01/18/bobby-fischer-dead-at-64/ died today. What an interesting iconoclast. A related side note: For the past week, Choire Sicha (pronunciation mp3), formerly of Gawker, has been guest-blogging for kottke.org all this week. Jason did this before, and both times I've found it interesting how the particular interests of the guest blogger take the blog down slightly different roads. Joel Turnipseed tended to post long, intellectual interviews, and I'd say Choire's dominant themes so far are gay, art, nyc, and music, in that order. He's got a strong personality and a narrower, less technologically-inclined focus than Jason, and the dissonance has grated on me all week. And when I read that Fischer had died, my first thought was, I should have read this on kottke.org, because I know it's something Jason would be interested in. Update: Yep, when Kottke came back to his blog, he was all over it.]]> http://coryforsyth.com/2008/01/18/bobby-fischer-dead-at-64/feed/ 2 http://coryforsyth.com/2007/08/05/not-original-or-quick-enough/ http://coryforsyth.com/2007/08/05/not-original-or-quick-enough/#comments Sun, 05 Aug 2007 17:21:46 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/2007/08/05/not-original-or-quick-enough/ YouFamous to describe people that become famous via, and whose fame is primarily limited to, the YouTube viewing audience. Turns out there are already a few matches on Google for the term, although I only count three in their first page of results, and a search on Technorati shows one blogpost that uses the phrase. Urban Dictionary didn't have a definition for it yet, so I added it. Update: The definition was accepted. Here's YouFamous in the Urban Dictionary. Update: The blogpost I link to above is from November of 2006. Not only am I not quick enough, I'm very late to re-coin a term that never caught on the first time. Maybe now, with me as its champion, its time has finally come. Then again, I might not be internet famous enough to effectively spread the word.]]> http://coryforsyth.com/2007/08/05/not-original-or-quick-enough/feed/ 2 http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/25/photoblogger/ http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/25/photoblogger/#comments Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:14:08 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/25/photoblogger/ http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/25/photoblogger/feed/ 0 http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/08/comparisons-of-web-company-headquarters/ http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/08/comparisons-of-web-company-headquarters/#comments Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:19:22 +0000 cory http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/08/comparisons-of-web-company-headquarters/ http://coryforsyth.com/2007/06/08/comparisons-of-web-company-headquarters/feed/ 1