Yammer’s Business Model: Infiltration of Value

09.12.08 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Posts, Reviews, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

When I first heard that Yammer (the “twitter for business” startup) had won TechCrunch50, I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I’ve been using Backpack’s Journal feature to do something similar with an agency that I do work with, and I immediately saw the value. It’s interesting to see what other developers or designers [...]


How simple is too simple?

08.23.08 Posted in Posts, Reviews, Social Media, Technology by Ryan W.

I’m a big fan of the “release early, release often” philosophy, where you break your software into small chunks and release it to market as soon as you can, let people play with it and give you feedback, and iterate from there. The other common option is to build a huge release and push it [...]


Searching for a decent small business accounting solution

06.02.08 Posted in Entrepreneurship, Posts, Reviews by Ryan W.

My wife and I are both self-employed consultants, we have several investment properties, and we each have entrepreneurial pursuits on the side. All of these endeavors have income and expenses that need to be tracked, not to mention our personal finances, which are currently being tracked with Mvelopes and Mint. I took a bunch of [...]


A Few Favorite Personal Finance Books

01.14.07 Posted in Finances, Posts, Reviews by Ryan W.

Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert T. Kiyosaki When I was about 19, this book changed my entire outlook on money and finances. Looking back, and reading through the book now, I see a lot that I disagree with, but it sparked my thinking about how to manage money, and what financial freedom truly means. [...]


LibraryThing.com Review

01.07.07 Posted in Posts, Reviews, Technology by Ryan W.

I’ve been putting together a list of recommended books for this blog and I decided to take a few minutes to play around with LibraryThing.com. I’m very impressed. LT is a site that helps people track their personal libraries. You can quickly and easily enter the books you own, rate them, tag them, etc. They [...]


My new video ipod

12.15.06 Posted in Posts, Reviews, Technology by Ryan W.

My wife works at Current TV. They recently had their Christmas party, and they gave a 30gb black video ipod to every employee as a little Christmas bonus. Fortunately, I had just bought my wife a green nano a couple months ago, so she had no choice but to give me the video ipod. It’s [...]


My recommendation for Akismet

11.22.06 Posted in Blogging, Posts, Reviews by Ryan W.

So I’ve had a huge problem with comment spam since I launched this blog. I was getting 10+ per day and climbing. I finally took the time to setup Akismet, which is a neat little service that moderates your comments and helps filter out spam. It’s a distributed service, so it compares comments posted on [...]


My mvelopes experience

10.19.06 Posted in Finances, Posts, Reviews by Ryan W.

Early last month, I started using a service called mvelopes.com. This is a personal finance and budgeting program that you would use instead of MS Money or Quicken. I had tried both Money and Quicken with very mixed results. I found them to be bloated, buggy, and trying to do too much and failing to [...]