We often have little opportunity to go through the details of how we do our work, so this post may interest you. On the Goplan (our project management web application - which you should try out, by the way) blog, one of our designers goes through the process he took to design the identity for Goplan 2.0.

The post goes into the thought process behind the logo, the stages it went through, and hints at ways to brainstorm brand identities, particularly for web applications. Make sure you don’t miss the post. Click here to read it.

Boy, have we been quiet lately. The last few months have been hectic. As some of you may know, we’ve been busy rewriting one of our products - Goplan -, and have finally gone live with the new version on Friday.

Back in 2006 we weren’t too happy about the existing project management and collaboration solutions out there, and we desperately needed one to manage our relationship and work with a growing customer base. We started the first version back in May 2006 and launched officially (after a long public beta stage) in March of 07. It’s been growing steadily since and with the new version, we’re aiming pretty high.

About the new version

Goplan 2 is a complete rewrite, both in terms of code as well as vision. It is now fully company centric (even though it fits single users just as well), and while we removed some things that we figured didn’t make sense for the majority of our users (public blog, real-time chat, fine-grained permissions), we added a few things that make it a compelling product.

The new calendar is insanely good, the status updates and per-user activity stream make sense in a team environment, and the new company dashboard makes everything come together. We’re biased, but we’re really happy about how the product has evolved. Here’s a quick glimpse over how it looks:

We’re always excited about a product launch, and this one is special because it’s one of our own products. We really hope you try it out and send us your feedback if you have any. For more information about what’s new on Goplan, check the official blog.

PS: Now that Goplan 2 is out, we’ll get back to posting on this blog more often. Thanks for being a loyal reader, even when posts are lacking.

So Techcrunch is reporting that Yahoo Brickhouse is closing doors. While this move doesn’t surprise me given how odd some Yahoo management decisions have been of late - and the fact that they had announced a downsizing recently -, it strikes me as, well, ultimately a poor decision. Allow me to reason why.

Mike argues that Yahoo should foster innovation throughout the whole company instead of just one group of isolated people up in San Francisco. However, while he’s obviously right about the need for innovation to be ingrained into Yahoo as a whole, I do like the idea of them having a group of individuals whose goal is to - at the lack of a better expression right now - think differently.

Changing a company’s mindset isn’t an easy task, particularly when you’re employing thousands of people. So by having a separate group of people working on inspiring products that normally wouldn’t come out of the “main house”, you might instill some healthy competition for great ideas - on everyone. This is the main reason why closing Brickhouse is weird unless there’s a set strategy to get people to innovate effectively inside Yahoo. On top of that, Brickhouse had some fantastic talent that shouldn’t go to waste.

I guess we’ll see how things unfold. I’m curious about what the strategy behind this move is, and about what happens to the products, ideas and people out of Brickhouse.

This entry is cross-posted with my personal blog at hellofunction.com (RSS feed), mainly because I figured this might be of interest to the readers of both.

I like slow weekends when I’m not under the gun with work. Matt Webb says this feels like “zero gravity”, and I have to agree. I typically take this time to catch up on my reading, so in case you’re interested, here’s what’s caught my eye in the past week.

1) This interview with Jeff Bezos on Smartmoney (about the future of Amazon.com) is interesting. I’ve always been a huge fan of Amazon and I do admire a company that manages to pull away from what most would call its core business (online sales) to fill a need of others - which is the case of their Web Services platform, that we‘ve been using for a few years now^[1] - or the Kindle, which follows Bezos’ vision that people will read again.

2) My copy of Adaptive Path’s Subject To Change has finally arrived and I can’t wait to go through it. I’ll post some more thoughts as soon as I finish reading it, but usually those guys don’t disappoint. It is safe to assume that if you’re into the business of building products, you’ll like (and get value out of) this book.

3) If you’re a fan of number crunching (we’re doing a few interesting things with map/reduce with a client of ours), you’ll probably be interested in a post about data mining over at New Scientist. It talks about what kinds of data companies are collecting based on your online habits. It also briefly mentions Stephen Baker’s new book The Numerati which I personally haven’t read yet (but will). If you fancy number crunching, though, you may want to look at Supercrunchers as well, that I personally loved.

4) For the rubyists out there, the Rubyconf 08 videos are now online, so you might want to start your downloads if you (like me) missed the conference. The guys over at Confreaks - who go through all the trouble of filming, encoding, uploading and serving these videos - deserve a few drinks.

^[1] For those curious, an interesting tidbit: Goplan was the first rails-based application to publicly run on EC2 instances (while EC2 was in beta, in September of 06). How cool is that?