Tumblr Architecture - 15 Billion Page Views A Month And Harder To Scale Than Twitter

One of the common patterns across successful startups is the perilous chasm crossing from startup to wildly successful startup. Finding people, evolving infrastructures, servicing old infrastructures, while handling huge month over month increases in traffic, all with only four engineers, means you have to make difficult choices about what to work on. This was Tumblr’s situation. Now with twenty engineers there’s enough energy to work on issues and develop some very interesting solutions.

A great writeup on the growth challenges Tumblr has faced from infrastructure to hiring the right team of engineers. 

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“Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.”

from Mark Zuckerberg’s founder letter in Facebook’s S-1 to IPO

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Valio Con 2012 I’m excited to announce that I was invited to speak at Valio Con 2012 in San Diego this summer.  Drew Wilson and the Valio Con team have put together an amazing line-up of speakers that I am looking forward to hearing. Rich Thornett, co-founder and developer of Dribbble  Cameron Koczon, behind Gimmebar and co-founder of Brooklyn Beta Ian Collins, designer and Javascript developer for Simple Kyle Neath, director of design for GitHub Garrett Murray, founder and creative director of Karbon Krystyn Heide, senior product designer at Squarespace David Desandro, front-end developer at nclud and creator of the popular Isotope Dom Leca, ceo and co-founder of Sparrow More to be announced soon Last year’s Valio Con was by far the best web and design conference I have attended in quite a while.  This year the conference takes place June 7-10th at the Hyatt Mission Bay resort in San Diego.  The $999 conference pass includes three nights hotel stay, beach bonfires, breakfast, local catered lunches and a chance to hang out with some of the best designers and developers our industry. Check out the Valio Con 2012 site for more details.

Valio Con 2012

I’m excited to announce that I was invited to speak at Valio Con 2012 in San Diego this summer.  Drew Wilson and the Valio Con team have put together an amazing line-up of speakers that I am looking forward to hearing.

Last year’s Valio Con was by far the best web and design conference I have attended in quite a while.  This year the conference takes place June 7-10th at the Hyatt Mission Bay resort in San Diego.  The $999 conference pass includes three nights hotel stay, beach bonfires, breakfast, local catered lunches and a chance to hang out with some of the best designers and developers our industry.

Check out the Valio Con 2012 site for more details.

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YouTube - One Hour Per Second To celebrate YouTube’s milestone of having one hour of video uploaded ever second they launch One Hour Per Second filled with hilarious collection of facts, animations and sound effects to help break it down into terms we all can understand. In 7 minutes of uploads to YouTube, the Nyan cat persists in saying “Nyan” over 6,048,000 times. Thanks for the link Jess

YouTube - One Hour Per Second

To celebrate YouTube’s milestone of having one hour of video uploaded ever second they launch One Hour Per Second filled with hilarious collection of facts, animations and sound effects to help break it down into terms we all can understand.

In 7 minutes of uploads to YouTube, the Nyan cat persists in saying “Nyan” over 6,048,000 times.

Thanks for the link Jess

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Soundmachines

Three units, which are resembling standard record players, translate concentric visual patterns into control signals for further processing in any music software. The rotation of the discs, each holding three tracks, can be synced to a sequencer.

The Berlin-based studio The Product for “spatial and media-related design” created the Soundmachines for VW’s premiere of the 2012 Beetle at the IAA Motor Show.

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Color 2.0

Color is a live broadcast from your phone. Unlike videos, there’s no audio, editing, or uploading. You got 30 seconds to tell your story. Up to 5,000 friends can simultaneously visit your broadcast from their phone and Facebook.

So after rehashing the complete flop of the first version of Color, they’re putting their $41,000,000 in funding to use to launch a platform to broadcast 30 seconds of boring, soundless video to Facebook.  Isn’t audio half the magic of video?

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Little Printer This tiny, ticker-tap like device from BERG design consultancy is their latest product launch that merges digital and physical to create a fun and playful gadget. Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper. From looking at the Little Printer site, it appears that it is the first of many playful home electronic products that they plan on launching for their new BERG Cloud device that lives on your home’s network. Previous posts about BERG - Making Future Magic: iPad Light Painting and Shuu.sh Twitter reader

Little Printer

This tiny, ticker-tap like device from BERG design consultancy is their latest product launch that merges digital and physical to create a fun and playful gadget.

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.

From looking at the Little Printer site, it appears that it is the first of many playful home electronic products that they plan on launching for their new BERG Cloud device that lives on your home’s network.

Previous posts about BERG - Making Future Magic: iPad Light Painting and Shuu.sh Twitter reader

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PROTECT IP Act Breaks the Internet

PROTECT-IP is dangerous bill that is up for discussion in congress today, and it has the power to cripple internet startups and vastly change the open nature of the internet.  PROTECT IP essentially gives the entertainment industry to censor, enforce, and sue any person, company or ISP that allows access to copyrighted material.  With the way that the bill is written this will put people singing an acapella rendition of their favorite pop song in the legal cross hairs of the entertainment industry in the same way that it would for a file sharing site.

Protecting copyrights and piracy are important issues that need to be dealt with, but PROTECT-IP and SOPA will drastically change the was we enjoy and do business on the internet for the negative.

Thanks to Tumblr’s efforts to get people to call congress, I had a great conversation with my local representative Gary Miller’s office.  Take the two minutes it takes to voice your opinion.  Simply fill out your phone number, address and zip code and Tumblr will call your phone connecting you directly to your representative’s office.

Read more about what you can do at AmercianCensorship.org.  From a business perspective read Fred Wilson’s (venture capitalist and Tumblr’s investor) post on the architecture of the internet.

Please reblog this and take action!

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Simple Any bank that values design at this level has my business.  In an industry that desperately needs innovation and creativity, Simple is clear at the right time and the right place. In short they are not a bank, rather partnering with charter-banks to store you money freeing them up to focus on technology, tools and customer service that will hopefully blow away the personal banking services of our parents era.

Simple

Any bank that values design at this level has my business.  In an industry that desperately needs innovation and creativity, Simple is clear at the right time and the right place.

In short they are not a bank, rather partnering with charter-banks to store you money freeing them up to focus on technology, tools and customer service that will hopefully blow away the personal banking services of our parents era.

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Jotly: Share Everything with Everyone

Ever since I started working in startup land, I’ve felt the need to ingratiate myself in the ever-buzzing world of *tech*. This means staying up on other companies, the blogs, and the general Silicon Valley scene. This can be very repetitive. People get funded, apps get released, and companies buy things. Sometimes a conference happens. Having spent the better part of the last few years neck-deep in this hullabaloo, I figured it was time to parody it.

A parody from the creators of Nosh and the most amazing 404 page on the internet.  Read more on the ISO50 blog about the creation of the video and the 15x increase in signup for Nosh as a result of the parody social network.

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Wordnik - All The Words

“Hey I have this great idea for a new startup!  We’re going to launch an online dictionary.”

What would be your first though?
“Yeah right buddy. Good luck with that.” or “You know that might work.”

Wordnik proves that even the most crowded ideas still have massive room for improvement.  When you look up a word on Wordnik they will return definitions from multiple sources, example usage from literature and news, etymology, related words (synonyms, hypernyms, hyponyms, same context, reverse dictionary, tags), tweets using the word, visuals and sound pronunciations.

For the devs out there they have a massive API and code library and active Github repositories

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