Starting At Home

Kristina B — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:12:00 -0500

As Pablo mentioned, Handwire moved into a new space in September of last year. We love it here on the capitol end of Congress near Little City, but we’ve been missing something.

About a month ago, we set out to freshen things up a bit. New hires? Nah. Inspired by places like Paragraph in NYC, we decided to rent desks in our space. So far this endeavor has worked out well. We’ve met a lot of other interesting techies and creatives in Austin and already have a few takers that we look forward to sharing space with. It’s a perfect start for what we talked about in the first post of this blog. It’s time to share knowledge and be inspired by our peers. Or, you know, just find new and interesting people to go to happy hour with after a long day. And, by the way, as of this writing, space is still available.

Handwire At The Conference

Kristina B — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:57:00 -0500

We’ve all been going to panels and parties, and though we are very close to achieving “plum tuckered” status, we’re keeping it alive for the rest of Interactive and then (gasp)... music. And when I say “it” I mean “us”. I, for one, both look forward to this time of year and dread it. Being an Austinite takes endurance sometimes.

Anyway, a bit about the panels we’ve seen. The general consensus in the office is that the Creating Passionate Users panel on Saturday was one of the best panels that any of us have seen so far. It scored not only on content but delivery. Kathy Sierra really did a bang-up job at conveying useful, intelligent perspectives in an engaging way.

The panel focused on the psychology of people’s reactions to things, and how that can be used to build community, buzz and loyalty around a product. I’m not a marketing person, and when I just reread that sentence it sounded like some kind of evil form of manipulation. There was a bit about that, I suppose, but it was delivered in such a genuine and realistic way that it didn’t seem either evil or manipulative. The reality is, for example, that people’s brains respond chemically to positive experiences and everything they are experiencing gets roped into that effect. So, for example, if you show someone a picture of an attractive, scantily clad person along with your product they will respond positively even if their logical mind identifies it as a cheap marketing trick. She really drove home the idea that, yes, there are cheap tricks you can use… but using them effectively is an art form.

Cheap tricks aside, the strongest message in this panel was to focus on your customers rather than yourself. Which, of course! Duh! Everyone knows that, right? Still, look around the web and you’ll find tons of marketing web sites that are really all about companies and products rather than their customers. It’s an easy mistake to make. This year really seems focused on creating user-centric products and marketing them in a user-centric way. Which is a good thing all around.

We sat around at lunch today talking about who the users of Bugwire really will be (people like us, no doubt), and what they might care about. There was no shortage of jokes about putting svelte, naked people on the Bugwire home page.

With the wayfinding work we’ve been doing recently, Steph was intrigued by the Online In Offline Spaces panel. The idea of tying web apps in to three dimensional spaces is exciting and Meetup, Dodgeball, and Socialite are brilliant examples of what can be done there. It’ll be interesting to see if this idea can find more traction in applications that go beyond social networks.

More on panels coming soon. If you missed the conference, some of the panels have been recorded as podcasts.

Handwriting: Tag austin

Starting At Home

Handwire At The Conference