As a former system administrator and datacenter addict, I can attest to the significance of this shift. Part of our job at the time was to setup “barriers” (yup, the stories about the angry sysadmins are true) for developers in order to keep them out of trouble and, more importantly, keep the underlying infrastructure manageable. But as the physical infrastructure layer disappears and the bar for creating dynamic web applications gets lower, not surprisingly, we will start to see a lot more dynamic and complex web applications come online. Just as we saw with the deployment of static web sites after it became as easy as “point and click” to get stuff online. Today’s web developers want it all: flexibility, scalability and manageability. And “all” is becoming possible. Recently for example, the hardcore development team at github announced its move to rackspace because of some of these same drivers.

As a modern web developer, you don’t need to know how to provision, maintain or scale your web application’s physical infrastructure (or need access to kick-ass sysadmins) – which, by the way, is a serious killer feature. And with abstractions like Active Record, Hibernate or SimpleDB, you don’t even need to know as much about the intricacies of your database or backend store. And with storage services like Amazon’s S3 you have easy access to scalable data storage on-demand. This is without a doubt an over-simplification but a powerful and noteworthy trend nonetheless.

All web developers need to do now is focus on creating web products that people want to use…less excuses, no barriers, more code.

It appears to me that the amount of growth in dynamic content (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Content Discussions, etc.) has caught up with Google? Static content is far less interesting today than dynamic content.

Here are the results from a recent search I did to figure out what GMail’s attachment maximum was, check out the first few results… to be fair, I changed up the language and received slightly better results but the very first result in both cases was over 3 years old! (BTW: the current answer is 20MB although I suspect this too will change)

Here are five noteworthy links from the last month:

1. How to Keep Innovating

2. Podcast with Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland (professor of one of my favorite undergraduate courses at UCSD)

3. Great Rolling Stone article on the financial “crisis” and AIG (Thx to Boogie)

4. President Obama’s Persian New Year Video (Thx to Kyle)

5. Release of Internet Explorer 8 (best of luck to MSFT and everyone involved in supporting this new version)

It’s been exactly two years since we launched dotherightthing.com to connect people with the companies they care about. This time has gone by quickly but looking back now it was all part of the journey that made this latest re-launch possible. Once again I have been lucky enough to be surrounded by extremely talented people most of whom went above and beyond to make the impossible possible… isn’t that always the case? (particularly Loren Baxter, Ryan Daigle, Ryan Mickle, Carsten Lindstedt, Peyman Pakzad, Robert Hoekman Jr., Jarkko Laine, all our clients and partners, and support from the original dotherightthing.com community)

Here are some key “notes to self” I discovered personally and professionally the last two years, I will undoubtedly refer to and stay mindful of these going forward:

1. Passion and momentum are the only requirements – when the unknowns mount and things get out of hand (which is standard for most entrepreneurial endeavors) it is key to continually communicate passion for what you are trying to solve or deliver and encourage the same from those around you, this builds the momentum required to stay motivated and stay in motion; it’s not enough to set goals, product requirements, and agendas (although these are important) but rather to keep telling yourself and the world around you what you are driving toward regardless of the perceived risks at the time
2. Help others take on new responsibilities and be true to your own – when taking on an audacious project it’s important to let those around you step up and be accountable for things outside their comfort zones, of course you should do the same but always stay accountable and get it done, experiment and draw outside the lines but always find a way to deliver
3. When you think it’s easy enough make it easier – creating good products is about solving real-world problems in innovative and elegant ways. The original dotherightthing.com for example was innovative but intimidating for companies and the community at large… the expectations were tough to overcome for most people, making it difficult to get started let alone get engaged; stripping everything to the core components not only ensures a solid user experience but it can also be very empowering and the more empowering it is the more engaging it will be (twitter is a good example of simple yet empowering)
4. Stay lean but not mean – stay lean but, more importantly, stay compassionate; things will likely unfold naturally and there will be many tough decisions that need to be made but do this without being shrewd or losing focus
5. Cultivate patience and persistence, it’s best done together – things will never get done fast enough but staying persistent ensures that things will happen and there will be movement toward the objectives, don’t sweat the small stuff but push on and remember it’s all small stuff (from this great book)
6. Engage the world openly and transparently – in many ways this is what dotherightthing.com is all about, transparent and genuine discussions with the companies/organizations you care about

New changes that are worth noting:

1. more empowerment with less of that activist edge – dotherightthing.com now focuses on what can and should be done, not on the good or bad; this new focus creates an environment that encourages action from the community and participation from companies/organizations; the flower metaphor helps visualize this
2. the community can engage directly – we’ve added a basic follow feature that allows community members to follow the activities of others (thanks Robert; there is also mention of it in his new book)
3. smart email notifications – you will now be notified of activities on the site through email notifications that are delivered more or less frequently based on your clicks and interest, you can disable these anytime but we think you will find them useful
4. new extra usable and sexy design – as always we did a good deal of research, prototyping, and design to ensure that this latest release is both functional and extra sexy

We look forward to implementing your ideas too. Please don’t hesitate to post them here. We would like to empower the community to help shape dotherightthing.com’s future. What do you think?

Go post an idea!

Related links:
dotherightthing (the original)
new dotherightthing (email me for this)
dotherightthing prototype deliverable example

NOTE: I meant to say “XBMC” sorry for any confusion (not XMBC).

Related links:
Boxee

I think this applies not only to large Fortune 500 companies interested in fostering this kind of working culture internally but also for smaller companies, startups and even individuals or consultants.

Chris’ thoughts included:

1. Willingness to accept that not all the smart people work for your company. We need to work with smart people inside and outside our company.

2. Willingness to strive for balance between internal and external R&D. External R&D can create significant value; internal R&D is needed to claim some portion of that value.

3. Willingness to give part of the control to others. We don’t have to originate the research to profit from it. We don’t need to control everything from the cradle to the grave.

4. No need to always be first. Building a better business model is better than getting to market first.

5. Dismiss NIH (Not Invented Here). If we make the best use of internal and external ideas, we will win.

6. We don’t need to own everything ourselves and keep it under tight wraps. We should profit from others’ use of our innovation process, and we should buy others’ intellectual property (IP) whenever it advances our own business model.

7. Open Innovation requires people with the right interpersonal management skills to manage the relationships with partners. We need people with agility and flexibility skills. The “soft” skills of emotional intelligence – fundamental social skills such as self-awareness, self-fulfillment, and empathy are needed to complement the traditional IQ skills.

8. Willingness to reward effort and learning. Failure is a fact of life for companies that pursue innovation seriously, and a leader’s response to it has a huge effect on company culture and therefore on future projects. Innovation leaders know that failures represent opportunities to learn.

As Tom Peters often puts it…”Fail. Fast. Forward.”

I went on to add a few more…

9. Bring together disparate groups and individuals from a wide-variety of disciplines with different skillsets both internally and externally. (attempt to coordinate interdisciplinary efforts, not just internal vs external but across this includes other stakeholders like users or customers)

10. Fearlessly facilitate open, honest communication with non-traditional methods/tools like online social media, blogs, etc. (most companies are still fearful of these new communication tools but open dialogue is a key supporting component to a thriving open innovation culture)

11. Encourage playfulness and creativity inside and outside the formal workplace. (innovation and creativity is more likely to happen outside your structured workplace)

What do you think? Thanks Chris for the thought-provoking ideas.

As an entrepreneur this is just another day with another set of challenges. Yes, the conditions are slightly different then yesterday but all in all this climate is ripe with opportunity. Not surprisingly, the source of most of this fear is coming from investment and finance people. Unfortunately, when it trickles down to entrepreneurs, this cloudy thinking puts their $ at serious risk. Innovation requires creativity and creativity requires clear thinking. During this time, opportunities are everywhere and particularly ripe for the taking…don’t give in to the doomsday theories.

TechCrunch recently wrote a solid piece on this entitled “Fear Kills Businesses, Dead” and it is spot on. Fear also kills innovation.

“Your rivals are retreating right now, so what are you going to do about it?”

This applies to you whether you are an entrepreneur, student or investor. So keep cranking.