Announcing RED Lounge in Austin, TX
Austin, TX is soon becoming known for their extensive community of technology experts, and the RED Lounge is a platform for all technology professionals to join together to share ideas, network and become more involved in their communities.
RED Lounge is a meet-up style forum for industry professionals such as developers, designers, CTO’s, students and everything in between. The next RED Lounge will focus on the evolution of mobile technology and the impact of consumerization on interface design and mobile architecture. RED Lounge members will also be discussing how their expertise in the technology industry can benefit members of their community.
Speakers for the next RED Lounge include Robin Thurston, Co-Founder of MapMyFitness; Matt Walton, President and CEO as well as Josh Wingstrom, CTO of RED Method, Inc. RSVP today to participate in insightful conversation and enjoy the many beers Flying Saucer has to offer! Read More…
Web goes on strike to fight against PIPA and SOPA
On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day
Today, we are striking against censorship. Join us in this historic moment: tell Congress to stop this bill now!
Not In The US? Petition The State Department.
Example of letter to Congress:
I am writing to you as a voter in your district. I urge you to oppose the Senate version of S. 968, the PROTECT IP Act. The PROTECT IP Act is dangerous, ineffective, and short-sighted. The House version — just introduced by Rep. Goodlatte — is far worse. Over coming days you’ll be hearing from the many businesses, advocacy organizations, and ordinary Americans who oppose this legislation because of the myriad ways in which it will stifle free speech and innovation. We hope you’ll take our concerns to heart and oppose this legislation.
Join The Strike! and add this to your site
Learn More:
Watch the video ·
American Censorship page ·
View the Infographic
Read SOPA on OpenCongress ·
Read PIPA on OpenCongress
Austin Startup: Best new way to find storage facilities
Shopping for storage the old-fashioned way is a headache. You can easily waste hours calling facilities, getting spammed by “free quote” services or clicking through outdated websites.
New Austin-based start-up SpareFoot solves this problem by organizing every storage facility in one simple marketplace online. In just a few minutes, you can find and compare storage facilities in your area, check out photos and read customer reviews. For example, check out the Austin storage page and click on one of the available units to see the full features of this site. Read More…
Attend SXSW 2012 as a Volunteer
The 26th annual SXSW festival will take place between March 9-18, 2012 in Austin, Texas. SXSW is divided into 3 core conferences, Interactive (March 9-13), Film (March 9-17) and Music (March 13-18). Last year, the total number of SXSW Conference and Festival participants totaled 126,100.
Here are some statistics from last year:
Read More…
Ozzie’s next Start-up – Cocomo.com
Who’s Ozzie? Ray Ozzie the creator of Lotus Notes who took over as Microsoft’s chief software architect in 2006 is busy with a new startup called Cocomo. After first reading Inc’s article about Ray Ozzie’s new startup Cocomo I decided to do some research… and this is what I found.
It looks as the Inc article suggests that Ozzie is working in some sort of collaboration/communications tool targeted to mobile devices, and now that I write that I see a possible relationship to the name Cocomo with the words: Collaboration Comunication Mobile? or perhaps the name refers to this Cocomo: Read More…
Change the language of your WordPress blog in 3 simple steps
I recently updated the site of my tax preparation business, as part of the re-design I was required to change the language used in the blog to Spanish. After searching in Google and trying a few WordPress plug-ins unsuccessfully, I ended up doing the following which surprisingly enough it worked out very well.
Step 1
Download the language files for the language you would like to translate your blog to. You will need to download two files, one with the extension .mo and the other one with the extension .po. The files are named using the two digit language code_two digit country code. For the Spanish file I needed I downloaded these files:
- es_ES.mo
- es_ES.po
These files can be downloaded from this site, just look for the folder labeled using the same format, language code _ country code:
http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/
The exact url for the files I downloaded is this:
http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/es_ES/tags/3.3/messages/
Step 2
Save the files mentioned above to wp-content\languages. If the folder languages does not exists, just create it.
Step 3
Open the wp-config.php file using a text editor, look for the following string “define(‘WPLANG’, ”);” and update it by adding the language file you downloaded. For example, in my case I updated this line to the following:
define('WPLANG','es_ES');
That is all, I hope this is useful for you and if you have any comments or better ways to localize a WordPress blog please let us know in the comment’s section.
2011 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 49,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 18 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Happy Holidays!
Video Credit: shadoPRoX
2011 has been a busy and challenging year. It’s been a year of building, of change, of growth, and a year of reflection. I’m thankful for your continued support and for the encouragement of my friends and peers. 2012 is going to be a great year- one that I’m looking forward to very much. I hope you have a great holiday season and a Blessed and prosperous New Year!
Merry Christmas And A Happy New Year!
We appreciate your friendship and your business.
Ricardo D. Sanchez
Ideas are worth… a lot actually!
image c/o old school value
We all have heard the phrase “Ideas are worth a dime a dozen”, but I’d like to think that ideas are actually worth a lot, good ideas that is. But how do we know which ideas are good and which ones are bad? the truth is, we can’t.
It would be impossible to execute on each idea that comes to mind, but talking about your ideas with other people might help you pick which ones to follow and which ones to ditch or save for later. Remember to take other people’s opinions about your idea with a grain of salt, people tend to see uncommon ideas as bad ideas but in reality innovation usually is the result of thinking different and the willingness to take risks… in other words, some of the best ideas are seemed as either bad or crazy ideas by most people.
There are organizations such as TED which promote innovation by allowing people to talk about ideas “worth spreading”, what ideas are those? who decides which ideas are actually worth sharing? that is my point, no one really knows what a good idea looks like in the beginning, there is no pattern other than the fact that some of the greatest innovations in history started with ideas that didn’t seem good or popular.
Was Netflix a good idea back when it started? how about Twitter? do not judge other people’s ideas or your own, it is really easy to criticize but really hard to come up and follow-up on ideas, just try it. Jason Cohen from asmartbear.com wrote a great post giving out some examples on how easy it is to criticize when listening to other people’s ideas…
Ditch the Lean Startup methodology, instead be innovative and take risks!
Often I heard many startup founders talk about lean startup, product market fit, minimum viable product, and on and on… I have always preferred the let’s do it and see what happens approach. This is not to suggest that the lean startup methodology and others are not good, instead what I am suggesting is that the best ideas and businesses usually come up when you don’t follow any one procedure or methodology but instead a mix of all of them. I am all for testing, iterating, getting faster to market, etc… However, if you want to start a business and achieve success, you do need to roll-up your sleeves and start getting things done. Startups need to be seen and treated as experiments, it is about doing things differently to find out what works and what doesn’t. It is also important to know that there is not a silver bullet for success in business, and believing that you can achieve success just by following one business methodology is just silly.
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