Jeffrey McManus

Seeing this post from Miguel about a major cock-up pertaining to the developer download experience in Mono made me think about the platform companies we’ve been advising.
Companies often trick themselves into thinking that every developer who discovers their stuff will automatically do whatever it takes to use their stuff. But developers actually make very calculated [...]

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Link: Hannah Montana Tickets on Sale! Oops, They’re Gone
"[Hannah] Montana tickets, whose face value is $21 to $66, have been resold on StubHub, on average, for $258, the company says, and that is without taking into account StubHub’s 25 percent commission (10 percent paid by the buyer, 15 percent by the seller). None of the [...]

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Link: Static on the Dream Phone
"Verizon announced last month that it will open its network to ‘any application and any device’ by the end of next year.
But while Verizon’s pledge sounds promising, the language in which it is couched makes me wonder whether Verizon understands what a true open platform looks like. The announcement states [...]

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I’m doing some more research on the GPhone/Open Handset stuff today. For the second week in a row, Google is evangelizing a new, "open" platform, with the promise that openness will inherently be easier to develop applications on, create a better consumer experience, and eventually solve world hunger.
Specifically, the Open Handset folks seem to be [...]

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Online music aficionados may be familiar with Songbird, a promising music player that sports extensibility, skinnability and all-around open-source goodness. Built on the Firefox code base, the player is in development now, but it’s open to hackery by third-party developers — you can create extensions (just like Firefox extensions), user interface skins and more.
Songbird launched [...]

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In a world in which many developers (myself included) use web search as their first avenue of inquiry when they run into a technical problem, it’s important for platform providers to have technical content that is thorough, well-organized, and discoverable from web search engines. (This means that you should apply the principles of search engine [...]

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