Notes for week #250

It’s been a while since the last time I wrote weekly notes. We’ve been busy – a good thing, no doubt. Since the time we announced we were only doing a total of 4 consulting gigs this year, we’ve accepted one and have a second one on the deal table. We’re quite happy with the self-imposed constraint – it gives us more time to work on things we’re really passionate about (both personally and collectively).

Goplan has been growing steadily, which is definitely exciting. Having companies like Boxee or Mozilla – both of whom we’re big fans of – using the product means we’re doing at least something right. Tiago has been working with our new credit card payment gateway to finally bring credit card processing into the application and dump Paypal, which will make it easier for us to change our pricing, give accounts away or offer discounts. Meanwhile, I’ve been tightening pixels inside the application, improving things one page at a time (no app is ever truly “done”).

We’ve been thinking a lot about the iPhone and the iPad. We have ideas we want to try out on both platforms and we can’t wait to finally begin in a week or two when the bulk of the stuff we’re working on gets done. It’s weird that we’ve been on the development program since day 1 and haven’t been able to dedicate much time to it.

Conference season is right around the corner. We’ll be at Ux-Lx, Shift and Switch in the next couple of months – hopefully others later in the year ^[1]. My new talk on entrepreneurship – a follow-up to the Lessons Learned talk I did way too many times last year – is on the light table and I’m quite excited about it. If you’re in or around Lisbon in a few weeks, you may catch it at Shift. Thanks to a partnership we just did with Adaptive Path, we’re probably heading out to UXWeek in San Francisco in August as well ^[2].

Speaking of conferences, we’re organizing a startup contest at Switch Conference this year and all the details on it are coming this monday. We’re excited to see what people around us have been working on – that should be pretty good.

Have a great weekend!

Footnotes

^[1] It’s a shame that there will be no Reboot in 2010, but I’m sure Thomas needs a rest. Reboot is a delightful conference that everyone should experience at least once. I hope someone else steps up to organize a conference to fill its shoes this year.

^[2] If you’ve read our notes for week #241 you know we’re thinking of moving out to the bay for a couple of months – for the change of air, mostly -, so it may end up being that we head out to UXWeek and just stick around.