Olivier Travers

I 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 [...]

The fine people at EllisLab have a quite interesting post on how they see feature requests. Generally speaking, I like their voice. Unlike many web 2.0 companies, they’re not delivering the usual pandering bullshit: “it’s all about you the users and the comm-you-nih-tee.” Yeah right, like we can’t figure out the part about UGC economies [...]

I’m a fan of services neatly packaged as products that answer a very well defined need. A good example is psd2html: you know what you put in the box, and you know what you’re going to get at the other end. Great way to complement your own resources. We’re coming to a point where our [...]

Why, now that all these topics that I posted feverishly about for years are making front page news, am I almost mute? Jeffrey Zeldman perfectly captures everything that got me sick of the whole web 2.0 noise explosion. I’m busy building our own businesses and I hardly even keep up with what’s new. Oh wait, [...]

Please welcome TaxPrinter.com, another site I created with Tig, this one totally different from what we usually do. Tig came up with the idea after he needed to address one of his administrative needs and couldn’t find a ready answer. The service is pretty basic: if you lost your old tax software but need to [...]

Excuse the lack of posts as of lately but I’m working on two new sites to be launched within a couple of weeks or so (one we’ve been planning to do for months and directly in line with what we’ve been doing for a while, the other a totally new experiment). Here’s a question for [...]

Must-read post by Ari Paparo on why older shared bookmarking services such as his own Blink didn’t work out as well as the much more recent and less-funded del.icio.us: "[P]roduct design matters. We had more money, more users, a five year head start, and some really, really smart people working on bookmarking in 1999. The [...]

Ken Norton, VP Products at Jotspot, posted this good wrap-up on product management last week (you can tell I’m not exactly keeping up with my RSS subscriptions these days). His focus was on how to hire PMs, but it’s a good read to define what’s a product manager in the first place. If you like [...]

I’m in one of those periods when I pretend to be a web developer. Low productivity but great fun, and maybe with another few years I might become half good at it. Anyway I want to let my users choose how to sort some lists on one of my sites, so I’m passing along a [...]