Archive for April, 2010

Friday Links: More iPhone 4 drama, social media crack, and some stuff about typewriters

• Meet Brian J. Hogan, the dude who stole the iPhone 4 and sold it Gizmodo.
• Also, a handy flow chart of the whole Gizmodo iPhone 4 drama.
• And, finally, because I have to: Steve Jobs’ kiss off letter to Flash.
• Much like crack, students go through withdrawal when they can’t access social media.
• An interview with Threadless’ VP of Marketing on the eve of their 10th Anniversary.
• The worst of sci-fi/fantasy book covers. The best of the worst? I Sing the Body Electric.
• Time’s 100 Most Influential People in the world for 2010. Once again they forgot me. (and Yahoo collects the five people from the list you’ve never heard of).
• Website teaches kids not to get suckered by ads. This reminds me of the girls I nannied for while I was in college. They begged for some Chips Ahoy cookies of some sort because there was supposed to be a party in each bite. “Uh, there’s no party in my mouth,” one of them said upon tasting the regular old cookie. She was crushed.
• Rock it old school: stickers to make your mac look like a typewriter. I wonder if they can make it so you get that delicious clicking sound and a ding when you reach the end of a line.
• Related to the last: beautiful, beautiful advertisements for Olivetti typewriters.
• Leslie Buck, designer of the iconic NY Greek coffee cup, died.
• The saga of forgotten brands and their logos.

Bloomington Chorale sings praise for volunteers from Ratchet

Before The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, The Bloomington Sun newspaper called The Bloomington Chorale’s website “antiquated” – perhaps the nicest word they could print in a family-friendly publication. Things are much better now at bloomingtonchorale.com thanks to a transformational performance by Team Ratchet’s volunteer web pros. For resuscitating what was arguably the least effective/attractive website of the antiquated bunch, Team Ratchet earned a spot in the judges’ Final Four. Watch below as volunteers Heather Davis and George Hilal reveal the long list of interactive goodies they gave freely to a nonprofit they’d only just met.

Bloomington Chorale & Team Ratchet from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Nerds in the News: The Nerdery’s growth attracts attention

The Nerdery’s growing so much the StarTribune had to add an extra F to the word staffing in the headline of their story about local tech companies that are growing. It’s grrrreat! (see what I did there? Tony the Tiger’d totally get it)

Since I’m on the topic, we also got some ink Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal about opening a Nerdery in Chicago. If you’re not a subscriber, we’ve got an excerpt of the article for you.

Agency Primer Notes: iPad Development for Advertisers & Marketers

Missed last week’s Agency Primer on iPad Development? There’s no need to fear, the slide deck is here!

Also, to help you with all your design needs you can download the iPad GUI PSD and the iPhone GUI PSD.

Nerdy deeds beget Quality of Life Award

If you’ve been in any way involved in The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge – whether as a sponsor,  a judge, caffeine, a nonprofit, a well-wisher and especially all you volunteers, we humbly share this with you.

Nerdery gets Quality of Life Award from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

MIA: the guy who came up with this now-award-winning idea is still stuck Paris due to a volcano with an unspeakable name.

Earth Day at The Nerdery

Being a web and mobile software company you might not think there’s a whole lot we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. Considering that we do not have factories that produce goods, and we have no need to ship products around the world so there is no fleet of thousands of trucks to make more efficient. But, on the contrary, there’s a plethora of things we can do and are doing to reduce our impact.

In a company such as ours where enforcing something as concrete as changing all truck routes to have as many right turns as possible (kudos to the dude at UPS that came up with that one) isn’t an option, our solutions stem from a more cultural stand point, such as turning off computers at night or over the weekend, recycling paper, and printing double sided. All of which are difficult to enforce and measure.

Building a culture of employees that are concerned about the company’s impact on the environment is not an easy task. To provoke interest and encourage critical thinking on the topic we send out a monthly update on our energy use that includes some analysis on the amount of energy used per employee and other green tips. Though the main focus is on culture, there are a few very tangible things we have done.

For one, we installed programmable thermostats throughout the building, which most probably contributed to a reduction in our energy use in the 2009-2010 winter season by nearly 50% of what is was in 2008-2009. We also have indoor bike racks, lockers, a lunch delivery program, and we recently switched from bottles of beer to kegs (w00t!). All of these things not only reduce our impact on the environment, whether directly or indirectly, but also either saves the company money or increases morale (in the case of the kegs I would say it does both).

There are definitely more things we can do, but we’re doing what we can and allowing the culture to grow organically (See what I did there?). Happy Earth Day from all of us here at The Nerdery.

How to raise a nerd

Have you grown tired of reading about how the 4.G iPhone was lost, what Nick Denton (he owns Gizmodo) thinks about it, and letters from Apple’s lawyers? (and really, how could you grow tired? It’s like the awesomest, nerdiest soap opera this month). But if you are tired of it and need to cleanse palate go read How to Raise a Nerd. It’s tender and sweet (though I warn you, you’ll have to ignore quite a few distracting typos). Plus, it’s pretty awesome to see others reveling in their nerdom.

“But why would I ever want to raise a nerd?

For me, I take nerd to mean someone who has in-depth knowledge on a topic. (I realize there are other connotations the word obviously has, but for me , this is my definition.) So there are video game nerds, sports nerds, anime nerds, history nerds and so on and so forth. What makes nerds so great is they are fountains of information, making some truly intriguing conversations possible — and better yet, some truly heated and even truly meaningless arguments.

But, in short, nerds care. They have fires in their bellies. They have passion.”

Power Rangers get RREAL; RREAL gets more than they bargained for

It seemed like a no-brainer for matchmakers at the Overnight Website Challenge to pair the nonprofit Rural Renewable Energy Alliance (RREAL) with a volunteer team known as The Mighty Polymorphin Power Rangers: Global Warming. See how the Rangers delivered the goods. Cliffhanger alert: a bevy of bonus goods are revealed in the second video.

RREAL/Rangers at Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

What could it be? Shshsh…let’s listen in:

Style points for Power Rangers from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Nonprofits: April 23 is the application deadline for this year’s Social Entrepreneur’s Cup; winning it last year was RREAL’s Golden Ticket to the Overnight Website Challenge. Our offer stands for the nonprofit that wins this year’s Cup, so apply here.

Congrats to RREAL for making the most of their Golden Ticket. Kudos also to Power Ranger captain Jon Pettersson and special congrats to his productive teammate Jon Rexeisen, who – to resolve that other cliffhanger – did indeed become a father about a week after his team’s overnight success. Jon Rexeisen will lead Nerdery webinars this week on developing apps for the iPad (his other new baby). RSVP at http://nerdery.com/ipad.

Friday Links: Vintage computers, female nerds, and the case for ignoring people

• Rise of Female Nerds.
• Why iAds will revolutionize mobile advertising.
• Movie posters recreated with Legos.
• What ‘Project Runway’ Can Teach Agency Creative Directors. (props to @malbiniak for that one.
• Ad agency or indie band? I did poorly on this quiz. So poorly I won’t reveal my score.
• This is one of those that’s way more interesting than you’d think: Evolution of Animation Film Posters.
• The case for ignoring people at work.
• Photos of vintage computers.

A nerdy petition

I have to tell you that lately Matt, who helms @the_nerdery, has been killing it. There’s been a lot of great tweets that you might have missed out on, and this one was my favorite.

Matt said, “The support for naming a conference room Laser Bay 2 (TRON reference) is building fast” and then posted this picture of the petition. My best part of the petition? That dog paw.