Olivier Travers
Software, Digital Content, Geopolitics, Economics & More from of a Libertarian Serial Expat and Entrepreneur
Zapier Devs Read My Mind, Among Other Feats
10 May 2013This API status meta dashboard is great, as it scratches an itch I’ve had for almost a decade. I meant to suggest to the Zapier folks that they develop exactly that, but didn’t end up sharing that thought, and here they are! Brilliant team, excellent product. Now they need to customize the datatable and RSS feed so that they can be filtered based on APIs you actually use as a Zapier customer.
Time to Pick Up a New Newsreader
18 Mar 2013I have been consuming newsfeeds since Pointcast (1996) and CDF/IE 4.0 (1998) so obviously once RSS gained momentum about a decade ago, I got hooked. It remains my main way to keep on top of both fresh news and background material. In recent years I tried several times setting up Twitter (by itself and via desktop clients such as Tweetdeck) but never reached an acceptable signal/noise ratio so I gave up and only check it out once in a while, certainly less than my daily RSS consumption. Read the rest of this entry »
In our dealings with various SaaS vendors, it is interesting to see cultural differences translating into behavioral patterns. You can see from the outside which functions have heft, which ones are afterthoughts, and where are the missing integration points. A behavior that I see pretty often is a good level of quality in customer support, but a failure to properly integrate it with other parts of the company. That is suboptimal both internally for these companies, and from the perspective of the customer. Vendors miss opportunities to learn and improve, while the customer feels he’s dealing with well-meaning professionals hindered by a poorly designed organization.
In my experience two scenarios often play out that give the customer an overall “meh, whatever” feeling no matter how great the work done by support.
Read the rest of this entry »
Time to Revive This Weblog
In: Uncategorized
26 Feb 2013Like so many people, I let my blog, which I had started relatively early at the end of 2000, fall into a state of utter neglect as various social networks took over in the late 2000s. But in the past couple of years I went through a conscious effort to improve my information diet, and that took me back to where I started: a careful selection of handpicked RSS feeds consumed via an RSS reader, many of which are blogs from entrepreneurs and interesting companies.
Despite applying the same upstream filtering to my various social media streams (i.e. I don’t follow celebrities and other noisy crap in Twitbook+), I find their information density way too low. If anything, the current crop of self-centered, ephemeral social media show the lasting value of a good blog with a purpose. Read the rest of this entry »
September 2010 necro-update: How things have evolved through the last decade! There’s now api-status.com to get the pulse of dozens of public APIs. You read it here first as per this entry originally from 2004.
People who use the Amazon.com web services routinely complain about their sluggishness. In the dedicated discussion board, after someone suggested they create an XML feed to advertise the current availability and average response time, as well as planned downtime, a developer from Amazon said they’d look into it. Better late than never, I advocated something similar for Paypal in late 2001. Read the rest of this entry »
Interesting Online Marketing Tools – 2010 Edition
In: cool tools
4 May 2010The marketplace for tools helping interactive marketers with their tests, tracking, and optimizing, seems more vibrant than ever. More and more small companies know what the issues are and work on helping solve them. Unfortunately, tools are time consuming – it’s not copying some javascript in a CMS template that’s really the problem, it’s all the post-implementation data cleaning, reconciliation, and analysis so you can actually get value out of the tool. Also, beware of self-inflicted wounds as all these third-party javascript calls will slow down your site.
As far as we’re concerned we’re making sure we don’t just play around too much and actually fully use a tool before considering implementing yet another one. Right now we’re focused on Clicktale, mostly for its forms analytics. A bit slow but if you’re into analytics, you owe it to yourself to try it.
There are other tools that we’ve been using for a while, and yet others that we might test later. I’m sure I’m missing many but here’s a list: Read the rest of this entry »
Pushing this entry back to the front after its first publication in October 2004. It’s fun to see what’s been right about it, and what already looks quite old context. It’s from the pre-Youtube/Facebook/iPhone era!
Despite the buzz, I’m not really excited about Google working on a browser or IM client, though I definitely can imagine them buying Trillian and giving its Pro version for free. I guess they’ll negotiate interop with AIM and they might even force the hand of Microsoft and Yahoo, which would be a Good Thing.
But looking at Google Desktop and its local web server comes a more intriguing thought. How about partnering with or acquiring a large ISP/WISP (say, Earthlink) to deliver an affordable service bundle with symmetrical bandwidth, static IPs, reliable DNS, and self-publishing with Blogger, Picasa and Hello. Let millions of personal web servers bloom and piggy back on that big wave of user-generated content.
Google would basically re-index their customers’ sites (just a directory on their desktop really) on the fly, and share the results with the rest of the world (or not) based on user settings (do not confuse the wedding pictures and the honeymoon sex tape, ok). And now it makes sense to give software for free because you have other ways to bill consumers and learn about them. How’s that for increasing targeted ad inventory while diversifying your revenue sources, and wiring yourself into people’s life as well as within the fabric of the internet?
Alive and grateful
In: living worldwide
28 Feb 2010Living through a major earthquake: pretty scary.
Realizing your family, yourself, and your property don’t have a scratch: priceless.
My thoughts to the families of the deceased, wounded and homeless. Te quiero Chile.
Update three years later: I had posted this after the 8.8 earthquake on Feb. 27, 2010 in Chile. We live about 350 km (215 mile) north of the epicenter, so we felt a pretty long ~M7 earthquake on the Richter scale. Not tsunami traumatic, but definitely scary nonetheless (the noise!). This will remain a strong memory for life for sure. Oh, and the aftershocks (we’re in the upper part of that collection of 458 aftershocks, with a bunch of M5s-M6s right where we live).
Quick Update; ExpressionEngine Struggles
7 Dec 2009I haven’t posted on this blog for a long time, mostly because we’ve kept ourselves quite busy hunting for, then buying and renovating a house in Concón, Chile. After 5 months of remodeling, we finally moved in last month and we’re very happy to have made that choice which satisfies both our heads – we’re convinced it’s a great investment over the long run – and heart – outstanding direct view on the ocean, lots of space, our kids love it. There’s easily two or three years of additional work ahead to get our dream home out of it (and home office – did I mention we’re across the street from the Pacific ocean?) but we’re starting to be nicely settled already.
On the web publishing tech front, we’ve been working with ExpressionEngine for a bit more than a year. We like it for the most part, but still have several unresolved issues: Read the rest of this entry »
State of my VOIP Setup
14 Mar 2009I just bought a prepaid data package from Claro, one of the three mobile telcos here in Chile. After fumbling with their settings (their APN for prepago banda ancha is bap.clarochile.cl, not bam.clarochile.cl) I’ve just completed a successful call with my Teliax account on my Nokia E71 to my Vonage account. The chain involved goes something like this:
Nokia SIP call -> Claro 3.5G network -> internet cloud to the US -> Vonage -> more internet cloud back to Chile -> Tutopia DSL -> Cisco ATA 186 -> Philips VOIP841 wireless phone (for whom Vonage is my “landline”, I also have Skype running on it).
There’s probably 20,000 miles worth of roundtrip involved, with data packets going through air, copper and fiber. Try to visualize it. Read the rest of this entry »
About this blog
I'm CEO of an online trade publishing firm in the marketing and defense verticals. We try to make news and data digestible and useful in an environment that is more noisy each day. This personal blog mixes my thoughts and interests on politics, business, software, and more, based on my business and personal experiences. Over the years I have posted items that turned out spectacularly wrong, and a few posts that stood the test of times better. Personal views only.
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- Zapier Devs Read My Mind, Among Other Feats
- Time to Pick Up a New Newsreader
- Customer Support Should Feed into Product Requests, Documentation
- Time to Revive This Weblog
- Web Services Need to Advertise Their Health Status
- Interesting Online Marketing Tools – 2010 Edition
- Out-of-Left-Field Idea of the Day: Google Broadband
- Alive and grateful
- Quick Update; ExpressionEngine Struggles
- State of my VOIP Setup
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