Ron Diver

H/T to ASteele.

Glenn didn’t need to try to impress ME when he gave the keynote at the Seattle 2.0 Awards, but he knocked it out of the park anyway.  Great, inspiring talk.  God speed, Redfin & Co.

Seattle 2.0 Awards – Glenn Kelman’s inspiring speech from Seattle20 on Vimeo.

Lovely animation by James Jarvis, sponsored by Nike.  (H/T to the Design Commission).

Onwards from AKQA on Vimeo.

When mucking around in software circles it’s sometimes necessary to argue that design refers to how things work, not just how they look. Make things useful before making them pretty, if at all.  Craigslist and Amazon are hideous, but are both fantastic designs for getting things done. Twitter outsources the pretty in order to grapple with hockey-stick growth, spam and other nonsense.

Bikes are the same.  Give me an old Motobecane rather than that sweet ride pictured above. With the IF-Mode folding bike (below), Mark Sanders makes the pendulum swing the other way.  I want the things we touch every day to be beautiful, as well as handy. At 32 lbs it still weighs less than my little babies.  Look out, I might just start wearing clothes from Swrve, then you’ll see me riding around town like a dandy.

The AppStoreHQ has preliminary results from their survey of iPhone App promotion posted to their blog.  There are lots of good bits in the write-up, even if I come away from the work wanting. For example, there seems to be quite a few ‘quick hit’ type opportunities like creating a dashboard to help track traffic and reviews across the 80+ app stores.

I’m looking forward to a robust result in future iterations.  Hopefully the team can also incentivize enough participants to make the findings meaningful.   As of this writing only 35 of the 9000+ devs joined the party.  If you’re a developer, please take a few minutes to answer the 8 questions.

This survey’s singular focus on ‘promotion’ also got me thinking about the need to spend more time on user value creation.  Only 6 percent of respondents tied their App into a website or service to serve as a monitization engine (think Jott or RTM).  To get a feel for just how high churn is within the app marketplace, check out the Pinch Media deck below.